Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The NBA, and only the NBA.

NBA basketball is the only sport worth watching. Most people hear me say that and they don’t agree. Then, when I tell them that every other sport is ridiculous, idiotic, and often not even a legitimate sport, they get really pissed. But it’s true.

I can give you reasons to support my claim. If you’re a fan of any other sport, you’re going to try hard to disagree with me. You won’t want to listen to reason because I’m dismantling the joy that you’ve spent countless hours trying to make yourself feel. But hear me out. Think about what I’m telling you. When you look at the world of sports through the lens of my all-knowing blog, you’ll see how right I am.

Football

Let’s get it out of the way. Football sucks. I’m sure you’ve spent sweat-soaked nights pouring over the stats of the NFL’s marquee players so that you can assemble the most kick-ass fantasy football team that the world has ever known. Bravo. You’ve wasted time. There are so many reasons that football sucks, I’m not even sure that I’ll remember to list them all. For starters, it creeps along at a snail’s pace. There is so much wasted time during the course of a football game that people get more enjoyment from watching Super Bowl commercials than they get from watching the Super Bowl. Seriously, the action on the field lasts for about 6 seconds, then you have at least 60 seconds spent getting ready for the next 6 seconds of action. It makes me want to nap. Second, there are about 15,000 people on a football team. It’s over-specialized. One roster spot on a football team is for the guy who runs interference for the receiver on plays that go to the left side of the field on the second Monday of each month in the event of snow. OK, maybe it isn’t quite that bad, but there is a guy who just kicks. Dumb. The scoring is non-sense. What is it? Two points for a safety, three points for a field goal, six points for a touch-down, plus one for a different kick? I don’t like it. Basketball gives you 1 point for the easiest shot at the basket, two points for the standard shot, and three points for the tough ones. That’s logical. Finally, football is not a sport. The reason is the same as the reason baseball is not a sport, which I’ll tell you about next.

Baseball

This game should be reclassified as America’s favorite nap-time. Baseball is probably the second-most boring game to watch on television, just barely beating football and just slightly better than golf. Baseball can go on for hours, and nobody will score! What crap! Like football, the biggest chunk of time in baseball is taken up between the brief moments that anything is actually happening on the field. Dramatic baseball moments include watching the guy on the pitcher’s mound stand there, make faces, look around, and maybe spit. Sucks. Also, this is a game, not a sport. It’s not a sport because you don’t have to be athletic to play it professionally. Now, I know that I’ve just sent a lot of readers into a conniption fit with that comment, so let me explain further. There are many athletic individuals that play baseball and football. These guys are healthy, strong, and well-conditioned. However, there are guys playing baseball and football – professionally, mind you – that are just fat bastards throwing their weight around. You can see fat cascading over the top of their pants. Baby cows see some of the guys standing over home plate and think that there’s an udder full of milk under that jersey. That’s just not acceptable. Now, maybe you want to defend these lard-asses, and in doing so you might point to a guy like Shaquille O’Neil and claim that he’s fat. Think again. Shaq’s a big dude. Once he retires, he’ll probably balloon up to the size of the Kingpin from the old Daredevil comics (not the modern Daredevil comics, in which the Kingpin just looks like a Sopranos outcast; I mean the old-school, white suit, wall-width Kingpin). Now, though, Shaq’s not fat. He’s probably way skinnier than your dad, proportionately speaking. He’s also fit enough to carry 340 pounds of Shaq up and down a basketball court for around thirty minutes at a run-like pace while only sweating enough to fill a kiddy pool. He’s big. He’s not a slim as he once was. But he’s not a chub like Barry Bonds, David Wells, or David Ortiz.

Soccer

Some people laugh soccer off anyway. There are some, though, especially non-Americans, that think soccer is a real riot. I’m here to tell you soccer sucks, and I played that sport for quite a few seasons as a boy. That, actually, is one of soccer’s biggest problems – it’s for kids. You know the term “soccer mom”? That term implies that moms are always okay with kids playing soccer. You’re safe. You won’t lose teeth, break bones, or get paralyzed playing soccer. All of those things could easily happen, but moms don’t think so. That alone makes soccer suck. My biggest gripe with soccer, though, is that it can go on for a few hours and the final score is only 2 to 1!! What the hell?! That’s not fun. That’s not exciting. Also, have you ever seen a soccer game end in a tie? They do this free kick thing until somebody scores! Real sports have overtime. Sorry soccer, you’re just a game. Not a very cool one at that.

Hockey

Hockey is just like soccer. Oh, except you get to play on ice skates. Gay. Hockey as a sport fails so miserably that people are more entertained when hockey players get into fights. There was actually an old Nintendo game called Blades of Steel that totally supports this fact. You could get into a scuffle with your opponent in this game, and the hockey action would cut away so you and your opponent could have a fist fight. When my friends and I played this game, we were playing exclusively to get to the fist fights! We could have just played Punch-Out, but we couldn’t face off against each other in that one, so we fought in Blades of Steel. I don’t remember the hockey portion at all, but I can clearly remember the Blades of Steel fight scenes.

Boxing/UFC

A lot of dudes like this garbage. Okay, these are tough guys who train hard to succeed in these competitions, but these are not sports. They’re fighting! Sports were created as a substitute for fighting. Cave-dudes got tired of having to beat the snot out of each other every time they wanted to compete, so they created other methods of proving physical superiority. Fighting is the ancestor of sport, but it can’t be a sport. As an extra diss to anyone who likes UFC - dude, if you don’t recognize the inherent homo-eroticism of that stuff, you need to talk to your therapist about coming out of the closet.

NASCAR

I shouldn’t even have to explain this one, but I will, because if I don’t, someone’s going to think I forgot about racing. This. is. no. sport. You’re using a machine! A huge, metal, combustive-fuel-powered machine. This is not a sport because a driver is not an athlete. I don’t need an explanation of the skill required to drive a car around a track at 50,000 mph. I know it’s tough. It just doesn’t make you an athlete. Sweat does not equal sport. Additionally, I’ve known some NASCAR fans, and any spectator event is going to draw a diverse crowd, but the NASCAR fan base is not quite diverse enough, ya know? It’s too homogenous, and I know this is true because any NASCAR fan that reads this is going to be angry that I just called him a homo.

Horse Racing

This falls under the same clause as NASCAR. It’s all about the horses, not the jockeys. There’s probably not really anyone out there that thinks this is a sport, but ESPN has it on their web site, so I felt the need to strike against it.

Tennis

Tennis is a game that I can almost get behind. The competitors are athletic, the contest is challenging, and it’s really only boring because one set can go on for 9 days. My main gripe with tennis is actually the scoring. Love-15-30-40? WTF? Spectacularly capped off in the event of a tie at 40-40 with the designation “deuce”, and then scoring is reduced to single-point advantage, then back to deuce, or a win. Wow. Someone was realllly drunk when they came up with that system.

Golf

This pains me slightly because the men on my dad’s side of the family are all golfers. They love it. My dad tried to get me into the game (it is just a game) when I was a small boy. Guess what? It didn’t work out. Something about being 4 years old in the hot sun (Jacksonville, FL) for three or more hours on a golf course where I was supposed to not make noise, not play in the sand traps, not play with the ball-washers, and walk all day as other people whizzed by in carts, didn’t convey the majesty of the game the way my dad hoped it would. I saw countless golf tournaments on TV when I was a kid, including something that seemed like a big deal at the time – Fuzzy Zoeller and Greg Norman in some kind of sudden-death stand-off; but, it never stopped seeming painfully boring to me. Watching golf seems better than playing golf, though, because playing would be just as boring, but with aggravation, discomfort, and heat stroke factored in. Not a sport because fat guys, old guys, and drunk guys could WIN professional tournaments.



So, that’s my initial argument. If you think of something else you would like me to consider or pass judgment on, feel free to send it my way. I didn’t get into my reasoning for why college basketball is completely inferior to the NBA, so maybe I’ll bring that up later.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

For starters...

Why on Earth would I want to start a blog about the NBA? There are countless forums for thoughts and opinions on professional basketball to be found on the web. ESPN, InsideHoops, Basketbawful, HoopsHype, HoopsWorld, RealGM, just to name a few. I'm not famous and don't have a published word to my name, so what makes me think that anyone will trouble themselves to read my blog?

Maybe they won't. I'm not writing because I think I'm better than any of the guys who write for the pages I listed. I've been a fan of all of them.

I'm writing because I love to write and I love the NBA. And I'm writing because I said i was going to a year ago and didn't. Now it's time.

I should tell you a little bit about myself and why this page exists in the first place.
I’ve never been much into sports. I was always the kind of kid who wanted to be inside reading or acting out great battles against the forces of Cobra than playing backyard football, or baseball, or basketball, or anything that involved people that weren’t me. That’s not to say I was a total shut-in. I had a Diamond Back Viper that was the next best thing to a Corvette. My brother Josh, other kids in the neighborhood, and I would sometimes spend ten hours a day riding those bikes all over the place. I played all of the above mentioned sports in the neighborhood with those kids, but it was never my favorite thing to do. I played neighborhood league soccer as a small boy, and mostly hoped the ball wouldn’t come my way. I played basketball, also on a neighborhood league, and sucked terribly. The point is I was never very athletic, and never very interested in playing sports, and it’s hard to say which was the cause and which was the effect. I was always bored watching sports of any kind on TV, even though I can remember my dad watching football, baseball, basketball, hockey, Indy and Formula One racing, and seemingly billions of hours of golf throughout my childhood.

In November of 2000, I moved to San Antonio, Texas. I lived a sports-free existence over the course of the next few years just as I always had, and my life was fine. I was aware of the Spurs, only because of the overwhelming ubiquity of logos to be seen around the city on cars, shirts, billboards, hats, bank commercials, grocery promotions, local newscasts, etc. I was not, though, a fan by any definition of the word. I couldn’t have identified a player on the team if one had bitten me on the ass. Ironically, one day I was bitten on the ass by Antonio Daniels.

Kidding.

However, one of the Spurs biggest stars, David Robinson, had attended the same high school that I did, went to that school simultaneously with my step dad, and used to baby-sit a friend of mine many years before I met him in high school. I don’t know if I was unaware at the time that Robinson was playing in San Antonio, but I do know that I never gave it much thought.

In 2003 I was working at a credit union and can remember some of my coworkers getting all worked up over how far the Spurs were going in the play-offs. A lot people talked about it, and I paid little attention. Soon the San Antonio Spurs were the champions, and still it made little difference to me. Oh, did I mention the fact that I was going through a divorce at the time? No? I was. Even if I had been a basketball fan, I probably wouldn’t have had a lot of focus on the Spurs at that particular time.

Well, after all of that, I was hanging out with friends a lot more and finding myself a bit more active in social circles, and sometimes that meant drinking beer and watching sports. I began to learn a little bit about this team and the players, and although I wasn’t quite to the point of declaring myself a fan, I was at least more knowledgeable about the game, the team, the league, and the perennial quest for The Ring. I don’t know how many games I saw that season, and I couldn’t even tell you anything about the ones that I did see, except for one. I was watching with a group of 8 or 9 friends on the night that Derek Fisher used .4 seconds to drive a dagger into the heart of the Spurs’ championship hopes. It was awful, even to someone only casually committed to the team.

So, I was almost there, but not quite. I spent some time away from Texas and returned in November of 2004. I was happy to be back, and I wanted to connect myself to San Antonio more than I had done previously. Following the Spurs was a part of that, and I watched a few games on TV and noticed wins when they showed up at the top of the page in the newspaper. A friend of mine was working at the ATT&T center (then called the SBC Center) and listening to him talk about work was another way that the Spurs were staying on my radar. My girlfriend at the time was a huge fan of anything that was popular, so she was suddenly a big fan of the Spurs. I have to give her my thanks for changing my life in an important way: she took me to my first live professional basketball game. And it wasn’t any regular season game, either; it was Game 2 of the Finals against the Detroit Pistons. It was such a fun experience, nothing at all like what I was expecting. Hell, right up through the drive to the arena I was hoping that she would say that she didn’t really want to go. The Spurs dominated. The Spurs went on to claim another title. I was officially a fan for life. I bought NBA Live ’05 that week and began learning tons more about the NBA through that game.

Very shortly after that, I broke up with that girl, went bankrupt, and had to move my ass out of Texas again. I moved to Virginia where most of my family lived, and made it my mission to turn my 11 year-old brother Taylor into a basketball fan. I started by getting him to play NBA Live with me. “Who do you want to be?” I asked. “The Lakers. Isn’t that the team Shaq plays for?” he asked me. “Shaq plays for Miami now. They also have this guy Dwyane Wade, who’s awesome in the game. I’ve never actually seen him play, but he’s amazing in the video game.” So Taylor took the Miami Heat, I took the Spurs, and the season began. I bought the League Pass on TV for the first time so I could fill my nights with basketball. In the winter I took Taylor to D.C. for a game that the Heat played against the Wizards. Neither team really looked like contenders at that stage, so we were able to get reasonably priced tickets at center court, about six rows off the floor. My little brother was less than fifteen feet away from the scorer’s table, looking face to face with Shaq, D-Wade, Udonis Haslem, Antoine Walker, James Posey. Jason Williams and Alonzo Mourning were out with injuries, but were dressed in suits and sitting with the team. Pat Riley paced the floor to our left. Dwyane played awful and I think he fouled out, but Miami won, and Taylor got a great kick-off to his basketball fandom. Late in the year, we were able to playfully argue over whether the Spurs or the Heat were going to take it all. I had my doubts about both teams, given some of the performances they were putting on in the play-offs. When the Spurs went down, I was sad and disappointed for my team, but I saw that Taylor’s team had the chance to do the double service of winning the championship and denying the team that had beaten the Spurs. And against the odds, they did just that. Miami won the title, and Taylor, in his first year as a young basketball fan, got the same luxury that I had the previous year: the team he loved went all the way to the top.

Late that summer I felt that my time in Virginia had run its’ course. The entire year I found myself missing San Antonio every time a game would switch to the outside cameras and show images from the Riverwalk, or the outside of the arena, or the skyline lit up at night. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to come back. If I said that the Spurs had nothing to do with my desire to return, I would be lying. They weren’t the only thing I wanted to get back to, but they were a major consideration, and I wanted to be back before the season started. I returned to San Antonio on The 5th of September. It was raining hard, and I had a lot of stuff to move with no help at all, but I was so happy to be back. I made it to several games last season, including the season opener against the Cavs. LeBron’s dunk over Tim was ugly, and I was so happy at the end of the year to see it avenged. I was also at the game during the playoffs against the Suns in which Robert Horry tossed Steve Nash into the scorer’s table and Amare took a little too much interest. Once again, the Spurs entertained me all the way to the title.

I may be the world's luckiest fan.Some people may read my blog and decide that I'm just a bandwagon jumper, but that's not the case. I've been fortunate, as a fan, to be in the right place at the right time, and my love and enthusiasm for the NBA are genuine. My hope is that I can use this blog to express that enthusiasm as a new, un-jaded voice in the crowd.

This history might have gotten a little boring, but I wanted people to know where I was coming from. If you read it once, I promise that I'll never force you to read it again.