Basketball and bagels

On the final evening of my brief Chicago trip,  I was invited to watch the Chicago Bulls play the Cleveland Cavaliers at basketball from my firm's corporate box.  I had high hopes for the evening, not least because I reckoned basketball was a sport even I couldn't fail to understand: you score by throwing the ball through a hoop, right?  I was also told that it flowed more than baseball and football.

Well I did enjoy the game.  I met some very interesting and entertaining clients and colleagues, the food in the executive box was very good, especially the desert trolley, and by the end I was getting into the game which got pretty close by the end before ending in decisive victory for the bulls.  I don't think I will be attending basketball games regularly in the future but it was a good experience, and one to tick off my bucket list, (should I ever complete my main list and start on my supplemental list of "experiences to which I wouldn't be entirely averse if they didn't clash with something good on the telly").

 

Corporate sports entertaining is rather bewildering to me.  You take somebody to watch a sporting event, pay significant amounts of money for good seats, and then people spend the time talking rather than watching the game.  So for somebody like me who wouldn't normally choose to watch any sport unless my children were playing in it, is odd to be find myself slightly irritated by people wanting to talk to me when I am trying to follow the events on the court.  I actually understand Roy Keane's disdain for the "prawn sandwich eaters" - if you're going to watch sport, then watch it!

Basketball is a bit more flowing, but is still broken up by division into quarters and by the teams calling "time out".  I had thought that time out was something invented by Super Nanny or some other child care expert seeking an alternative to the good slap that so many children so badly need nowadays, but apparently it is yet another expression with its origins in American sport.  The breaks in play are filled with dancing cheer-leaders, musical interludes, free T-shirts falling into the crowd on parachutes, free T-shirts being fired into the crowd from special cannons operated by employees of McDonalds, and a cartoon race between a cup of coffee, a bagel and a doughnut, the winner of which entitles those holding the appropriate ticket to claim the winning item at participating branches of Dunkin Donuts.  This last event sounds naff, but I was quite hoarse cheering for that bagel.

I still have some unanswered questions about American sport:

(1) Why in this enlightened age do they still think it is acceptable to have scantily clad women dancing around in support of the male sportsmen?

(2) Why is there a peculiar link between sport and a college education?  Large screens giving players' stats included the fact that one individual had a degree in communication studies from some minor university somewhere - why should we care?  I know sport scholarships can be a way into education for people from poorer backgrounds, but it seems a wasteful way of going about things, paying for somebody who is primarily a professional sportsman to take a Mickey Mouse degree.  It would make more sense to me to train the talented sportsmen to play sport, and fund scholarships for poor clever kids?  I could not imagine turning up for drinks in my tutor's rooms at Cambridge to discover that John Terry had started my course on a soccer scholarship.  (And that's not snobbery by the way, I would feel just the same about a posh scumbag.)

(3) Why does nobody sing (with the notable exception referred to below)?  It is a sad fact of British life that one of the few places that many people, especially men, feel comfortable singing is in a sports stadium.  But in America they don't even seem to have that.  The chants in basketball are basically the same as they are in baseball (see my earlier post), unimaginative, lacking spontaneity.  Even when they played  a bit of "Chicago, Chicago" by Frank Sinatra nobody joined in apart from me.

(4) Why are they so unfair to the away team?  There are almost no away fans, so the visiting team are pretty much on their own.  Whenever the Bulls were awarded a penalty they were cheered, whenever the Cavaliers took a penalty, all the Bulls fans behind the basket made distracting noises by bashing together special yellow plastic tubes provided by the home team.  I can't understand why anybody thinks this lack of sportsmanship is either acceptable or entertaining for the home fans. 

(5) Who builds a sports stadium with no public transport links in the roughest part of town?  Madness.

(6) And WHY do they murder their own national anthem in such cold blood?  They seem to invite different people to sing it for each game, and are too patriotic to notice that most of their singing is flatter than the proverbial witch's tit.  Being "Veterans Day" (and for supporting their own military and ex-military you cannot fault the Americans, even though they seem totally lacking in the paper flower department) they invited a close harmony group of military personnel to take their turn at massacring what ought to be called the Star Strangled Banner.  Imagine a karaoke impression of Whitney Houston crossed with Wet Wet Wet - lots of poorly executed vocal gymnastics.  And the further they stray from the actual tune into the realms of pure ego, the more the crowd love it and cheer!  Why am I the only person wincing?  Does patriotism make them tone deaf?  Compare with Last Night of the Proms where the audience seem willing to join in and keep to the tune.