Ten huge oafs lumbering about a squeaky school gym, bouncing and hurling a reinforced beachball at each other. They have to put the ball in a net, and that’s made nice and easy by the huge board they can deflect it off, like that motorbike racing where they lean right over, but with stablilisers. To win, you need to be less shit than the other team just once in 48 minutes, which is why every game seems to finish about 190-188.
No, basketball is not for me, but I accept it’s for some people. And two legends of the game were recently linked across time by monumental sporting moments. Michael Jordan won the 1998 NBA Finals with the last shot of the game, as the astonishment of a Salt Lake City Crowd was immortalised in the background of a famous photograph.
And last year, LeBron James broke the all-time NBA scoring record, and the background again shows a wide-eyed crowd basking in the joy of history in the making. Not that they saw any of it. The second of these two now-classic pictures shows almost every fan beside the court holding a smartphone in front of their face so that they can one day hear a young child say “But Grandad, why didn’t you just watch the fucking game?”
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