Who's In?

Things are looking up for so many reasons since the US presidential election. It was THE competitive event in the country for the last few months. We went straight from the Olympic Games to the White House race with barely a change of intonation. There's always a little too much mindless my team-your team in electoral politics, but enough people got over it that ... OK, who am I kidding? Enough people wised up to the fact that "my team" was the right team. : )

But the results are good for two big reasons, even if you don't care for the particular winner. One, we actually got through the election event with a "clean race." That is (disregarding pre-game trash talking, mostly by the other side), no protests, no major equipment failures, no doping scandals, no Supreme Court intervention. Phew.

Better yet, there's to be a hoops player in the White House! It's felt a bit like the love of basketball has fallen off since the turn of the century. Am I wrong? Is it the retirement of Jordan? The aging of Shaq? The souring on Kobe? The winners being in the wrong market? The women's game being undermarketed? I mean, just look at the output of movies with basketball as a subtheme (a post yet to come) and you see a huge peak around 94-95, and what lately?

Maybe getting some pick-up going at the White House will bring back some luster to the game across the land. Bring out more players. (More 40+ players?) Maybe more women players, even.

This is a pretty crappy video (below), but check out 25 seconds in: There's a woman on the court.

Golly, maybe there'll be a woman on the Supreme Court after another four or eight years....

My friend of the great basketball blog writes:

So I'm in line at the bank just now, two behind a guy who's so frustrated at the numbing slowness that, I'm thinking, it's a good thing he didn't read Tobias Wolff's short story, "Bullet in the Brain". Anyway, a third teller who looks like something Donoghue's dog Riley might have buried three years ago and who, just moments before, dug her way out, moves toward a window, but before opening her window  (really, why speed up?) says to another teller, a sister Neanderthal, but so everyone can hear, "Did you see Obama's speech is delaying the start of the World Series a half-hour?" To which I shout (maybe eight people in line now), "No it isn't it!"

And she says, spitting grass and dirt, "Yes, it is, it's supposed to start at eight o'clock; he's really messing things up for himself in a hurry."

And I shout, louder yet, "The game never starts till 8:30pm. Eight o'clock is just a pre-game show. It never starts till eight thirty. That stuff about him delaying the game is just more Republican lies." (I hear people behind me laugh.) "What's more important, the pre-game or the  election?"

To which she replies, grubs and ticks and slimiest of worms calling her head home, "The World Series." I end the discussion with "There's the problem isn't it?"