Tonight I am spending my evening watching two
basketball games at the community college where I teach. I have, combined, on
the women’s and men’s teams, six current students, and at least half a dozen former
students. This is not the first basketball game I have been to for my students—I
attended one last spring, when the women’s team was tearing it up in the NJCAA tournament.
Of the major competitive sports, I fully admit that basketball is the one I
follow least. I am rabid in my following of baseball and ice hockey, and I put
in a fair showing on the matter of European football and the NFL. I even got
fairly embroiled in our (no longer) local Rookie League baseball team, the
Casper Ghosts, a Rockies affiliate that has since moved on to greener pastures
in Colorado.
But basketball has always been on the fringe of
my sports-loves. I get caught up in the March Madness with everyone else, of
course, but I don’t understand the niceties of the game. Sitting here on this
vaguely uncomfortable moulded plastic, I still don’t understand them. I get the
rules in a fairly basic way—shot clock limitations, fouling out—but unless it’s
NBA-level traveling, taking the ball for a walk on a leash, more or less, I can’t
see those sorts of infractions. And I watch too much ice hockey to see the foul
in a little bump, in obstruction. So this is not a post about basketball, at
least not in the way that it could be.
What this post is about is about putting my
money where my mouth is.
