Wizards Are The Cheer Leaders

Local Fans Rallying Around NBA Team

Glenda Stewart is one of many long-suffering Wizards fans getting excited about the franchise. The team has already surpassed the win total from last season. (Jonathan Newton - The Washington Post)

Off-camera at the Washington studios of CNN, Wolf Blitzer and New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh recently put the subjects of war and world politics on the back burner to discuss their favorite National Basketball Association team, the Wizards.

Hersh asked whether the CNN anchor had kept his season tickets for the once woeful club, which this season is astonishingly off to its best start in 25 years. Blitzer nodded, yes, he had.

"I should have kept mine, too," Hersh said, as recounted by Blitzer.

For the first time in the post-Michael Jordan era, there's real excitement surrounding Washington's once woebegone basketball team. Actual athletic contests, not marketing schemes, are bringing people to MCI Center. Singles Nights, College Nights, Retro Nights and Tax Nights have given way to genuinely good basketball.

Whether the Wizards have become a genuine water cooler team, worthy of work-time argument and gossip, is still up for debate. Attendance at games is up modestly from a year ago. The courtside luminaries pale by New York or Los Angeles standards -- or even those in Jack Kent Cooke's box at RFK Stadium during the Redskins' heyday.

But the team is in second place in the Eastern Conference, winning more games (26) at the midway point of this season than the Wizards had all of last season. And crowds are enthusiastic. The grace of their star players and the grit of their role players have led to a turnaround even the team's longtime fans could not have foreseen.

"There's a lot of buzz," Blitzer said. "It's actually cool now to be a Wizards fan."

The crowd runs the gamut, from longtime season ticket holder Tim Russert, the host of NBC's "Meet the Press," to the singer-sitcom star Brandy. Hall of Fame quarterback Sonny Jurgensen and current Redskins linebacker LaVar Arrington were among the local luminaries at a recent game.

But more importantly, the Wizards have begun to fulfill an informal contract with a city clamoring for a winning team.

"For a team that has struggled for years, to see them come together and rely each other to win is just wonderful," said Glenda Stewart, a District resident who proclaims herself the Wizards' No. 1 fan.

Stewart's torso on Wednesday night -- when she watched the Wizards beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 117-107, to record their 11th win in the past 13 games -- was covered by a retro orange Bullets jersey, featuring the number 0, worn by the team's starting point guard, Gilbert Arenas. She wore a matching orange hat, wrist bands and fluorescent orange running shoes. In one of Stewart's more transcendent moments in her relationship with the team, she said, Arenas removed his sweaty jersey, balled it up after a game -- a nightly routine at MCI Center -- and handed it to her.

"I think they're more dedicated this year," she said of this season's Wizards. "Not saying the other players didn't love the game, but you can see them coming together as a team as opposed to, 'I want to be the big star.' "

The Wizards' bruising mix of bad play and off-the-court misconduct has played out over parts of three decades. During the particularly disheartening 1997-98 season, several of the team's star players, which included Chris Webber, Juwan Howard and Rod Strickland, were either arrested or ordered into alcohol rehabilitation. They had fistfights among themselves. The atmosphere at the recently opened MCI Center became so bad during the spring of 1998 that Strickland, the team's point guard, was pelted with garbage from the stands as he and a team of underachievers left the court during a late-season loss.

Washingtonians' longing for an NBA team they can be proud of seems to have intensified the interest in the Wizards' renaissance. Fans have indeed waited long. The Wizards have not made the playoffs since 1997 and last won a playoff series in 1982. After their victory on Wednesday night, they have the second-best record in the Eastern Conference at 26-15. It took Washington 41 games -- the season's halfway point -- to surpass its 25-victory total for all of last season.