The Los Angeles Lakers start the regular season tonight playing the Houston Rockets. This season will be different than any in the last sixteen years. I will not be watching all 82 games—in fact I won’t be watching even one game on TV (and no, I do not have season tickets. And yes, I still love the Lakers and basketball and have the scars to prove it).
In June, a week after I finished Hebrew, I was in Carpenteria with my family to celebrate my brother’s college graduation.
The trip and my summer were about to be ruined. It was the third quarter of game seven of the NBA Finals and the Lakers were down 14 points to the Boston Celtics. My brother had 500 dollars bet on the Lakers winning and was on the floor in disbelief. My father was slouched in a chair trying unsuccessfully to detach himself from the game and remind himself that it doesn’t really matter.
I was trying to reassure myself the Lakers were still going to win. But, I knew if they somehow didn’t pull through by double zero I was going to be devastated (this is not an exaggeration—I’m a little choked up right now remembering being down 14).
Deep in my heart I truly believed the Lakers were still going to win. I was so confident that during one commercial break I started to realize that this was going to be the single greatest moment of TV I would ever see. It had been a decade since the Western Conference Finals Game seven where the Lakers came from behind in the fourth quarter to beat Portland (that was the previous greatest moment).
The story line of this game was perfect. Game seven against Boston who had beaten us in the finals two years before (I spent a week after that series feeling completely numb inside). Kobe, my childhood hero, was going to have one more ring than Shaq. And, the icing on the cake was going to be coming back from so far down.
I had been thinking about going on a TV and movie fast in the weeks leading up to this game. Now that I realized this was going to be the single greatest game ever played—as long as the Lakers won—I decided I wanted to retire from TV until the 2011 Finals and possibly forever.
This was the TV experience I wanted to go out on.
At 14 down I was praying, “Lord, if the Lakers win I’m not going to watch TV again until the finals next year” (Kobe you owe me).
It wasn’t really a bargaining prayer—it was a prayer for freedom. If the Lakers lost, the only way to cope would be to watch all the off-season acquisitions, anxiously watch 82 regular season games and then hope for vindication in the playoffs. If the Lakers won I could have a year away from TV with an easy conscious knowing I wasn’t missing anything because nothing could compare to this game.
The rest is history—the Lakers gave me a quarter and a half of electric basketball, I would stop watching TV, and now I no longer even have access to a working TV in my house.
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