(01-17-2014 10:46 AM)BewareThePhog Wrote: (01-15-2014 11:16 PM)JRsec Wrote: (01-15-2014 11:10 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote: Basketball interest is in the negative for me.
It is a boring game to watch these days. 5 individuals doing their own thing, taking numerous steps on the way to the bucket, palming the ball at will, and that is just the beginning of why I hate basketball. The officiating is atrocious. The players don't stay long enough for us to get interested in them so there is no continuity from season to season, so all in all the product just stinks and the play isn't worth the price of admission. Did I say I love baseball?
My wife really, really, really hates the blatant traveling and palming of the ball in today's game.
Phog, my wife and I once bought season basketball tickets as well. We once enjoyed the game. Watching Pete Maravich in a shoot out with John Mengelt in a sold out Beard Eaves coliseum was spectacular. Yes we watched Sir Charles, the Persons (Wesley and Chuck), and many others that went on to the NBA like Chris Morris. But those days are long gone.
I have a theory about the spread offense in football and the problems with today's basketball teams that have a common factor. Here goes. With the advent of video games in the late 70's exploding into a must by the late 80's way too many kids became insular. In my day nobody had to teach us the fundamentals of any game. We only watched TV on a rainy day and spent every afternoon after homework was done playing the sport of the season. In those days the high school gym was never locked so we played basketball there or at an outside court the Baptist Church had built. Baseball was played at the National Guard Armory's drill field every evening from Spring through the Summer. Football was played there too. We got up street teams and the older kids taught the younger ones the fundamentals so that they wouldn't be the weakest link on the field or court. We enforced rules and every kid wanted to play all sports from pee wee through high school. The kids today are constantly supervised, are raised to be so mistrusting and isolated and spoiled that getting them outside is tough enough but then getting them with such poor social skills to organize any kind of a game with multiple people from the neighborhood is simply out of the question. Little league and Pee Wee has devolved in too many cases to simply having the coach make his kid the star. They put the best athletes on the field and just hope that they can throw, catch, hit, or shoot. The same thing happens in high school. The spread offense in football is the result of the lack of skilled players. It is ideal for kids who are the fastest players on the field. If the quarterback can learn the reads and has any kind of arm you are in business. The goal becomes outscoring the other team and the poorest athletes are put on defense. The college coaches got tired of taking raw talent that lack fundamentals and trying to teach an 18 year old spoiled prima donna how to play. So, the colleges now adopt the spread.
The same damned thing has happened in basketball. If you have 5 kids that dribble well, are fast, can jump, and are shooters then it's 5 guys running wild doing their thing and if they are better than your 5 guys running wild you win. The same lack of fundamentals are dictating the play. Without fundamentals rules and technique break down, discipline breaks down, and any semblance of team is long gone. It's killing basketball and when college football becomes fast break no defense football it will eventually kill it too. There is no beauty to the game any more because these kids are athletes, but they are not skilled in ways that make team play possible. That is why right now baseball is back to being front and center in my life. Those kids play winter ball in high school, travel ball in the Summer, and go to camps to learn fundamentals. It is still the game that I played and loved in my youth. The others are mere shadows of their former artistry.
While I'm griping our old coliseum had bigger seats and sat about 20,000. The new coliseum at Auburn seats about 14,000 has plastic seats where your knees are jammed into the back of the seat in front of you and there are no long urinals in the rest room for the men. There are private individual urinals. It's the first time in my life I've had to stand in line to pee at a basketball game because the modern male is apparently to bashful to hang it out in a public way in the men's room. Boy, I can't imagine what they would do on a jungle patrol or in a battlefield foxhole. They built the seats closer to the floor so the noise would be a factor, but that's it. Give me my old wooden theater chair with leg room, and the multiple easy access men's rooms any day and I would pay through the nose to see basketball played like the art it once was. I'm more entertained by a good game of RAT than watching what they put out there today.
I understand totally why your wife feels the way she does. Tell her I said "May your tribe increase!"