ThrowItDownBigMan

Hello friends, my name is Jesse and I’d like to thank Geoff and his buddies for welcoming me to this wonderful blog. Since I originally hail from the east coast I’ve been brought on in an attempt to provide some balance to TIDBM, but we’ll see about that.

Growing up in the DC area, I first got into basketball around the age of eight when I started playing organized hoops. I’m not gonna lie, in my early years I was a pretty big fan of those ugly, defensive minded Knicks teams of the 90s. My mom was from New York, my dad was from Philly, and neither was a huge sports fan, so I had free reign as an ignorant child to choose my allegiances and I jumped on the Knicks bandwagon. I loved Anthony Mason, Charles Oakley, John Starks, and how sweaty Patrick Ewing got before the game even started.

But as I got older and became more attached to the area I grew up in, I started to get into the Bullets (don’t tell me you forgot) more. For a little while I was a fan of both the Knicks and Bull-izards. Chris Webber was a star, Juwan Howard was getting overpaid, and Rod Strickland was the man. As the century turned and the Knicks faded from relevancy, I eventually abandoned them to become a complete homer.

My Wizards fandom reached it’s zenith while in college at the University of Maryland and then during my first year out of college while living in DC. The Wizards assembled a solid starting five of Gilbert Arenas, DeShawn Stevenson, Caron Butler, Antawn Jamison, and Brendan Haywood and for the first time in my life become a perennial playoff team. It’s hard to remember now, but for a few years in the middle of that decade Arenas was arguably one of the best and most engaging players in the league. He was an amusing personality during interviews and on his NBA blog, and he backed up the talk with stellar play and memorable game winning shots.

The Wizards player who perhaps best shaped my fan experience though was Stevenson. I know that some NBA fans consider Stevenson a joke and a moron, but to me he was awesome and hilarious. In the fall of 2007, his beard growing contest with Drew Gooden inspired me to grow one myself. Keep in mind that I was at this point a grown man fresh out of college trying to hold down my first legit job … I looked real professional. And I may or may not have been able to feel my face after making jumpers in DC rec leagues. Finally, Stevenson’s feud with Lebron during the 2008 playoffs somehow involved Soulja Boy and Jay-Z while inspiring one local DC rapper’s extremely underrated response diss of Hova. You cannot make this stuff up.

Alas, the Wizardry did not last. Arenas got hurt, got hurt some more, and brought guns into the locker room. As the team crumbled, the rest of the starting five eventually got traded away so the team could rebuild. Now the Wizards face a promising but uncertain future with 2010 number one overall pick John Wall as the face of the team and Arenas, untradeable due to his contract and past, as the reluctant sidekick.

As their success has faded so has my enthusiasm as a fan, but not solely due to their performance on the court. After moving to San Jose in the summer of 2009, I no longer attend Wizards games in person and see far fewer on tv. Now I just follow them from a distance. But maybe that’s fitting, because being a basketball fan for me has always been about much more than one team or one star player. It’s about loving the game and the amazing athletes and funny characters who play it.

JB