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Spurs vs. Lakers, Game 5, Western Conference Semifinals
Part One: How to watch basketball on TV
Pay attention to open space. Let your eyes go a little soft. Feel the flow of bodies in groups and in isolation, sense guys moving into and out of gaps. The game is territorial -- not snatch and grab but cut, glide and fill. If you're trained on open spaces rather than particular players or the ball, you're getting a glimpse of what's about to happen, of the pockets on the brink of being crucial. When the ball goes down low with Duncan, let it go -- anticipate and appreciate Manu Ginobli easing into position half a court away.
|  | | Think you're tired? Try walking in their shoes. |
Empathize. Timeout on the floor: Players get a blow, coach rallies the troops and announcers chatter. Use the break to imagine how much primal, pre-adolescent hunger is hiding behind Greg Popovich's cool, blank expression. Use it to think about the doubt in Robert Horry's fingertips. Ask yourself whether the Admiral feels like he's really a part of things anymore. Ponder how much hurt must be pulsing through Shaq's limbs after so many nights of banging down low. Walk a mental mile is what I'm saying.
Guacamole. Lots of it. With lime and cilantro, and the sturdy sort of chips that hold a little something.
Think historically. Yes, the game is happening in real time, and yes, it's moving quickly (though not quickly enough if you're a Spurs fan and too damn quickly thank you very much if, like me, you're part of Laker Nation), and yes, before you know it, the special dispensation you got to sit on the couch and rot like a brown banana in the sun will evaporate, leaving you with nothing but a pile of dishes to do before bed. But that doesn't mean you have to despair. Because time is just a construct, my friend, just a mass hallucination perpetrated by the Man on regular folks like you and me, folks just trying to get their sloth on. I say shake off the shackles of time's quick, tight march. I say let your mind wander. Go back. See Artis and Ice in Duncan and Manu. Heck, see Billy Paultz and Larry Kenon if it suits you. Whatever, just so long as you stretch things out and back aways. Now the game is echoes and tributes, see, it's an ongoing tradition. Now, when your partner calls from the other room to ask when the game will be over, and when you might get to those dishes, you can answer without hesitation: "Never."
Ask yourself, "Whatever happened to Wesley Snipes?" Then see a TNT promo for "Art of War" and ask yourself: "What the hell ever happened to Wesley Snipes?"
Nerfoop dunk re-enactments. (Be careful of the guacamole.)
Think poetically. The gentle way Tony Parker lofts a runner in the lane, like it's a bird he's nursed back to health and is letting loose to fly again for the first time -- that's a poem. Derek Fisher hitching up his drawers around mid-court, staring at and through the guy bringing it up. Poetry. William Carlos Williams used to say, "No ideas but in things." The game on TV is full of things, things and bits of things -- gestures and looks -- offered in close-ups and wide-shots, in quick cuts and stills, and often without comment. These things are their own ideas, they have their own heft and resonance. Duncan rubs his hand down over his head and face in the moments before the ball goes live. A lyric. Phil sits still, head bowed, coming out of a timeout. An ode.
Appreciate the way the nets are miked. Start making that tidy little bvvvttt sound as accompaniment to balls of paper you throw in the trash and so on. (Makes you feel good, doesn't it?)
If you're living in the East, you might want to set the VCR to tape the second half of the game so you can get some shut-eye. (Don't worry, I'm sure you'll get a chance to watch it the next day. There's no way you're going to hear the score on the morning radio and lose interest, or suffer through a bunch of folks telling stories at work, or anything. No way.) If you're living in the West, be glad and sleep later on.
|  | | Duncan's double teams should get Parker more open looks. |
Rage is good. Get unreasonably mad, show some anger all out of proportion with the room you're in. In no way suggest that you understand that this is just a game or that there is a distinction to be made between what happens on the floor and what happens in your own life. I broke a little Hummel figurine during the second quarter last night. Laker rage. They were down, I don't know, by like 79 points or something and couldn't none of 'em hit the broad side of a barn, and they were looking tired and slow and incredibly beatable and I just screamed, you know? Kind of Macauley Culkin in "Home Alone," kind of Janis Joplin at Monterey -- all hurting and helpless and hoping for more. So I'm screaming, only it doesn't feel like quite enough, so I pick up the poor porcelain blue-and-white schoolboy, and hurl him clear across the room, scattering his bits all over the living room floor. And then I just stand there, looking at the shards of schoolboy, then looking up at the screen, as if to say, There, are you happy now? (Now that I think about it, this isn't a recommendation so much as a confession. Thanks for listening …)
Libations. (Like you couldn't have guessed that, based on the above …)
If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. (Stole this one straight off Satchel Paige's "Six Rules of Living." Always seemed like good advice, no matter what the topic or occasion.)
Part Two: How to not watch basketball on TV
So I'm lying on the couch somewhere during the middle of the third quarter last night, mourning the death of the Lakers' Game 4 mo' and the untimely demise of the Hummel figure. I'm trying to heed the good word of Satchel, searching for a cool thought. Then it hits me: Turn the game off.
It sounds counter-intuitive and disloyal, but there's actually a subtle magic that can come into play if you turn your back.
Watch with feverish fan's eyes, get on your knees and whisper a mantra, and the sports gods, like the girls you knew and wanted to know better in high school, smell desperation on you. Want it too much and sometimes you squeeze the life right out of your team's chances.
But cut the ties, flip the channel, and maybe, just maybe, you let a little air into things. Take your desperate want-to off the airwaves and it's possible your boys will play with looser, more supple and confident heads and shoulders. And then, who knows?
So, for the good of the team, and in the hopes of pacifying my disputin' stomach, I turn to VH-1's Lisa Marie Presley all-access special.
And maybe it's because I'm a father now and I can't help but still see her as that little girl on Priscilla's lap, or maybe it's because, dormant as it's been forever, she does have some of her pop's magnetism (or maybe it's just the happy, logy feeling I get from guacamole and libations) … whatever it is, I start feeling free and easy for Lisa Marie. I start feeling she's going to be fine this time, feeling she can just be and it'll be all right. I'm feeling Zen about her is what it is.
And all the while, unbeknownst to me, the Lakers are mounting a furious comeback.
Part Three: How not to watch basketball on TV
Forget the Hummel figure, the worst thing I did last night was this: I turned the game back on.
Lisa Marie's show was over and my little one was off to bed, and the dishes were daunting enough to keep me on the couch in front of the set.
My intentions were good, I swear. Drink the dregs of defeat with your comrades, I told myself. Stand up and take your suffering straight.
And when I tuned in and saw the gap closed from 22 to 9, I should have clicked off and walked away.
But I didn't. Boosted by hope thought long gone, dizzy with the comeback juice, I sat right there and watched the end of the game.
|  | | Hey, TNT said it knows drama. |
I knew the risks. I knew there was a chance the gods would find me impudent, disrespectful of ancient codes of conduct.
But the Spurs' lead kept dwindling -- six, four, one after a Shaq 3-point play -- and I let myself think that the good mojo had done its work, and all that was left now was to ride a Game 5 W on into shore.
Then Horry's shot goes down and back up the rabbit hole.
A paper-thin margin between a win and a loss, between stirring comeback and futile effort.
You could say the miss was luck, you could say it was on some small imperfection in Horry's suddenly ineffective shot, or you could say a hard-charging Tony Parker upset his timing and trajectory just enough.
Me, I'll just say it was some bad TV. My bad.
Eric Neel is a regular columnist for Page 2.
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NBA VIEWING 101 |  |
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