Big Man vs. Machine

"That was difficult," he said. "I kind of went through a depression for a while."

The hardest part was not knowing if he would get better. The nerves in his feet had spread so far apart they weren't transmitting information to the brain. Once he went to a physical therapist who took off his shoe and told him he had shards of glass stuck in his foot. A few days before he had stepped on a light bulb but had no idea that glass had lodged itself in the skin. At other times, he said, the nerves would try to cover the distance between them by "amping up to fire."

"Parts of my feet are so numb I don't feel anything," he said. "Other parts I feel too much. They're always irritated and buzzing and tingling. You don't know what causes it and you don't know how to make it go away. And it's constant. There's nowhere to run. There's nothing I can do. Being on my feet makes it worse and irritates it, and even if I sat with my feet up on an ottoman that nerve pain is still there. The pain is not a weight-bearing result. It can happen at rest, which is really frustrating."

He has received treatments in which a therapist puts a machine that sends neural impulses over the injured part of the body, which has helped some. But not anywhere near enough to let him play basketball again.

When he retired in 2004, the 76ers gave him a job doing color commentary on their radio broadcasts. His droll humor was a good fit and it allowed him to stay close to the players and still feel a part of the team. But by last season, most of his old teammates were gone. He found he had more in common with the radio broadcasters than he did with the players. The final confirmation of his status as a non-player came outside the 76ers' hotel in Cleveland when a fan started halfway across the street to ask for an autograph before realizing MacCulloch was not on the team. The man's face filled with disgust, he cursed and walked back across the street.

"I wasn't worth walking across the street to accost and be asked for an autograph," he said. "I remember thinking: 'Yep, this guy thinks I'm somebody when in fact I'm a 7-foot radio announcer.' "

Before this season, the team told him it wouldn't be using a color commentator anymore. Jana had just given birth to their first child, a girl named Carmen, so they closed up their house outside Philadelphia and moved back to the home on Bainbridge Island they bought as an offseason retreat when he was still playing.

There are still times when he gets depressed. Because of the lingering discomfort in his foot he has to wear either flip-flops or shower shoes. This bothers him, too. But then he thinks about a movie he saw recently, about a Mexican soccer star who is driving on his way to sign a huge contract with a professional team when a little girl runs into the street and he kills her. The soccer player never plays again. The girl's family is destroyed. And he remembers how the movie starts, with the old adage that appears on the screen: "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your dreams."

Fierce Competition

When MacCulloch started playing competitive pinball he assumed he had an advantage over the others. He was a professional athlete, after all. He was the NCAA Division I field goal percentage leader for three years at the University of Washington, had played in NBA playoff games and for Canada in the 2000 Olympics. He knew something about pressure and he knew how to handle it. He figured that when the pinball matches got close he would be able to endure the tension.

This has not happened.

"I still get nervous in big tournaments where there has been some big money on the line and it might have been a fraction of what I made in a check in the NBA," he said. "But it's still the pressure of the moment -- the heart starts beating a little bit, the games are designed to increase the music just to make you feel something, to make you feel the pressure and rush your shots. When I've needed to I haven't been able to pull some games out of my, um, hat."

In basketball he always had the ability to do what athletes call "slowing the game down," seeing every possibility, making careful, methodical decisions even as he was running full speed. In pinball he feels himself speeding up, the game too often spinning out of control. He wonders why this happens and figures it is simply because he hasn't played as much as the other players, some of whom have been competing for 30 or 40 years.