Oh the joy!

As my family will no doubt recall, and many of my childhood friends will identify with, I spent much of my childhood and teenage years in the unfortunate position of attempting to follow the NBA from a far-away island called Australia. This was the era of rivalries between Jordan, Bird and Johnson, the Pistons and the Bulls, and the beginning of the Shaq era, all of which we found out about approximately six months after the event. I remember ‘Shaq Attack’ themed basketballs reached Australian shores before the majority of the population even new who Shaq was (I still bought the ball anyway…damn my impressionable young mind).

While it is now difficult to imagine a world without internet connectivity and cable television, that was the sort of barren and unsophisticated society in which we lived in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s in Australia. This technological dark-age condemned my friends and I to maintaining our devoted status as basketball fans through box scores in the newspaper, two-week delayed games broadcast at 1 o’clock in the morning, as well as a host of other sad and depressing attempts to be involved in this American past-time.

Television stations that aired such games would be careful to edit out the American advertising, as if to ensure that we would not be exposed to the level of coverage available on the other side of the world, and hence further condemn our current situation. Occasionally they would slip up, and advertisements for the multitude of games to be aired in the coming week, or various stadium giveaways would give us special insight into how sad our lives had truly become.

It was thus an exciting night indeed this past week that witnessed the opening of the NBA season, my first as a long-term visitor to the USA. The excitement was somewhat lost on Jennifer, and basically everyone else I have spoken to, but none-the-less it was an event, and the joy found in being able to choose from multiple games to watch will remain a highlight to be savored. Ain’t life grand!