Yesterday I took delivery of a recumbent exercise bike, but that's not what this post is about. It's about what I did while I was straining up hills and coasting down. I watched television, You see, when I'm on the treadmill I can enjoy Hawaii Five-0 or Mission Impossible or Millennium or any number of a a host of mildly diverting DVD's from the past. But I didn't know if I'd last 50 minutes on this new apparatus, so I aimed lower: ESPN's SportsCenter.
Now I don't mean "lower" in any pejorative sense. I guess I could have said shorter: I figured I'd watch some baseball highlights; after all, it's July.
And so I did watch some highlights; unfortunately, it took 20 minutes to get to the first one, for SportsCenter had transmogrified into the LeBron James Show. Let me say this: to me NBA athletes are unbelievably good and beautifully conditioned, but NBA basketball as a sport lies somewhere between professional wrestling and full-contact checkers. It's filled with silly touch fouls, body slams that pass for good defense, and four-step dribbles that involve something called continuation which, apparently, refers to any event that happened in the past decade. But because Mr. James has promised to make his upcoming betrothal known on ESPN first, the network has sold out to the young man, lock, stock, and promo.
So yes, I have little use for NBA basketball, as much as I like LeBron and Kobe and Wilt—isn't he still playing by the continuation rule? That bias aside, it's July, people! The NBA season has ended—not even the continuation rule applies—and yet ESPN devoted 30 of the first 40 minutes of SportsCenter to the signing of someone named Chris Bosh (I guess he's really good) and his future pairing with Dwyane Wade (I guess he's really good too, even though my spellchecker balks at the spelling of his name—his first name. His surname fools the spellchecker nicely.)
Years ago I watched SportsCenter every night, often eschewing the local news to see the day's highlights. Even then there were superstars like LeBron James, but I don’t think they owned the network in quite the same way. And the worst part of all this is that all these signings and machinations result in no more than conjecture. We can all remember pairings that were supposed to guarantee championships and never did, and while I don’t care enough to wish harm on Messeurs Bosh, James, and Wade, there will be something reassuringly delicious about watching next year’s finals slugged out between Boston and L.A., or whatever team Elgin Baylor plays for.
