The other night I was watching some thrilling NBA action -- a late-night matchup between Portland vs. Seattle, and on this night at least, the product on the court was about as good as professional basketball gets. Ray Allen was unconscious (for my non sports-savvy readers out there, "unconscious" doesn't mean literally knocked out. In basketball-speak it means "shooting the ball very well to the point where the player doesn't even know what he's doing." Hence the reference to loss of consciousness).
Getting to the point, the game was good. Ray Allen was, as I said, playing out of his mind, and moments after he put Seattle up by 2 points with a deep trey, Portland's Damon Stoudamire hit a long jumper to tie the game with 1.1 seconds left. At this moment, the TV cameras panned to the Portland bench as the broadcast was about to go to commercial, and for whatever reason I happened to notice that one player on the Portland bench was particularly fired up about the fact that his team had just tied the game. He was slapping high fives, patting people on the back, just truly "amped," as the young folk like to say these days. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this player, Slavko Vranes, was more excited than anyone else on the team, Stoudamire included. Though I suppose it doesn't come as much of a shock that none of the Blazers were excited, since most of them smoke so much ganja that it's probably difficult for them to get riled up about much of anything.
But anyhoo, Vranes was really very excited. And in most cases, I would think that it was great that he was showing such enthusiasm. I actually take great joy in seeing professional athletes, most of whom I think of as being jaded, showing genuine excitement about what's going on in the game. It keeps my faith in sports fresh. Furthermore, guys like Vranes who sit on the bench should have good attitudes and try to pump everyone up. It's part of what being a good teammate is all about.
I guess the only thing I find slightly weird is the fact that, at the moment Vranes was at the peak of his jubilation, he had been with the Trail Blazers organization for all of 8 hours, having signed to a 10-day contract earlier that day. I know sports can be kind of an odd fantasy world that is an escape from real life, but it's just not normal to show up for your first day of work and be more jacked up than anyone else. The new guy in the office isn't generally screaming out, "GOD! THIS IS AWESOME!!! I AM SO FIRED UP TO BE WORKING WITH YOU PEOPLE!!!" How can you have any credibility if you're acting like the team's fortunes matter to you more than anything when you don't even know anyone on the team? There's actually a decent chance Vranes didn't even know what city he was in or which team he was playing for. I'm not saying he should have been sitting there like a lifeless drone, but watching the way he was acting, it was hard to believe that he could possibly have been that excited without faking it. It's kind of like someone who doesn't follow sports very much sitting down to watch a game involving your favorite team, and before you know it, that person is more excited than you are. And worse yet, they're using the dreaded "we" pronoun to refer to your team. Are we gonna win? I think we're gonna win!
In the end, Slavko Vranes kind of sold himself out, but it's tough to really put any weight on him selling out because there really wasn't much of a reputation for him to mortgage in the first place. And the more I think about it, if someone signed me to 10-day NBA contract, I'd probably be acting like even more of an ass than Vranes was.
I wonder if Rasheed Wallace would get mad if I dumped the cooler of Gatorade on him...
