Now that my Lakers suck again, watching the NBA has kinda lost it’s luster for me.
However, I’ll usually try to watch the All-Star Saturday events. Not the All-Star Game itself; I could give a rip about that. But I LOVE the Three-Point Shootout, and I USED to enjoy the Slam-Dunk Contest, to a point. You can only watch so many behind-the-back two-handed gorilla jams, and I’m not the type to jump off of my couch and yell “OH NO YOU DIN’T!!!” at each successive defiance of gravity.
So in all of the Olympic hubbub I totally forgot that yesterday was NBA’s All-Star Saturday, until someone online who happened to be watching mentioned it, and I turned it on right at the end to discover that Nate Robinson and Andre Iguodala (whoever they are) were tied at the end of the contest, and that a Dunk-Off would determine the winner. Okay, nothing else on, so I’ll keep watching.
And Robinson goes first, and he’s got some ornate dealie where he passes the ball under his legs a couple times, throws up an alley-oop, and jams it home. So he sets up, under the legs, and tosses….too hard. Whoops.
Reset, try again. Dribble, jump, under the legs, toss….over the backboard. D’oh.
Third time’s the charm, right? Dribble…jump…the toss…oh, too hard. Rerack the tape.
This went on FOURTEEN TIMES. And to their credit, they had lost the crowd of 18,300 (probably a few more, they usually find a way to shoehorn in some extra seats at thoe prices for events like this) in Houston after about the fifth. At the end, Cheryl Miller comes out to interview this guy (who won, by the way, despite Iguodala only needing a couple of attempts to make his dunk), and fires off a desperation “Let’s hear it for him, Houston!” at the end, and we heard…crickets. Nothing. Nada. That sound you heard was 18,300 cars starting, because everyone might as well have left.
This made my night. I love when stuff like this happens; you see it every so often on wrestling shows, too, when the reaction of the live crowd is the exact opposite of what you know the producers were hoping for. It amuses me when you see irrefutable evidence that an event’s producers are totally out of touch with their audience.
So I offer up a Well Done to the fans in Houston last night. Good on y’all for not being mindless sheep and cheering when the scoreboard flashed a “WOW!!!!!!111!!ELEVEN”, when you were watching a stinker.