It was in the NBA Finals of 1996 when I didn't develop a liking in basketball. The live feed directly ran through the set of morning cartoon shows I watched as a routine.
My father and uncles, who would gather around the TV set and shout and cheer and shriek and growl with every turnover, insisted that I should just miss the whole thing for just two hours, it's not every day that it's NBA Finals anyway. But at six years old, cartoons mean everything to you and when they took cartoons away from me, they took everything from me.
The Chicago Bulls won that year.
Fourteen years later, I sit in my college lobby where students gather to watch Game 7 of the LA Lakers-Boston Celtics game. The winner of which would be proclaimed NBA Champions.
I get lost in the sea of yellows and green, in the look of excitement and disbelief in their faces, in every profanity they utter. They are so into the game. And it hits me, I may have never fully understood the way we, as a people, love basketball.
The Lakers and Celtics have been gunning for it for a long time, their rivalry is legendary. The closest we Filipinos can get is the Ateneo-La Salle rivalry. And as a tennis aficionado, I just think it's another Federer-Nadal match to better understand the kind of spite and complex fanatic behaviour that surround this rivalry.
I dropped out early of the NBA Play-offs when the San Antonio Spurs were eliminated by the Phoenix Suns. The Spurs is the team I keep and I closely just so I can talk about basketball and not look stupid around people who talk about basketball. In the Philippines, that's everyone. It helps that Manu Ginobili is cute.
To be honest, the only Kobe I like is a slab of meat that costs a fortune. So in every Lakers-Celtics Twitter update, or in any Facebook post, I feel indifferent. Sure, it's a momentous event in history. But for me, it has value not because I get entertained with every awesome, selfish shot Kobe makes, but because as a journalist, I should know a little bit of everything. It is a nugget of informaton that might come in useful in everyday conversations, or in everyday articles.
I may never have a heart or at least, an understanding of what is this to be tangled in the Lakers-Celtics rivalry. I do not really care if the Lakers didn't win. Or the Bulls made a comeback. If the Spurs won, it would make a difference but very little. Ever since that NBA Finals game in 1996, I have developed all these judgments against basketball. Basketball is overrated, overpatronized. And this love we Filipinos have for basketball, I will never understand.
