Basket Case

In 1992, professional basketball players were allowed to compete in the Olympics for the first time. The players who were part of the team the US sent to Barcelona were superstars from the golden age of the NBA – everybody’s heard of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Charles Barkley, right? I remember watching the games on the wood-panelled TV in my grandmother’s living room (“Bohdan, go play outside, the weather’s too nice to stay indoors”), and being completely, utterly, irredeemably hypnotised. Those guys were just out of this world, and they were having so much FUN. I wanted to be just like them, of course, and this new-found ambition fuelled long years filled with hard training and scotch-taping broken pairs of glasses together. I did make it on my school’s high-school team, and then I could have my own brand of fun, watching most games from the bench as I wondered why the coach hated my guts so much. But I digress. I meant to show you this:

Yes, I fulfilled my childhood dream – I went to see the Washington Wizards' first game of the season (they were once called the Washington Bullets, but as DC used to have the dubious honour for being the US murder capital for many years, they changed the name; it seems to have helped, although the new logo is enough to make you want to kill someone). The game was a bit of letdown (most of the Wizards’ best players are currently injured), but the whole shebang was just perfect – the overpriced hotdogs, the lightshow, the cheesy announcer, the cheerleaders, the burrito toss, the kiss cam… You get a lot of metaphorical bang for your quite literal buck, even if you are stuck way, way up near the ceiling because you bought the cheapest tickets on offer. Here's the kiss cam, which I think synergises very well with the Sprite ads:

There was only one worrying thing, seeing as election day is just around the corner:

Adam said it was probably fake, and they were trying to get the people to text more in order to take their money. Or phone numbers. Or both. I’d rather believe that, too.