For starters...

Why on Earth would I want to start a blog about the NBA? There are countless forums for thoughts and opinions on professional basketball to be found on the web. ESPN, InsideHoops, Basketbawful, HoopsHype, HoopsWorld, RealGM, just to name a few. I'm not famous and don't have a published word to my name, so what makes me think that anyone will trouble themselves to read my blog?

Maybe they won't. I'm not writing because I think I'm better than any of the guys who write for the pages I listed. I've been a fan of all of them.

I'm writing because I love to write and I love the NBA. And I'm writing because I said i was going to a year ago and didn't. Now it's time.

I should tell you a little bit about myself and why this page exists in the first place. I’ve never been much into sports. I was always the kind of kid who wanted to be inside reading or acting out great battles against the forces of Cobra than playing backyard football, or baseball, or basketball, or anything that involved people that weren’t me. That’s not to say I was a total shut-in. I had a Diamond Back Viper that was the next best thing to a Corvette. My brother Josh, other kids in the neighborhood, and I would sometimes spend ten hours a day riding those bikes all over the place. I played all of the above mentioned sports in the neighborhood with those kids, but it was never my favorite thing to do. I played neighborhood league soccer as a small boy, and mostly hoped the ball wouldn’t come my way. I played basketball, also on a neighborhood league, and sucked terribly. The point is I was never very athletic, and never very interested in playing sports, and it’s hard to say which was the cause and which was the effect. I was always bored watching sports of any kind on TV, even though I can remember my dad watching football, baseball, basketball, hockey, Indy and Formula One racing, and seemingly billions of hours of golf throughout my childhood.

In November of 2000, I moved to San Antonio, Texas. I lived a sports-free existence over the course of the next few years just as I always had, and my life was fine. I was aware of the Spurs, only because of the overwhelming ubiquity of logos to be seen around the city on cars, shirts, billboards, hats, bank commercials, grocery promotions, local newscasts, etc. I was not, though, a fan by any definition of the word. I couldn’t have identified a player on the team if one had bitten me on the ass. Ironically, one day I was bitten on the ass by Antonio Daniels.

Kidding.

However, one of the Spurs biggest stars, David Robinson, had attended the same high school that I did, went to that school simultaneously with my step dad, and used to baby-sit a friend of mine many years before I met him in high school. I don’t know if I was unaware at the time that Robinson was playing in San Antonio, but I do know that I never gave it much thought.

In 2003 I was working at a credit union and can remember some of my coworkers getting all worked up over how far the Spurs were going in the play-offs. A lot people talked about it, and I paid little attention. Soon the San Antonio Spurs were the champions, and still it made little difference to me. Oh, did I mention the fact that I was going through a divorce at the time? No? I was. Even if I had been a basketball fan, I probably wouldn’t have had a lot of focus on the Spurs at that particular time.

Well, after all of that, I was hanging out with friends a lot more and finding myself a bit more active in social circles, and sometimes that meant drinking beer and watching sports. I began to learn a little bit about this team and the players, and although I wasn’t quite to the point of declaring myself a fan, I was at least more knowledgeable about the game, the team, the league, and the perennial quest for The Ring. I don’t know how many games I saw that season, and I couldn’t even tell you anything about the ones that I did see, except for one. I was watching with a group of 8 or 9 friends on the night that Derek Fisher used .4 seconds to drive a dagger into the heart of the Spurs’ championship hopes. It was awful, even to someone only casually committed to the team.

So, I was almost there, but not quite. I spent some time away from Texas and returned in November of 2004. I was happy to be back, and I wanted to connect myself to San Antonio more than I had done previously. Following the Spurs was a part of that, and I watched a few games on TV and noticed wins when they showed up at the top of the page in the newspaper. A friend of mine was working at the ATT&T center (then called the SBC Center) and listening to him talk about work was another way that the Spurs were staying on my radar. My girlfriend at the time was a huge fan of anything that was popular, so she was suddenly a big fan of the Spurs. I have to give her my thanks for changing my life in an important way: she took me to my first live professional basketball game. And it wasn’t any regular season game, either; it was Game 2 of the Finals against the Detroit Pistons. It was such a fun experience, nothing at all like what I was expecting. Hell, right up through the drive to the arena I was hoping that she would say that she didn’t really want to go. The Spurs dominated. The Spurs went on to claim another title. I was officially a fan for life. I bought NBA Live ’05 that week and began learning tons more about the NBA through that game.

Very shortly after that, I broke up with that girl, went bankrupt, and had to move my ass out of Texas again. I moved to Virginia where most of my family lived, and made it my mission to turn my 11 year-old brother Taylor into a basketball fan. I started by getting him to play NBA Live with me. “Who do you want to be?” I asked. “The Lakers. Isn’t that the team Shaq plays for?” he asked me. “Shaq plays for Miami now. They also have this guy Dwyane Wade, who’s awesome in the game. I’ve never actually seen him play, but he’s amazing in the video game.” So Taylor took the Miami Heat, I took the Spurs, and the season began. I bought the League Pass on TV for the first time so I could fill my nights with basketball. In the winter I took Taylor to D.C. for a game that the Heat played against the Wizards. Neither team really looked like contenders at that stage, so we were able to get reasonably priced tickets at center court, about six rows off the floor. My little brother was less than fifteen feet away from the scorer’s table, looking face to face with Shaq, D-Wade, Udonis Haslem, Antoine Walker, James Posey. Jason Williams and Alonzo Mourning were out with injuries, but were dressed in suits and sitting with the team. Pat Riley paced the floor to our left. Dwyane played awful and I think he fouled out, but Miami won, and Taylor got a great kick-off to his basketball fandom. Late in the year, we were able to playfully argue over whether the Spurs or the Heat were going to take it all. I had my doubts about both teams, given some of the performances they were putting on in the play-offs. When the Spurs went down, I was sad and disappointed for my team, but I saw that Taylor’s team had the chance to do the double service of winning the championship and denying the team that had beaten the Spurs. And against the odds, they did just that. Miami won the title, and Taylor, in his first year as a young basketball fan, got the same luxury that I had the previous year: the team he loved went all the way to the top.

Late that summer I felt that my time in Virginia had run its’ course. The entire year I found myself missing San Antonio every time a game would switch to the outside cameras and show images from the Riverwalk, or the outside of the arena, or the skyline lit up at night. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to come back. If I said that the Spurs had nothing to do with my desire to return, I would be lying. They weren’t the only thing I wanted to get back to, but they were a major consideration, and I wanted to be back before the season started. I returned to San Antonio on The 5^th of September. It was raining hard, and I had a lot of stuff to move with no help at all, but I was so happy to be back. I made it to several games last season, including the season opener against the Cavs. LeBron’s dunk over Tim was ugly, and I was so happy at the end of the year to see it avenged. I was also at the game during the playoffs against the Suns in which Robert Horry tossed Steve Nash into the scorer’s table and Amare took a little too much interest. Once again, the Spurs entertained me all the way to the title.

I may be the world's luckiest fan.Some people may read my blog and decide that I'm just a bandwagon jumper, but that's not the case. I've been fortunate, as a fan, to be in the right place at the right time, and my love and enthusiasm for the NBA are genuine. My hope is that I can use this blog to express that enthusiasm as a new, un-jaded voice in the crowd.

This history might have gotten a little boring, but I wanted people to know where I was coming from. If you read it once, I promise that I'll never force you to read it again.