A nervous quiet pervades some visiting-team locker rooms before a game against a superior opponent. The Bucks, up against the Lakers, are not rattled. Perhaps that's because their minds are on everything except Jax's crew.

Jerome Kersey growls about the Spurs, who earned his enmity by not re-signing him last summer -- after two years of minimum-pay contracts. Romeo -- Kersey's nickname -- called me over the summer to dispute a report that his surgically-repaired broken foot was permanently damaged. "Every time I got on the treadmill," he said, "I thought about them."

I get some dap from Darvin Ham, who is a close replica of Kersey as an undersized power forward/human turbine. Ham has his left foot in a cast, and Kersey -- as if reading my mind about their similarities -- notes that Ham also has the identical foot injury.

Ham is reflecting on his former team, the Wizards. He gripes about all the frontline talent Washington has let go -- himself, Ben Wallace and, of course, CWebb. Sam Cassell overhears our conversation and does a spot-on impersonation of former teammate Hakeem Olajuwon talking about Webber. "He so quick, Sawm. You have to get back for me, Sawm. He quick." Cassell then brings up a dismissed marijuana possession charge in Puerto Rico that came just before the Wizards traded CWebb to Sacto. "Wouldn't matter to me if he smuggled in 50 pounds," Cassell says. "If he's on my team, that big-handed m-----'s going nowhere."

The seemingly unfocused Bucks then upset the Lakers, with Sawm scoring the game's last five points in the final 3.7 seconds for a 109-105 win. After the game, coach George Karl walks up to me and asks for some NBA gossip: "You got something for me?" Yeah -- don't worry about motivational speeches for Romeo. He packed his own.

Ric Bucher is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at ric.bucher@espnmag.com.