On Not Watching Basketball

It looked like nobody was going to be watching basketball this year until the players and management struck a 50-50 deal (meaning the players and owners will share the billions), and we had a five game bonanza on Christmas Day.

I didn’t do any basketball watching last year, either, except for a week: the NBA finals. I’m not a fan of either team (Dallas and Miami), but I’m especially not a fan of Miami. The hype generated by its acquisition of LeBron James as a member of the Three Musketeers (Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh being the other two), was enough to make even the most diehard fan jaded. Yes, even Mark, who loved basketball, had already admitted that the spectacle had defeated the substance. But I watched in his memory.

I gave up being a fan, meaning wanting a particular team to win, after the Pistons’ and Lakers’ great years in the late 1980s: I’ll never forget the on-court kiss of Magic Johnson and Isaiah Thomas. We loved Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis, Maurice Lucas, and Michael Cooper (he came from New Mexico), Isaiah, the crazy Dennis Rodman, John Salley, and Bill Laimbeer. Mark stayed a fan through the Laker transition to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. The kids and I gave up after Bryant was accused of rape.

You could make a case for not being a fan of any sports team if you wanted to make criminal activity the criteria: the transition from the ghetto to the “show” (as they call it in that great baseball flick Bull Durham) has littered the playing field with adulterers, wife beaters, rapists, animal abusers, and even a few murderers. To be fair, a lot of them are guilty only of wearing silk suits and driving Mercedes Benz’s and Jaguars. I always marveled at Mark’s ability to disassociate sports, particularly basketball, from the criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed, media misinformation, etc. While he knew the world of sports was complicit in all these machinations, he didn’t care, because he just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run. Watching games he became just another fan, yelling in excitement over a great play, groaning with disappointment at a missed opportunity.

Mark and I bonded watching Monday night baseball years ago. These were the last of the Oakland A’s days, also the last time I got excited about a baseball team: Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue. Then when the baby came along, one of us would cook dinner while the other one swung Jakob in his Tarahumara swing that a friend had given us. We hung it from a viga and tied a rope to its side so we could sit on the couch and swing it to and fro without it getting in the way of the TV. I sometimes still watch the playoffs and the world series, but once you lose track of who the players are you kind of lose track of the game.

The only football I watch is Friday Night Lights. A friend just told me that the only actor who actually played football is Landry, the Johnny come lately to the team and the ensemble oddball. Mark was a diehard Buffalo fan (his hometown), which was a kind of torture, even when they were winning (remember, Jim Kelly took them to the Superbowl, what, four times, and lost every time). I never really understood this about his sports nature, either. He knew perfectly well that the Buffalo Bills had nothing to do with Buffalo other than arbitrarily playing there, but he hung with them, and suffered with them, to the bitter end.

But back to basketball. I do appreciate the athleticism, the ballet jumps, and whirlwind speed the players display in every game, but without Mark to remind me, I just don’t watch and only tangentially know which team in each division is winning and how it looks for the finals. I’ll watch the finals again, just as I did last year, and hope that it’s not Miami or Dallas (or the Lakers). I can’t really say which teams should be there instead, but hopefully I’ll enjoy the spectacle: Marvin Gaye singing the Star Spangled Banner could redeem the show, but alas, that is not to be.