parlando

top five sports teams

Posted on January 22nd, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Sports.

Fred asked me for my Top Five Teams, any year, any sport.

5: Philadelphia 76ers, 1982-83. 65-17. Lost only one game through the playoffs, swept the Lakers in the finals. The one bright spot in the streak of Laker and Celtic championships. Led by two all-time greats, Moses Malone and Julius Erving, and two superb all-stars, Bobby Jones and Maurice Cheeks. The most fun I've ever had following a team that wasn't my hometown.

4: North Carolina Tar Heels, women's college soccer, 1986 to 1994. Eight consecutive national championships, two unbeaten streaks of more than a hundred games.

3: UCLA Bruins, men's college basketball, 1966 to 1973. Seven championships, four 30-0 seasons, an 88-game winning streak.

2: Seattle Mariners, 2001. One of the best teams in baseball history, almost certainly the best to not win a championship. 116-46. Ichiro's rookie year. The most delight I've ever had following a baseball team. I can't talk about the awful way they lost to the loathesome Yankees in the playoffs; I'm just not reasonable about it. I stopped following sports altogether for a year because I felt so terrible at the Mariners' loss, and I knew this wasn't a healthy way for me to feel. I came back to sports when I felt I was able to approach it with less passion. Which is a much better place for my head to be, but also means I will never again experience anything close to:

1: Seattle Sonics, men's professional basketball, 1978-1979.
This is the one that matters. I was fifteen years old, and had been a basketball fan, and a Sonics fan, as long as I could remember. The Sonics were a young franchise, admitted to the NBA in 1967, and had been up and down over their first decade. In the same period, their archrival, the younger Portland TrailBlazers, had already won a championship behind the dominant leadership of Bill Walton, before his feet fell apart.

The seventies were a great time to be a basketball fan. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom; the seventies are supposed to be the nadir of the NBA, and it was the bottom of the NBA's popularity. The eighties brought the three-point shot (lifted from the defunct ABA) and the superstars who lifted the NBA to its preeminence: Magic, Bird, and Jordan. But I hated the eighties, with its emphasis on the big stars, and the well-balanced teams (Milwaukee, Atlanta, San Antonio, Denver, Portland, Dallas) always falling in the playoffs to the superstar-led teams getting superstar calls.

The seventies were about team play. Defense hadn't yet taken over the game, and the players were not the amazingly conditioned athletes of today; run-and-gun was still a viable strategy, and teams could make the fast break a fundamental part of their game. The first half of the decade still had the marvelous wide-open ABA. No superstar ruled the game; as great as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was, he had one championship before Magic Johnson joined Kareem's Lakers in the 1979-80 season. From 1970 to 1980 no team won the title two years in a row; the seventies feature the only championships for Portland, Milwaukee, Golden State, Washington, and Seattle. Seattle's championship was the last of that era; Magic and Bird entered the league the next year (along with the three-point shot). The Sonics were the last championship team to not feature a hall of famer (or obvious future hall of famer) until the Detroit championship team of a year ago. If that Detroit team wins another championship -- and they look very good this year -- they're going to have to put someone on that team into the hall.

At the beginning of the 1977-78 season, the Sonics were in turmoil. They started the season terribly, at 5-17. Coach Bob Hopkins was fired, and old local hero Lenny Wilkens was brought back to coach (he had been the Sonics' player-coach a few years earlier, and I think he's the last full-time player-coach the NBA has seen). Wilkens scrambled the starting lineup, emphasised the youth of the team, instilled a hard-nosed defensive work ethic, and the Sonics made a historic turnaround, going 42-18 the rest of the way, the best record in the league. Because of their terrible start, they had to overcome both Denver and Portland's home-court advantage to beat each of them in six games in the playoffs, then faced the Washington Bullets in the finals. The Bullets were another cinderella team, having only gone 44-38. They were led by two hall of famers near the end of their careers, the undersized but rugged Wes Unseld at center, and the great power forward Elvin Hayes, a player of machine-like efficiency who was the Karl Malone of his time. The Sonics took a 3-2 lead in the series but lost the last two games to lose the championship, and leave their amazing turnaround incomplete.

The next year they burned up the league. The Bullets and the Sonics weren't cinderellas any more; they had the two best records in the NBA, and met in the finals. The Sonics had a bad scare against Phoenix, needing an overtime win on the brink of elimination before prevailing 4-3. But the Bullets were extended to seven games in consecutive series against Atlanta and San Antonio. The Bullets pulled out the first game against the Sonics with a narrow two-point win; then Seattle won the next four to take their first and only championship. Jack Sikma, Dennis Johnson, Gus Williams, John Johnson, Lonnie Shelton, Fred Brown, Paul Silas: I could spend a couple paragraphs on each of them -- pages on Lenny Wilkens, my favorite person in basketball ever -- but I've gone on too long about this already.

I can't describe what it meant to me. I can't explain it, either. That was the peak of my life's experience as a sports fan, and I know that nothing else can be like it again. The night the Sonics won, I conceived the idea of finding out when their flight would come back to Seattle, and going down to Sea-Tac airport to meet it. I knew I wouldn't be the only one. My parents, bless them, did not dissuade me. Very early the next morning, I took the long bus ride to the airport -- I think it must have been a couple hours -- with my portable radio, and I walked around asking airport employees till I got pointed in the right direction, then hiked an hour to the non-commercial field where the plane would be arriving. I was the first one there, and for an hour I worried that I was in the wrong place. But then a few people showed up, then a few dozen, then a few hundred, then more; airport workers began setting up ropes beyond the fence we all waited behind. For the first time in my life, I experienced Festival Seating Anxiety: the frustrating knowledge that all one's care and planning can go astray with bad luck and the bad behavior of others, and that all one can do is wait, try to hold one's place, and be alert. I was ready when they opened the fence, and I sprinted to the ropes, and while I did not have the best location, I was in the front. It was still an hour before the plane arrived, but it was a happy crowd, playing music in various places, sharing food and drink, enjoying a festival atmosphere. When the plane finally taxied and stopped and the team emerged, waving and happy, we roared: not a roar like any I had heard at a sports stadium, not even a roar of triumph: it was a roar of celebration and joy. And I got to shake the hands of my heroes. It's no use telling me what we ought to have felt, where our priorities ought to have been: that crowd celebration is one of the peak moments of my life. The next week there was a parade, and I climbed and straddled a lamppost to watch, and no policeman ordered me down; the next day several people told me they had seen me on the news.

That's where I ought to have ended my sports fanhood, I suppose. I will never experience anything like it. But today I will watch the Seattle Seahawks in the NFC final, one step from the Super Bowl. And I'll be cheering for them, and will feel bad if they lose. But not so bad as I used to, nor so good.

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