Denial of Sound and Basketball in Absentia

"Who's your favorite basketball team?" I have friends that are pretty into basketball. Inevitably it rolls around. "Who do you follow. You write a lot about sports, but not basketball? Why not? Who's your team, who do you like?" Basketball is to me as baseball was to others. I played it some as a kid. But I never really got that interested in watching it. I can appreciate the skill, no question. But I can't sit through a game, not sit through it and be interested. No offense to anyone. I talked with a friend the other day. "Help me find a team. I'll try. We hammered out a few options, but it really doesn't sound like anything that easily fits my kind of team. Oh sure, those teams are out there, but not a huge fan of the teams for the two cities I latch to the most (Miami and Houston), and I know less these days about most of the players. It's hard to figure out, no question.

Who's my favorite team? At the point I tried to follow every major sport, I had an answer. Technically this is my response these days. "The Seattle Sonics. They still play right? That's my team." I know they moved to Oklahoma City. I find it bizarre. Good for that community, they have a team. I find the story as to how that was even an explored market extremely interesting. But I'm not following that team. I carry that transferred anger of serious Seattle sports fans from when I found out. Totally unjustified, I never had strong ties to the team. I sound like one of those people that refused to say Washington Redskins, calling it "The Washington Football Team," in my case, "That team in Oklahoma City." Nice try with the name by the way, a passing semblance of the previous nickname. "I'll follow basketball when they bring the Sonics back. Keep me up to date."

Team affiliation and loyalty is such a funny thing. We attach ourselves, often to teams in cities we don't live, as fervent fans. This is OUR team. Year by year the team makeup, the players shift, the molecules turn to different elements. We lose, our favorite player is traded, our team is relegated. We win a championship. We go back to losing. We go back to heartbreak. And the dedication, still. I lived on the other side of the country from Seattle. No real reason to follow them other than I kind of liked Shawn Kemp at the time. But other teams, Miami, Orlando, Charlotte, Houston, were all significantly closer to me but that's the one I said I liked. Purely aesthetics. The colors, the design, the Sasquatch mascot. That was my draw, not a dedication to locality and all sports within.

And that's not weird. That's not odd, there are quite a lot of people in fact, with that level of dedication. That's sports. That's all part of it, whether we're there or not, we're willing to either be that one lone fan or the one fan in the mass, whoever our dedication of fandom is set to. That's okay. Some people just want to watch the good games. That's okay too. For me I find that somewhat harder, I need that attachment or else I'm just not that interested. So yeah, i could watch some fantastic game between the Bulls and the Warriors, but I won't. I'm still waiting for the Sonics to come back. Someone give me a call when it happens.

Escaping the Event Horizon of the Super Bowl

Here we go, ladies and gentlemen, are you prepared? As each of us leaves work this weekend, it begins. It is Super Bowl weekend. Sure, there are other sports that will be on. Hell, ESPN is running two back to back basketball games with some of the best teams in the league.NBC is daring enough to air a Flyers/Capitals game ON game day. Even if we watch these, we know the truth. The Super Bowl will encapsulate all.

I looked at the schedule, there's an entire day of events (and fuck if I know what they actually are, probably nothing actually important) that will consume the CBS network. "We have the Super Bowl now," the say, "nothing else matters!" It's true. There are TVs that will be prepped to go, never leaving the station starting at 9am. Food being bought and prepared full days ahead of time. The call's going on out. The party, are you coming?

It's a great game. It's going to be portrayed Cam vs. Peyton but come on. We're gonna see Cam going up against the Broncos defense, and it will be a sight to see. That will be the game. It's probably one of the better matchups of teams, and barring the unseen and not taking the halftime show into account, it should be pretty fantastic. But, no, I'm not coming to the party.

For me, there's a brief moment in my childhood where outside of social activity, I followed the Super Bowl. My best friend was a huge football fan, i was in 8th grade, and so I became a football fan too (sort of, anyway). So when our friendship faded, so did my football interest. Later, at one of my jobs where football was a regular topic, I became interested insofar as it was an adaptive technique. And, since we were all watching Sportscenter in the cafeteria of the casino we worked at. But still, it was highlights and me talking at the seat of my pants. I never watched games. I wasn't at the party.

My father-in-law is my tie to football, in general. When me and my wife first started dating and we moved back to my hometown where her family also lived, we'd go over on Sundays and watch football with him. He's a soccer guy, played soccer and was part of a team sent from Saudi Arabia to the US to play and go to college. Whenever he brought his kids and his American wife back to the American South, football is everything. So he adapted. And he loves the game, and I love watching it with him.

It's not standard football fair; he doesn't drink, we do have chips and salsa, though, mixed in with hummus and occasionally dried dates. Both of us constantly falling asleep (the man hardly takes a day off), we always made a giant pot of REALLY strong coffee. Coffee, chips, salsa. Football. That's how I imagine it. So otherwise for me, football, it doesn't really matter. And now, with us in Texas and him still in Mississippi, I will not be watching. I actually scheduled myself to work. And he's not going to miss it, I'll give him a shout out. I'm sure it'll be a great game. Drink a cup of coffee for me.