It's the scowl, isn't it? Karl Malone has the doomsday machine of scowls. His dark eyes narrow ever so slightly, his brows nearly shake hands with each other, his menacing black beard looks rough enough to sand your entire patio deck. You don't know whether to look for a bomb shelter or just go ahead and melt into a small, lukewarm puddle.

Malone helped make the Lakers disappear.Or maybe it's that kiss-my-ass attitude of his, the one where he bitches about his contract, an underachieving teammate, Xers, excuse-makers and anything and anyone else who rubs him the wrong way. He refuses to film commercials with opposing players, and don't even bother waiting for Malone to publicly compliment an opponent. A Fun Police candidate, he isn't.

Then again, it could be the elbows, which are attached to a pair of arms right out of Monday Nitro, which are attached to a chest the approximate density of poured concrete. Let's face it, the man looks like he belongs in an action movie. He knocked the Admiral into the Sixth Fleet. He sent Isiah Thomas to hospital sewing class. He comes barreling into the paint like a T square -- all hard angles and edges.

Even before his Utah Jazz swept the Lakers, forcing Shaq to change his favorite acronym from IDGAF (I Don't Give A F -- ) to ICWAG (I Can't Win A Game), Lakers coach Del Harris was accusing Malone of being some sort of kung fu fighter.

Wait, it's the hick factor. Malone listens to country and western . . . on purpose. He wears boots and T-shirts to go along with the three pairs of blue jeans his mother-in-law made for him. He has a Louisiana twang as thick as gumbo. He's a mama's boy. Charles Barkley calls him a black redneck -- and Barkley is a friend. All in all, the only black man less cool than Malone is Urkel.

So pick a reason, any reason. America just can't seem to put its arms around this guy for a group hug, partly because he's too wide, partly because he won't let you. He's not warm and fuzzy like MJ. He's not precious like little Kobe. He endorses Apex athletic wear, which is so far off the sneaker radar screen that nobody even cares if the company is exploiting Third World factory workers. His big national ad is Rogaine, which is what balding old guys use, right?

Yes, well, maybe it's time to reconsider this whole question of Malone and his hugability factor. Because at last look, the 34-year-old power forward once again was carrying the entire Jazz franchise on those Wasatch Mountain shoulders of his, carrying them to this latest rematch with the Chicago Bulls in the NBA Finals. And while it is basketball blasphemy to suggest otherwise, Malone's season might have been better (gasp!) or at least equal to that of CEO Jordan. If nothing else, Malone somehow is having a more productive season than the one he had in 1996-97, which just happens to be when the big lug won the league MVP.

Not that Malone gives a damn. Check that. Not that Malone will admit he gives a damn. He quit tinkering with his personality years ago. Malone thrives on being the heavy. See your Freud textbook for details.

"I'm not going to live a lie,'' says Malone, sitting in a nearly deserted Jazz training room, his feet and ankles submerged in an oversized yellow mop bucket with enough ice to form a baby glacier. "I'm not going to live a fake life. Just because I'm a professional athlete don't mean I've got to have 20, 30 people with me all the time, that I've got to get out of a limousine all the time. But because I don't do that, I'm not cool, or I'm old-fashioned, or I'm an old man. That's fine with me because that's who I am.

"I don't live life with a chip on my shoulder,'' he says, "but I play the game like everybody out there doesn't like me."

An hour earlier, the Jazz had disposed of the Rockets in the first round of the playoffs. Two television crews wait in the locker room for a Karl sighting, but Malone has a postgame routine. He hates the cold but his swollen ankles and bruised shins respond to the ice. At home in his 27,000-square-foot hunting lodge of a house, Malone won't dip a toe in the bathwater-warm swimming pool without first zippering himself into a full wet suit. But here he has no choice. Twenty minutes. Every day. Every season for 13 years. Feel the burn.

Malone squirms slightly in his seat, the little chair crying "Uncle!'' under his 260 pounds. Good friend Ike Austin sits nearby. This is the extent of Malone's entourage. He'll drive home in the family Chevy. Right now the old codger has injured tendons in the middle finger of his shooting hand. Postseason surgery is a given. He has a bruised hip. A sprained wrist. A tender ankle. A tweaked knee. And that's just the stuff that has leaked out.

Look at him. Tiny nicks and scars on his face from a career of NBA mosh pit work. Scratches and scars that look like stretch marks on his shoulders. The occasional back spasm. Earlier in the series-clinching victory against the Rockets, the ball struck the tip of his right forefinger, causing a blood blister the size of a sequin to swell behind the nail. A needle was heated and brought to Malone, who worked it between the skin and the nail and lanced the blister himself. He didn't bother to wince.

This should surprise exactly nobody. When your great-great-great-grandparents are sold into slavery for a combined 80 cents, when your daddy kills himself when you're 3, when a bucket is indoor plumbing and tree stumps your Ethan Allen furniture, when your mama works double shifts at the sawmill and another in the cotton fields to make ends meet, when you're one of nine children raised with love but in near-poverty, when nobody thought you'd be anything but another Louisiana country bumpkin earning minimum wage hauling pulpwood ... then you don't acknowledge pain. You keep it inside. You let it become your mental blast furnace. Life owes you nothing. Life owes you everything. You create "The Mailman,'' all sharpened elbows and biceps gone condo, then purposely hide behind the cartoon character. That way nobody sees the hurt, the loneliness, the pressure, the fear that shoves you toward greatness.

The 20 minutes are almost up. Malone puffs gently on the Danny DeVito of cigars -- plump and stubby. He is wearing a pair of shorts, a pair of purple booties on his toes, and a fly-fishing T-shirt. Malone smokes only on special occasions: the births of his four children, a milestone playing performance, a series-ending win. "I'm like Clinton,'' he says before sending a trail of spittle into a cup. "I don't inhale.''

It isn't much of a cigar, but working your way past the Rockets isn't good enough reason to break out the kickstand-sized stogies. This will do for now. "This is a short one because we didn't do nothin' yet,'' he says. Same thing happened after the Jazz eliminated the San Antonio Spurs in the conference semis, and again after Utah embarrassed the Lakers. Malone kept his celebrating -- and his cigars -- to a minimum.

This is core Malone dogma. He is the fourth-leading scorer in NBA history, trailing only Kareem, Wilt and Michael. He's a two-time Olympic gold medalist, an 11-time All-Star, a pain-endurance freak who has missed only three of 1,066 regular season games because of injury, and yet reaching around and patting himself on the back won't do. He needs us to do it for him. He has a legacy, but no ring. He has numbers, but what he craves is universal respect. He is driven by what he lacks, and once he achieves something, he is driven by whatever new injustices can be invented in his nimble mind. Don't like him? Take a number.

"My driving force in all of what I do is being afraid to fail," Malone says. "That's what drives me. I know about all the doubters out there who said I couldn't do certain things. My thing is not to fail because I don't want to prove them right. I'm still nervous whether I'm playing the Clippers or I'm playing Chicago."

Malone is powered by 34 years' worth of doubters. They said he would never leave tiny Summerfield, La. Said he would never make good on his promise to take care of his mother and family. Said he would never play college basketball. Said he would never make grades at Louisiana Tech. Said he would never be an elite pro. Said he would never last this long. That was more than 27,000 points and 11,000 rebounds ago, a combo only four other players -- Jabbar, Wilt, Moses Malone and Elvin Hayes -- have achieved.

Now he glances back and pretends time is grabbing at his ankles. Has he slowed a step? Can he still take the punishment that comes with earning a living in Dutch Boy territory? Is he phoning it in? Each day, a different obstacle, real or imagined.

"It scares me to think what Shaquille would be like if he had Karl's work ethic,'' says Jazz owner Larry Miller. "Karl looks at how far he's come and it heightens his fear of failure. If he ever fell from that, it would affect his level of esteem. The view down looks scary. I'd say he's paranoid about getting old.''

In last year's conference finals, Malone burned three layers of skin from the palm of his shooting hand after skidding long and hard against the floor. Jazz trainers did what they could, but the palm was so gory that Jazz assistant trainer Terry Clark compared it to raw meat. Malone played the rest of the series, then averaged 23.8 points against the Bulls in the Finals -- and never made a peep.

Malone wants to win so much that he personally recruited Greg Foster to the Jazz. Foster had come off the Timberwolves bench and dropped 13 on Malone in a late-season game in 1995. Malone turned to him during a free throw and said, "You ready to get out of there?'' Foster nodded. Five months later, Foster was signed as a free agent. "I don't know what the hell drives him," Foster says. "If I knew, I'd try to get some myself.''

So phone it in? Malone doesn't know the area code. Ask Isiah, who still has stitch marks from a Malone whack. Ask David Robinson, who did the submarine thing (Dive! Dive! Dive!) after Malone knocked him unconscious with those elbows by U.S. Steel. Of course, all this weighs on Malone's mind like a feather on a meat scale. He will apologize for his playing style shortly after the free skating period in hell.

"I'll tell you what most people think," he says. "They see me and they think I'm the meanest person in the world. When I play, I don't have but one way to do it. Some people been calling it dirty, but that's how I play. Now let me pose a question to those players who have a hard time taking me: What if you had an opportunity to play with me to win, where I'm gonna come play with you every night? You want to play with me then?''

Damn right they would. Malone is borderline certifiable when it comes to competitiveness. If he's driving one of his meticulously maintained Harleys on the freeway, he refuses to allow any car to nudge ahead of him. They go 70, he turns the right wrist handle counterclockwise just enough to go 75. They go 75, he pushes it to 80. To Malone, it's like being the lead goose in a flying V formation.

His August workout routine at his ranch in Arkansas is legendary. Wake up at 6 a.m. An hour on the StairMaster -- level 12. A morning spent doing sprint work at a local high school track. Then stadium stairs. Then weight lifting. Then another hour on the StairMaster. A former teammate once traveled to Arkansas to train with Malone. He lasted one day. "Uh, man, I've got to catch a plane because, uh, something came up,'' the player said. Malone knew better.

At the peak of his fitness mania, Malone will return to Salt Lake and teach a pair of one-hour spinning classes at a local health club. Imagine the horror on a housewife's face as she climbs atop the stationary Schwinn and hears, "Hi, I'm Karl. I'll be your instructor today.''  Malone (with wife Kay) isn't out to make a fashion statement. If he's preparing for a game, Malone always takes a shower beforehand and then sprays cologne on himself. He does it because years ago, he heard other players mock an opponent for body odor. "I used to say to myself, 'I'm not going to let anybody talk about me like that,' '' he says. "I don't want guys in that other locker room saying, 'God, you smell that Karl Malone? God, he stinks.' '' So in the must-win world of Malone, he considers himself one of the NBA's best-smelling players. Honest.

The 76ers' Derrick Coleman had a different definition of Malone: the whitest black man in the league. Malone lives in Casper-white Utah, where only 0.84 percent of the population is African-American. Malone wears fly-fishing T-shirts, for crissakes. What's next, a series with Donnie and Marie? "A lot of people don't understand him," says Jazz teammate Antoine Carr. "Karl isn't one of these New Jack type of guys. He's a country-western black man who likes to have fun. He rides his Harley, does all those normal things that people like to do. But I guess they consider him not black enough for them. It's ridiculous.''

Malone dresses like someone preparing to clean his garage. Those homemade jeans. T-shirt. Boots. Cleveland Indians baseball cap. "Let me just tell you something,'' he says. "In life, you can be too black or too white. This is how I was brought up. This is me. My most important thing is to be true to myself.''

True, he has a Mercedes, but it has been washed more than it has been driven. He has his dream house, with its nine air-conditioning units, its 34-foot-high ceiling, its theater room, its two laundry rooms, its master bedroom with a 10-foot-by-10-foot bed, its indoor basketball court, its fireplace with enough masonry for a rock-climbing wall. Malone and his wife, Kay, helped design and decorate the home, which sits high above the city and provides a remarkable view of the Wasatch and Oakers ranges. Miller, the man who signs his checks, lives down the street.

But when it comes time to prove himself once more for another season, Malone thinks of rural northwest Louisiana. Bobcats lived in the woods near his two-room house. Former Louisiana Tech coach Andy Russo remembers driving up in time to hear a gunshot, followed by Malone's stepfather running out of the house holding a dead eight-foot-long snake. He thinks of Miss Shirley, who held a family together with love, the Bible and a leather belt. Malone wouldn't report to the pregame meeting at Louisiana Tech until he had greeted his mama at the arena door and then walked her down to her seat. He thinks of buying his own clothes with the money he made from cleaning five chicken houses. You changed the water troughs. You made sure the feeders were working. You picked up the dead chickens because the bacteria could kill the whole house.

He thinks of the 12 teams that passed on him in the 1985 draft. Or of being the league's 33rd-highest-paid player right now. The fear returns easily. So do the mood swings. The intensity. The paranoia. But in a good way. He says he's got a split personality: "When I play, I'm a certain way. When I'm not playing, I'm a certain way.''

That second way is as soft as a baby's breath. His perfect day is to sit by the pool, barbecue hamburgers and watch his "keeds'' play. He goes through a pair of size-16 high-tops each game and then quietly donates most of the shoes to charity fund-raisers or has them presented to children. He is a frequent unannounced visitor to Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City. The Make-A-Wish Foundation presented him with a four-inch-thick folder of all the children he has met. Their photos and thank you notes fill each page. If only they knew that Malone is the one who wants to say thank you, that he occasionally cries at the memories of his visits. Like the time Malone handed his watch to a child too ill to walk and gently reminded him it was time to feel better. Guess who later returned the watch -- on two feet and with a proud smile.

Malone recently invited the entire Jazz organization to his house for an Easter egg hunt and dinner. When Terry Clark's 10-year-old son, Tyler, found the golden egg with a $100 bill inside, Malone convinced him do do something nice for his sister. Now 14-year-old Natalie has a $50 savings bond, courtesy of Tyler. When a visitor comes to the house, Malone's two daughters, Kadee and Kylee, and son, Karl Jr., introduce themselves and offer handshakes. Malone beams in the background.

And you should have seen him when Jerry West made a surprise visit to the Jazz locker room after an April 19 game at the Forum. West approached Malone and said, "I've just admired you from a distance and I would be remiss if I didn't say that." Malone considers the compliment as important as winning the MVP. West meant every word of it. "It was something I had wanted to do for a long time,'' he says. "Every night. He delivers every damn night."

There is no telling how much longer Malone will keep delivering his 27 points and 10 rebounds per game. He is a free agent after next season and already has warned Jazz management not to wait too long to make an offer. Too long would be next July. "The Red Sox tested Roger Clemens and you see what he did," says Malone, who is his own agent. "There are certain players they test and their hand was called and they had to go. I don't envision it, but I'm not going to rule anything out. They know what they need to do here and if they don't do it, if they wait until the last minute, then they force my hand.''

Just so there isn't any misunderstanding, Malone also says he absolutely, positively won't play for any other Jazz coach but Jerry Sloan. Maybe it's coincidence, but Miller says negotiations are under way to extend Sloan's contract. As for Malone, Miller says Utah would be willing to "roll the dice longer than another team would be doing with the higher [salary] numbers.''

By his own estimate, Malone says he can play four more years at his present level, maybe seven or eight more "if I wanted a paycheck.'' He doesn't drink. He fusses over his diet. He has to be the best-conditioned player in the league. But he doesn't do anything strictly for money. The moment the offense has to wait for him to arrive from the other end of the court, he's gone. At some point, Malone says, he will literally ride his Harley into the Utah sunset. Then he can see himself as a pro wrestler, or better yet, as an actor.

"I'd love to do action-packed movies, kind of a Rambo, no-shirt-on kind of movie,'' he says. "And there's got to be a Harley scene."

But not now. The greatest power forward in the history of the NBA is still scared stiff of failing. "I've been playing basketball for what, 23, 24 years now?'' he says. "And it's like from high school, to college, to now, I took a deep breath and never blew it out. It's like I've been holding my breath through the ups and downs and I've never just exhaled and said, 'God, I don't have to do this no more.' One of these days, that's going to come.''

Until then, he will live by Sloan's motto: "I've got a barbed-wire tail and I don't care where I drag it.'' Figures. There are bigger cigars to be smoked, more doubters to be shamed. Malone can't rest until he conquers all, including the Bulls and his own ridiculous standards. Then, and only then, does he get what he wants. Serenity. Peace. Contentment. A ring.

"Then I want to get on my Harley and just ride and ride and ride, not have nowhere specific to go,'' he says. Malone smiles when he says it. Not a scowl in sight. No hard edges.