Turkey. The land of kebabs, delight and now the second best basketball team in the world, which is even more disturbing than the time the Captain Kirks finished third at the football World Cup in 2002...
Basketball is played in a lot of countries and internationally it appears to be a very competitive sport, which should make it great and compelling to watch, but yet it doesn’t because who really wants to see Lithuania win a world anything?
Basketball is one of those sports where it’s not about scoring – that’s the easy bit – but outscoring your scoring opponent. Fans of such sports will say that makes it exciting, I say anytime a team scores a hundred of anything and only just wins then that makes it boring.
Consider this; I drive the passion wagon in and out of the garage several times a day, would trying to do so more times than the boy racer next door make it any the more exciting? No, it would not.
Now I may well be a white man who can’t jump, but I have some history with basketball that allows me to make the criticism including having watched the movie of the same name more than once.
I grew up in the mean streets of Naenae at a time when interest in the NBA really cranked up and for a while there I was even an official garment of the NBA wearing kango.
But back then who wasn’t? We had moved on from the WWF; had collected all the trading cards and watched all the Summer Slams, had grown out of our NSW and Queensland State of Origin jerseys so basketball wear was the natural progression.
This was at the height of the Chicago Bulls legacy and some guy called Mike was making ‘hang time’ a profession. Bruiser was into Mike in a big way and now that I think back on it, his obsession for the seven foot black man was probably not healthy.
He always had the shoes, the ones with the pump in the tongue, the life size posters, all the videos and all the clothes. He not only watched Space Jam several times but rated it and if Facebook had been around then he would have been a fan and dare I say it, a friend of the big man.
We all had our favourites. I can’t recall mine but then I would’ve only pretended to be interested so as to appear windswept and interesting to the young ladies that hung around my tall, long dicked, basketball playing mates strutting around in their Club 55 tees. It didn’t work.
Back then, as it is now, basketball is great when it’s a five minute highlights package of all the slam dunks and massive, buzzer beating three pointers from the men’s toilets, it’s just everything in between that blows.
And why does every game have to be commented on by at least one loud American who wheels out every annoying basketball phrase in the book?
John Dybvig was always good value as a comments man but then he looked like he would thrash his wife and kids, or somebody else’s, within an inch of their life at any moment, which made him imminently watchable.
Yes, they might love basketball in Turkey and Lithuania (who finished third for fucks sake) but it’s not my cup of tea.
Jammin with my homies, back when Basketball was as cool as wearing two singlets...
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