Before I moved to Whidbey Island pretending to be some sort of Sherwood Anderson-like small town reporter, I spent a year as a sports columnist covering the Seattle Supersonics during their disastrous 2000-2001 season. It was a great gig: good seats in the press box, access to every game and a writing schedule that chained me to a mere 800 words a week. I didn’t care that the team hit the skids. For a basketball fanatic, this was a dream come true — a once-in-a-lifetime chance to blather on about my favorite sport, and get paid for it. Heaven.
By now you’re likely wondering if I haven’t wandered into the wrong section by mistake, dragging basketball like clunky luggage into an entertainment column. No accident. It’s only by habit that I refer to basketball as a sport. For me, hoops — more than any other sport — qualifies as the purest form of entertainment, and a heck of a lot better than most of the Hollywood pastimes currently out there for our timely consumption. There’s good argument for this, actually, and with the Sopranos series taking a nosedive and Tinseltown continually pimping its usual sub-standard fare, I’m hoping to rub-a-dub you with a little excitement and anticipation for the Sonics’ upcoming season.
Basketball, for all its unfortunate hype, is nothing short of high drama. First, you’ve got a cast of recognizable and (once you’ve watched a few games) familiar characters who orbit a relatively small stage. Confined within the parameters of a basketball court — think of it as the stage — these players act out the exaggerated antics of their individual personalities, with just as much gusto, hubris and ambition as any Shakespearian tragedy. What basketball has over Shakespeare, or any other type of theater, is that the drama is completely unscripted.
Think of a basketball game as a real-time soap opera where the outcome is unknown yet crucially important to the process. This is as close as art gets to real life, with the added appeal that all this gorgeous action is simultaneously bigger than life and utterly unimportant. It’s exactly what you want from escapist entertainment: the amped-up illusion of high stakes.
Not to mention the fact that basketball players are the most talented and graceful athletes among those of the top three professional sports. Football? Forget it. It’s like watching tanks run each other over. Baseball? Right — hardly qualifies as a sport. Look at those beer bellies and steroidal biceps. With basketball, though, you’ve got something akin to ballet, with the most physically adept and nimble athletes on earth dancing down the floor according to the competitive choreography of the game, leaping and flying through the air seemingly effortlessly. It’s thrilling, and absolutely inspiring to behold.
Sunday I got the opportunity to check out the Sonics in a pre-season contest against the Sacramento Kings — a team, by the way, that was egregiously robbed of the NBA championship last year through bad officiating and some poorly-placed Lakers bias. Anyhow, being a pre-season game, there wasn’t much at state, though it did allow fans an opportunity to check out some new players and get a taste for the upcoming regular season. The Sonics lost in the final seconds, 84-83, after a botched possession that resulted in a Kings’ freethrow and a blown last-ditch shot at the buzzer.
Of course, the main appeal of the Sonics is All-Star point guard Gary Payton, a scrappy veteran who, on the floor, generates the crackling excitement and inexplicable intensity of a mega-star. Payton undeniably is an excellent athlete, someone who overcomes physical limitations and — at this advanced point in his career — age, through sheer determination and caginess. Payton’s efforts often border on slapstick; his body has the flexibility of a rubber-band and he throws himself around with an almost comedic recklessness, ducking, bending, lobbing the ball toward the basket with apparent abandon. If he weren’t so good, such action would be ridiculous. As it stands, with his talent overcoming all obstacles, he’s brilliant. Watching Payton plan is almost obscenely fun.
I don’t know if the Sonics will win many games this year. They do have some fine players: young and super-agile Desmond Mason; the two super-Slavs, Vladimir Rodmonovic and Predrag Drobnjak; high-flying Rashard Lewis; off-guard and ace shooter Brent Barry (sporting a shaggy new ‘70s look). Among the new players, Kenny Anderson and rookie Reggie Evans look good. This, then, is your cast of players. Get to know them.
In an age of TV overkill, schmaltzy pop music, poorly mass-produced movies and infinitely bad novels written by roundheads and reprobates, apprehending basketball as a form of entertainment may indeed be a radical notion. Consider each game to be a play, not in the sense of overt action but of dramatic tensions interwoven on a field of competition and enacted by individuals driven to the limits of endurance and physicality. It’s not even all that expensive. For $11, you can get a ticket in the nosebleed seats at Seattle’s Key Arena; they’re not bad. And if you’re crafty, you can always sneak down into the rich-folk seats — otherwise known as the orchestra pit.
