Posts tagged ‘austin daye’

A developing lockout trend amongst those with an online presence and interest in the NBA has been to scan/photo old basketball cards and share them on the world wide web.

Some say we are doomed to repeat the past, in the future, if we don’t remember it (or something like that). I say the past is also great for present-day zingers, which is why I’m sure I’ll take part in basketball card scanning in the future (which, one really only needs the summertime to do, not necessarily a lockout – there’s also the fact that my sports cards are spread out between my apartment in D.C., a dad’s house, a mom’s house (both in other states), and a friend’s house in Virginia).

Anyhow, in lieu of those old basketball cards, today, I’m here to share with you some Washington Bullets posters from yesterday, equally worthy of nostalgic zingers, if not more so.

What you are about to gander upon (and please excuse the impromptu, perhaps hard-to-view photos of old-tymey wrinkled posters) comes courtesy of Wizards veteran Basketball Facilities Manager Jerry Walter. Jerry just completed his 20th season with the organization in his current area, but has been working home games in some capacity in upwards of 28 years. He is always polite, often wishing folks a good morning no matter what time of day it is, and when famished reporters await outside of the Wizards’ practice court for interview access, Jerry almost always offers, nay, insists that they hydrate with a cup of water.

Near the end of this past season, Jerry brought in some of old franchise posters as a kind display of his glorious endurance with one of the more hapless franchises in the NBA. (Yes, we know there is a plan to change all of this — the haplessness — but admittedly, by said team proprietors, it’s a process that ain’t easy. So until that happens, hapless fans of Les Boulez we will be.)

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When I was in junior high and behaved in a way that my father deemed incorrect or beneath his standards, he would banish me to my room.  He knew how much I loved watching sports (specifically basketball), and that if I were exiled to my television-less room, I’d be crestfallen, dejected and angry — and the first few times it happened, I was all those things and more.

Then one day I discovered the joys of talk radio, and I realized that listening to the Washington Bullets play-by-play was almost as exciting as watching the game on television.   I could create my own mental pictures, I could hear the players’ sneakers squeaking through the sub-standard radio speakers, and the announcers seemed to pay more attention to detail than the TV broadcasters.  I enjoyed the experience so much that even when I wasn’t punished, I’d watch the game on TV with the volume down while listening to the radio broadcast.  In fact, I was so smitten with the radio that I started using that technique to watch football as well.

Somewhere along the way I stopped listening to radio broadcasts during sporting events and just watched them on TV or via the Internet.  But last night, for the second time in two weeks, the Washington Wizards (with No. 1 pick John Wall on their roster) weren’t anywhere to be found on television or by streaming bootleg video on the Web.  To the radio I went …

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