Sein und Zeit und Blazers

Love Nate, give Blake a chance? I need headers or bullets. This is why I left college.

huge rec for you.

To your question, I think my earliest Blazer memory is Danny Young hitting a mid court shot against the Pistons that got waived off. I remember thinking that call was horribly wrong.

Whether or not that’s “where it all began” for me in terms of how I remember is unknown to me. But I would say that the synchronic way of remembering is true of nearly all sports fans. Part of this is because there is just so much to remember. The mind almost has to whittle it down to a few highlights to hold it all. I don’t remember everything from the buzzer beater against Houston last year, but I will always remember Brandon Roy launching the shot and seeing the net splash. I’ll remember the highlight until I die. But the context of the shot in relation to that particular season/team/or upwards trend for the Blazers as a basis for the memory or as part of an overall narrative will not be there for me as years pass. Sure, it’s there now, so I suppose it is a building block, but that will fade and in time the memory will just be the highlight.

Great topic.

u are talented and this you bring up a very important and relevant point.

but who cares? I just want my favorite basketball team to win.

s

and I don’t recall any other “worst fanpost ever” in BE history…

(silent rec)

I was writing something about instant gratification, and about people being bad at judging slow long-term developments which is why we overvalue short-term positive developments (like getting more money, or a team winning one big game) and underestimate long-term negative effects. Which is why fans never expect their teams and players to do bad or get hurt, and why banks suck at risk management because not even the theoretical models can capture the total breakdown much less people would expect it. It was such a nice post :-(

But well done NBF.

I didn’t grow up in Portland or in a big basketball household, so my first memory of the Blazers was that they some obscure team from Maine getting steamrolled by the inevitability of the Jordan dynasty.

After I enrolled in Oregon in the fall of 1999, my next memory that stands out to me was the 2000 WCF, and I realized that many of my friends and acquaintances were actually FANS of this otherwise obscure franchise. Strangely…. I have a similar sensation regarding everyone’s universal frustration with Telfair….

The third major memory for me was of watching Outlaw hit the runner at the buzzer against Memphis (two years ago tomorrow) – the shot that started the streak – and I realized that I had become a fan.

To be honest, I’ve been racking my brain for a Blazer “first memory” and I don’t have one. I have no idea whether this is odd or not.

1. Junkers : the junk drawer elite. They come in , throw a thread off topic, draw everyone around in and have lengthy conversations. They dont always know much of basketball but like the company of blazersedge.

this is displayed in the top portion of the comments. (this one included, but nevermind that ) ( i am also the guiltiest junker in the history of this site..)

2. the arguing wanna-be elite: these commenters start arguing about ANYTHING, mostly for the sake of arguing and probably to display some intelligence they feel isnt recognized in their real life. (i am also the “arguer”)

this is displayed in the middle portion of the thread of comments. flame away guys

3. THe serious commenters. These are usually found commenting on Dave’s post. They take a question, ponder it and answer it literally, thoughtfully and succinctly .

These comments are at the bottom . (excluding this one and i DO sometimes answer questions seriously but usually not, being seriuos could ruin my rep)

Disregard the fact that I am a hybrid of all these commenting traits ; this post has unintentionally incited the admiriaton/randomness/ire of commenters.

LOL well done

s

testing my own memory, what I first remember is the Blazers vs. the Pistons in the finals… but I know I watched before that, and I remember watching and learning how to be a fan from my mom… I would also be interested to see if anyone’s “first” sports memory is a negative one… I doubt it as we (fans) always remember the past as better than the present

a Blazer game because I was a girl and the the boys would appreciate it more. I consider that my parents were very liberal but I still heard “because he’s a boy” far too often. That was probably also the start of my feminism. Guess who’s the only sibling who follows the Blazers now?

I started following the team in grade school during the 1999-2000 run. My first memory is watching a Laker game with my dad, but having to go to bed before the fourth quarter. I woke up in the morning, sprinted downstairs and waited anxiously for the 6:00 news to tell me who won the game.

The Lakers won. It sucked.

I remember the Blazers and specific Blazer players before my first memory. At least, my first specific memory. And it shows that synchronic approach vividly. I can remember Kiki Vandeweghe on the team, but not specifically. I couldn’t point out a game and a time or anything else. It’s just a vague impression, just as likely to be a name mentioned as a game watched.

The first point I can remember back to and know when it happened and the events around it is 1990, Game Seven vs the San Antonio Spurs. Both Wayne Cooper and Kevin Duckworth were doubtful for that game. Before the tip, they annouced that Coop could play, but when Duckworth was announced in the starting lineup, everyone, including me went crazy.

The strange thing about memory is that it sometimes puts things together that don’t belong. I had to go look it up, because I had the impression that Portland’s perfect quarter was in that game. It wasn’t, it was the next season (only 6 months later, still 1990) versus the same San Antonio Spurs. But without the diachronic analysis, I would have concluded that those two things belonged together.

Very interesting post. Thank you.

I was 15 years old and doing my time growing up in Los Angeles, and for some reason, there was an expansion draft that the Lxkers (my favorite team at the time) had to prepare some players for. My team yielded Dick Garrett, a promising young guard who unfortunately played the same position as Jerry West, to the Buffalo Braves; and Johnny Egan, a solid backup point guard, to the Cleveland Cadavaliers. They gave no one up to the Blazers – thank goodness!

This was something I fretted about because in the 1968 expansion draft, the Lxkers gave up Gail Goodrich to the Phoenix Suns. Goodrich was a player I kept close track of, because he played at my high school (JH Francis Polytechnic HS in Sun Valley CA) and had graduated about 10 years before I was scheduled to graduate; and he also played at UCLA for John Wooden’s awesome championship teams. This hit very close to home.

Moreover, the Lakers had lost John Block, a big center/power forward from USC; Henry Finkel, a huge center who could barely move, but hey, he was 7 feet tall; Bob Boozer, who looked like a solid backup for Mr. Baylor at the time; Jim King, a decent backup guard and ball handler; and Walt Hazzard, a very talented guard from UCLA, in previous expansion drafts. So it was difficult to see these young guys get away for nothing.

Other things I knew about the Blazers at that time: They drafted Geoff Petrie who I witnessed as a Princeton player vs. UCLA – he single-handedly gave the Bruins a real challenge that night. They also had Sidney Wicks who I knew from UCLA.

Through the Ramsay years, I pulled for the Blazers but was secure in my knowledge that the Lxkers could be counted on to reach the playoffs and keep the NBA interesting to me, after the Blazers inevitably missed the playoffs or were eliminated in the first round every year. It was a nice contingency plan for me.

When Drexler arrived and we acquired some nice players at the end of the 1980s, including the underrated Steve Johnson, former OSU Beaver, at center, we were suddenly much more competitive and fun to watch. Too bad we hadn’t spent some dough and gotten some players for Ramsay while he was here.

It was only in 1991 when Magic Johnson eliminated the Blazers with the long pass to no one at the other end of the court that the Lxkers finally pissed me off so much that I couldn’t root for them any more. – Not Elgin

Like T Darkstar, my early Blazer memories are hard to pin down in specific moments in time.

I have a very early sense of hearing Schonley on the radio. And looking back in hindsight, that had to have been my first exposure to all things Blazers. We either couldn’t afford game tickets or lived too far away, but that radio dial was always tuned in. And during those early years, there wasn’t a TV in the house (so I guess that raises some even more difficult spin-off questions about aural vs. visual memory in the context of these questions about synchronic/diachronic memory. Yikes).

So the idea of “a Blazer game being on”, I think, existed before I can point to specific visual memories. Leaving aside for a moment the visuals that would go in a young child’s head with no visual context for radio phrases like “lickety-brindle-right-up-the-middle”, “climbed the golden ladder!” or “through the cyclops at mid-court” I’m left with memories of wherever I was listening to the game. I can call to mind early living rooms and kitchens, but I can’t pin down a specific time. I can also clearly remember staring at my radio dial and trying to orient a (imaginary) basketball court in my mind when Schonz would say “moving from left to right on your radio dial.” I’m pretty sure I also had a mental image for Fat Lever that didn’t match reality.

Beyond that, it’s really hard to say. As far as visuals go, I remember finally going to some preseason games. And also ultimately seeing games on TV, in pizza parlors, or back when they’d show games at the old Fox Theater. But it all blends together. I remember my brother getting Jim Paxon’s autograph at a local signing, and I remember seeing the Adelman Blazers at their training camp when it was held at Willamette University— it was probably the closest I’d gotten to an actual player, and I was pretty stunned at how enormous they were.

But all of this doesn’t amount to a synchronic, highlight film play. Once the era of the late 80’s and early 90’s Blazers came, those more specific play-of-the-game memories start appearing in bunches. Not coincidentally it was around the time I would have started watching games on TV much more regularly.

I’m not sure this adds much to NBF’s questions, though. Interesting stuff.

When I was in 5th grade (1981), NBA playing cards were really popular, and I remember a Jim Paxson card floating through my life.

Then in 7th and 8th grade (1983-ish), I babysat for a family who had season tickets. I was happy to make money, never gave a single thought to the actual basketball.

I lived in Massachusetts in 1990, and I tried to follow them via the paper, for civic pride reasons, but all the west coast games finished too late to make the paper.

I moved back to Portland in 2004, and I would be mad every time KGW preempted regular programming with a Blazer game.

Yes, my fandom was an E-X-T-R-E-M-E-L-Y slow progression. Actually, I take that back, it was very fast, it just took years and years and years to start.

were because my friends were fans. It was mostly about a shared experience. To this day I have maintained a sentimental attachment, if not an actual rooting affiliation, to those teams, the exception being the Steelers for whom I still root mainly because I was in a class once with Franco Harris. Of such random occurrences are affiliations born.

Now in my childhood fandom I did not necessarily root for the same teams my friends rooted for. Each buddy seemed to have their own team, and since the local team actually stank – the 1950s and 60s Phillies, they were kind of up for grabs. But it didn’t last. Once I realized that the people I was trying to impress were douchebags, I pretty much forgot about the Phillies. That was about the same time that Richie Allen pushed his hand through a headlight, so it was convenient anyway.

As an adult I find that I enjoy the adrenaline rush that comes with letting ones self get caught up in the winning or losing, and I enjoy, after the game the cries of joy and/or howls of anguish emitted by the faithful. It’s a form of group identification in a world that has sorely limited opportunities for real tribal affiliations, which I think are a basic human need.

But the sad truth we all share is that we are losers living vicariously through our heros. That’s why we hate them so much when they fail. It makes us realize that we have let ourselves down. Their losses and humiliations are literally, not figuratively, our own writ large. Their victories are fleeting and hollow and leave us craving more because we know, they are only images of victory and not victory itself.

Reading the rest of the things here, I’d say that my love for sports boils down to a few things: (1) my undeniable love at a young age for statistics, and (2) the fact that sport was the arena which my dad and I did together. I grew to like sports and care about sports because he liked and cared about sports.

I go to the UW now but my heart still pulls for Oregon State. Why? I feel like my childhood and relationship with my dad revolved around Oregon State football, and that’s meaningful to me.

Anyway… this has been really thought-provoking content. Some people root to root against the establishment, some fans root because the environment around them roots for the team, some fans root because they want to be associated with a winner, and Clipper fans are masochists.

Losing the last game against the Mavs in the playoffs. We had been down 0-3 and forced a game 7. It was my favorite player’s last game. I can “remember” other stuff, like I know I cried during the 2000 incident, but I can’t visualize it.

was a feeling of empathy for the difficulty Naismith was experiencing while attempting to nail up the peach basket.

I inadvertently brought up my first NBA memory in the JD without even linking it to your post, which I must confess I hadn’t read (only because I wanted to give it the time and attention it deserves).

My first NBA memory was AI’s 76ers in the finals. Absolutely incredible.