{flickr/bestfor/richard}
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 …
