Being rather bookish my entire life, the first basketball game I ever witnessed in its entirety came last winter, in my sophomore year of college. At this game, however, I, being the sharp one that I am, figured out exactly how they play basketball (Note: this post may eventually be followed by posts on other sports and how they play them, too. Also, these posts are not intended to slam athletes of any kind, if anyone, they are meant to poke fun at my own intelligence level. Thank you!)
HOW THEY PLAY BASKETBALL:
First, assemble two teams. The game I witnessed was men’s basketball; I assume it works the same for the ladies, but we’ll refer back to the men’s game here (and before I get called a sexist, I AM a woman, if that isn’t evident from my other posts. We’re cool.) So you assemble two teams of men. Promote rivalry between these men. How you do this is up to you, most seem to use school spirit or regional pride to accomplish this. Also, the team who owns the court gets to pick one special player. I’m not sure what criteria our school used, but this guy was very durable, pleasant, got good grades, and had good hair, so it must be along those lines. He’ll come into the picture a little later. Place these two teams of men on one “court” (place with a hard wood floor and bleachers), and place a basket way up over their heads on each side.
Now comes the truly evil part: give these guys ONE BALL and expect them to share! What happens in preschool happens in college; human beings have an innate inability to share things. So the two teams will begin to fight over the ball. The crowd in the bleachers will cheer for one team or the other in a manner reminiscent of the gladiator fights of the coliseum (or the Lions vs. Christians events, if the teams are especially mismatched.) The tall guys have a distinct advantage here, as they’ve figured out that what works for the teacher in preschool will work for them now: if they can put the object in question up high enough, the others can’t have it! What they don’t realise? The baskets (where they might put the ball) are defective. They have holes in the bottom of them, and the ball keeps falling out. Every time that happens, the other team tries to take the ball away and hide it in their basket, which, since both baskets are defective, doesn’t work either.
Remember the special guy you picked out before? He comes in now. If, at any time, this guy gets run down by everyone else, a guy in stripey clothes yells that there’s a foul. (Note: the stripey clothes guy seems to be very important, as he has a whistle and can even break up fights. One wonders, then, why he’d stand there and let these guys fight over the ball, but theodicy or anything analogous to it is not the subject of this post.) Sometimes, they even make a force field next to one basket, and one guy tries to throw the ball into it. The emotional torture for the other team seems to have the name of “free throws”.
Now, every time the guys try to hide the ball in the basket and it fall out, someone has been giving them points (and the pep band’s been playing, but that kinda goes with the crowd cheering.) At the end, someone adds up all the points, and whoever has tried to hide the ball the most times wins. Then everyone gets really excited…and goes home.
And that, my friends, is how they play basketball.
[...] Soapbox Soliloquies put an intriguing blog post on How They Play BasketballHere’s a quick excerpt … this post may eventually be followed by posts on other sports and how they play them, too…. [...]