Beware: The NBA … it’s fantastically long

  • By John Sleeper / Herald columnist
  • Tuesday, June 13, 2006 9:00pm
  • Sports

My friend Pete Moss was on the phone. As usual, he seemed frazzled.

“Come over,” he said. “And hurry.”

I’d come to expect this from Pete, the most drooling, frantic sports fan I know. At least he forgives quickly. One day he’s ripping me for making fun of World Cup soccer; the next he’s asking me over to his house. Yes, I knew the request had self-serving motives, but still, the tirade was forgotten, as they always are.

He looked awful. His eyes were pools of red, looking out of blackened lids that suggested he hadn’t slept in days. He didn’t bother rising out of his La-Z-Boy.

“What happened to YOU?” I asked.

“NBA TV package,” he said, crunching a Doritos, cool ranch.

“Huh?”

“You can get any NBA game you want,” Pete said. “Pay the fee and theoretically, you could watch every minute of every game in the NBA.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I did it.”

“You watched ev _?”

“Yep. That’s 2,378 games, 114,144 minutes, plus overtimes. Four-hundred-seventy-thousand, eight-hundred forty-four points, half by Kobe Bryant. Saw every one of ‘em.”

“You mean, from mid-October to mid-April, you …”

“Yep. Sat right here and watched every game in the 2005-06 season. You’ve heard of split-screen? My TV can split into as many as nine smaller screens. It looks like a tic-tac-toe game or a Brady Bunch rerun.”

“But why!?!”

“Just to see if I could. Hey, you saw the ads. The NBA put out the challenge and you know how much I like a challenge. I figured it out. It was 216 straight days, or the approximate gestation periods of the black bear, the hippo and the chimpanzee.”

“That’s all you did?”

“Oh, heck no. When basketball wasn’t on, I watched the NHL. Ya know, you can’t do the same with the NHL because of the lousy TV package it has. You can’t get every game. It’s tragic, really. I’d like to try that sometime.”

“No, I mean, what about getting out of the house? Did you quit your job? What about getting some exercise?”

“Exercise, schmexercise. It’s as overrated as Stephon Marbury.”

“Well, at least the regular season ended in April. I don’t have to worry about you wasting any more time with this silliness.”

“Well, not quite.”

“You don’t mean …”

“Hey, it’s the second season. Playoffs. Two months’ worth. I invested too much time in this already to quit now. It would be like da Vinci leaving the smile off Mona Lisa.”

“Does it bother you that this is all you’ve done for nine months?”

“Are you asking whether it bothers me that the NBA season starts during football season and ends shortly before Wimbledon? Do you mean do I find it unusual to shut out everything else just to watch overpaid gland cases in knee-length shorts jump around and whine at referees? Do you mean whether I think this kind of behavior is, for lack of a better word, idiotic?”

“Yeah, Pete. That’s what I mean.”

“Not really. Why?”

I looked at Pete. Here was a great high school athlete. Did everything. His best event was the high jump, where he cleared 7 feet and got scholarship offers from everywhere.

Now here he was, wearing a Tulane sweatshirt on which you could tell what he’d had to eat for the past three days. Pizza boxes were piled high, if haphazardly, on his coffee table. His house was, in a word, pungent.

“What did you want? Why did you call me to come over?” I asked.

He smiled. Rolled his eyes.

“I’m a little stiff,” he said. “Can you help me out of this chair? I have to go to the bathroom.”

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