I Absolutely Sucked At Basketball

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

But I’m certainly pleased to see the Bay Area’s basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, win their first National Basketball Association championship in 40 years. This is a team that in those 39 years in between, only made the playoffs nine times (16 teams out of 30 qualify each year), and only made it past the first round three times. Most of those other 30 years they were downright terrible, sometimes struggling to win even 20 of the 82 regular season games. This year, they won 67 of them.

It’s tough when a team continually struggles and no one wants to play for them, and the Warriors had an incredible history of that in the last 40 years. Because teams that finish poorly get the first choices at drafting of players from among the colleges, the Warriors had ample chances to build a team, but invariably they’d pick wrong, and wind up with players with terrible attitudes who often sabotaged their own play so they could be traded away. Lattrell Spreewell tried to choke his coach during a practice. Chris Webber grumbled his way through a couple seasons. Chris Washburn proved to be a terrible player whom the colleges sent through because of his potential, not even caring that he could barely read. (One player asked Washburn what country was south of the US; he replied “France?”) He developed a drug problem, and that was that. Even when the team was fairly good in the early 90’s, having a trio of players that were all-star calibre, they managed to trade all three of them away within a couple years.

What amazes me about basketball, and why I was so horrible at it, is the inherent ability of its best players to sprint up and down a court while bouncing a ball for 48 minutes, and having the wherewithal to accurately shoot a ball into a net 10 or so feet off the ground. They do all this while men sometimes over seven feet tall are chasing them. I get tired just watching them. Stephen Curry made so many miracle plays for Golden State this year, but one which astonished me (though I know it’s been done thousands of times), was one where he dribbled down court while opposition was chasing him, then without looking, passed the ball behind him to a teammate who he somehow knew was there. The rest of the players’ momentum carried them into continuing to chase Curry, while his teammate had the ball, completely unguarded, and had all the time in the world to make a three-point shot. Consistent team play like that can almost guarantee championships.

When I played in PE classes as a kid, I was always among the last ones picked for a side, and I justified that positioning by nearly always allowing other players to easily manoeuvre around me. They could fake moving to the left, and my entire body would move left, making it a breeze for them to shift the other way as my momentum took me further away. I made EVERYONE look like Stephen Curry. My ability to dribble was mostly non-existent, giving opposing players easy opportunities to steal the ball away. And my shooting abilities, on those rare occasions I actually had the ball and was in a position to shoot it, were not what you’d call accurate. I can’t count the number of times that game humiliated me, and how I so badly failed to grasp the basics of it. I wasn’t great at any other team sports either, but could occasionally make a decent play in either football or baseball and have a brief moment of redemption. In basketball I was strictly comic relief.

It was a blessing when I graduated high school and would never have to deal with basketball (among the many bad things) again. Oddly, though, when I was about 22, I had a friend who had a basketball court set up in his back yard. He and a couple friends were playing and asked me to play, but before I accepted, I told him how atrocious I was, and he actually showed me how to do a couple basic things. Damned if I didn’t actually play at something nearing competence. Since then, I’ve only played one other time, with my nephew, who was probably around 12 at the time, and the uncoordinated being from high school was back in full force.

I’m happy for the Warriors, who play in the same division as the perennial champion LA Lakers, who have been in a rebuilding mode the past couple years, and actually finished in last place this year. In head-to-head competition, last time I looked, the Lakers held about a 60-game advantage, which means the Warriors would need to win every game for about the next 15 years or so to catch up. That most likely won’t happen, but at least for the time being the Bay Area has another team with bragging rights.

June 17th, 2015



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