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Imagine being tightly guarded by Kobe Bryant. You bolt past him on the baseline, only to find Shaquille O'Neal looming between you and the basket. So what. You continue toward the basket, rise over the rim and--boom!--throw down a monster slam over the big fella. Before you wake up, you know you must conclude your performance with a dose of smack talk. If you're going to dream the part, be true to the role.

And don't forget a good primal scream, an angry glare or a nice, little shimmy shake. In the NBA, trash talking and taunting have become as much a part Of the game as tattoos, entourages and $100 tickets. It's as if a basket without braggadocio is worth less than two points.

Of course, it wasn't always like this. Until the 1980s, sportsmanship meant more than styling, playing counted for more than profiling, and trash talking had yet to turn into taunting.

But, oh, how times have changed.

In the '60s, little guys did not dunk on Chamberlain or Russell, and hardly anyone stole the ball from the Big O. It wasn't worth it. Show up the stars, and you paid the price with an embarrassing line in the box score--or worse. Don Kojis, a two-time All-Star who played in the 1960s and '70s, remembers an exhibition against the Celtics his rookie season. Kojis was a hot-shot forward out to show his worth against future Hall of Famer Tommy Heinsohn. So Kojis went out firing and made numerous jumpers against Heinsohn. The Celtics called timeout and as Kojis' Baltimore Bullets teammates huddled, they saw the Celtics substituting Jim Loscutoff, the team's enforcer, for Heinsohn.

"`Oh, no,' they told me. `Watch out now,'" Kojis says. "I'm thinking, `What can he do to me?' Well, I come around a screen and, bam, I got a forearm to the side of my head that put me on the floor." Forget trash talking. Kojis had to come up swinging just to protect his reputation and let players around the league know he wasn't soft.

Heinsohn says he doesn't remember the incident but, chuckling, admits, "It was within the realm of possibility." Heinsohn played in the '50s and '60s, coached in the '70s and has been an announcer since. He is not and never has been a fan of players who run their mouths.

"In my era, you let your game do your talking. I mean, trash talking and trying to beat your opponent down verbally doesn't do anything. A great competitor is not going to be intimidated," Heinsohn says. "The game has evolved into, `I'm going to outdo you.' It's not, `We're going to outdo you guys.'"

When Earl Monroe entered the league in 1967 via the streets of Philadelphia and Winston-Salem State, he introduced the playground game to the NBA. Besides his spin moves and yo-yo dribbling, Monroe also brought a bit of talk. "Talking was always part of the ghetto game," says Hall of Famer Walt Frazier. "I knew that from playing in the Rucker league. That style came into the league with Earl the Pearl."

But when Monroe talked, there was no finger pointing and no taunting. Like other players from that era, he realized that making an opponent angry was not in his best interest. "Our saying was, `Let sleeping dogs lie,'" Frazier says. "If I scored 40 points on you, I didn't want you to become more motivated."

Norm Van Lier, a guard in the '70s known for his in-your-face defense, played hard and wanted to be respected. "If anyone had talked trash to me, they would have gotten punched in the face," Van Lier says. "Don't taunt me when I'm busting my butt. The first one to talk trash to me, he's going out.

"We were taught some respect. Someone like Gail Goodrich and I would have a big battle, but after the game, I'd drop him off at the hotel."

Two moves in the '70s fueled the on-court chatter: Darryl Dawkins joined the league in 1975, and the free-wheeling ABA merged with the NBA a year later. With the merger came an influx of street-wise and playground-tested players who brought a new cockiness with them.

In Dawkins, the league got its first player who liked to talk more than he liked to play. He was 18 years old, 6-10 and already larger than life when he signed with the 76ers out of an Orlando high school. Magic senior vice president Pat Williams, then a 76ers executive, remembers moving Dawkins up to south New Jersey to play in the Philadelphia summer league. After one phone call, Williams knew his new center was not likely to become homesick. "I called to check up on him once, and I hear this voice, `This is Dawk, and I'm ready to talk.' I'm kicking myself to this minute that I didn't have my comeback ready: `This is Pat, and I'm ready to chat.'"

Dawkins, now a head coach in the U.S. Basketball League, likes the suggestion that he was the league's first true trash talker. "I may have been," he says. "There wasn't any talking when I first came in the league, but by the end of my career (in 1990), I was talking more s--than ever and more people were talking more s--."

Mike Gminski, an opponent and later a teammate of Dawkins', remembers their first meeting. "The first time I played Darryl, I was a rookie with the Nets. He still was with Philly," Gminski says. "I look at him, and he's bigger than life. In the first quarter, he drop-steps on me, dunks and throws me into the stanchion. I'm thinking, `I want to go back to Duke for some postgraduate work.' But those were the only two points he scored. With Darryl, it was like one of his baskets looked like 10 points. After a while, people got a handle on that. By the end, it was almost like he was a caricature of himself."

By 1984, trash talking had arrived on a national stage, courtesy of the Lakers and Celtics. With their rivalry came towel waving, finger pointing and the brashness of Larry Bird, whose playing skills may have been surpassed only by his ability to talk trash. Bird would carry a running conversation with whomever was guarding him or, as he put it, trying to guard him. Against the Lakers in The Finals, that usually was Michael Cooper. But Bird talked all season long.

Recalls Gminski: "I was with the Sixers, and once we were up by one with three or four seconds to go. The Celtics called timeout. Bird came out and told (Charles) Barkley, who was guarding him, that he was going to take three dribbles, fade away and win the game by one. The ball was halfway to the basket, and I started walking off the court." As a player on the losing team.

By the late '80s, windmill slams and 360-degree dunks weren't enough. Every slam had to be followed by a scream.

"It's what the fans want," says Frazier, now a Knicks analyst for the Madison Square Garden Network. "The NBA caters to the kids, and the kids like it. Look at the video games, the dunking and then the styling. The dunk is the thing."

By 1994, the league added a "taunting" clause to its technical-foul rule to, in effect, penalize a player for non-verbal trash talking. Eight years later, if you think that rule put a lid on the trash talking, you're dreaming.

RELATED ARTICLE: Great moments in talking trash.

* Larry Bird was the ultimate trash talker because he backed up his talk. At the 1986 All-Star Game, he greeted his opponents for the 3-point shooting contest with, "OK, boys, who's going to finish second today?" For the record: Craig Hodges.

* Michael Jordan was the master of put-downs, but running mate Scottie Pippen is credited for whispering this to Karl Malone as "The Mailman" prepared to shoot free throws in the final seconds of a tie game in the 1997 Finals: "The mail doesn't deliver on Sunday." Malone missed both shots, leaving Jordan--who else?--to make the game-winner.

* Lakers coach Phil Jackson has made the Lakers-Kings rivalry the best in the league by disparaging Sacramento players and fans. Jackson once said about Sacramento's devotion to the Kings, "That's their game, their one game in town.... What else do they play? Pick the fruits and vegetables."

* Charles Barkley was the king of comebacks. Once Oliver Miller, who weighed about 340 pounds, said Barkley didn't set a good example on the court. Barkley to the Big O: "You can't jump high enough to touch the rim unless they put a Big Mac on it."

* Dikembe Mutombo does most of his trash talking with his finger wave, but he also can talk a good game. While blocking nine shots against the Mavericks, he was heard saying, "Don't they have cable in Dallas?"--S.M.

E-mail managing editor Stan McNeal at smcneal@sportingnews.com