Shortly before Christmas, I got an email from the Washington Wizards basketball team. “You are in your 45th year with the Wizards!” it said. “We will be taking you and a guest on a trip to see your Wizards in Atlanta on January 27th.”
I was astonished, not by the trip but by the 45 years I’ve been a season ticket holder. I’d never kept count. My life consists of few threads that long. I’ve been married longer and in the same line of work—journalism—longer too. But that’s about it.
A day or two later, when the “Milestone Travel Itinerary” arrived, I was thrilled. The Wizards are an acquired taste, and I acquired it in 1966, the year before my wife Barbara and I got married. We spent many hours in her parents’ basement, sometimes watching TV. That’s when I discovered the Baltimore Bullets, as the team was then known.
I don’t know why I was smitten. I wasn’t much of a basketball fan, and the Bullets were terrible. They got better with the arrival of Earl Monroe, the master of the spin move, and Wes Unseld, a dominant big man. So when they moved to Washington in 1973, I signed up for season tickets, even though Monroe had defected to the New York Knicks. Barbara never got over his departure.
No one in my orbit joined me. Washington is filled with transients devoted to their hometown teams. Many adopted the football Redskins and later the baseball Nationals. The Wizards were a bridge too far.
But not for Robert Novak, the great columnist. I met him while covering a trip of Vice President Gerald Ford. We got to talking about basketball, and he suggested we get Wizards seats together. He knew Peter O’Malley, the team president and a political leader in Maryland. Great seats followed—at midcourt.
Bob was as astute an analyst of basketball as he was politics. We rejected the common idea that college basketball is wonderful but pro ball isn’t. I suspect the folks who say this rarely watch an NBA game. If they did, they’d know the pro players are at the top of the sports pyramid.
Pro basketball has many advantages over football and baseball. A 48-minute game takes a little over two hours. Pro football takes nearly twice that, as you sit though endless ads, long timeouts, and reviews of calls by refs.
Columnist George Will may relish baseball’s lack of a clock. I don’t. Baseball needs a clock, especially in the late innings when relievers wander around the mound between pitches. Umpires are supposed to speed things up. They don’t.
NBA players are the best athletes in the world. Their skills and their smarts, especially in passing or driving to the basket, continue to amaze me. The big scorers—Michael Jordan, LeBron James—also play defense. The 7-footers also shoot three-pointers from 25 feet away.
This may be more than you want to know, but the most underrated players are the non-shooters who play hard. They make contact. They’re brutal. They know how to foul without getting whistled. They treat basketball as a test of strength and usually prevail.
Which leads me to Dennis Rodman and Steven Adams. Sure, Rodman was crazy, but so what? He could harass, rebound, and shut down scorers like no one else. The Detroit Pistons wouldn’t have won two championships without him. I saw Oklahoma City’s Adams last week against the Wizards. Anyone who got near the rim with Adams around paid a physical price. Adams is from New Zealand.
Washington’s Bobby Dandridge was a special type, the clever, mistake-free player whose presence is the difference between winning the NBA title and merely coming close. Dandridge coolly worked the baseline and embarrassed taller defenders. He palmed the ball without getting called. No Dandridge, no championship in 1978, the only one Washington has enjoyed in my long tenure as a fan. Sadly I was away that season on a fellowship at Harvard.
When our “milestone” group gathered at Reagan National Airport on January 27, there were 22 of us, counting me and my son Freddy. We didn’t know the others, a diverse lot including a lobbyist, a Capitol Hill aide, and an official in the George W. Bush administration. We didn’t exactly bond. But there was a shared feeling that longtime Wizards fans are especially loyal but not obnoxious about it.
In Atlanta, the Wizards won easily. The only revelation came from backup point guard Tim Frazier’s performance. He had 14 assists. All the players hung around to chat with our gang of 22. Bradley Beal worked the group like a pol.
John Wall, resting a sore knee, didn’t play. He was friendly and talkative, not at all like the glowering figure on the court. He told me he could have played if he’d wanted to. Well, maybe not. Several days later, he had surgery on the knee.
With my son’s help, I’m committed to seeing that my five grandsons are raised as Wizards fans. I took one of them, 9-year-old Paul Liles, to the Thunder game last week. I explained to him why a lot of people cheered for the Thunder. They’re frontrunners. I made sure Paul understood that wasn’t a compliment.