Barack Obama won’t discourage you from thinking he’s as into basketball as any dude in his demo. Anyone who saw what little he played for Punahou’s high school team, which practiced up the hill from Kapiolani Hospital, where now most sane people know he was born, those who attended those Interscholastic League of Honolulu games in which Barry Obama came off the bench, sometimes the last guy in for the Buff’n’blu, will tell you that he freelanced like Dr. J loose on a playground and was greatly hindered by his inability to jump. Teabaggers and bigots may choose to pursue his baller roots and theories of ethnic twitches and abilities (and they’ll bewrong if they dig deep enough) but it is more interesting, when in comes to the NBA, to consider The President’s Team, the Chicago Bulls, and the whole craziness that has gone off like the rampant like the Kamoamoa rift eruption in March in the lull of what should be the offseason for those of us who pledge our allegiance insanely to the NFL. The Associated Press reports that seven New York Giants were present at Eli Manning’s informal, voluntary “passing camp” at Hoboken High School on Wednesday. There were eleven media vultures on hand to cover this.
Everything has changed when it comes to electrodes based on my reading Professor Marshall McLuhan. There’s also a need for us sports junkies who do not hold in our hands the fate of western civilization to feed our addiction with tokes of crazed octagon fighting, road races at speeds of up to 200 m.p.h.—think of that in terms of traffic or gasoline costs — increasingly tolerable horse racing with its ghoulish realities, college softball with young women whipping it in at what seems like 200 m.p.h., the preservation and pursuit of lacrosse, professional bowl (I think I see it go by), the real football as played by teams in Europe increasingly owned by Americans, few of whom have won a “world” championship at home in America, surfing to the extent we get to see it here in Hawaii, Tigerless golf, tits’n’ass tennis, good old boy rasslin’, the twentieth century incarnation of Leo Seltzer’s roller derby http://www.rollerderbyfoundation.org/
It’s easy for me to kick it back to Obama, having not fully recovered from the year I spent writing the first biography of him by a fellow Really Born Here in 2008, a project that begin percolating in my mind in the late 1990s when I was paying all I could for my daughter’s fine education at Northwestern University and heard of a “local guy” (from Hawaii) who was making noise in the Illinois legislature, such as I paid attention to politics, surrounded as I am by its most bush league manifestation here in the Aloha State, unfortunately, a false paradigm of paradise. But hey, it’s most sunny, never snowy, and if you get here for the big Asia-Pacific Economic Conference coming to Honolulu in November, so international that President Obama will be here, home, sneaking a peek at the Bears if he’s in his Kailua Beach White House on a Sunday when the Bears are playing, if the Bears are playing. Those of us born here must leave to find a big league team for which to cheer.
The lead headline online in today’s “edition” of Honolulu’s remaining daily newspaper reads, “Prostitution expected to surge for APC” and “Local politicians, hoteliers and law enforcement officials are planning heavier security to combat an expected increase in prostitution as pimps bring more sex-trade workers to the islands to meet higher demand.” The fact is that The Stroll, that strip on Kuhio Avenue that runs Diamond Head from Kanekapolei Street to Seaside Avenue. That’s where the circuit hookers blend in with local wahine of every sexethnic blend troll taking the usual toll on the johns, the cops and themselves. Remember, “Hawaii Five-O” is a TV show, Jack, and whatever you see in da jungle might jump back. Once I was thrilled to say my folks lived at the corner of Seaside and Kuhio when I was born in 1937, but alas, my dad, who used to endlessly remind me, “When you we born we didn’t have to lock the doors at night in Waikiki.” I reacted as did my daughter when I began a “When I was your age” rap, which is to roll the eyeballs towards heaven and wait for the next bromide to fall.
FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARADVERTISER.COM
We are not only the farthest place from any other major land mass, we are also a place with one sports team, period. Not a major league team, not a minor league team, not an indoor or outdoor pro team of any kind, just a football team that plays in the Western Athletic Conference, a subdivision of the NCAA. Yes, the University of Hawaii Warrior football team. Well, that’s what it was called since June Jones a former traveling college quarterback landed somewhere where he could start and ran the one-note run-and-shoot offense with a few quarterbacks who broke passing records—a team with no tight end tends to throw the ball like a Thompson submachine gun spits lead—and Jones touted as Theisman candidates these quarterbacks with UH-funded DVDs and the best the Manoa-generated PR available and were last noted in non-football situations imbedded in the Googleverse.
The first jock upon which the hopes, dreams and expectations of the panting 50th State rested was Timmy Chang, a local high school star. On July 2, 2009, Chang was arrested at his Mililani home on suspicion of robbery. Chang was booked on criminal property damage and harassment, and pleaded guilty to both crimes in February 2010. His plea deal includes six months probation and requires him to attend an anger management assessment. Following Chang came the heroically named Colt Brennan, from Long Beach, California after several non-starting attempts at Saddleback and Colorado. While playing for the ominously garbed Dark Green and Black of the UH (its rainbow and white colors dumped by Jones as candy-ass or something at the same time he re-logo’d and branded the team like Poly-ninjas with a Tiki-Tacky font) Brennan cranked out numbers that would tax any accountant, like the NCAA season records for passing efficiency (a 186.0 mark) in 2006 and the NCAA career record for highest pass completion percentage: 70.4%.
With Colt and the 'Gun, the Bows marched through the 2007 season undefeated, 12-0 against the until they ran into sophomore quarterback Matt Stafford and the Georgia Bulldogs, who crushed Hawaii like poi pounders on speed in a feeding frenzy, 41-10. Brennan, always a headline maker in the islands, popped up in headlines recently with updates on his road mishap while hanging out on Big Island of Hawaii. As reported in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser—what now passes for daily print journalism in Hawaii: “Police today turned over to the Prosecutor's Office two negligent injury cases against the driver of a sport utility vehicle, in which former University of Hawaii quarterback Colt Brennan was a passenger. The SUV driver, Shakti Stream, is Brennan's girlfriend. The Nov. 19 head-on collision in North Kona resulted in the driver of the other car, Dr. Theresa Wang, to suffer [sic] traumatic injuries including a stroke that caused her to lose consciousness. Brennan suffered serious injuries, including a head injury, a broken clavicle and injury to four ribs. Shakti suffered a shoulder injury.”
Ah, the joys of the sidelines, from Shakti Stream to Shaka Smart, Obama to Osama, bin Ladin to Biden, LaBron and Elmore James, Twitter to Skype, MSNBC to RIMPAC, Charlie Trump to Donald Sheen, I could scream like Dallas Mavericks fans of the of the NBA. Yay. Huh, who? Oh yeah, Mark Cuban’s persistence pays. Finally, some reality TV for the Lou Adlers, Larry Davids, Dustin Hoffmans, Sly Stallones, West Los Angelenos, Beverly Hillsiders and other Tinsel Town types who cough up thousands of bucks to dress up (or down, bling or hoodie) the elite crowd that so predictably jumps off the ship whenever anything bad starts to rot in Hollywood within any athletic, show biz or political enterprise. Lived there, done that, didn’t win the t-shirt.
Hell, in 1969 I flew out of London for L.A. after hearing the Boston Celtics in the middle of the night on American Forces Radio tie the NBA championship series at 3-3, taking the show back to the Fabulous Forum, where I was able to witness from behind the Laker bench courtesy of KHJ Radio (where I brought back the first copy of “Abbey Road” to play in the States) as the thousands of celebratory balloons with "World Champion Lakers" printed on them suspended from the rafters haplessly hung there as the one-and-only Bill Russell watched Wilt (10,000 Fornications) Chamberlin sit on the L.A. bench as his Celtics won the game 108-106 as the Inglewood parking lots and hopes drained into the night and the balloons still high in the rafters were donated to a local children’s hospital. The team and their fans can go down with the Titanic as far as I am concerned.
Over The Line, Off The Chart
On May 1, Osama bin Laden went down with more élan than the Lakers disgraceful Sunday. Only Magic Johnson, who possesses what once was showtime, turned to blow time. The former Laker great—mandatory sports cliche’—verbally ripped the players, coaches and the owners of them a new okole in his condemnation of the thuggery on Sunday afternoon when Los Angeles threw in the purple towel in a 122-86 loss the lowlight of which was the forearm smash Laker’s seven-foot center Andrew Bynum laid on Dallas’ smallest player, barely six-foot J. J. Barea as he was in midair, defenselessly going for another easy basket.
Magic, former Lakers superstar and now their VP, HIV survivor and smiling entrepreneur says, "The Los Angeles Lakers embarrassed the organization by getting blo
wn out by the Dallas Mavericks. Classless acts on physical fouls that should have never happened. You have to show class when you win, and you have to show class when you lose and the Lakers did not show class in Game Four.”
Pissed and recalcitrant, the looming Laker lifted off his jersey and flapped it around as he exited the arena, which doubtless titillated the ghost of Leo Seltzer, but caused Magic to rant: “The Los Angeles Lakers embarrassed the organization by getting blown out by the Dallas Mavericks. Classless acts on physical fouls that should have never happened. You have to show class when you win, and you have to show class when you lose and the Lakers did not show class in Game Four.”
If Andrew Bynum ever makes it to the White House while Barack Obama is still in residence my bet it will be with another team. He’s about as popular in LA today as Charles Manson was a few months after Wilt The Stilt sat on his ass and watched the Lakers choke, or puke, or whatever that thing is they do for their gazillion dollar paychecks.
As forearm smashes go, the best one I ever saw in person was delivered by Mike Ditka when he was playing tight end for the Chicago Bears against the Los Angeles Rams in the LA Memorial Coliseum when a crazed and drunken fan got loose onto the field during a time out and laughingly waltzed through the Fearsome Foursome and the entire L.A. defense until he encountered number 89, those little numbers on a black Bear jersey, and Mike Ditka stepped out in time to clobber the miscreant who dropped like a terrorist dumped in the sea and was out cold longer than the player who ran into placekicker Tom Dempsey’s sawed-off metal reinforced foot to block a Rams field goal and our gang in row 117 under the press box thought we had seen our first death in a modern coliseum since the Flavian Amphitheatre--or anywhere near the Harbor Freeway since the Watts Riots.
Will the NBA playoffs be over before the NFL begins? Will Obama strike again? Will anyone buy the Official Boss Radio Real Don Steele wristwatch I’m hocking on eBay? http://tinyurl.com/3rkn7y9 “Ah, sweet mystery of life” and other lyrics writ before Obama, Osama, Biden and Bynum were born. Doubtless nothing of this means a thing, but at least I got it posted before the Internet crashes, (aka The Elephant In The Universe). Until then, cain’t wait for the Kathryn Bigelow movie version of "The Raid On Abbottabad" (Not Costello Land) unless NBA Films does it first.
Sheet Music
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