For my birthday my wife got me a book by one of my favorite writers for ESPN, Bill Simmons. The book is all about the NBA and his take on it. Simmons executes this with his razor sharp wit and in depth knowledge all the while adding his personal moments with the game. The book is over 700 pages long and I'm not even a third of the way through it yet. My early thoughts on this are summed up in the title of this blog: enjoyment with no end in sight.
I tried to think of the last time I was in a similar situation where I was really into something and there was still a lot to cover. It usually seems to be the opposite: the great things are over too soon and the lousy things aren't over soon enough. I remember when I first got into U2 during my sophomore year of high school. By then the band had released seven albums and was about to release their eighth. I listened to Achtung Baby end to end and liked every single song. This was a first for me. Usually an album has some good songs and ones you fast forward through (this was back in the era of cassette tapes). Once I had absorbed Achtung Baby I started working my way back through their 80's catalog. I was hooked. Soon I had bought the movie Rattle and Hum and was watching it practically every day after school. I had found something that made perfect sense to me...as if someone had studied the way my brain worked then formed a band that played the notes I would crave.
Basketball has a similar role in my life although it has changed over the years. I started out playing youth soccer then sometime around the 3rd or 4th grade my parents put up a hoop in front of the barn. Basketball then became my drug of sorts. I would spend hours just shooting by myself or playing one on one with my friend Mark. It was all I wanted to do. We had two recesses at school and I played hoops during both. Heck I broke up with my first girlfriend after one day because I didn't want to give up one of the recesses to hang out with her instead of playing basketball.
I think we all have something or some things that we enjoy like nothing else. Sometimes it could be a person while other times it could be something silly (Do Anything by Natural Selection). It's what makes us tick. It's what makes us us. People have different passions and a lot of time what works for them doesn't do anything for me. All the same though the cool part is that they are wired for something. There are plenty of things that I'm not good at but I love to spend time watching people that are good at those things. I'm not good at video games for example save for a couple of Super Nintendo games that I play ad nauseum. I used to dig watching my friends play certain games though because they could get way farther on the game than I could. It was kind of boring and frustrating to play because my guy would die early and often. I guess I might never save the princess but that's okay.
So this week and next week I've taken time off to enjoy basketball...specifically college basketball. I could go for a nice bottle of wine and maybe some popcorn too. I'm enjoying this and at the moment there is no end in sight.
-Brent
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