Anyway

Tim and I went to Port­land for a couple of days. Apart from the oblig­at­ory vis­it to Pow­ell’s and a couple of micro­brew­er­ies, we also went to an NBA game. Tim likes live sports, and there isn’t a pro­fes­sion­al bas­ket­ball team in Van­couver, so it seemed like a chance to do some­thing we would­n’t nor­mally do. No, we did­n’t go to Port­land to go to the game, it was a last-minute decision. The team isn’t doing very well, so we could eas­ily buy last-minute tick­ets. Pro­fes­sion­al games in North Amer­ica are run quite dif­fer­ently to the rugby games etc. that I went to grow­ing up; here are some of the things that struck me.

First off, kudos to the city of Port­land for mak­ing the game really easy to get to from down­town hotels. You hop on the light rail, the Rose Garden sta­di­um where the game took place is with­in the “free” zone, you get off the train at the obvi­ous stop and walk a couple of minutes to the box office. Get­ting back to the hotel was equally easy.

We had seats a little high­er up than was optim­al, but they were cent­ral, so it was easy to see everything that was going on. The main emphas­is seemed to be on con­tinu­al fren­et­ic activ­ity to enter­tain the crowd; in fact the actu­al game often seemed flat in com­par­is­on to the enter­tain­ment in between the peri­ods or in the timeouts. I was some­what bemused by the enter­tain­ment at the first break being a duck mas­cot and a beaver mas­cot play­ing foot­ball (at a bas­ket­ball game, isn’t that a little insult­ing?) until Tim told me they were the mas­cots of the loc­al uni­ver­sity foot­ball teams. There seemed to be more interest in people show­ing which foot­ball team they were fans of than in sup­port­ing their loc­al bas­ket­ball team whose game they were actu­ally at; I gath­er there was a game com­ing up. 

I don’t get cheer­lead­ers; I guess I’m not the tar­get audi­ence. The ones at the game seemed to be divided into two groups. There was the acro­bat­ic group, with women and men, where the women did acro­bat­ics and obvi­ously had a fair amount of gym­nast­ic tal­ent, while the men were good at catch­ing them as they came down from the vari­ous flips and turns. Then there was the dan­cing group, all women, with much skim­pi­er cos­tumes than the first group. For this group the require­ment on tal­ent and dan­cing abil­ity seemed to be less than the require­ment to be skinny with long hair. At half-time there was a ridicu­lous show that involved the dan­cing girls throw­ing balls at each oth­er in a dodge­ball game rep­res­ent­ing the two uni­ver­sity foot­ball teams. I got a fair bit of knit­ting done dur­ing that time.

The game itself was shown in close-up on a big screen hanging over the court. Which meant that for some of the time the game was con­tinu­ing while they showed the replay on the big screen; most people were obvi­ously watch­ing the screen rather than the game giv­en their reac­tions. And there was the seem­ingly oblig­at­ory loud music on at all times to add to the feel­ing of fren­et­ic activ­ity. Towards the end it was coupled with a few appar­ently sev­en-year-olds in the seats dir­ectly behind us scream­ing their heads off to egg on the loc­al team. 

Over­all, it was inter­est­ing to go to an NBA game once, but I’m not sure it’s some­thing I’d repeat often. It cer­tainly isn’t cheap entertainment.