Thanks to the wonders of Google Video, we have easy access to melodramatic homemade videos of Kobe’s numerous dunks overlaid with some awesome rap music.

And another one, this time with some excellent foreboding music that sounds like it was ripped right out of Requiem for A Dream.

There are so many ways to ridicule the game of baseball that it’s difficult to choose where to start. Difficult, but not impossible.

As a kid whose parents were from South America, I grew up with the notion that soccer (or fútbol, as we called it) was a far superior game. This was despite the fact that neither my parents nor my relatives in Argentina cared about soccer any more than they cared about bais-bol. My grandparents believed, and still believe, that it’s a sport for thugs and low-lifes. My mom worried about head injuries and tackling. Also drugs (Maradonna, cocaine, etc.).

And still, I made a point of treating the national pastime with contempt. I decried it as a non-sport. It required no physical fitness, I said, like golf or chess. It was the most poorly designed of the sports, in my mind, because the rules were strange and arbitrary.

So when the time came in gym class or on the playground to play what was, in the late 80s and early 90s, still The Nation’s Pastime, it was with glum satisfaction that I joined in the game. On one hand, I had to participate in the Sport That Crushed All Other Sports (like soccer). On the other hand, I could criticize to my heart’s delight, from the best vantage point: right field.

This happened throughout my childhood. Late summer nights spent watching wispy dead dandelions under the bright outfield lights. I even played on the rec-center team in a misguided attempt at cultural assimilation.

In the short term, at least, it didn’t work. I never fit in with the boys who collected baseball cards not because everyone else did, but because it was a fact of life, like breathing. These were kids who really did play catch with their dads in the back yard after dinner. My dad and I played multiplication tables.

But over time, baseball made a mark on me in a subtle, nearly undetectable way, like a painting on a sun-facing wall. I remember running up the stairs the night the Twins won the 1991 World Series. We’d just moved into our house.

I remember getting my first fitted ‘Minnesota’ hat, now trapped in a grave of dust behind a dresser in my little brother’s room.

And I remember the sun going down over a slow freight train out behind right field. The red coat of infield gravel on my shoes and my gloved hand raised above my head to draw the gnats away from me.

There I stood; for all anyone knew I was waiting for a fly ball.

Somewhere between then and now I learned to love baseball. Not for the game itself, which still bores me to tears most of the time, but for the way it burrowed into my memory. Uninvited, unwelcome and out of place, baseball made a place for itself in my life.

It is the end of summer. It is the Twins and the Braves. It the bright crack of a high fly ball, sailing into the summer sky.

Up, out, and into right field.

My forearms are sore because I went rock climbing with my brother yesterday. Rock climbing is a sport you play with your fingers, mainly. Ninety percent of the muscle strength you need comes from your digits, which are the point of contact between you and the rock. And for physiological reasons I cannot explain, when you work out your fingers, your forearms take the brunt of the punishment.

Then again, maybe I was just doing it wrong. Maybe there’s no need to clutch at the rock for dear life till your fingers are curled and cramped like raccoon claws. But if the was some other way of doing it, no one told me. And if there was some way of putting on the climbing harness without producing a horrible pinching sensation between his thighs, nobody told my brother.

Still, we had a great time, and we’re planning on returning. There’s just something so natural and childlike about wanting to climb things. And it’s instinctive; you just climb up. There aren’t a lot of special skills to learn. No rules to follow. Just grab whatever you can get a hold of and pull yourself upward.

And, despite common sense, the chance that you could fall is a big part of the thrill. Never mind that you’re suspended from a rope that could hold a sumo wrestler. Forget that the rope is attached to an anchor that could sustain a small car. When you’re thirty feet in the air, it feels like the only thing between you and the ground is the strength in your finger and your toes.

Anyway you look at it, humans are not meant to move this way. We are not built like mountain goats. So to do it is to defy not only common sense, but nature. And who wouldn’t enjoy doing that?

Does that same impulse drive people to risk their lives climbing ridiculously high mountains? Must be. But there must be something else about those people that allows them to take it that far. Me, I like the danger … as long as there’s no danger. I like the imagined danger. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy climbing in a situation where I might actually have to rely on the strength of my fingers.

On a road trip a few years ago, we stopped at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming (that’s the one from Close Enounters Of the Third Kind that Richard Dreyfus builds out of mashed potatoes). All around the base are huge boulders just begging to be screwed around on, so I obliged. I screwed around, scampering up and down them, imagining myself a great climber.

Then I looked up. There, about half way up the sheer vertical face of the tower, were two little dots; one blue, one white. Climbers’ helmets. I don’t know much, but if it had been me dangling there, I’d have wanted not a helmet but a parachute. Or a jet-pack.

A few hours later, they’d be at the top, where the view is, I’ve heard, impressive. But at what cost? Craziness?

No, sorry. I’m happy to attach myself to a nice, firm rope and pretend-climb in a gym. But this business of actually risking your life in the pursuit of fun is not for me.

But really, I don’t think I need to see him. I don’t need to see any more of the Olympics. It’s not good for my self-esteem. Sure, I like watching the competition. It’s thrilling to see the world’s top athletes push themselves as hard as they can in pursuit of victory. But then I realize that an otter-man three years younger than me has captured the world’s attention by excelling so thoroughly at something that it’ll be a disappointment if he doesn’t win.

And that’s not all. Practically everyone at the Olympics is younger than me. At least, that’s the way it seems. 21-year-old Kaitlin Sandeno is keeping up nicely with the world-record holder in the 400m freestyle. China’s Zhang Tianyi, a female medley swimmer is all of 14, she was born in the 90s.

These are young people, like me, but they are making me look bad. Terrible, actually. Wasn’t our generation supposed to be the one that didn’t care about anything, didn’t do anything? Well? Come on, people! Generational apathy only works if everyone does it (er, doesn’t do it).

I mean, I can swim and everything. I can do a front crawl, a breaststroke, and even the butterfly (although I stay away from it; it makes the lifeguards think I’m drowning). But I’m only 22, I figured if ever was going to become the world’s best anything, I still had years and years to do it.

Now that the Olympics have rolled around, with their bright-eyed army of adolescent athletes, I can’t turn on the TV without being reminded of how far in the dust I’m behind left behind. The time to excel, apparently, is not now. It was four years ago.

If I’ve been secretly excelling at something for the last few years, I look forward to collecting my crate of gold-medals. If not, I think I have some catching up to do.

I’m already past my prime for some events – women’s gymnastics, for example, peaks before 20 – so I’ll have to find a sport in which my seniority will be an asset. I’m sure there’s room in the walking competition for someone who’s getting along in age.

Then again, maybe I’m just dreaming. As shocking (and depressing) as it seems, it’s possible that my chance at becoming a world-class athlete has already come and gone. From now on, each Olympics will find me four years older, and the Olympians four years younger. Maybe that’s part of getting older; watching the infinite possibilities of your youth shrink away

What was a real (if unlikely) possibility at the age of 12 is bordering on hopeless at 22. And I don’t even want to think about 32. But while it’s healthy to come to terms with your limitations, there’s something human about refusing to accept them. Some say it’s delusional to watch the Olympics and think, “I could do that.” But if it weren’t for those same delusions, those athletes wouldn’t be where they are today. I’m not saying this kind of ridiculous optimism will make us all Olympians, but it doesn’t hurt to dream.

Ah, and what’s this? It looks like Michael Phelps and his truncated legs failed to win a gold medal in the men’s 200m freestyle, which makes it impossible for him to beat Mark Spitz’s 1972 record for most gold medals in a single Olympics. Now the best Phelps can do is win six.

HA! Underachiever. I could do that.

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.

Oh, don\’t you hate Mondays? What about Tuesdays that feel like Mondays?

Minnesota has been wrapped up in clouds like a sunflower seed in a cotton ball for the last week. Everything is gray. Even my skin is gray.

The world seems soaked and mushy. Impermeable things have begun to absorb water; the driveway looks like it would squish and squirt if you stepped on it. Water has begun leaking into the trunk of my car. In the absence of sun or heat, it sits there, unevaporated, developing a rotten smell that creeps into the rest of the car. I would open the windows to air it out, but it\’s raining.

At least I don\’t have to worry about forest fires.

The citizens of Norway, on the other hand, will. That\’s because their newly enacted national smoking ban covers only indoor public spaces. That, arguably, will push the smokers outdoors, where their haphazardly disposed cigarette butts pose a grave fire danger.

But I joke. Good for Norway. Like all people who live in cold climates, the Norwegians are used to being out in the cold. If you can fish in sub-zero weather, you certainly can smoke in it. It won\’t be long before someone invents mittens specially designed to allow you to hold a cigarette (maybe with a lighter built into the palm).

Cold climates invite adaptation and resilience. When it\’s too cold to go outside, the only thing you can do is … go outside. Because if you don\’t, you\’ve lost, and winter will dominate you for ever. People here in Minnesota know that; we ski, skate, snowshoe, and even swim despite fridgid temperatures. The Saint Paul Winter Carnival is our way of celebrating this. We\’ve got nothing on these guys, though (my favorite is the ice-wall climbing competition, which in the U.S. would be called the Race to Get Ourselves Sued).

Yours,
Bruno

And now, a note to Karl Malone:

Dear Karl,

You are the Mail. You are the Man. But you are also the Punk. In the future, please withold your admittedly large forearms from the chest and stomach of Mr. Kevin Garnett.

Also, great lameness has resulted from your quitting the Utah Jazz to play for the already well-endowed Lakers at a substantial pay cut. Why not just get all the best players in the league together on the same team and win every game? Because that would be lame, just as you are lame.

You have dispensed of the Timberwolves, and perhaps deservedly so. But should you go on to win your first-ever NBA Championship, I hope you remember that you could only do it by joining a team that was already destined for victory. Your Championship ring will still be made of gold, but it will shine ever so much more faintly.

Also, I am awarding you a technical foul. Because this is my letter, and I can.

I will now shoot a free-throw.

Swish. It was good.

With bitter regards,
Bruno Bornsztein

But it won\’t. Despite how undeniably likeable KG and the gang are, and depite the Lakers detestable smugness, I\’m going to stop caring. If, by some twist of fate (or legal misfortunes, in Kobe\’s case) the Twolves go on to win this series, I won\’t have the satisfaction of knowing I was with them all the way. I feel bad for that, but win or lose, I\’m just not sure I want to be a part of it.

Plus, I\’ve got this to keep me entertained.

Bendo – the MVP of my cubicle

House updates
The roof has stopped leaking. I went up there and distributed caulk like ketchup on a ballpark frank. Now I\’ve just got to fix the ceiling tiles that came off in the family room.

The trees have been trimmed and the branches hauled away, to some awful tree graveyard, I suppose. The roof hasn\’t been fixed yet, I keep hoping it\’ll just get better. To that end, I have been smearing it with Zinc and Echinacea.

Retaining wall = fixed. Fixed = with chewing gum. It is a horror to behold. Ugly and deformed.

Otherwise, the house is lovely as ever, with Lilies of the Valley blooming on the north side. Sounds right out of Mary Poppins.

You know why the T-wolves keep losing? Because I\’m not there to cheer for them. And neither are 19,000 other Minnesota fans. I propose a simple technological innovation to solve this problem. Every TV set should be equipped with a micophone. When the Wolves fans watching at home cheer, those cheers should be relayed instantly to speakers in the Staples Center (or wherever they\’re playing). That way the TV audience can be involved in the game.

Or, better yet, every household could have a controller that operated a cardboard manequin in the stadium. There would be a whole section of cardboard fans, with speakers for mouths. They would spin their arms and make jolty, puppet movements to resemble clapping. Wouldn\’t that be encouring, Kevin?

Nothing better than a couple thousand creepy simulacra to fire up the away team.

.
.
.
I think it means puppets.

That\’s me. All year long my affiliation with the Timberwolves has been scant, and my attitude cold: I didn\’t bother them if they didn\’t bother me.

But now that they\’ve bootstrapped (is that the right word?) their way into the third round of the playoffs, I\’m trying to make up for lost time. I have quickly memorized the name and position of every player on the team, despite not really knowing what those positions mean. My girlfriend yesterday asked me to explain what a point guard was, and all I could say was, \”Usually a short guy who dribbles.\”

That may be right, but my sports ignorance shows in my inability to express it clearly. And I was pretty much just guessing.

Let\’s not get into my feigned explanation of the difference between technical, personal, and team fouls. It was like cooking with a blindfold on: a little of this, a little of that, and I don\’t know what any of it is, anyway.

I\’m an excellent plagiarizer, so I can talk about ball rotation and penetration without having the vaguest idea what it means. OK, maybe the vaguest. But it all comes from listening to announcers\’ chatter.

Despite all that, I\’d like to offer the following mediocre insights:

• The Lakers have more talent than the Wolves. Much. More. It\’s very hard to beat a team when you shut down Kobe, Shaq, and Karl Malone and they still have 3-point shooters like Fisher and George to bug you.
• Just because they have more talent doesn\’t mean they\’ll use it. Intensity is what the Wolves can\’t do without. And as they showed last night, hustle, teamwork and a little bit of luck can beat the Lakers. And it doesn\’t hurt if baby Shaq is sleeping, either.
• The Wolves\’ bench can be deep, but it can\’t be deep forever. Without big games from KG (Cage is what I\’m going to start calling him) and Sprewell, there\’s no way we\’re going to get a split in L.A.
• Which brings me to my last point: we don\’t need a split in L.A. Sure, it\’d be nice, but we\’re guaranteed a game 5 back here, and as scary as that sounds, an elimination game at home could be just the kind of make-or-break situation Minnesota could capitalize on.

There. The Sports Illustrated Uninformed Edition. Just as sexy as the swimsuits; no need to hide it behind the computer at work.

And, of course, a bunch of hooey.

Soccer is one of them. 30 years ago, soccer occupied the same place in the American consciousness that curling does now. U.S. soccer programs – the few that existed – were considered to be among the worst in the world.

But then we started trying. A big turn-around came in 1994 when the United States hosted the World Cup for the first time. Still, it was rumored that if we hadn\’t automatically been allowed to play in the tournament (the host country always qualifies), our team wouldn\’t have made it out of the qualifying rounds. Regardless, we were eliminated rapidly, losing in the second round.

Since then things have steadily improved. The U.S. women\’s soccer program is probably the best in the world. And the men were just ranked 8th. That\’s a pretty big accomplishment, for a country that still doesn\’t regularly televise soccer on broadcast channels.

But apparently, our accomplishment is rubbing some people the wrong way. At a U.S.-Mexico game in February in Guadalajara, the fans chanted \”OSAMA, OSAMA!\” at the American players.

Frank Deford, a writer I respect greatly for his style and substance, commented on NPR this week that this is part of a greater trend. He said our dominance in most sports, combined with our uncanny ability to excel even at sports we don\’t really care about (think cycling) is only adding to the rest of the world\’s contempt for us.

He said our foreign policy and diplomatic style are political examples of the same idea: we\’re on top, and we like to flaunt it.

Deford\’s suggestion, then, to U.S. fans and athletes going to the Olympic Games this summer, was to win graciously. In other words, don\’t rub it in. Don\’t chant U.S.A. at sporting events, don\’t drape American flags on anything.

He stopped short of advising us to throw a match here and there, and he did seem to acceed to our playing the national anthem, when appropriate.

But what he never mentioned, and seemed to overlook, was how completely disgusting it was that Mexican soccer fans would even consider chanting the name of a man who orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans.

We\’re not talking about Mexican fans chanting \”MEXICO!\” That wouldn\’t offend anybody here in the U.S. It wouldn\’t be considered rubbing it in, even if in soccer, we are inferior to our southern neighbors (they\’re ranked 6th).

But somehow, it\’s OK for other countries to cheer for terrorists, while we can\’t even say our own name?

And what\’s the cause for this self-imposed restraint? Have we done something really terrible like attacking other countries\’ Olympic teams?

Not at all. We\’re just good at soccer. And cycling, and tennis, and running, and swimming, and just about everything else.

And why are we good at those things? Oh, well, it must be because of the Bush Administration\’s unilateralist foreign policy. Or because we squandered the world\’s goodwill after 9-11. Or maybe we keep winning gold medals because of our support for Israel?

No, the fact is, we\’re good at sports for the same reasons we\’re good at other things. Because we live in a country where people are free to do what they\’re good at, and encouraged to get better at it.

There are a lot of other reasons too (economic factors, immigration, a large population), but none of them justify a Mexican crowd, or anyone else, chanting \”OSAMA!\” at us. And none of them justify telling our fans not to cheer on their athletes with a frank, rhythmic intonation of our country\’s initials.

What DeFord is missing here is that the Mexican crowd wasn\’t chanting \”OSAMA!\” at us because we\’re winning, but because they\’re not.

And that\’s as much their responsibility as it is ours.

In that sense, DeFord is right; when we chant \”USA!\”, it shouldn\’t be because the other team is losing, but because we\’re winning.

Because if we ever start seeing other countries\’ losses – in sports or at the hands of terrorists – as reasons to cheer, we will have stooped to the level of those fans in Guadalajara.

And that will truly be a step down in the rankings.

Is that because I\’m Latin? Is it because my parents are Argentine, and I want to connect to my roots?

No. Salsa is from Cuba, not Argentina. In Argentina they dance tango, which looks a little like two people trying to kick each other while holding hands and kissing.

Salsa, on the other hand, when done right, looks like you\’re trying to balance on a big rubber ball.

Only I don’t do it right, so I look like I\’m on a really humane death-march: One, two, three, rest. One, two, three, rest.

It\’s in the hips, they tell me.

That doesn\’t mean a thing to me. But I don\’t tell them that.

I started about two months ago, learning a style called \”Salsa Rueda\”. That\’s where you dance salsa with a partner, but all the couples make up a big circle. A leader then calls out all kinds of moves, and you\’re constantly switching partners. Like polygamy without commitment.

So last week we got put in the intermediate \’rueda\’ despite not really knowing any of the moves. The results were disastrous.

The leader called something known as a \’Sombrero\’, which means I-don\’t-know-what-the-hell-it-means. The lady I was dancing with at the time was clearly disappointed.

But hey, that\’s what dancing is all about, right? I mean, the whole thing is set up to be embarrassing for the man: my girlfirend is there, and all she has to do is follow my lead.

But I don\’t know how to lead her; I barely know my own steps.

Then you\’ve got the dance instructor, the leader of the \’rueda\’, who shoves me in the kidney while I\’m switching partners: “Move faster,” he barks.

And he shoves hard, he does. Right in the small of my back, because he\’s not just trying to get me to move faster, he\’s also punishing me for all my previous slowness.

And best of all, my mom is there (it was her idea for my girlfriend and I to dance in the first place). She’s a good salsa dancer and an enthusiastic teacher. Unfortunately her advice tends to come while I\’m trying to listen to the instructor explain the steps. That way, I don\’t really hear what either of them says, and I end up knowing less than before.

The logical conclusion to this, of course, is that after a while the circle instinctively shrinks, squeezing me out like a pimple.

I stand on the outskirts for a while, pretending I\’m still part of the group, bobbing my head. But the circle moves, amoeba-like, away from me, slowly enough that it\’s hard to notice. And before I know it, they\’re on the other side of the room, and the dance-studio mirrors make it look like there are hundreds of them, all far away from me.

Well, to be honest, that only happened once. And they didn’t so much squeeze me out as I squeezed myself out, after I got tired and confused.

But my point is that dancing is a very social activity. And salsa-rueda is even more so. Because if you screw up, you screw everybody up. And that includes all the people in the mirrors.

The solution is to dance better. To dance faster. And to avoid the kidney punches.

But that’s easier to think about than it is to do. Especially with moves with names that translate as “hat” and “plug” and “double-plug”, it becomes difficult to concentrate on what your feet are doing.

But here’s my advice: next time you go into a Latin bar, go up to a pretty lady (or man) and say to her, “Hola, want to dance the double-plug with me?”

It will definitely be a learning experience.