SportsBlahg

Happy Friday Sportsblahg nation! While I know we are working our way up to “nation” status there’s just something about Friday that gets me juiced up, it could be the fact that Roger Clemens and I hang out on Thursday nights. Regardless we have an exciting new addition to our Sportsblahg staff, since most of you have realized that The Nate is the only one that posts anymore, we decided to go out and recruit ourselves some talent (in honor of the NBA draft). Fortunately we picked better than the Knicks, but then again my 1 year cousin could have made a better selection.

Presenting to you, in his first blog ever, The Slayer. The Slayer is a recent graduate school graduate from the school of redundancies. He is a savy writer with 2 main flaws:

1. He LOVES Boston & Duke WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much.

2. He has a ridiculous obsession with the NCAA Men’s Final Four (but not in the gambling way).

We felt these flaws were minuscule compared to the warrants that are out in Chris Carrera’s name. So here he is in his Sportsblahg debut, and as always, enjoy the weekend:

Okay, so I thought it would be valuable for me to add to the massive glut of “Celtics Are Awesome” pieces that are now overwhelming the world’s newspapers, television programs, blogs, jokes on popsicle sticks, pretty much all important forms of media. I assume that you will be more than excited to read what I have to say (Oh really? You don’t care? Not at all? And what? You would rather be sat on by the Celtics Glen “Big Baby” Davis after he went on a week long Taco Bell-only diet than read more about the Celtics? Really? Wow, Okay, well, you win. Um, I am still going to write about it though. Moving on).
I have an interesting and almost completely useless perspective on the 2007-08 Celtics considering I spent almost the entire season in London, England. On the other hand, one could say if one had eaten one-too-many fish n’ chips meals (oh, you know I am going to use every stereotype, just wait) that witnessing the Celtics’ season from across the pond gave me a “special” view of the team (kind of like how ESPN’s John Kruk has a “special” view of baseball). Anyway, for complete disclosure, I am a huge Celtics fan, the championship was one of the better moments of my fan career, blah blah blah, I am the illegitimate son of Brian Scalabrine, and so on.
My entire Celtics experience for 07-08 can be simplified into two games:
It was October and I was sitting in the second row of London’s O2 Arena to watch those same Celtics play a preseason game against the Ricky Davis-led 2005-06 Boston Celti…um…sorry…I mean the 2007-08 Minnesota Timberwolves! Considering the Celtics had given up a third of their team to the Twolves in the Kevin Garnett trade plus the Celtic’s second string “guy who picks up the warm up shorts when players check in” (That is my dream job; seriously, that is it), it was not a surprise that they felt familiar.
Of course, the best part was sitting within flyswatter distance of the court and the Timberwolves bench. It kind of goes without saying, but it’s a completely different experience than sitting where normal people sit. Also, Glen Davis is larger in person than on TV. Under no circumstances, do you want him sitting on you. Furthermore, Taco Bell can be upsetting to the stomach when eaten in unhealthy portions. Please people, don’t do it, the children are our future. Okay, here are some of the other highlights from the game:
… the greatest team basketball player ever/old man who for some strange reason cannot stop laughing Bill Russell walked out to midcourt during a timeout (I assume David Stern has someone constantly spraying laughing gas around Russell so he goes on these publicity tours)…In the moment where I fell in love with KG, the very long man walked toward the baseline where I was sitting and began screaming at the very British crowd (for some reason, the crowd also decided at one point to take part in the ultimate American baseball ritual of “the wave” at a basketball game) in order to pump them up. Let me remind you that this was a preseason game against the painfully bad Timberwolves in London bloody England. At that moment, I knew the Celtics were going to win the NBA championship. Furthermore, I am pretty sure Garnett has to be sedated during the off-season in order to become a normal functioning human being…witnessing Kendrick Perkins give a Chewbacca-like yell after being called for a foul and then current Twolves, former Celtic Theo Ratlif yelling from the bench “Let it out, Perk!” and Perkins responded with another longer “Yaaawwaaaaar”…listening to the guy sitting next to me talk into his cell phone: “You can’t see me? What’s wrong with you? I’m going to wave my hand. I should be in the right hand corner of your screen. You can’t see me? You must be blind. Ah you see me? Haha, hi honey, I’m saying hi on television.”…no, wait a second, that was not a highlight, that sucked.
The other half of my Celtics experience was lying in my bed at 4 AM BST about two weeks ago listening to Game 4 of the NBA Finals on nba.com radio and screaming “JESUS!” repeatedly (as in Jesus Shuttlesworth, He Got Game) as Ray Allen continued his Finals revelation that he was playing basketball and not wine-tasting and led the Celtics to the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history. The next day I hopped on a plane and landed in Boston to find a town that was two basketball games from taking home their seventeenth NBA championship (okay, that is a lot, I admit that the Celtics “22-year drought” has been played up a little too much by the east-centered popsicle joke writers, but….um…my counter-argument…”Yaaawwaaaaar?” Okay, you win. Moving on.)

The whole experience of following my home town teams while living five hours into the future and across a large body of water was hard sometimes, but it did teach me one valuable thing: Boston teams do much better when I am out of the country. Therefore, I am leaving for Madrid next week in hopes of giving that scrappy New England Revolution soccer team the extra push they need to win the MLS championship. It is really the least that I could do. Go Revs!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Basketball, SportsBlahg Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.