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| Tuesday, October 21, 2008 |
| High dialogue on teh Intarnet |
CuckingFunt said:  Originally Posted by angel_luv My thinking Senator Obama could be the anti christ is similar to someone looking at a tall person and wondering if they play basketball.
No.
No it's not.
Your thinking Obama could be the anti-Christ is more like looking at someone with a Super Mario Bros. t-shirt and wondering if they're going to anally and vaginally rape you, simultaneously, with your own amputated limbs.
OK so Spurs fans are good for something, after all.Labels: God, idiots, Obama, religion, sports |
posted by Steve @ 3:06 PM  |
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| Wednesday, April 30, 2008 |
| A Relationship Complicated by Heartbreak |
The Phoenix Suns have become one of the best first-round exit playoff teams in NBA history, and notched yet another 'great' series (along with many others that were usually lost), and afterwards my wife and I sat down and had a talk about the Suns. In particular, she pointed out that during the playoffs she would constantly ask her co-workers how the Suns were doing on a game day - not because she especially cared about the Suns (she likes 'em fine but not the way we do), but because she knew that when the Suns lost big games, she had to go home after work and do some psychological damage control on her pissed/frustrated husband.
Put it this way: I have drunk alcohol to comfort myself exactly twice: once because I was wrongly fired from a good teaching job out of malice, and once just after Game 1 of this playoff series, which was a thriller, but ultimately was a loss.
This is no way to treat your wife, or yourself, and it needed to change.
I've determined that in order to be a Suns fan, you have to have a bit of emotional distance from this. This is true of anything that one can be emotionally invested in, but can't do much if anything to actually control: politics, pro sports (i.e., not ones that you're actually playing in), the accomplishments of others, etc.
Games can be exciting, but I have to learn to let it just wash away, after every disappointment. I'm 27 and I've been following this franchise since I was seven or so (1987) - and at this pace I'll have ulcers by the time I'm 30.
The truly maddening thing about the Phoenix Suns are always an A-minus team. They're consistently an exciting, playoff-bound team with realistic hopes for a title. In fact, the Suns have the 4th-best all-time winning percentage of all active teams:
- Los Angeles Lakers (.618)
- San Antonio Spurs (.595)
- Boston Celtics (.587)
- Phoenix Suns (.556)
Of course, there are 34 championships between those four teams in 62 years - a little over half - and none of them belong to the Suns. I suspect that the Spurs very recently overtook the Celtics because the Celtics just plain sucked for about the last 10 years until Kevin Garnett's arrival this year. The Suns hold the record for most playoff appearances without a championship (26 of 40 seasons). In fact, they're in the sixth place (of 30+ teams) for how often they're in the playoffs, and the newest team on the list:
- Lakers 54/60 (90%)
- Sixers 44/59 (75%)
- Celtics 45/62 (72%)
- Spurs 28/41 (68%)
- Pistons 40/60 (66%)
- Suns 26/40 (65%)
The lack of an NBA salary cap for a long time is a big reason that the teams from L.A., Philadelphia, Boston, and Detroit have such high percentages. San Antonio and Phoenix were born within a year of each other and went through similar growing pains to post very similar winning records, except of course that San Antonio is a bunch of assholes. (I'm bitter, but I'm not alone.)
Although my wife doesn't agree, I argue that the "A-minus" syndrome is actually much worse than being a Chicago Cubs or Arizona Cardinals fan. With those teams, any foray into the playoffs (if they make it into the playoffs at all) is a huge and great thing. Hope rises for a championship, certainly, but to an extent you can be happy just knowing they got as far as they did. Suns fans can't take much satisfaction in being a playoff team because they're always a playoff team. They've missed the playoffs twice in the last twenty years. Even the years they they were out, they weren't terrible (36-46 and 29-53, the former record being good enough for this year's Eastern playoffs). For fans of perenially mediocre teams, there's also the added bonus of having a community of loser-lovers that has grown up around the team. With the Suns, every year has high expectations. It's emotionally untenable.
That's not to say the Suns haven't done me some good, in the NBA, in the Phoenix community, for basketball in general, and even for me personally.
- I have learned to evaluate my own likes and dislikes through this team. In the mid-nineties, I had a huge falling-out with someone who was a Bulls fan. He liked Chicago because he was from Chicago. I decided that was a stupid reason to like a team: what if everyone on that team was a jerk? I thought about this for years; pondered the nature of how where you were born can influence your behavior and how stupid that is. I decided I like the Suns because they're a class act. Not only the current team, but historically the Suns have valued good people, who care about their communities, and even the rebels - Barkley, Shaq - were only bad boys because of their passion and the game. Barkley was acutely aware of it: "I am not a role model." You'll never find a Dumas or a Bowen on the Suns for long, if at all.
- The Suns inspired me to play basketball once during high school, and now again in my adult life. Steve Nash in particular has inspired my current run, knowing that he has roughly the same body type as I do, but has worked on his body and his skills with maniacal intensity. His work ethic inspires me, in practicing my free throws, and also in my music and work.
- I suspect Suns' Charities is one of the reasons the NBA Cares came about in 2005. I don't know if the Suns organization was the first NBA franchise to make charity an integral part of its existence, but I do know it was a good model for the rest of the league to follow when it wanted to clean up its image. Kevin Johnson and A.C. Green, in particular, come to mind as extraordinarily community-minded people. Both are still doing community work and I heard Johnson is even running for mayor in his hometown.
- The Suns have been a point-guard franchise for about twenty years, now. We've had roughly half of the truly great point guards in the last twenty years on our team at some point or another: Kevin Johnson, Jason Kidd, Stephon Marbury (in his prime), Steve Nash, Joe Johnson, Dennis Johnson, and Sam Cassell have all been Suns. I'm a big believer that the game of basketball is best when it is about movement and flow. I believe in my core that things like hack-a-Shaq, intentional fouls, dominant centers, and 70-point games are antithetical to what Naismith wanted: an athletic, skill-based game.
- As a web guru, I appreciate the absolutely ludicrous amount of work that the Suns put into their media. They post thousands of hours of video on their site, have players and staff blog occasionally, and even created a MySpace-like fan community site called Planet Orange. That willingness to explore technology - and spend money on it - in the name of the fan community is impressive.
Ultimately, I'm glad to be a Suns fan. It's a relationship complicated by heartbreak and disappointment but made healthy by the sense that the organization keeps its head up. It continues to have faith in a pure vision of what basketball is and should be; it has faith in its community and despite the escalating cost of games and inaccessibility of the players, makes real efforts to connect to its community.
They have strength of conviction in their work and in what is right; in small ways, through that, so do I.Labels: basketball, community, heroes, Internet, life, sports, Suns, zen |
| posted by Steve @ 4:09 PM |
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| Tuesday, August 14, 2007 |
| Baseball in Phoenix |
I visited my family this last weekend.
It was good to get out of the house. Nice to see the family. Awkward to admit that we had given away the dining room table that we inherited from the grandparents. Grandpa seems to believe that the furniture he bought us is indestructible.
He's half right, actually. I think the couch we got (and are forever upholstering) would outlast most nuclear blasts. But then, it was built in the '60's.
I have been assured that the fact that I haven't heard any repeat stories from my grandparents in a few years entirely stems from the fact that I don't see them as often. I don't mind, though, even if/when they are. Grandpa actually knows what he's talking about usually, even if he is stubborn. I fully expect to be at least as stubborn when I'm in my 80's. Seems like a perk of getting old to me.
After an awesome barbecue dinner (I arrived at around 7; it takes an absurd amount of time to fight through traffic in both Tucson and Phoenix), I considered going home but was persuaded to stay another day. It was the first time I had been detained in Phoenix for a reason other than a broken vehicle in quite a while, and that was refreshing indeed.
The next day, I got a chance to sit down and hang out with Steve & Tanya. It's rare I get the chance, mostly because they live in Russia, but also because usually I only see them at family gatherings where the conversation is strictly PG. I live in a very liberal town and while I wouldn't call myself liberal or conservative, I'm much more conservative than my grandparents.
Back when the presidential election was up in the air over Thanksgiving, I decided to declare that I was, in fact, an adult at the dinner table and asked my grandmother what she thought about the election. She said, "The weather's fine, Steven."
Steve's perspective is that of an international businessman and he's generally a conservative in the old-school, balanced-budget/not-insane type. I picked his mind quite shamelessly. I also managed to get Tanya's new PDA (a Palm like my new phone) to check her email. Unfortunately a lot of it was in Russian, and I didn't have time to get a language pack.
 To end the day, we went to a Diamondbacks game at what used to be the BOB (Bank One Ballpark) and is now Chase Field. It's just down the road from the Suns' home arena, what used to be AWA (America West Airlines) Arena, but what is now US Airways Center. Which can be abbreviated U SAC. Say it out loud.
Nice.
Anyway, I've now watched a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, a Sidewinders game in Tucson, and a Diamondbacks game at Chase Field.
Chase Field is huge and impressively has a retractable roof. Unfortunately, only about half of the people in the stadium - which had 33,121 people in it - can read the score boards. There's a huge one on one side, and a pair of teeny ones that are too small to be read by humans from the other side of the place. Thankfully I had my awesome camera and could zoom way in, take a picture, and see what it said on my camera. This shouldn't have been necessary. But it did give me a rare instance in which I could both (A) give my camera a true test of its abilities and (B) out-gizmo my globetrotting uncle.
 While my camera could make out the 1st baseman's number, it was just a few meters shy of being able to make out the name. Considering the guy must've been a quarter-mile away, that's not shabby. Also, the players were all in the shade, so it's possible it could've resolved the name if I didn't have to have the ISO so high.
On the other hand, the ratio of food booths to attendees was about 4:1 (for you hard of mental math, I'm exaggerating to the tune of saying that there are 8,250 food vendors in the arena; a more realistic ratio would have been 4.5:1). The lines for food weren't nearly as bad as at a Suns game for this reason.
Actually, since I saw a few Suns games last year, I was struck by how different a Suns game is from a baseball game. I am once again reaffirmed in my belief that baseball games are picnics in bleachers, and that's great. Though, I think Steve was right - it's right expensive when soda is $5 for a cup.
 After the game, I wandered around the downtown area a bit with my camera. I didn't realize how much I enjoy doing that sort of thing. Eventually, one day, I'll be able to take pictures of people without feeling weird.
I also bought a nice bookshelf for Rachel from IKEA on the way back. With a little luck, we'll have our living space arranged before the month is out; our last place took 10 months.Labels: basketball, family, Phoenix, sports |
| posted by Steve @ 1:08 AM |
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| Friday, January 13, 2006 |
| Random Thought no. 17: Baseball v Basketball work ethics |
I was thinking about how I'm vaguely disappointed that the Suns aren't playing a game today (I've become a bone fide fan over the last 3 years or so). But then I thought, well, it's ok because basketball is a really tough game when you have back-to-back games, especially when playing the frenetic pace they do.
So I started thinking about how it must be nice that baseball teams play all the time - sometimes twice a day. But does that make them lesser athletes? Not really - I mean, they train to the highest physical level that they can. That's why they're professionals. There isn't a ton of exercise involved in baseball - it's sitting on the bench or waiting for a pitch. Then I came to a weird conclusion: I bet that baseball players have harder, more exhaustive days on the days that they train - their 'days off' - than days with an actual game. Weird. "Oh, man thank God we have a game today - I could use the break."
Oh yeah and I lost my job. I hated it passionately, so how bad this news is depends on how long it takes to replace said job. EDIT: I talked to the father of a White Sox player, and he says that because they do a lot of drills and warmups before the game on a game day, it ends up being about the same amount of exercise.
 | Currently listening :
Cowboy Bebop
By Yoko Kanno |
Labels: exercise, jobs, Maloney's, sports, Suns |
| posted by Steve @ 4:04 PM |
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| About Me |
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Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
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I know what's going to happen tomorrow and it is this:
After work I will go to the bar, order a beer and a cheeseburger, and watch the Mariners game, because I'm so fucking bored of this primary fight and I'm saving my energy and attention for talking shit about McCain once we eventually get a nominee.