After the 2007 NBA season, which saw the Spurs crowned as champions, Charles Barkley sat in the TNT temple of basketball speaking in tongues, and, somewhere in his screaming of “Maaaaaaaannnnuuuuuuuuuu!” and mutterings of “Timmy Duncan. . . . best ever” was the prophecy–the Utah Jazz will win the Western Conference next year.  They didn’t.  But prophecies are often shrouded in a fog of pythian smoke, and, while most waited for the air to clear, they forgot about the Utah Jazz.

There are roughly twenty games left for every NBA team in this year’s regular season, and the Utah Jazz sit at 39-21, fourth in the Western Conference, second in the Northwest Division, just one game behind every nontraditionalist basketball fan’s flavor of the month the Denver Nuggets.  How did the Jazz arrive at this position?  Well, they are 19-5 in their last twenty-four games, they have the best All-Star not to be named an All-Star in point guard Deron Williams (so named by Twitter), and they have a Mongol warrior in the paint–facial hair is clearly the most overlooked trait when it comes to the analysis of sports figures.

Carlos Boozer arrived in Utah under a cloud of suspicion–like a pregnant virgin–how could he arrive on the shores of the Great Salt Lake?  Such miraculous events often lead to conflicting dichotomies: the converted and the doubtful.  Cities like Cleveland spat on Carlos’ name and called him a snake and oil salesman, a Joseph Smith to their Martin Luther–every Pope needs a scapegoat.  But Carlos was never that simple to pin down.  He was never transcendent.  He was just good and suffered from blood clots, causing him to miss thirty or more games in three out of his first five season in Utah.  The closest Carlos comes to Christian archetypes is the basketball embodiment of a stuttering Moses, having arrived in the Beehive state with his tongue swollen and in need of Deron Williams to do his talking.  No, the Bible never was for Carlos; hence, he rocked a fu man chu.

Genghis Khan repped a fu man chu too, was born holding a blood clot, and licked the blood of Chinese dynasties from off the tips of hair that sprouted above  his upper lip.  Carlos Boozer looks to do the same, having missed only three games in his sixth year as the Jazz’s starting power forward, and under his good health the confederation of Deron Williams, Andrei Kirilenko, Mehmet Okur, and Paul Milsap looks to wreak havoc on the frontiers of the Lakers’ budding empire.  In fact, the only issue that remains is that of succession; after all, Boozer’s been on the trading block it seems since he first arrived in Utah, stroking his ’stache, contemplating the terrain, and as a free agent this summer he will finally be allowed to claim his kingdom, which, if anything like his past, will be left to the barbarous margins of history’s stubble.