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legs slowly kicking
Tuesday, September 16 2003
For Gretchen, the day was one long agony of anticipation as she waited around for 8:00 PM Eastern Time, and the final game of the WNBA finals - the last gasp of the season for women's basketball.
One way to pass the time was to watch a NetFlix movie. So we saw It's All About the Benjamins. It was more of a movie for guys who like movies than I'm used to Gretchen getting (though she did once order Smokey and the Bandit). Hell, it even had the obligatory firey explosion, though for some reason the explosion lacked people flying through the air slo-mo (with kicking legs) in the foreground. As junky early evening watching, it was a reasonably entertaining movie, helped in large part by the character depicted by Mike Epps, Ice Cube's gangly sidekick.
The basketball game interrupted our movie about three-fourths of the way through. For its first two-thirds it succeeded at keeping us entertained without driving us to involuntarily prune our fingernails. But then somehow Los Angeles rallied against Detroit (our heroes) and managed to get a little two point lead with only a minute and a half left of play. Happily, at that point Los Angeles suffered a series of minor setbacks and Detroit quickly came back from the brink to win the championship by five points. The most satisfying of these setbacks came when LA's star player, Lisa Leslie, fouled out of the game, though she hadn't actually been contributing much to it. Were it not for the preternatural three point shots of Mwadi Mabika, Los Angeles would have experience a severe humiliation.
This was the first time an Eastern team had ever won the championship, and Gretchen took great satisfaction from the fact that this first was achieved by a team from a downtrodden blue collar rustbelt city. Indeed, her support for Detroit throughout this season leaves her wondering about the fierce loyalty she once had for the New York Liberty.
Look at me, now I'm a sportswriter! Fortunately for you, there will be no more of this nonsense until May. Mind you, I have no particular interest in basketball and find I don't enjoy watching men play it the way they do in the NBA. There are those, of course, who think women's basketball has too few slam-dunks or is too lesbian to watch. Those same people no doubt love the part of a movie where there's a huge firey explosion, the kind that sends people flying through the air in the foreground, their legs slowly kicking.
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