Sports sports sports

Fittingly enough, in my first post back after a long hiatus I will be talking about sports and more precisely, the NBA Finals. Now, as most people who know me reasonably well can tell you, I am a rabid sports fan. I love intense thrilling competition, being involved in something exciting, adrenaline inducing and balls shrinking. In short, I am a testosterone junkie. While other like minded souls who are wired the same way would get their indulgences from racing cars, living life dangerously and recklessly, womanizing, I get mine almost exclusively from sports. The thrill of being in a tightly contested game, where the score is tied 10-10 and the first team to win by a 2 basket margin wins, and everyone knows what everyone is going to do, and everyone tries their best to pull out all the stops to stop everyone else, and then, in spite of them trying their utmost to stop you, you still do what it is you do, and then you beat them, and rip their hearts out in the process. That’s what it’s all about.

The mental state that I can get into while in the midst of a furiously paced, action packed, physical, toe to toe, evenly matched basketball game is addictive, is high and often times, an aphrodisiac. Hmm… if I can’t get my sports, I also like to get into adventure sports, with a fair amount of unpredictability and muscles involved, like white water rafting and abseiling.

But I digress…the most exciting event in the yearly calendar is back!!! Ladies please excuse your boyfriends for a bit. It is the NBA Finals, where the best of the best, the world champion, is truly decided. In this year’s historic matchup, we have the Boston Celtics against the LA Lakers. Now, I won’t expound on this too much, but c’mon, does this not evoke in one memories of Larry Legend and Magic? It’s too exciting! I miss my Astro. Reading about the espn online account of the games was enough to evoke goosebumps and enough adrenaline to send me soaring. I am itching to play, right now. The drama, the subplots, the matchups, the deserving Big 3, and I hate LA!!! Beat LA…goes the famous Boston chant, now taken up fervently by me.

Best sport in the world

On a slightly different note, how can people say football is better than basketball!? Well for one, if you want excitement and unpredictability, ok, then maybe football is more exciting to watch because the games hinge on just 1 game. The outcome is decided in just 1 game. But in basketball, the champion is decided over a series, with the first team to win 4 games taking it all. Isn’t that fairer, and a better way of establishing unequivocally who the BEST TEAM is? I mean, when you are trying to decide the best team, obviously winning 4 games will really require that you ARE the better team, and hence, you are deservingly crowned champions. Whereas, in football, the winner is only who was the better team that day.

So flukes can determine the winner. And that is not how we should determine the BEST TEAM. One has got to sustain their winning ways to be a champion.

At any rate, in a recent poll that espn conducted, and let us be very clear that ESPN screens about 22 times more football programmes than basketball programmes, the results indicated that among professional athletes themselves, they rated basketball as the more demanding sport, and as the sport with the fittest athletes. There you go!

In basketball, you are literally sprinting up and down the court for the entire game, with no rests. In football, the players around the ball are the ones mainly involved in the action. In basketball, you have only 5 players on the court from any team. That way, your contribution is vital and every move is critical, and any mistake magnified.

Anyway, Euro 2008 is starting soon, and I am getting caught up in the fever of it. Laid my bets. The 4 semifinalists will be Germany, Spain, Netherlands and the last one is a toss up between Portugal (if Christiano is on form…watch out), Italy (no Cannavaro) and France (dark horse).

It’s great to live in the world of televised sports!