My Basketball Jones

It's well past midnight and I just finished doing the dishes after fixing dinner for two most charming ladies (my sister and The Sauron). I have every reason to be wiped and hit the deck. And if it weren't for the fact that, while doing the dishes, I listened to Hatebreed's 'Perseverance' album in its entirity, I probably would be in Dreamland by now.

But seeing as though that album gets your blood pumping faster than speed ever could, I'm still here, kickin' it on da blog.

This morning - before driving from Zwijndrecht to Zele, from Zele to Vilvoorde and from Vilvoorde back to Zwijndrecht - the picture which you see above this post caught my eye on nba.com (my 5th favourite website after Hotmail, this blog, Webstats for this blog and standaard.be).

Not only is it a magnificent shot of The Best Basketball Player This Side of Michael Jordan; it also represents my early love for basketball in general and the NBA in particular.

(Also, looking at the picture, it occurred to me that I have only referenced my Basketball Jones - that's how they call 'love for basketball' in the States - sideways on this blog, in the three weeks that I have been back in business. As this cannot be tolerated, I decided to dedicate today's post to my passion for the Beautiful Game of Basketball.)

My Basketball Jones showed up as early as my seventh year of life. I was in third grade of elementary school (OLVA Male, where u at??) and one of the many after-school activities was learning how to play basketball.

Though I wasn't very good at it, I soon started to wear Jordan apparel (even though I had never heard of this guy named Michael Jordan; when I first saw the name on the outfit, looking at the Jumpman logo, I thought he did ballet - that gives you an idea of how distant a notion the NBA was to me, growing up) and Nike sneakers.

(God dammit, if I think about the sneakers I wore back then, I would've copped a couple o' more larger sizes, so that I could still wear those fine, neon-colored butters today.)

We're talking 1990 here, around the time this Michael Jordan dude led his Chicago Bulls to a first of two three-peat World Titles in the NBA. Names were thrown around such as 'Johnson', 'Robinson', 'Jordan' - they all meant sh** to me as the National Basketball Association was about as underground in Belgium as the up-and-coming grunge movement.

(God dammit, if only I had known back then what I know now; I would've checked out Nirvana at Pukkelpop, I would've bought the first Tool LP's and gone to see them in obscure Belgian venues, I would've checked out the first RATM gigs on the European continent. There's so much that I've missed.)

From time to time, I would see highlights coming from the distant US. By 1992, the Dream Team came and took Europe by storm. 'Johnson', 'Robinson', 'Jordan' were no longer just names; I could now put faces on them. And highlights, lots of highlights.

The NBA soon became an obsession. I bought the XXL mags and the Upper Deck Cards, copped the gear and the sh**s, but it wasn't until 1998, when this scrawny, 18-year old kid named Kobe Bryant came along, that my NBA appetite was whetted forever.

This guy had it all: a cool team (the LA Lakers), a cool sneaker ad with a West-Coast trash metal soundtrack, and hops which hadn't been seen since MJ first showed up. This guy was the real deal.

All this time, I never played organized ball. Bruges had a pretty lively streetball scene back in those days, especially in the summertime, when guys like me only got to play when it got dark and the real ballers got tired. But I loved the game - and I still do.

In 1999, the New York Knicks advanced, as the second no. 8 seed ever, to the NBA Finals. That was one amazing run with some amazing players. Camby, Ewing, Sprewell, Childs, Ward - heck, even Dudley. A gritty team which never said die. I watched their run to eternal NBA glory night in, night out, on the Canal + pay channel. Got up in the middle of the night to see them play.

Canal + got too expensive the next few years, so my attention swung back to Formula One - though I never lost track of the world's greatest basketball league via nba.com.

Coming April, I plan to get a subscription to NBA League Pass, the online network which lets you enjoy every. Single. NBA ballgame. Live. (Non-basketball fans better stay away from this website then, as it'll be my primary point of focus.)

I could wax lyrically about Kobe Bryant and the NBA all I want, but maybe I should point out the reasons why I love this sport so much: it's fast, intense and very often the most exciting sport you'll ever see. It's not a discipline made up of a bunch of wankers (which you all too often see in football) kicking the sh** out of each other - no, this is a hard-punching man's game.

And I think the NBA is made up of amazing athletes with often electrifying personalities, writing basketball history through emotion-laden matchups.

So to me, 'Where Amazing Happens' is a pretty good tagline for this sport. Anything goes, anything can happen, but it's always the most talented and persevering (there we've got that Hatebreed album again) which take the prizes.

And if you could excuse me now, I'm off to bed. I've got a special treat planned for tomorrow, which my inner movie geek will certainly appreciate.

Happy trails

DM