A semiprofessional sports journalist friend of mine recently told me he was taking his talents to another website, and it was discussed that perhaps I would also be interested in throwing my pen in the ring. Although I did have my own sports column in a monthly newspaper at a tiny Christian college in Idaho 15 years ago, and although I do have interest in doing more writing than I've done for years (as any faithful reader of my half dozen prior posts knows), I'm not sure I have enough enthusiasm to throw my pen into the ring just yet. Desires aside, I don't know that I really have the talent or the determination to keep making contributions, particularly if it's not my living.
Of course, it does provide a potential avenue to keep me using this blog. And so I think I'll try to get something down here.
As a fan of the NBA's San Antonio Spurs, I am not proud of the fact that I pretty well tuned out the sport during "last season" (they only wrapped it the first bubbleball season up a couple months ago and have already started another abbreviated season to try to maintain the semblance of normalcy). Between the China/Daryl Morey story, and the disastrous responses by LeBron, Adam Silver, and many others in the NBA, and the league's decision to have a season in the face of a pandemic experience this country has never experienced, I was pretty well turned off. The truth was and always will be that the league will do whatever it can not to lose money...if they can spin their greed as providing a public service for the morale of the average American, they will.
Of course, at this point, they're going to have another season (gotta have that money!). And though their reasons for having a season in the face of danger and setting a shitty example for the public were dirty as sin, the bubble has been noted publicly as more successful than the attempts of any other contact sports league. And as I am getting bored with the same old stay-inside routine, as many Americans--and I think I've held out longer than the average person, as I'm more of a home-body than the average person--I'm bending to my baser desires of catching a basketball game.
Lost in the shuffle of the past year and change of China and COVID were my formerly beloved Spurs.
Although I will never care as much as I did when Tim and Manu and Tony were suiting up, I still consider myself a fan and surely know more of their bench players than I do from any other team. All that in spite of the fact that they missed the playoffs, had a losing season, and won fewer than 37 games for the first time in 20 years or more. Of course, over the past few years, things have gone about as poorly in the luck/probability/randomness department as they could go for a franchise who is still doing an adequate and self-aware job (as opposed to, say, the Suns organization). Tim, Manu and Tony retired or spent a year in Charlotte before retiring, Aldridge got old, Murray got injured, the team was still picking low in the draft every year, and then the Kawhi situation, wherein the Spurs also lost Danny Green and got probably as much back as they could in DeRozan, who is of course a very good player but also makes it harder to see the writing on the wall.
So now I'm left with the the spectre of former glories behind me and the unknown silhouette of the present and future in front of me. If I'm going to continue calling myself a real fan of the sport, I have to make an effort to be watching it somewhere and somehow. If I'm going to remain a self-proclaimed Spurs fan, I really need to know not just the names but the direction of these players and this team. In short, I need to take a look for the first time since Kawhi left town. I'm excited and a little bit scared of what I'll find.
