It would have been pretty tough for me not to be a Blazer fan.

in rip city got the hook in pretty deep.

I was a Celtics fan until the 5th grade when the Blazers got Buck.

I remember when Buck got hit in the eye and began wearing goggles, I’m not sure if it was before their 1990 playoff run or not. But that moment really stands out as a turning point. I’m guessing that was probably around the time that my grandparents got Blazer Cable.

tickets were cheap, so i went for fun and fell in love with it

I moved here from Alaska in 2001, was stoked to live somewhere that had any sort of major league team, so I became a Blazer fan. While many poster’s here formative Blazer memories include Finals appearances and playoff runs, mine include basketballs and towels being thrown at teammates, dog fighting, tin foil, airport security etc etc. I am ok with that, I guess.

but that was only because my favorite player was Shawn Kemp. So I followed him to Cleveland, and that was not fun at all, then of course he led me to the Blazers. One of the reasons I stuck it out in the beginning is the team logo and team colors. Its not ugly like the L*$ers and the Spurs. Its not bright as the Suns and the Hornets. But after ‘the Game 7 meltdown’ I knew this was my team. Always the underdog! Plus who wants to look like a bananna?

I was 9 years old – more of a baseball fan than a basketball fan (Griffey’s rookie year – good times). We went to pick my aunt up from PDX at like midnight, and, while waiting at her gate, a large group of even larger men emerged. My dad was really excited about this, but I just wanted to see my aunt. I remember him going over to one of them, shaking his hand, and bringing him over to me. “This is Clyde Drexler,” he told me. Clyde shook my hand, signed a scrap piece of paper that had my aunt’s flight information on it, and asked if I played basketball. Some of the other players came over as well, but I didn’t really care at the time. On the ride home, my aunt said that the players on the plane were all extremely nice to the patrons, many of which were walking up to them for autographs.

After my dad explained to me the significance of Clyde, and me remembering my principal having a picture of him in his office (don’t ask how I know what his office looks like), I turned to my friend, Todd, who was an avid fan, and who’s parents were one of the few people in town that had “Blazervision” (Remember that stuff? CSN before CSN was CSN – but much easier to get…ahh, the days of Cableview) – the rest was history.

But my brother watched, and listened to Schonz on the radio since my earliest memories. The first guys I remember watching where Mychael Thompson, Sam Bowie (yes he did play some games!), and Sleepy Floyd. That’s when I started, haven’t left since.

Fell out with the team in high school, and was kind of pushed back towards the Blazers in College by a friend. After about a semester of getting re-educated in what was happening with the Blazers, I then came home for winter break.

I was actually really surprised to find my room covered in Blazer things (like when you get used to your room you kind of forget everything that is in there), from programs signed with all but Mr. Cooper on the ‘92 team, to a signed card of Terry Porter’s (they used to bend the corners on the cards that you could mail them so they wouldn’t be valuable, but I didn’t care), to the Franz bread cards all up in a plastic sheet on my wall, and finally a blazer’s hat signed by James Edwards (I thought he was going to be a star).

After seeing all of that i remembered how much I loved the team, and I’ve been back for the last several years after a couple of year hiatus…

in 76-77. You know, back before expansion, when we we had to go THROUGH the Bulls to get to the finals instead of playing AGAINST them in the finals.

That was a magical season. My Dad let me skip school and we went downtown to watch the parade after game 6. Never seen anything like it.

Moved here and loved the spirit of the Blazer fans and started following the team around 7 years ago! I also cannot get enough of NCAA March Madness and that spurred my interest in all things NBA come spring time. Go Blazers!

Back in the early to middle 80’s, when the broadcasts were on KOIN-TV and both Pat Lafferty sp? and Steve Jones were the commentators. My parents bought Franz Bread, so I was able to collect all of the Blazer trading cards. I remember having Clyde’s, Terry’s, Kenny Carr, Steve Colton, Fernando Martin, and a few others. They’ve been my team ever since.

I was a lifelonf Sonic fan (well…..for the first 21 years of my life) who married a lifelong Blazer fan in 1908. We moved to a little town in the Columbia River Gorge, and although it’s on the Washington side of the river, I soon found out that MY state (WA) pretty much considered the Gorge to be in Oregon. No WA news available….no WA sports coverage, pretty much all Portland, all the time.

We lived in an old farm house that had a small portable dishwasher that was a piece of crap. Shortly after we were married I decided that I could wash dishes faster and better than that POC. So to keep my brain occupied while washing the dishes, I started listening to Blazer radio broadcasts. I found Bill Schonley to be pretty entertaining (bingo, bango, bongo….RIIIIIIIP City………you’ve got to make your free throws…etc.) and soon I found that I liked these guys in Portland better than the Sonics.

Jim Paxson seemed to be a pretty good player, and Mychal Thomson was both good and really funny, Calvin Natt, Fat Lever, Kenny Carr….all seemed like a bunch of good guys who could win enough to make the playoffs, but never get out of the first round.

Before you knew it, I was a full-fledged Blazer fanatic, trading trash talk with my Seattle-based brother-in-law. One of hte peaks of my Blazer happiness was when the Blazers played the Sonics in teh Tacoma DOme, and so many Blazer fans showed up that it was effectively a home game for the Blazers, who came back from a 20 point deficit to win the game. I believe that shortly after that game, the Sonics announced they would no longer play Portland in Tacoma. Great stuff!

How did I come to be a Trail Blazers fan? It slowly got started last year. I was a longtime Sonics fan as they were the closest team to me. During last season the Sonics last, I began to grow away from them and grow towards the Trail Blazers. I was paying attention more to the Blazers. They were going to be my new team with Seattle moving. Read up on them, learned about the Blazers. Brandon Roy emerged as one of my favorite players outside of Steve Nash. And once the Sonics left, I officially became a Trail Blazers fan. Little wierd as I used to hate the Blazers in the Jail Blazers days, and made fun of people who liked them. Plus they were an afterthought with the Sonics around. I get made fun of for liking the Blazers at times, but the Blazers have grown up. I am converted to the Blazers and a Brandon fan. I am not a bandwagoner. A new fan with his team regardless. The closest team to me now and a team I am close to. GO BLAZERS! Brandon’s the man.

I remember really disliking the Bulls, Pistons, Jazz, and Lakers even at such a young age.

It is my parent’s fault that I am such a big Blazers fan because I was watching with them. Really though, I wasn’t as much into the Rasheed era. I’m one of those fans who takes the character of the team to heart. With that in mind I’ve never been a bigger Blazers fan than I am today.

While i was in college at Lewis and Clark. Those were some pretty ugly years for the blazers (i graduated in 05). After college i spent a year living in Beijing, which furthered my appreciation of baskteball. I spent a while cheering for an absolutely pathetic Sonics team, so when they left i was almost relieved to be able to cheer for the blazers again, as before they’d been my second favorite team.

I grew up in Philadelphia, and I was a huge Eagles and Flyers fan. The relevant part is the Eagles. When they went on their lack of a championship run, I always manage to find my way into those miserable NFC Championship games. Bribing security guards, buying in bulk overpriced ‘club seats’ from the Eagles with no ammenities, and reselling them for more yet saving 2 for myself, ect. That got me thinking that I should get my own season tickets. Problem was, the Eagles had sold out their stadium and had a wait list that could fill 2 more. So I started buying season tickets for other teams and reselling them. That’s the scumball part. It was for football only (trust me, there’s pretty much no money in doing it for basketball), and I absolutely do not buy teams that I don’t root for. Not the best strategy, but it keeps my heart in it.

Then, I moved to Portland in the summer of 05. I thought it would be a good idea to get on board the Blazers. Afterall, they were the home team and I never had my own home team’s tickets. Besides, they were bad the year before and were drafting young (seriously, I had no idea what I was doing, but it worked well with the Bengals and the Seahawks, thus the idiot part). Anyway, they ended up being the worst team in the league and I ended up going to a bunch of the games myself. Also, I met a bunch of people and dated two beautiful girls (not at the same time) who reminisced about the good old days. In Philly, that’s unheard of. If the team isn’t doing well and you say anything other than “those (explicative) (expicative) suck”, you might as well be a Cowgirls fan. And these were girls who followed and stuck it out with a bad team. My mind was blown, and I knew the fan base was like one that I had wanted to be part of all of my life. I couldn’t hang on to the seats after that season (or either of the girls as it turns out), as I moved to Japan, but I still followed the team. Then, after the ‘07 lottery, I knew the boat was going to fill up quickly. I stayed up until 1 am to call the box office first thing in the morning, I got my seats, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going to happen with this team. It was a stronger curiousity than I had ever had with any team since an emerging Donovan McNabb lead Eagles to an NFC Chapionship game in St. Louis, and maybe even stronger than that. I did a google search about possible trades for Zach Randolph, and it lead me here. I have been hooked since. The team, the site, everything. I have easily 5x as much invested in football, but I still watch much more of the Blazers than I do all of football combined. Over half of my Blazers tickets go to people I met on this site, and I don’t charge much more than I pay. In fact I think I messed up and am actually charging one person less than I am paying.

I have lived in 6 different areas in 2 countries, and I couldn’t imagine calling Portland my home at the end of it all. The Blazers are the heartbeat of the city, and a pulse I can groove to. I consider moving back there at least once a month, yet my financial situation (resulting from the ticket thing where I woulg get huge sums of money all at once and spend it on toys and trips instead of paying back my cards) has me stuck in Japan for another year and a half. I have had a lot of thankless jobs, counseling and teaching kids, for little money and a lot of headaches. If it wasn’t for this extra income I could never go to any games at all, which is a huge passion of mine. I get to go to some when I am home, but all in all the amount of time, stress, thought and energy put into this doesn’t really make sense compared to the little return I get back on it. Anyway, that’s my story, and no matter what you think of it, I’m Rip City for life.

Moved to Portland from Central Wash. It was the only game in town. Slept on the sidewalk at Meir and Franks for tickets to games 4 and 6, in the finals against Philly. Awesome. My ex has the ticket stubs to prove it, as well as all the DQ glasses!

What am I doing here? Who am I? And if yes how many?

I have some faint memories about NBA basketball in the late 80s starring the Celtics and Lakers and Pistons, but it really started in 91/92. I loved watching that team around Clyde Drexler, though I was too young (and not influenced by anybody) to also hate the Bulls since I really liked to watch Jordan. To this day, I don’t really hate any team as much as some people seem to do. Well, the Spurs. But that has more to do with also liking Dallas since about the time Nowitzki signed up there. I have an odd fascination with jump-shooting teams ;-)

Never was much into European basketball, but I always loved the Olympics. 1992 in Barcelona were probably the greatest Olympics for me to this day. Loved everything about that from the official song (Mercury and Montserrat Caballe) to the opening ceremony to the amazing Dream Team to some dreams of competing there one day myself. Those guys seemed so cool (“I don’t know much about Angola, but I know one thing, they’re in a lot of trouble.”) on and off the court, and so dominant. That really kept me into following that up by watching every piece of NBA basketball that was on TV.

It all started for me in 1998, but first I have to go back to 1996. I was living on the east coast and I was a hired assassin for a brutal gang called La Costas Nostra. It was a secret society run by a well know sports broadcaster. I was called, "The Buckwheats Stabber," for the particularly painful and sinister way I dispatched of my victims. I was the best in the business and as my reputation grew, so did my bravado.

I started freelancing and became careless. My fee for a hit was outrageous, one day a man offered me double my fee if I took care of one his most nefarious problems. I accepted the job without even asking who the target was. It turned out; my target was the leader of La Costas Nostra, also know as "The Midget."

Even with my superior cunning and intellect, I could not reach The Midget. He was too well guarded and always in the public eye. At the time I had a horrible addiction to collecting Beanie Babies and I blew my entire fortune on a Snow Angle Beanie Baby. I had hit rock bottom, The Midget found out I was hired to rub him out, my client found out I could not complete the job, and they both put out a hit on me. I had nowhere else to go, so I turned to the government.

I turned state’s evidence and helped bring down all but the head of La Costas Nostra. The government put me in the witness protection program and had me working at Les Schwab Tire Center in Cottage Grove, Oregon. That was the fall of 1998. I fell in love with the Blazers soon after that.

I discovered the Portland Trail Blazers on a day trip to Portland. Old habits die hard and I fell off the Beanie Baby wagon. I was at Lloyd Center and was reaching for an Alacazam at the same time as Isiah Rider. He tried to pull it away from me and like an animal, instinct took over and I tried to stab him Buckwheats style. He had on a fannypack backwards that was filled with cellphones.

I stabbed a cellphone and Rider looked at me and said, "I like your style." He gave me Alacazam and just like that, I was back in my old business. I did all sorts of petty crimes for Rider while he gave me lots of game tickets, and introduced me to the rest of the team.

Rider moved but I did not. I spiraled further down the abyss of crime and Beanie Baby collecting. To support my habit, I started doing favors for members of the "Jail Blazers."

The Jail Blazers treated me well, they gave me plenty of game tickets for my favors and during that time I learned to love Blazer’s basketball. I stuck with the Jail Blazers until late 2005.

One night I was hanging outside a stripclub with two members of the Jail Blazers. We were shooting cans off the heads of toddlers with a Glock 27. The police came; we got away, but not before KP found me. He had hired a private investigator to round up all the Jail Blazer instigators.

My first meeting with KP was intense. He threatened me with a "career ending injury" if I did not get out of town. I resisted and he responded by using Darius Miles as an example. After what he did to Miles, I knew KP would stop at nothing to dispose of me. I heeded his warning and moved to Hawaii.

After that, KP earned my respect. I adopted a "What Would KP Do?" (WWKPD) Lifestyle. I replaced my addiction to Beanie Babies with an addiction to everything Blazers.

I’m still trying to mend my broken relationship with KP. Someday, with the help of Blazers Edge, I hope hold KP in my arms, tell him I’m sorry, and tell him how proud I am of him for what he’s done for me and the Portland Trail Blazers. Godspeed Kevin Pritchard, Godspeed.

I already wrote way too much about this