geeking out

so it's the beginning of october and you would think that when you write about sports and october, you're going to write about baseball, but if i were to write about baseball, you would ask me to loosen my pants because it was muffling my voice.
when i think about sports in october, i think about training camp.
in the 80's i successfully avoided the mullet and by avoiding the mullet one seems to thankfully avoid all mullet related sports (with the exception of soccer in my case) and hockey was never a sport i could even bear to watch or even care about. the one hockey game that i did go to, on the assumption that the claim, "you just have to watch it live man, you'll be hooked!" was true, i found myself leaving at the beginning of the third period, ready to pay $20 to watch paint dry. so i never fell for the only sport i felt was hand tailored for rednecks, i mean, where would you ever find more mullet wearing, toothless grinning, facially deformed, hot headed, vocabulary challenged white men on one team?
when i start to think about sports in october, i start to think in purple and gold.
sports in october means hope, it means, potential, it means dreams of may and possibly june, it means get together's with friends, it means calls from my dad and brother and all my other friends who i have lethally injected with the purple and gold serum. it means the beginning of the year for the only team that people in los angeles care about. it means laker season is upon me.
last year october was a disaster. in fact, it was the first october that i wasn't even excited about the team. actually i couldn't even handle the thought of them. i knew that rudy would be a disaster and the lakes would throw up more three balls than loyola marymount from the hank gathers, bo kimbal days. i couldn't even believe who we got for shaq, three scrubs? i mean, i was pushing for nowitzki like it was my job, and only nowitzki would i trade shaq for (maybe garnett), and how could kupchack not get cuban to bite on that?? always trade big for big, never big for small! and at least get another freak of nature, not the same kind of freak of nature, but nowitzki is a freak, he plays like my brother benj if he were seven feet tall. silky smooth moves, great shot and absolutely no defense. kobe and that fool together would have made for an exciting october, even with rudy. but i couldn't even watch the season. it was kind of my protest against all things laker. kind of my way of letting the lakes know that they had hurt my feelings, that they had injured me personally. i would catch glimpses, of games, glimpses where the court looked darker, somehow foreign, to my eyes.
but things have changed in lakerland. i feel like i needed the time away, the distance to work on forgetting what we had, it wasn't like their best player got aids and the second best player's knees went out, these things i can understand and suffer through with a team... the time away allowed for me to come back a different fan, a more jaded fan, but nonetheless a fan whose blood runs purple and whose heart is made of gold. they reached out to the only coach they could reach out to, coach phillip, to make up for rash decisions. kobe has suffered through a year where he was given his reign of a team, a coach, and a city and lost them all, realizing that he is neither of the three and merely the key component on a team. if he can take the energy from the humbling he received and put them into his desire to win and into discipline on the court, and shut his mouth and just play, he could probably win the mvp this year. i guess that i am excited about this team because i have no idea what it is going to look like, i have know idea, or can i even predict what this season will look like. finally the lakers are back to being something worth watching because each game will be a complete surprise, each game will be a crap shoot, each game the lakers could potentially be competitive in if they all play together. finally they seem like a team again, finally they seem like family once again, finally i care about them again, finally it's october.