Sports
T-Mac: Once the source of all my joy, now the cause of all my pain
When I first moved to Austin from the East Coast six years ago, Texas and I had an understanding: I would ignore the fact that my new home state prided itself on Tom DeLay, pickup trucks, evangelical Christianity, honky-tonk music, the death penalty, football, Karl Rove, size, heat, lethargy, and a sex-education curriculum built around the belief that the best way to prevent unwanted pregnancies and STDs is to advocate “getting plenty of rest”; and, in return, Texas would grant me close proximity to three of the best basketball teams in the world – the San Antonio Spurs, the Houston Rockets, and the Dallas Mavericks. So long as these three teams kept playing top-tier ball, I agreed not to run screaming from this godforsaken land that time and culture and decency have forgotten – a land, by the way, where it has been at least 100 degrees for 17 months straight.
For a while our agreement worked beautifully. The Spurs won two championships – one in 2003, the other in 2005; the Mavericks reached the finals in 2006, and their star player, Dirk Nowitzki, became the first German with a goatee to win the MVP award; and the Rockets, my sentimental favorite, managed to get to the playoffs every year despite the fact that their two star players, Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady (delicate geniuses who, like Marcel Proust and John Keats before them, were born just a little too sensitive for this world), played together for a total of three and half games in five seasons.
But what do I do now?
Now that things aren’t quite so pretty anymore?
Now that the Mavericks have become a league laughingstock, a shell of their once-proud selves, yearly proof that all the talent in the world can’t make up for a lack of heart, a team that can give away a two-and-three-quarter-game lead in the NBA finals to a team made up of one superstar (Dwayne Wade) and a ragged assortment of middle-aged also-rans, that can enter the playoffs as the No.1 seed with the league’s MVP and get clobbered by a No. 8 seed that before then was best known for the fact that its star player looked like the bass player in a 70s funk band, a team that threw its most successful coach (Avery Johnson) overboard for no reason and replaced him with a perpetual mediocrity with a haircut only an insurance adjustor could love, that traded away its point guard of the future (Devin Harris) for some other team’s point guard of the past (Jason Kidd), that somehow always manages to find a reason to let Erick Dampier play, and that – in a league full of colorful personalities and street-hardened tough guys – only manages to stir up controversy when one of its players calls out Francis Scott Key?
Now that the Spurs are aged and broken, a shell of their once-proud selves, constantly one twisted ankle away from total catastrophe, a team that can beat any other team in the league except for the Dallas Mavericks (the one team they always seem to meet in the playoffs), that gave away the 2006 Western Conference semifinals with a ridiculous “and-1″ foul that still stands as one of the league’s most stunning examples of basketball incompetence ever, that will collapse as soon as Tim Duncan does, that is collapsing as Tim Duncan does, that is more famous for being Eva Longoria’s favorite team than it is for being a four-time champion, and that calls the land of the River Walk home?
Now that the Rockets are officially and at last a big pile of bones; a shell of their once-proud selves; a team that went from being a championship contender with two perpetual all-stars (Yao and McGrady), a legendary shot-blocking, finger-wagging center (Dikembe Mutombo), and a volatile swing-man who changed his number to 37 in honor of the number of weeks Michael Jackson’s Thriller spent at No. 1 on the Billboard charts (Ron Artest) to a lottery grubber with none of those things (not even a copy of Thriller on cassette) in approximately 37 minutes; that is heading into next season with a roster consisting of Shane Battier, Luis Scola, two junior high school guidance counselors, six paperback copies of Faust, and a velvet sack filled with margarine; that will never win a championship so long as the Chinese government continues to treat Yao Ming like the subject of a science experiment seeking to understand the effects of exhaustion on a 7-inch-6-foot body and a 3-inch flat-top?
For chrissakes, I bought a house here! I have a mortgage and a band and a brand-new air conditioner I haven’t paid for (and don’t plan on paying for). I have responsibilities. If I had known Texas was going to welsh so egregiously on our agreement I would have left here years ago to pursue my dream of becoming the first Jewish chairman of Focus on the Family. Now it’s too late.
I’ve been hoodwinked; I’ve been had; I’ve been bamboozled; I’ve been sandbagged and shanghied, baited and switched.
Six years ago, Texas offered me eternal basketball happiness in return for my soul, and, being a great lover of the NBA who was convinced his soul wasn’t worth the bother anyway, I took it. And now Texas basketball is no longer the envy of the league. The Spurs, Mavs, and Rockets are middling teams at best, historical tragedies at worst. A new generation of teams has risen to take their place, like the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Orlando Magic, and the Denver Nuggets, leaving me in the unenviable position of having to choose between Cleveland, Orlando, and Denver as my next home.
Places like that could almost make a man like me sad to leave a place like Texas.
Almost.
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