Hop on…

 

…is the appropriate jeer to someone like me, who tunes in to the NBA championship after not following the season -- or really, the game. But who doesn’t love a Game Seven? And how can you not love Celtics/Lakers?

I figure I’ll show up, and find out what television advertising is up to these days. I am already blown away by the local news’ extraordinary promise of eleven minutes of news every night at 11. Every. Night.

  whoa.

 

 

 

And I need the blog topics. So here we are. Poor World Cup networks.

I have written before of my baseball love. Many times. Less often about how basketball gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m a person who will pretend to look for her keys just to avoid walking through a door at the same time as someone else. This game already looks like hockey in the first 5 minutes. Quit --- touching – me! (I’m not guarding yoooo… I’m not guarding yoooooo). No wonder everyone goes for the 3.

I do enjoy professional sports played well. But I think we all admit I have no skin in this game. I just need to be able to get through the workday tomorrow. This is the only reason I watched Bionic Woman in 6^th grade too, by the way.

I could never run enough to play basketball, and I am pretty sure we only played half-court. Girls rules, you know. Early Title 9.  One school generation out of the jump suit. I always managed to be on the misfit team when numbers were called in PE. The short, fat, near-sighted girls. I was a 3-fer. And I stunk at any game that involved running and hitting a target. You can fake involvement a lot more easily in softball.

So here’s what I know about this game: Big Men, Little Ball. You can punch people, and make that noise with your sneakers your mother never stood for in the mall. What if basketball sneakers came as wheelies? Is there even a Lake in LA?

1^st Q – 9:32

The other day a Stan Rogers song came up on my iPod -- one of those American sea shanties he growls out. This one about a merchant marine dropping by for his quarterly landfall on his lady -- a sort of a response to “Brandy” called “Your Laker’s Back in Town.” In the time it would take me to make a mini-movie of it with slides of Kobe Bryant, the joke, and this season, would be over. So just trust me. It’s funny.

I told you earlier I’ve been watching The White Shadow. Paul Pierce reminds me of Thorpe. You remember, Kevin Hooks?

I’ll you what about that show: there is some real basketball being filmed. You should check it out if you enjoy this game. It’s 70s style ball, too, pre-Jordan, pre-3 pointer. Shorty-shorts and slow passing. Davis is Coolidge, I guess, and Perk might be Haywood. But he’s not playing just now, and it is quite possible I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I’ve been wanting to spend some time praising what’s great about that series. It will have to wait for another time, I am afraid. Score is tied just now.

Garnett bowling over Jack Nicholson may be the best assault on an old man in pro sports since Pedro threw Don Zimmer aside.

2^nd Q 10:10. Make a wish. 40-34 Boston.

Are there still Laker Girls? T-shirt guns? Man, I got to catch up.

There’s a weird thing going on with my TV where only the sound effects in the ads are playing. Is this also a new trend? I might be on Mono or something. But it is an interesting phenomenon to watch people mouthing their silly copy and then a bunch of boing-yoing-oing and slide whistles. Oh, wait, that’s the halftime commentary now. I’m flipping around.

Over on Fox, Boston News staple Jack Levin is giving halftime chat to the killing of an entire family in Winchester. Switching back. Magic reminds us why he should not have been a talk show host.

Then I flipped channels long enough to find a story about Mannyon ESPN and forgot what I was doing for a while.

I like that Rondo . He might be Gomez. No storyline until the later seasons.

If you flip too long during a basketball game, you could miss a whole turnover. In baseball, you can flip to an entire episode of Law and Order and barely miss a pitching change. I guess I won’t go for ice cream now – though in this commercial break I can sell you some Ben and Jerry’s Milk & Cookies. A cookies n cream that understands it wasn’t Oreos we needed, it was good old chocolate chip. Cooked. And it’s just sitting up there in the freezer while I tell you about it. That’s how you keep ice cream in my house.

Shouldn’t it be Ben’s and Jerry’s?

I was going to count the number of uses of “downtown” but I forgot. I am imagining a cross-section of the court where Midtown and The Heights are also labeled . The wrong side of the tracks, and the suburban sprawl. The Docks! I’d like to hear a shot made “from the Waterfront.”

 

Q3 11:00pm. Nail Biter. I am supposed to be in Bed. But you know if this were Oscar Night, we would still be in the production awards or an Irving Thalberg honoree. I got this. With ice cream. Watching 300 lb men run for 2 hours inspires me to think it is perfectly FINE if I eat a bowl of ice cream at 11pm. Sleep better, right?

I actually watched that last quarter, which occurred in near real-time. I think the Celtics were rope-a-doped. I don’t know how you tell what a foul is anymore, but it’s crazy to think that games can be won on them. I am trying to design a free throw equivalent for baseball. What would that be? A free steal? In the school yard, we called that “One Base on an Over-Throw.”

Remember when game scores were in the 100s? What happened to that?  Same thing that happened to the underhand free throw.

I blame myself. I’m the one who sent a text to the Essex girls, now in Hollywood, when we were up by 10. My bad.

This essay does not contain the word “vuvuzela.” Oh, crap. Now it does.