Aaaaaargh apparently “our” Dallas Mavericks are taking on Boston’s Celtics in the annual championship netball game tonight.
This means that for the next ten days or so the only thing that I’ll hear, on any media channel, will be basketballbasketballbasketballbasketballbasketball, which interests me less than stories of Kim Kardashian’s ingrown toenail.
It’s not the games per se that bore me to tears (although why anyone bothers to watch the first three quarters of any pro basketball game is beyond me). No, what drives me into an absolute coma is the endless commentary both before and after, mostly by pundits whose last basketball game was with their teenage sons in the driveway.
Charles Barkley? Larry Bird? Magic? Michael Jordan? Them, I’ll listen to… perhaps. But when the talk becomes something along the lines of “when he drives to the paint for a layup” is when I reach for the on/off switch and/or the Southern Comfort.
And oy… try finding a bar around here which won’t have the pre-game prognostications, the game highlights, the post-game blather, all at earsplitting volume… as Doc Russia so often says:
“The game itself: fine. People talking about the game: ugh.”
I don’t even do that shit when it’s a sport I love — cricket, football, F1, women’s professional nude gymnastics* etc. — and when it’s stupid basketball or Australian underwater wrist-wrestling…
Pass.
*Okay there’s no such sport, but there should be.
“women’s professional nude gymnastics* ”
You’ll just have to settle for the prepubescent girls version with the painted on body suits they broadcast every 4 years. This summer from Paris. The older versions do swimming and the taller ones do track and field, but some of those are only questionably female. The problem with women’s gymnastics is that their CG gets all screwed up.
Women’s beach volleyball is my go-to Olympic sport.
Any time I see John Madden scribbling on the screen or holding one of those bullshit turkey legs, it’s time to extinguish the TV in favor of something more enjoyable, say raking leaves or visiting the dentist.
Kim,
Charles Barkley does have *One interesting thing to say .. and he says it frequently and loudly to the misunderstood melanin-rich urban youth .. the msg? The path out of the ghetto is not through pro sports-ball, because only in the vast minority of cases will you achieve that kind of high performance. Instead, Barkley encourages urban youth to work on their MINDS.
Little interests me LESS than anything sports related. I played ALL the sports to excess in my yoot, but then I grew up and moved on. In all of my 69 years I have seen, in a combined total, less than 15 mins of sports stuff. Even just talking about that stuff is, as you say Kim, coma inducing.
I sympathize. I can totally understand PLAYING a sport. Don’t get WATCHING them at all. I used to get a kick out of watching my wife and my father watch football, but that was because they were having such a good time. It was happy-making.
*shrug* That’s ok, some people are baffled by what I like to ‘waste’ time on.
never could understand “couch potatos”
used to play/teach my kids/grandkids how to kick a soccer ball, how to swim, etc.
their cousins used to call my kids (the girls, too) “jocks!” but mine, now in their 50s, are far healthier than their cohort.
I agree completely, but we have a far worse and more ominous threat on the short term horizon – namely, the 2024 Olympics which is being carried by the ever odious NBC, Satan’s own network of choice
Listening to those multi culti secular humanists blather on about the human interest backstories behind the athletes would be an experience I would only want visited upon death row and pedophile inmates
The Olympics will certainly be my cross to bear this summer
I still enjoy the NBA from time to time; Luka & Jokic are legitimately amazing.
I attended my first NBA game in 1977 as an adolescent. Seattle Sonics hosting the Portland Trail Blazers; the Bill Walton squad that would go on to beat Dr. J in the finals that season. We had seats behind one of the baskets. I remember being thunderstruck at how big these dudes were in person.
Seattle was starting a rookie forward named Jack Sikma, who was being guarded by Portland’s Maurice Lucas. Lucas was among the more intimidating enforcers of his day, and was pounding the shit out of Sikma. As a rookie, the refs weren’t making any calls in Sikma’s favor.
The following exchange happened about 20 feet from me: Downtown Freddie Brown misses a jumper. Walton grabs the rebound & kicks it out to start the break. Everyone runs the other way – except for Maurice Lucas, who bent down to tie his shoe, and Seattle’s center Marvin Webster who just stood there watching. As soon as Lucas stood back up, Webster wheeled into him with his forearm and knocked him on his back. He pointed down at Lucas and said “Lay off the white boy.”
That’s pretty much the starting point of my NBA fandom.
I just cannot believe you don’t care about the commercially induced surrogate interest in heavily drugged over-height mercenary mutants hired by your village competing with the similar mutants of some other village to see who is better at throwing and bouncing a ball.
I got “commercially induced surrogate interest” from Heinlein who also said that when your fellow villagers insist on rubbing blue mud onto their bellies it is unsafe not to do so.
Up here in Canada every sane man knows enough about Hockey to at least appear to have a bit of a blue belly. When I’m with my German cousins I brush up on current events in Fussball so they don’t treat me like a drooling idiot pervert.
RE: Women’s nude gymnastics
They are all shrimps with the build of 12 year old boys. Do you really want to see that?
George Willhas a great little talk on why baseball is the best sport. he sums it up nicely with something to the effect of, Baseball is a sport where you don’t have to be seven feet tall or seven feet wide to excel.
My interest in sportsball has only ever been passing at best, and has declined with age. That said, I rather like this story–
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVKJ7IAOKLI
RHT that’s a good story.
Never been a sports fan at all. When I was a kid none of the Chicago teams could win a damn thing. On top of that I was that klutzy kid who always got picked last for the team.
So the first time I ever go to a Hooters restaurant is 1998, near Chicago. I got seated quickly. And after about twenty minutes I notice that every TV in the place has the same basketball game on. It was Michael Jordan’s last season with the Bulls (I checked this with a fan and friend) and they were in the play-offs. Then I notice that every guy in this Hooters, except me, is watching the game. All these guys are watching ten ugly, sweaty guys in tank tops and shorts, running up and down a wood floor with a big orange ball, whereas I’m watching, all around me, these lovely women, wearing tank tops and tight short shorts running around on the Hooters’s pine floors. I thought someone’s got their priorities truly screwed up, and I don’t think it’s me! As far as I’m concerned, I still have my prioities straight.
As another dad said within my dad’s hearing once, The women folk have a longer season than these ball players.