Final delivery: Jazz honoring legendary champion today

It was the mid-1980s, early in Jerry Sloan's Utah Jazz coaching career, Karl Malone's rookie season in the NBA. The two were living in the same hotel at the time — a Residence Inn.

Sloan, an assistant to head coach Frank Layden, approached Malone, the team's first-round draft choice in 1985, with a question phrased in the form of a challenge.

"You'll probably change after a couple years, being in this league?" said Sloan, his inquiry intended as much as anything to be food for thought for Malone.

The power forward's response: "No, coach, I'm not gonna change."

Whether or not he has is open to debate.

From this day forward, however, Malone stands as a man whose image in Utah is designed with perpetuity in mind. He is captured in a larger-than-life statue, which will be unveiled outside the Delta Center late this afternoon.

Hours later, at halftime of the Jazz's home game against Washington, Malone's retired No. 32 uniform will be raised to the rafters of the downtown Salt Lake City basketball arena, joining those of Layden, the late Pistol Pete Maravich, Darrell Griffith, Mark Eaton, Jeff Hornacek and longtime teammate John Stockton.

Pomp and circumstance should be little and less.

"With the 18 years of memories, of accomplishments, I think we'll have our hands full just trying to present what needs to be presented in the short period of time we have," Jazz owner Larry H. Miller said. "I don't think we need to manufacture too much stuff."

Erecting a statue seems quite enough.

Hoisting the oversized jersey is icing that really was only a matter of time.

It goes up nearly 21 years after an insecure young man arrived from the backwoods of Louisiana, 18 of which were spent playing for the Jazz in an ultraconservative state that alternately loved and learned to live with the ups and downs of the NBA's No. 2 all-time scorer.

Deseret Morning News graphic Malone career timeline Requires Adobe Acrobat.

In that time — all of it alongside point guard Stockton, whose own statue is appropriately situated just a few feet from that of his pick-and-roll partner — some of Malone stayed true to self.

"Except for the money part of it — he made more money — he didn't change," Sloan said.

Or did he?

Malone is still moody, indecisive sometimes and dead-set in his ways in others. He is still unpredictable, often difficult to deal with, frequently charitable with time and money. He is still an enigma, quite confusing, truth be told, even to those who think they finally have figured him out.

But other indications are that he is nothing like what blew in with the draft of '85. His coach, after a moment of reflection, concedes as much.