Just don\’t call me Kobe
Who says watching TV makes kids less physically active? In the two weeks since the Timberwolves-Lakers series ended my friends and I have played basketball three times.
The level of play has been laughable, but the nice thing about basketball is it’s good exercise whether you play well or not.
That said, now I can really appreciate the nearly 40-minute efforts put forth by Kevin Garnett in every game of the series. That’s a lot of running, and it’s on a bigger court, against bigger opponents.
He does get paid though, there’s that.
We tried giving ourselves salaries the first game we played. We figured it would be an incentive to work hard, like KG. We each promised to give ourselves 25 cents for every basket we made.
Suffice it to say no one had enough money to buy a stick of chewing gum after a half hour of running the court. So we dropped that idea.
Now we just congratulate ourselves and give each other nicknames. My girlfriend, because she’s tall, and matches up against Alex, who is short, is called Shaqlicia.
Alex, when she makes a shot, is called Shaqlex.
They are uninventive nicknames, I know. But it’s OK, because we’re tired.
Some others: Josh is Gary Payton, because he likes to kick the ball away on defense. I am Kevin Garnett, for no reason whatsoever.
Everyone else is either “Yeah!” or “Woooo!” but only when they do something good.
After our pick-up game, I did the only reasonable thing a person can do after physical exertion: I watched TV.
My infatuation with the NBA Finals continues; last night I watched the Lakers beat the Pistons 99-91 in overtime, after Kobe hit a buzzer-beating three-pointer to tie the game.
I now love the Pistons, despite having previously known nothing about them. A similar thing happened to me with the Wolves. I know part of it is that I hate the Lakers the way the band president hates the prom queen. But what weirds me out is my capacity to develop an emotional attachment to something that had never meant a thing to me before.
The Pistons? Detroit? I’ve been to Detroit, and nothing about that city inspired me to care about it or any of its athletic teams. Mostly what I remember is boarded up skyscrapers in the middle of downtown. And how Tigers Stadium looked abandoned.
So why do I now find myself staying up late to watch the end of a basketball game, cheering for a team as familiar to me as the Japanese interstate numbering system?
Despite my frequent complaints to the contrary, I think there’s something engaging about watching, and caring about, professional sports. I know this is not a great discovery; it’s like saying Hollywood is successful because people like seeing movies.
But even with their outrageous salaries, inflated egos, and questionable off-court activities, professional athletes still manage to inspire. And though they’ll still be millionaire celebrities if they lose the finals, you get a sense that they really do care about winning. In some small way, these guys are like the lottery winner who promises he’ll keep his old job, and does.
Of course, in many larger ways, they’re not.
But that glimpse of real, unfettered competition is what comes out during the finals, especially in the close games. Seeing Kobe drain that three-pointer with two seconds left on the clock, I could almost imagine him doing the same thing in a run-down city park gym, where the only reward he’d receive would be another quarter towards that stick of gum.
Of course, to do it, he’d have to first get by his defender, Shaqlicia.
And that, my friends, would be a difficult task, even for Kobe Bryant.