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    The Breaks of the Wind
    The Breaks of the Wind
    The Breaks of the Wind
    Ebook132 pages2 hours

    The Breaks of the Wind

    By Blogcat

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Have you been longing for a book that provides deep analysis on the worst basketball team of all time? One whose author also likens his work to that of the great mid-century existentialist philosopher Albert Camus? Well, have I got a book for you!

    This book has it all. Meditations on a terrible basketball team; a list of his favorite player names that sound like Presidents; comparisons of athletes, coaches, and teams to everything from Iran to serial killers to mafia thugs to gay sitcom neighbors...there is something for everyone here. (Then again, there's probably a lot for nobody.)

    I would say that this is what a 7-win basketball team does to a fan, except that Blogcat has been this demented forever. In these pages, as the 2011-12 season of his favorite team, the Charlotte Bobcats, becomes increasingly hopeless, so does Blogcat's mental state. Hopefully you'll find this book at least slightly more funny than it is disturbing.

    This book will be a favorite for fans of any sport, and/or fans of seeing someone suffer. At $1.99, what have you got to lose? I can tell you this much for sure: less than 59 out of 66 games.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlogcat
    Release dateOct 7, 2012
    ISBN9781301209408
    The Breaks of the Wind
    Author

    Blogcat

    Blogcat is a semi-depressed, fully-deranged Charlotte Bobcats fan. When he's not cursing openly at the team's atrocious play on the television, he tries to envision happier things, like nuclear winter. Judging by the obscure references he throws into his prose like concussion grenades, he's fond of movies, songs, and TV shows from the 80s, 90s, and 00s, and absolutely nothing more recent than 5 years ago. Presumably the same thing can be said about how he dresses himself.

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      Book preview

      The Breaks of the Wind - Blogcat

      ***~~~***

      The Breaks of the Wind

      Published by Blogcat at Smashwords

      Copyright 2012 Blogcat

      ***~~~***

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Introduction

      In the spring of 2005 I was discharged from the military after ten years, and I reentered civilian life. I’d been accepted to school in North Carolina, and because I was beginning life anew, I thought I would also make a clean break from all of my past ties. Among those past ties was my heavy affiliation with and affection for New York sports teams. They actually made it easy for me, as the Knicks and Giants were both awful at the time and begging to be dumped.

      Best of all, a brand-new NBA franchise had opened up for business the previous year in Charlotte, and because basketball was and remains my favorite sport by far, I instantly devoted myself to this embryonic team’s cause. I almost felt a kinship with this new NBA team, for we were both simultaneously starting a new existence in a lovely state. And make no mistake, the state is gorgeous—lush and diverse, especially the part I was in, the famed Research Triangle Park. I planned to devote myself to all things Carolina, and this fresh young basketball franchise would be my muse.

      Unfortunately, our marriage was troubled almost immediately. First and foremost was that name: the Charlotte Bobcats. A narcissistic product of their original owner, Black Entertainment Television mogul Robert Bob Johnson, it’s a moniker that’s largely reviled by everyone other than Ohio University alumni. To this day there is a steady stream of utopian-style articles in the local papers about a possible buyout of the name of the New Orleans franchise, the Hornets, where the original and still beloved Charlotte team relocated years ago. Even though this has never happened before and seems logistically impossible, fans dream of it the way Scientologists dream of liberating their alien spirits.

      The second problem was those colors: originally the team sported a noxious, irradiated orange look, which was broken up only by a) an alternative blue combination that made them look like a half-dozen other blue/orange teams; and b) a hideous auto-racing-themed checkered flag outfit, presumably to capture that all-important overlapping NBA/NASCAR fan demographic. After a few years, the team, now under the ownership of former superstar Michael Jordan, went with a pinstripe look and deemphasized the orange. In terms of sartorial taste, this was a lateral move at best. It was a transparent homage to those dearly-departed Charlotte Hornets, who also sported pinstripes. But it was the wrong homage, because what fans really wanted was the purple-and-teal color scheme of the old Charlotte Hornets, not so much the pinstripes. It was like designing a new Batman suit that kept the bat-insignia but changed the colors to hunter green with beige trim.

      Third, my stay in North Carolina was much shorter than I planned. I was gone in just two years after discovering that Research Triangle Park, as industrious and tasteful a place as it is, was more interested in hiring biotech engineers than snarky bloggers with zero technical skills. This was clearly a foolish, shortsighted, and unsustainable strategy on the part of the local municipal authorities, and I’m prepared to make my benevolent return as soon as they wake up and realize the errors of their ways. Until then, I find myself right back in New York, with those same Giants and Knicks leering at me, their flush wallets, big city cachet, and innumerable superstars tempting me to renounce my folksy Charlotte teams. This won’t ever happen, though, because at this point I’m bound to the Bobcats.

      In fact, one could say I’m bound like a hostage, because the fourth major problem with this team is that they’ve been horrendous since their inception. It’s to be expected that expansion teams scratch out meager existences, at least in the beginning. But even after 8 years the Bobcats remain lost in the wilderness. They briefly sniffed the playoffs in 2010, only to be swept in four non-competitive games, after which they were quickly disassembled. Along the way, there have been cosmically ill-informed draft choices, a revolving door of coaches, unstable ownerships, failed arena sponsorships, and—for several years—a lack of a television deal. Fans didn’t so much boo as ignore (or fail to locate, in the case of the television rights fiasco).

      Which brings me to the 2011-12 season. Adopting the postmodern strategy of NBA management, personified by the Bobcats’ polymathic new General Manager Rich Cho, Charlotte openly pursued a lose to win approach in the spring and summer of 2011 by severing all of their expensive talent in favor of cheap journeymen and underpaid rookies. The advantage to this tactic is a) its low cost (obviously), and b) the ability to build a core team for the future by securing high draft choices (which are inversely apportioned according to each team’s regular season performance—i.e. the worst teams get to pick first).

      It’s that latter benefit that teams who do this sort of thing pitch to their fans, although in the Bobcats’ case there are serious credibility issues. First of all, the team doesn’t have much money, and owner Michael Jordan has a well-earned reputation of aloofness, so fans like me worry that Charlotte is being cheap for cheapness’s sake. Second, as I mentioned earlier, the Bobcats’ history of draft picks has been mishandled more than the government’s history of defense spending. So even if they succeed and get those draft picks, there’s no assurance that those college stars whom the Bobcats select will eventually turn into even functional players, let alone good ones.

      Regardless, the Bobcats team that was preparing to take the court in December 2011 was designed to lose. However, nobody knew that it was going to lose so spectacularly, and herein lies the purpose of this book. There have been lots of great books about championship contenders, and many memorable ones about lovable or colorful losers. This is neither. This is a book about a bad team with zero personality, the banality of incompetence, and what it feels like on a daily basis to be devoted to something so utterly devoid of any discernible grace or charm. The team finished 7-59, which is the worst record ever, and because this is a compilation of my own notes from every single game, you’ll be receiving a blow-by-blow account of my reckoning with the sporting atrocities I’ve witnessed. As the title crudely suggests, this book is like the late, great David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game, only so much less.

      Given the Bobcats’ epically bad season, whatever insights I’ve gleaned are often in spite of, rather than inspired by, what I saw in each game. In fact, for the games themselves, I usually focus more on the opponents (and their announcers), for they were often the only source of variety or amusement I had to provide texture to my daily grind of accumulating loss and hopelessness. Indeed, in its gestalt the 2011-12 NBA season was an overwhelming aesthetic and competitive success, filled with wonderful and charismatic teams and stars. And though most of those swashbuckling characters will appear here, their presence is merely tangential; they swoop in and do their damage, and then they move on to greater glories. I’ll leave them to their own inevitable full-length, victory-saturated chronicles, and instead I’ll take the point of view of the perpetually conquered.

      Admittedly, this is a perspective that is probably not bound to be a personally lucrative one. But it is absolutely authentic, and, in my opinion, under told. Here it goes...

      Part 1: Preseason Prediction? Paiiiin.

      It’s early December, 2011, and the lockout is over—let us all rejoice! The NBA and the Players Association have just proven their impeccable business smarts by shrewdly deciding not to destroy a multibillion dollar cash cow for no good reason. As we all knew they would, the owners have suffocated the players via a lockout into forking over a huge share of the profits in exchange for a truncated 66-game season. God bless us one and all. My concerns of spending my winter fretting over what to do with myself have shifted to fretting over who is going to score for my Charlotte Bobcats, and I couldn’t be happier about this.

      However, as the talk on our web page, BobcatsPlanet.com, demonstrates, the forecast for this team looks cloudy with a severe drought of wins approaching. It’s easy for me to imagine the Bobcats’ offseason meetings resembling the opening scenes of the movie Major League: the Bobcats dumped a ton of salary over the previous several months, and the team’s management—owner Michael Jordan, President Rod Higgins, General Manager Rich Cho—are transparently going the tank-the-season route. I don’t follow college basketball closely (read: at all), but I understand that the 2012 draft class is supposed to be delicious, and the small-market Bobcats want to get a big taste of it. That’s all well and good, but it means a lot of pain for fans to stomach until then, because access to high draft picks in the future entails losing early and often now. It could also very well mean a coronary for the team’s coach, Paul Silas, who doesn’t suffer fools and is the epitome of the adjective grizzled.

      If losing and the cardiologic-related death of the head coach are the goals, then it looks like the Bobcats’ roster might be up to both tasks. Charlotte did have two lottery picks this past draft, Bismack Biyombo and Kemba Walker, but both have more question marks than the Riddler’s tights. Walker, the heroic but diminutive point guard for UConn, has leadership to spare but, alas, not height. Biyombo, a center-forward tweener, played in the Spanish league but originally hails from the Congo and speaks 5 languages, but even in the most charitable scouting reports he is described as extremely raw. This leaves us with mainstay PG DJ Augustin, also extremely small; shooting guard Gerald Henderson, who can neither shoot nor guard; small forward Corey Maggette, the shoot-first, pass-never, overpaid-always acquisition from the Milwaukee Bucks; string-bean forward Tyrus Thomas, forever on the cusp of having a breakout season; corpulent French forward and Segway-enthusiast Boris Diaw; backup center Gana Diop, whose basketball moves could best be described as glacier-like; and a gaping hole at starting center that could be filled by anyone from free

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