Big Man vs. Machine

Not very long ago MacCulloch shared a locker room with Allen Iverson. His colleagues rolled hard, ripping $100 bills from their wallets like so much pocket change. Now he spends his time with men like Kerins, a math textbook writer from Salem, Mass., who still talks with wonder about the time MacCulloch squeezed into the passenger seat of his Honda Civic, and Josh Sharp, a controller for a video game company, who runs the current ranking system.

His new friends are not wealthy. They live suburban lives, tend to be technologically minded and could care less that he was a professional basketball player. Most, MacCulloch assumes, don't even know he played. Their world is pinball. Their endless phone conversations are about the mysteries of each pinball machine and the games' secret tricks. "The key to getting better at pinball is to learn from other people," Kerins said.

And MacCulloch is delighted that this is his world, too.

"Your average jock is not going to be a pinball lover," he said. "He probably only likes sports."

Then again MacCulloch was never much like the rest of the jocks. As a child in Winnipeg, he spent much of his time at the local 7-Elevens drinking Slurpies and playing the pinball machine that was always in the corner. On summer nights as a teenage member of the Canadian junior national basketball team, he slipped down to the game room of the team's dormitory where a rafting-themed pinball game called White Water almost seemed to call to him. And though most of the game's light bulbs were burned out, essentially rendering it useless, he played it for hours.

"I guess I can trace this back to being really addicted to [pinball] and not being very good at it," he said with a small laugh.

Years later, not long after he signed his contract with the Nets and bought a home in New Jersey, he thought it might be fun to purchase a couple of those games he adored so much and put them in his basement. Which he did. Then he got hurt and needed something to fill the spare time. This led to an all-out spending spree on pinball.

"It's become a good outlet for his competitiveness," Kerins said.

His Feet Fail Him

In the summer of 2002, it appeared MacCulloch was on his way to a long and prosperous NBA career. He was 26 and in three years, had turned himself into a center with soft hands and a delicate shooting touch. His breakthrough came in the 2000-01 season when he helped the Philadelphia 76ers reach the NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers and wasn't overwhelmed by star center O'Neal when they got there.

That offseason New Jersey gave him the $34 million, Nets point guard Jason Kidd called him "by far the best center I've ever played with," and the following spring he went to the Finals again, played Shaq once more and held his own. A few months later, the 76ers, desperate to get MacCulloch back, traded Dikembe Mutombo to get him.

That's when his feet failed. They had bothered him for a few months, while he was in New Jersey, but MacCulloch figured it was something he could learn to play through. In the 76ers' training camp he had a uncomfortable sensation that his socks had dropped and balled up in the bottom of his shoes just under his arch, and yet when he pulled his shoe off, his socks were perfectly in place. Other times it felt as if his foot was on fire.

He finally had to admit to the 76ers that something was wrong. Eventually he received a diagnosis of bilateral neuropathy, which in effect means he has severe nerve damage to his feet, although doctors say they are not certain why. MacCulloch's symptoms weren't that severe, but they were strong enough to keep him from playing basketball. By age 28, he was retired.