"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.
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