On Coming Close, So Close

By CATHY BOOTH BEULAVILLE

For a few breathless seconds, you are just 19 ft. 9 in. away from a million dollars. You're standing on the basketball court in the Lakefront Arena in New Orleans, and all you have to do is toss the ball through the 18-in. hoop that now seems a mile off. The crowd of 6,600 is chanting your name. Your wife's counting on you, thinking about a little red sports car. Your son, the Nintendo addict, wants a new computer. You'd love some cash for your daughter's college education and to buy a tractor for yourself. And maybe, just maybe, you could quit your $32,000-a-year job as a pipe fitter.

You come out with your arms raised in victory, like Rocky Balboa. You bounce the ball three times and, as your heart clenches, you shoot -- and you know instantly that you've blown it. The ball goes left and clangs cruelly off the rim. Your wife has tears in her eyes. She'll always remember that she turned 42 the day her husband bungled the million-dollar bucket.

So much for the Warholian interlude of a 45-year-old North Carolinian named Bobby Shivar, on whom fame and fortune smiled very warmly, and all too briefly, last week. As the winner of the Gillette 3-Point Challenge promotional campaign, Bobby was given $25,000 and flown to the NCAA Final Four weekend in New Orleans to take his single -- and, as it turned out, not quite ! accurate -- shot for a million. Then it all started vanishing like a dream. Within days, he was back at work fixing the aging steam pipes around Camp Lejeune. Back in his neat three-bedroom brick house on a rural lot dotted by a stand of loblolly pines and a satellite dish. Back in Beulaville, a town so small that wife Vickie jokes, "We just got our second traffic light." Back to oblivion. In a week there'd be no more crews from CNN and ESPN, no more calls from radio stations in Texas and Tokyo.

"Hey," says Bobby, with a wistful half smile, settling back into his favorite lounger. "You win some, you lose some." Besides, he confides, "Vickie said she wasn't going to hold it against me."

Vickie is the reason he got his chance in the first place. She signed him up for the promotion at a local K Mart store last year. When the winner's envelope came last August, telling him he had beat out 2 million other contestants, Bobby was, well, suspicious. "I thought it was a scam," he says. "I told Vickie that as long as nobody asked for any credit cards or money, I'd go along with it." Although he had never played basketball as a kid, he planted a brand-new Slam Dunk hoop in his gravel driveway last September and began to practice. Sort of. There were interruptions, like hunting season.

He was terrible at first. "I might shoot one or two out of 10," he says. "Or sometimes I would miss 10 out of 10." Gillette sent down former Boston Celtics star Dave Cowens to give him pointers. "Dave says I shoot like a pipe fitter. And I do," Bobby concedes with a laugh. "At 45 years old, when you're learning to shoot, you feel sorta awkward." Bobby learned to push the ball off with one hand instead of throwing it with two. And, with Cowens' help, he did improve his average to almost 40%.

Practice proved brutal on Bobby's knees, but not nearly as brutal as the media attention. Though he had labored from age six in his father's tobacco, bean and corn fields, had served in Vietnam and had worked on car bodies and pipes for 23 years, he had never been through anything quite like the blitz he endured last month in New York City. "It just drained me. Interview and shoot. Interview and shoot. Interview and shoot," he says, looking dazed at the memory. He heard reporters making bets that he'd miss his big shot. "They kept saying, 'If you win this million dollars, are you gonna move out of that swamp?' " he recalls, making fun of his own accent with an exaggerated drawl.

Still, Bobby was a quick study. By the time he arrived in New Orleans, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He shot baskets for morning TV shows, he effortlessly dropped Gillette's name during radio interviews, he posed with tourists for photos. Vickie, meanwhile, carried his cherished Rawlings basketball around in a plastic Wal-Mart bag. Everywhere he went, fans recognized him.

At home in Beulaville these days, Vickie says things are pretty much back to normal. "Bobby hasn't picked up the basketball since we've been back," she says. On the other hand, he hasn't chopped up his Slam Dunk board either. After all, it just might come in handy: Vickie has entered him in the contest again.