Basketball? Really? By Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #202

December 27, 2010 Mike Gold 0 Comments

It’s not that I dislike basketball – it’s an exciting sport, and I’m a fan of great acting. But it kind of bores me. The shot clock turned the game into Cirque du Soleil in shorts, the superstar licensing bit really got out of hand, and, most important, only the final ten minutes of each game are relevant.

This is not to say I can’t appreciate an awesome game or a true magician such as, well, Michael Jordan, duh. I was quite impressed when I met Karim Abdul Jabbar slinking out of my boss’s apartment early one morning when I was picking her up for a flight; he actually looked embarrassed and he gave me a nice little shrug. I thought it was cool to meet him and, anyway, I wasn’t sleeping with my boss.

I’m even less impressed by college sports. I appreciate team-building and team-unity, which is also why I’m also less impressed by minor league sports. Besides, “college sports” is an oxymoron: those kids are no more following a real college curriculum than I am.

But I gotta tell you, I’m extremely impressed – proud, even – by the women’s basketball team at the University of Connecticut.

Of course, I’m predisposed to appreciate any team that has a name that is a horrible pun. They’re called the Huskies. University of Connecticut = UConn = Yukon, which is where real doggie huskies turn the snow yellow. Get it?

So last week the UConn Huskies broke an NCAA basketball consecutive win record, female and male, by beating Florida State. 89 consecutive victories. 89 in a row. That’s an amazing achievement. They beat the record earned in 1974 by UCLA men’s team. 36 years is a millennium by sports records standards.

Of course, there are some people, most in possession of that wacky Y chromosome, who say it doesn’t count because women’s play isn’t the same as men’s. This idiotic argument is akin to saying a welterweight boxing champ is not a real boxing champ because he’s not a heavyweight. Yeah, you go a dozen rounds with him, sucker.

I wish I could say I’m surprised, but as a student of social history I’m merely disappointed. Of course there’s a difference between women’s play and men’s; I gather these naysayers never noticed that women are built differently than men. But the same is the same and the playing field is level. Women play women. Men play men. If Jack and Spike were real basketball fans, they would have been there.

And you thought I wasn’t going to get political this week.

I know what this means. I was privileged to be part of the team that brought the first Title IX lawsuit against a Chicago school where I was doing drug abuse prevention work. This was back in 1972. Within a few years most schools had active and ass-kicking women’s sports programs. Self-esteem skyrocketed, drug abuse (as opposed to drug use) plummeted.

So the UConn women are this year’s role models for teenage girls. And they know it. And they love it.

A great, great way to end the year. Happy New Year to all, and to all a good fight.

Hockey fan, psycho-metaphysician and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on America’s pop culture channel The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his hilariously offensive Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants are foisted upon the listening audience each and every day at the same venue.