We went to see an NBL basketball game tonight – the Boston Celtics vs the Chicago Bulls! Y’all should have heard that last bit in a loud booming PA voice as though it’s filling the stadium! Now, we are not really fans of either team, it was just an opportunity to go see two well known NBA teams play while we happened to be in Boston.
Given we had spent a small fortune to go see Mr K’s favourite hockey teams – The Vancouver Canucks and the Toronto Maple Leafs (grrr… the bad pluralization gets me every time), we decided to just get some modest tickets for this game. Which meant that we were up in the third balcony in the nose bleeds. Mind you the view from up there at TD Gardens in Boston was pretty good – you could see the whole court, and you were looking down on the big screens that run all the replays, rather than looking up at it, which is a bonus to stave off getting a crick in the neck. One thing I did notice, the seats up there were narrower than the seats on lower levels – probably to squish more people in, and of course the arm rests don’t move so you get nice comfy steel digging into you for the whole game… they gotta work on that.
The game kicked off much like the other events we went to – an acknowledgement to the military servicemen and women for their sacrifices and then someone singing the national anthem. This time a choir of school girls. You know, I still can’t get used to the Americans all putting their hands on their heart and absolutely everyone singing along at full volume and looking disapprovingly at anyone not doing the same… in Australia, the national anthem comes on, you’re lucky if everyone stands up, some people will know the words to the first verse and the chorus, but only about 3 in 10 might make it through the second verse. We give a shit. We are patriotic and all, but we just don’t give a shit in the same way. The other odd thing about the anthem bit – every time I hear it, I am reminded of a rather absurd scene in the movie ‘Short Bus’… please don’t Google that, and if you do; don’t blame me for, ‘that which is seen can not be unseen’.
The crowd of course were largely Celtics fans, which meant lots of green, lots of big leprechaun hats and clovers and stuff everywhere. One thing that happened here that didn’t happen at the hockey – they were periodically booing the Chicago Bulls! I assume to try and throw them off their game, but it was weird. Yeah, of course you cheer your team on, but do we really need to ‘boo’ the visiting team? Not very sportsmanlike imho. We were mostly on the fence and found ourselves cheering both teams whenever they did something cool.
We did notice this guy though, Chicago Bulls No 5 Carlos Boozer… and he is a massive 6’9″ power forward who was having a helluva game. I felt an immediate affinity with Mr Boozer, for a start – could you get a more Aussie name? – and then there was his aggressive style that made you think his name should be Broozer not Boozer. He was great under the net and we had a lot of fun watching him.
We also noticed that every time the Bulls got possession of the ball, the spruikers/commentary team or whoever was in charge of the noise in the room, was playing AC/DC! Go the Aussie rock. It was probably supposed to help get the home team all stirred into action, but instead just made us associate the Chicago team with AC/DC. Nice. So between Boozer the most Aussie, German born, American basketballer ever and the soundtrack, we came away from the game as new Chicago Bulls fans! Go Bulls!
