For the Love of the Game

Sometime in my childhood, I fell in love with basketball. I loved going to my dad's practices, shooting hoops, and watching the NBA. Over time, I became somewhat obsessive (imagine me being obsessive about something?!?) about my favorite teams and players. Of course, since it took four tries to finally get a son, my dad was very supportive of his oldest daughter's love of basketball. He would watch games with me, and even spent a little money, taking me to a Jazz game and buying me this awesome Celtics shirt.

Now, over twenty years later, Connor loves the shirt and wears it regularly. Also pictured above is a testament of my NBA obsession. Sometime in middle school, I got this great idea to make a scrapbook for a Young Women in Excellence Project. However, I couldn't just make the regular type of scrapbook with pictures of family and friends, decorated with cutsie paper and stickers. No, I wanted to make an NBA scrapbook. So I wrote a letter to the management of every single NBA team and basically asked for free stuff. Most of the teams responded, and I organized all the paraphernalia alphabetically and put it on display for all the other parents to judge. I'm grateful that my mom kept her embarrassment about the "project" to herself and allowed me to just be excited about what I had made. When justifying why this was a worthy project for a young women's project, I remember saying something like, "My kids will love this someday!" I'm pretty sure I got a few eye rolls with this remark. But guess what? Connor thinks this book is the best thing ever made! So there, doubters.

Apparently, this love of the game may be a genetic trait, as Connor definitely has it, and in a much more intense way than I ever experienced. Right now, he is laying asleep on the couch, exhausted from watching the NBA All-star Saturday night not once, but twice, thanks to DVR. Also, last week was his school's celebration of the 100th day of school. Every student in his class was asked to bring a collection of 100 items and display the collection in a creative way.

Yes, there are 100 basketball cards on that basketball court, with some awesome match-ups playing against each other.

Connor's class also does "book talks," where once a week they share a book that they have read with the class. A couple of weeks ago, Connor was trying to select a book to share with his class and came out of his bedroom with this--a program from last year's state basketball tournament. I told him that I didn't really think this was the kind of book Mrs. Walker had in mind, to which he replied, "What? It has lots of good information in here!" And it is information that Connor knows, like which team in the state has the tallest player or which team didn't graduate anyone from last year's team. He truly has studied this program in the past year!

Although I rarely watch the NBA anymore, and will probably watch it even less now that Jerry Sloan resigned (I'm SO upset about this!), I do enjoy sharing this love of the game with my son. And when the time is right, I have a box of videos in the basement that I've been hanging onto for years, including some great playoff games and Michael Jordan's first game coming back from retirement.