fallen from the grace of Hoops

The NBA All-Star game was on last night. For the first time in years, I sat in front of a television and watched a basketball game... well, the first half. Sports watching is a rarity for me these days. Last year I watched bits and pieces of the NBA finals so I'd have something to talk about at the office the next day. It's difficult to picture myself 11 years ago as the raving basketball enthusiast I was. I was in my final year of college at the University of Iowa and I had the best basketball seats that 5 years of student-ticket priority could purchase. I would skip evening classes if the Hawkeyes were playing and after a home game, I would be hoarse from the whooping and screaming. I entered every tournament pool and would read strategy books on offensive and defensive philosophies so I could spot the difference between a 2-3 zone and a box-and-one. I knew coach and player tendencies - I would have made a hell of a oddsmaker if I had been a gambling man. When the NBA draft approached, I'd scout out rookies and try to anticipate Jerry West's every pick and trade (I was a HUGE Lakers fan). What happened to that person? How could that same individual shut off the TV at half time and go read a book?

The natural answer is to blame the basketball culture. Nobody calls travelling in basketball anymore. It's no longer exciting to watch basketball players dunk when virtually every player on the court can do the same, plus 99% of them are considerably taller than me and even I could do it (albeit, no longer). The basketball skills shown by the Lakers, Sixers and Celtics of the 80's has completely disappeared from today's game. Athletes and owners fixate upon raw talent and not at all on skill. Athletes have become fixated upon the narissism of their highlight reels and 7-figure salaries. The endless pump to sell shoes and beer becomes irritating once you get old enough to realize that your identity doesn't hang upon your footwear and major-label American beer, for the most part, tastes like crap.

This argument is great for casual conversation and it's the tactic I take from the bar stool, but it's really just bullshit. The dunk was banned in the NBA when towering, 7-foot tall players started showing everybody up in the 60's, while Earl "The Pearl" Monroe shocked basketball in the 70's with his gliding style, causing fans to scream "showboat". Basketball, like all things, must evolve to survive. If it doesn't, it dies. The special quality of seeing a high-flying dunk diminishes over time simply due to repetition. I've spent years watching Dominique Wilkins, Michael Jordan, etc. perform stunning dunking maneuvers. Let's be honest, there's only so many ways a human being can stuff a ball through a hole. These dunks are new for younger fans (also known as the fanBASE). There are still great, skilled, basketball teams, like the Detroit Pistons of last year who shoved the ego-driven, pickup gameplaying of the Lakers back down their throats. The narcissism and money-making of athletes is simply a ripple in the wave of today's American culture. I see the same behavior in music, film and every 'reality' show on television. Marketing is marketing. Mars Blackman- I mean, Spike Lee, shilled for Nike and Jordan while Magic Johnson/Larry Bird hawked Converse. For a kid trying to get drunk, Coors might take like hamster vomit but if it gets the job done and affordable...

The truth to my lost love might lie in how I watched the Super Bowl last month. It was the middle of the third quarter and the announcers were driving me crazy with their lazy banter. None of them acted like they had any insight and had instead decided to rely upon their sparkling personalities to fill every second of airtime. When the announcers weren't gabbing away, we were being treated to highlights of the SAME GAME that I had been watching for the last hour. Hey, I might have a little problem with keeping my attention focused on a task, but I remember the touchdown I saw only 10 minutes ago. Unable to take it any longer, I shut off the sound and spent the rest of the quarter watching a silent pantomime of a football game. I had become my father.

Dad was a great sports fan back in the day. Boxing and football were his meat-and-potatoes. He would set a small wicker basket of mixed nuts on the table next to his La-Z-Boy then, with a nut pick balanced at the end of the armrest, he would crack nuts, dump the shells in the a soup bowl that lay between his legs and pop nuts in his mouth. He loved the ritual of watching football games, but gradually, a malice crepted into the comments that rose over the cracking of the filberts and almonds. Frustration and disillusionment touched his voice as he lamented the smarmy hype-machine of Don King and the big-money fights where Cassius Clay (NEVER Ali in my household) and Larry Holmes, my dad's Idols, were paraded out long past their prime and pummelled for national television and the promotion of a Bright, Shiny, New fighter. Non-Madden sports announcers made his blood boil to the point that I spent hours begging him to turn the sound back on so that I could listen to the game. Finally, the wicker basket found a permanent home on a kitchen counter and my dad spent his hours in the garden or out in the tool shed.

At some point in my life, I had discovered that there was something more to doing than watching. The emotional investment I weaved into the accomplishments of my team felt like a waste of energy. There would always be another year and another championship to win and the fact was that they were never MY team. Their accomplishments weren't my own, no matter how emotionally-invested I was. No one is going to remember my role in the glorious upset of the Lakers over the Portland Trailblazers. Granted, going to a game has the activity of effort and being THERE for the event, but the endless afternoons/evenings spent in front of the television were just a waste. I sat through the first half of the All-Star game telling my girlfriend one statistic after another about the older players that I had watched years ago. Grant Hill gliding through the air at Duke before blowing out his knee in Detroit, Shaquille O'Neal looking like a man among children at LSU and always waiting to move on to the NBA, Magic Johnson hitting the last second shot to beat the Celtics, Larry Bird... and I suddenly realized how much time I had spent and how much I knew and exactly how much it Totally Didn't Matter. I was reliving moments that were other people's lives. I could recollect the highlights of their lives nearly as well as my own. What about my life?

Suddenly, I realized that I didn't miss sports... and I had something else I'd rather be doing.