The Lakers are really on fire after the Pau Gasol trade. They are playing decent basketball, and this brings my passion back to the NBA.
I have to admit that I haven’t really closely follow the NBA for a while. There’re lots flaws of the NBA. Too easy to get into the playoff (16 out of 29 teams will qualify), which makes the regular season too long and boring. Only the final two minutes are fun. Couple superstar can easily dominate the game. Huge difference between good teams and bad teams ( You will have top teams winning over .700 while the worst teams are below .300. Upsets are rare. Take baseball as an example, usually the difference between the top team and the bottom team is less than .600 to .400). And we no longer have the God, the Magic, and the Bird in the game. So I dedicated more my research time to baseball and others, and no longer focus on the NBA that much.
But I have great old memories.
NBA is definitely part of my high school memory. Among major professional sports, basketball is one of the easiest to understand. And the fact that most of my friends do play basketball. It’s fair to say NBA is the most popular sports among high school guys back then in Taiwan (We didn’t have Chien Ming Wang by then). I still remember that how we shared newspapers (fought for it) in the morning, how we trash talked to each other about our favorite teams. How we compared each other’s basketball shoes (and who endorse them). If the college entrance exam had a subject in NBA, I would be quite confident that I will be on the top of my class. I will even say that NBA is the reason I learn English well because I tried to read all ESPN.com news and articles everyday. They are definitely better than the textbook.
That was an era that everyone idolized the God of Basketball, MJ. 95% of my friends are Bull fans. They adore MJ, they admire MJ, and they salute MJ. I am one of the very few exception that I am a proud Laker fan. I began to watch the NBA earlier in the 80s (yes, in elementary school), that’s why Magic Johnson is my first hero. But I still owned a pair of limited MJ XIII, which made me a better player (in my imagination) on the court. Yes, in MJ we trust.
I clearly remember the scene of NBA finals then. We are still in the class in the morning, but somehow many people managed to get small TVs and followed the game. Some of us (okay, me) just skipped the class and watched the game with the campus guards (I pretended to be a senior, who has all the privileges because of they need to study for the college entrance exam). At the moment MJ concluded the game by a jump shot after a fake over Russel of the Jazz. Huge cheering were suddenly around the campus at the same time. Wait, aren’t you guys supposed to be in class? Well, this is the beauty of my high school: we never pay any attention in class, and we managed to have all kinds of fun.
A new God has come, in the name of Kobe. And I click into ESPN NBA scoreboard to follow him again. And I lament my lost of youth.
