The Sports Nut-You Gotta Love Sports!

My wife and I have an unspoken deal when it comes to me watching sports on TV. I agree not to watch every single meaningless game that comes across the digital spectrum, and in return she agrees not to be one of those annoying wives that busts my chops about watching sports. Like most of our agreements, it has served us well for the last 18 plus years, and while it involves compromise on both of our parts, it is the type of natural compromise which are the only kind that really work in the long run. Which is to say that I don’t mind doing my part and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t either. As opposed to the compromise whereby the husband is forced to go to the mall and watch his wife shop for shoes or some other excruciating activity, and the wife is then forced to watch monster truck racing at the local arena with her husband. Both hate every minute of it and end up, usually sooner rather than later, hating the other for forcing them to do stuff they abhor doing.

So in our case, I enjoy watching the shows that we watch together in lieu of the Milwaukee-Indiana game on TNT. I very much enjoy Desperate Housewives and Brothers and Sisters, the latter is one of the more intelligent shows on network TV, even if all the characters are rich, beautiful, and witty. They can’t all be Six Feet Under or Dexter, especially considering that the broadcast networks have to appeal to a wide audience, but it is a very interesting and humane show nonetheless. I have been a big fan of ER since we started watching it the season it began, when our now 14 year-old son was a newborn. And I will even do a little bit of Oprah or some Home and Garden TV, although admittedly a little bit can go a long ways for me on those counts, but I do like the Oprah segments with Dr. Oz. However, I draw the line at Dr. Phil, that guy is just a blowhard jackass, enough said.

In return, my wife will indulge me with some sports viewing when it comes around to the big games, and to pretty much any pro football game, a Laker game, or the final round of a golf tournament with Tiger Woods in contention. Now granted, her participation usually consists of her settling into her comfy spot on the couch, cuddling up with her favorite blankets, asking me a few questions about what is going on, and then promptly falling asleep for a good afternoon nap. But at least she is there by my side, and even in a state of sleep that is better than not having her there. Of course even she has her limits too, her line is drawn at baseball, which I actually got her into for a brief time when she was pregnant with Jake, but like her trying fish, it turned out to be a brief exception, something in the hormones must have made her inclined toward baseball and fish, but it didn’t last. And she always has to use her standard line when I tell her there is only a couple minutes left in the game, the line about how the last two minutes take twenty minutes, and even though that’s generally true, it’s not always the case as I inevitably point out, because sometimes the team trailing is out of timeouts. So there!

The point of all this is to say that while I am a huge sports fan who follows closely the comings and goings in the wide world of sports, I don’t watch every game that’s on, I mostly keep up by watching Sportscenter and the best sports talk show in the history of the universe, Pardon the Interruption, PTI to those that are loyal viewers, of which there are many. I also don’t watch entire games much anymore, partly due to the fact that there are always shows on DVR to watch, and also because as I get older my adult ADD becomes more acute and I can’t sit still for three hours at a time to do much of anything. I have become pretty adept at catching the beginning of the game, and then the fourth quarter, or in the case of baseball games, the last few innings of close games. Yet there are always exceptions to the rule, and yesterday’s epic battle between my beloved Lakers and the dreaded Celtics was certainly one such exception.

Simply put, the Lakers-Celtics is the greatest rivalry in all of sports, one that spans three generations and encompasses passion that transverses the entire continent. The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is a close second, and Michigan-Ohio State in college football would probably take the third spot, but those are both regional rivalries with a national interest, unlike the Boston-LA clash which is truly bicoastal, matching the east coast tough guys against the west coast pretty boys, strength versus finesse, blue-collar Beantown versus high flying Hollywood. Of course the differences are exaggerated, and when it comes down to it, the Lakers are capable of playing hard nosed physical defense just as the Celtics are capable of playing run and gun up tempo offense. Regardless, when these two teams clash, it matters in the sports world, and as the NBA in my opinion has surpassed baseball to become our nation’s second most popular sport after NFL football, this rivalry is at the top of the list.

Yesterday’s game was one not to be missed by the sports enthusiast or the casual fan alike. It involved not only all the technical elements that make basketball such a great game to watch when it is played properly, but the raw emotion both on the court and in the stands was palpable and real. The Lakers gained a small measure of revenge for their defeat at the hand of the Celtics in last June’s Finals by pulling away down the stretch, thanks in large part to the play of Pao Gasol, aka Spaniard, and the always stellar play of the planet’s best baller, Kobe. Like Magic, Bird, Dr. J, and MJ before him, or like Reggie or Tiger, the greats are known only by one name, like Brazilian footballers, and Kobe certainly merits such status, as does the planet’s second best player, Lebron.

The Christmas Day clash ranks in the top five sporting events of the year, along with the great Super Bowl back in February between the New York Giants and New England Patriots, with Eli Manning leading the greatest game winning drive in the history of football to knock off the unbeaten Patriots. The next memorable event of the sports calendar was in June, with the U.S. Open and Tiger Woods battling veteran journeyman Rocco Mediate mano a mano into a 5th round playoff and coming up with yet another great victory, made even more impressive by the revelations afterward of the extent of the injuries that Tiger was dealing with. Skipping over the painful NBA Finals series which saw the Celtics first make up an impossible deficit to beat the Lakers in the middle of the series and then saw them completely annihilate them in the final game to win the championship, the other memorable event of the year came on the Fourth of July and the Wimbledon Finals between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, an tennis match for the ages between two of the greatest rivals the sport has ever known. Then comes the best regular season clash to hit the NBA in quite some time yesterday, and at a time when pro basketball is as interesting as it has been since it’s heyday back in the 80’s, when the Lakers-Celtics rivalry was in it’s second incarnation, the first being back in the 60’s when the players were less athletic, the game less relevant, and the Celtics won all the time so the rivalry was pretty one-sided.

The 80’s rivalry brings back the best memories, from DJ’s gut wrenching game winning jumper, to the great speeches of Pat Riley which give me goose bumps just thinking about them now, to Kareem’s sky hook and Magic’s baby sky hook to beat Boston. Jack Nicholson courtside at the Fabulous Forum and the Boston Garden with no air conditioning and dead spots on the floor but as much character and charm as an arena can have when it houses your mortal enemy. The current rivalry has a ways to go, but it is well on it’s way to becoming a classic in the same vein, and if we’re lucky the two will meet up on the hardwood of the Staples Center and the faux parquet floor of whatever the Celtics call their arena now in June for another clash of the titans, hopefully with the good guys coming out on top this time around.

In a Seinfeld episode shortly after George had gotten together with his new girlfriend Susan, he is stuck sitting with Susan in their apartment watching a rerun of the TV show Mad About You while Jerry, the perpetual bachelor is at home watching that night’s Yankees game. While George has the look of agony on his face of a man waiting for his wife to try on yet another pair of shoes, Jerry has the smile of a man in all his glory, while in the background after a big Yankees homerun the announcer declares, “you gotta love sports!” Indeed you do.