Basketball. Pfft.

Originally published in the July 4, 1990 edition of The Camden Chronicle

Well, guess who won

If there are some Benton Countians whose lives are so dull and uneventful that they are interested in professional basketball, they know that the Detroit Pistons (a team that does not play in Detroit at all, but in the far northern suburb of Auburn Hills) and the Portland Trailblazers (a team that represents a small town in Oregon) are currently locked in a play-off contest to determine who is the best there is in that game. This might be likened to to a contest to see which creek bed is rockiest, which waterfall is the spillingest, or which dandelion patch is the yellowest.

The basketball season and play-offs last for such a Methuselah-like period and the games are so much alike in execution that the sportswriters in this town are running out of cliches and redundancies to describe the action and events. No doubt the problem is the same in that one horse town of Portland, so writers in both cities have stopped writing about the games and the players and have begun to insult the locations to which each team ostensibly belongs. One Detroit paper referred to Oregonians as "Californians who couldn't cut the mustard." That same writer said Portland was so foggy that on a clear day you could see the bathroom and "Oregonians didn't know what a baked potato was until Mount St. Helens exploded." The same article referred to Portland as a suburb of Seattle, while calling it a "jerktimber town" rather than a jerkwater town.

The small town writers from Portland were not intimidated by our Detroit scriveners. In an editorial, one Portland paper described Detroit as a halfway house on the way to Houston. The same editorial said that Antoine Cadillac was accompanied by an Indian when the transmission gave out on his canoe. Cadillac, this writer asserted, had to stop at a place that later became Detroit before continuing on to Montreal, leaving the Indian behind to start the city. Another writer said, "Henry Ford was prospecting for rust when he struck a Model T. He convinced the world it was a Toyota and the Tokyo of the West was born."

I find reading this far more enjoyable than reading about "post ups" and "technical fouls." Reading about setting the picks and scoring triple doubles excites me not at all.

The best line I read was by a man who was asked if he would watch the play-offs on TV.

"Watch the play-offs?!" he exclaimed, "if they were playing in my backyard, I wouldn't raise the shade."