This was probably the equivalent of catching the Beatles in the Star-Club in Hamburg in the early 1960s, when they were still bound in leather jackets and greasy Elvis pompadours, a few dozen German kids dancing to the music, unable to understand even one word of the lyrics.
But knowing — just knowing — they were seeing something different.
That was the Meadowlands in November and December of 2001, when Jason Kidd first started weaving his spell on the basketball citizenry of New Jersey.
Lou Lamoriello was in charge of the Nets that year, and he saw no value in padding attendance figures. So if the boxscore says there were 6,532 for a Saturday night game against the Hornets, or 5,277 in the house for a Thursday night game against the Sonics, you can believe those were precise figures. And the arena felt every bit as empty as those numbers suggest.
Kidd didn’t care. He had arrived suggesting the Nets could be .500 and was greeted with howls of laughter, because he was joining a joke, a 26-win team that could barely execute a layup line for all the banana peels strewn on the floor. Yet in those early days in North Jersey, he accomplished the impossible.
He turned the Nets — the Nets! — into a must-see act. By season’s end, the Nets had doubled their win total. They made it to the Finals. In their opening playoff series, against Indiana, they won a double-overtime classic in a deciding Game 5 that not only electrified the Meadowlands — only Springsteen could make it rattle louder — but actually outdrew the season finale of “ER” on New York City’s televisions.
Jason Kidd did that. And for all he accomplished in a career that spanned 19 years, which included one NBA championship and 17 consecutive trips to the playoffs, a co-Rookie of the Year honor and an endless string of accolades and thank-yous from grateful teammates always at the receiving end of his passes, his finest work may have been delivered those first few months in Jersey.
“Nobody can ever accuse us of being a product of the hype machine,” he told me later in that 2001-02 season, once it was clear the Nets were legit and Kidd was an MVP candidate. “Maybe that’s the way all teams should be built. Nobody paid attention to us, and we could learn to play as a team when nobody was watching. And by the time they did, we were able to give them a show.”
Kidd was hardly perfect. One of the reasons the Nets were able to steal him from the Suns was because of a domestic incident with his ex-wife in Phoenix. He wasn’t a Knick 15 minutes last summer when his picture was in the paper after he was arrested on a drunk-driving rap.
As brilliant as his ascent was with the Nets, the demise was just as ugly, his hand all over the firing of Byron Scott, then a sitdown strike for a game against the Knicks that all but guaranteed his exile.
But what you saw on the basketball floor … well, it was enough to make you talk to yourself. It was enough to make players like Kerry Kittles and Keith Van Horn and Richard Jefferson and Lucious Harris — who would never be near as good without him — play at sublime levels for every minute they ran alongside him.
That was on display his whole career: twice in Dallas, in Phoenix, in college at Cal, even in brilliant spasms in this final season with the Knicks before the grind and his birth certificate finally caught up to him. But it was never more on display than it was in the swamps of Jersey, early, often in front of 15,000 empty seats.
Maybe you got to see Brando perform summer stock in Omaha. Maybe you saw Springsteen at The Stone Pony back in the day, when he was still figuring it all out, playing for free cups of Pabst. And maybe you got to see Jason Kidd and the Nets in those days, playing for friends and family, elevating basketball from sport to art, from a night of leisure to must-see TV.
If you did, you didn’t think of the 10 games in a row Kidd went scoreless to end his career. You thought of the games he would play when you planted yourself courtside, or in front of the tube, because you didn’t want to be absent when he did something you’d never before seen and never would forget. And he almost never disappointed.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com