July, not January, arrives when the clock strikes midnight in New York tonight, so there's no Times Square countdown to mark the occasion. But Karl Malone plans to celebrate just the same.

"I'll probably lower my guard and have me a big ol' stogie," Malone said in a KSL-TV interview last week. "We'll see what happens at 12:01."

What will probably happen at that hour -- actually, 10:01 p.m. MDT tonight, since the NBA runs on Eastern time -- is the phone will ring in an office in Southern California. Perhaps more than once.

And on the other end of at least one of those calls to Dwight Manley, Malone's agent, will be Kevin O'Connor, the Jazz's vice president of basketball operations.

"Absolutely. We're going to make contact just as soon as we're allowed to," O'Connor said. "Actually, I'll probably find out if Dwight wants to talk that late or wait until [Tuesday] morning, but we'll do whatever we have to [do] to make it clear that we want to get together just as soon as possible."

The witching-hour contact is entirely symbolic, since no NBA free agent can actually sign a contract until July 16. But considering what the Jazz are asking of the franchise's greatest scorer -- to take a huge pay cut and give up his championship ambitions in order to retire as a Jazzman -- symbols could be important.