What happened to basketball?

I grew up in a suburb of Boston and one of my earliest memories is of listening to Johnny Most call Celtics games on my transistor radio while I drifted off to sleep. This may seem unusual for anyone who had ever heard Most’s trademark, rusty nails on a chalkboard squawk, but his calling of names like Bird, McHale, Parrish, Ainge and Johnson, as in Dennis, better known in Most-speak as DJ, was like a soothing mantra for a little boy with hoop dreams.

That era of Celtic basketball was outstanding and I’m sure there were legions of people like me who played games in their driveways or backyards or at the local park pretending to be Larry Bird, shooting the ball, down by one, with just seconds remaining on the clock.

I loved basketball, even when Michael Jordan and his Bulls took over the NBA landscape and I couldn’t stomach the colors black and red, I still kept up with the players and standings and attended games at the Garden and then at the Omni when I moved down here. I also still played games with my father or my friends, even into college, but somewhere along the way, basketball started to lose its luster.

I think the biggest reason is the NBA itself. NBA basketball often doesn’t resemble the basketball I have always known and appreciated. The games are filled with too many dunks and too much one on one play. It seems slow and though the season is probably as long as it ever was, it now seems like it goes on way too long. There are plenty of superstars and some of them I can still root for. There’s nothing wrong with Tim Duncan and I’ve always enjoyed Shaq, but I could barely tell you who the star player for every team is and I used to know that stuff like I knew my own name.

Maybe all the great story lines are gone now, maybe there are too many teams or maybe there are too many players entering the league too early, but something has dramatically affected interest in the NBA and I know I’m not the only one who thinks so. In a completely unscientific poll, practically everyone I talk to about sports admits they couldn’t care less about the NBA and that is just sad. It was a terrific league with a great and storied history. I feel that the history being written today isn’t all that compelling.

Things get a little better as you get out of the pros. College basketball can be lots of fun, but it is also big business and you can see the dollar signs in some player’s eyes if they have a good stretch, especially during tournament time. As someone who went to nearly every Georgia home game for four years, I can vouch for how great it is to follow a team throughout a season and what a win over a big time like rival means to everyone involved, but players leave early or decide to not come at all and jump straight into the NBA, ready or not.

Nothing wrong with March Madness though, it’s arguably the best thing in all of sports.

High school ball is where the game is perhaps at its most pure and it is where I get my big fix of hoops these days. Some days are better than others. Some of the games I have seen this year have been great, but others have been really sloppy and kind of boring. There’s no complaint that applies to every game though. Sometimes I think the refs are calling a game too tight and other times I wish teams would get real and quit fouling so much. Overall, I find myself getting blown away by certain players getting hot on any given night and I love that it happens to the players you would least expect.

Still, the sleazy side of business is trying to get their mitts on high school hoops, too. Games are being televised on ESPN, shoe companies are making exclusive deals for teams and camps. It’s all very scary and it seems to have happened really fast.

It would be great to see team basketball make a triumphant comeback, to have a team come together and make a national audience care. We occasionally get that from a Cinderella team in the NCAA tournament, but I would love to see an NBA team put the pieces together and, without a prima donna and storylines that make you blush, win and win big games that should clearly be out of the realm of their possibility. An NBA team without brawlers, loudmouth owners, paternity suits, drug offenses, sniping and coach choking. A team that can shoot the ball from anywhere on the court, play great defense and make astonishing comebacks.

I think America would like to see a team like that, and though sometimes I think it may be too late, I still see kids shooting hoops in their driveways or tearing up a court in front of the fans at their school. There’s somebody who always wants to take the last shot with seconds remaining and, more often than not, they want to play the game the right way. There’s still a glimmer of hope out there.