When did you first fall in love with basketball?

Sadly, the only WNBA game I have seen this season is the Storm-Monarchs one I attended at Key Arena on Sunday night.

I tried watching a few games via WNBA Live Access this past weekend and alas was told that the game I wished to watch had not yet started. Then the week started up and for various reasons, I have just been caught up in doing things other than staring at my computer screen (a nice change of pace).

So with the extra time to think, my mind wandered as it typically does.

I was thinking about an article I’ve been asked to write for a friend’s blog and suddenly my mind wandered to a question that I’ve thought about frequently when writing this blog:

When did you first fall in love with basketball?

The question is neither complex nor original. In fact, as I thought about the question, I was reminded of a similar question from the movie Brown Sugar:

When did you first fall in love with hip-hop?

(Full clip from Brown Sugar can be found here)
Of course, Sanaa Lathan (who has never been in a bad movie as far as I’m concerned) was also in Love and Basketball (one of my favorites), which followed a similar narrative (girl meets boy, puppy love with the phenomenon and each other, girl and boy grow up together, girl and boy end up together) and answered the basketball question in movie form.

I suppose I already answered this question for myself when I wrote about Chuck Daly last month – I undoubtedly fell in love with basketball because of Isaiah Thomas and the Bad Boy Pistons as a collective. But for some reason the question never gets old.

Then I just got silly and started imagining what the opening scene of my personal movie would be if I were to answer the question in a way similar to the way Brown Sugar did it with hip-hop.

Who would be in my interviews? What would they be likely to say? Would anybody say anything about their love affair for basketball as funny as what Black Thought said about his love affair with hip-hop during the Brown Sugar intro:

I was gonna be dealing with hip-hop whether I wanted to or not. Like a forced marriage, it was pre-determined.

This thought experiment was forced to end once I started thinking about what I would be wearing in my vignette (80’s clothing just is not cool) but I share only because I’m curious about what others think:

When did you first fall in love with basketball?