Making do with little - appreciating much

• Well, good fansites like this one, for starters. Especially ones that have a great sense of community and intelligent writers/members.
• The sheer amount and diversity of news, knowledge, and opinions/analysis about your favorite sports team and players is truly staggering. I have mixed feelings about whether it’s a good thing or not, because it can be a huge time sink.
• The ability to catch games anywhere in the world (or in orbit) with a fast Internet connection is something I wish was available when I was working in Japan, years ago.

What I’d love to have today is an adaption of 3-D video technology to provide us with holographic games broadcast in full-size and real time, paired with an eyeglass display system so that while it looks like I’m enjoying a day at the park wearing my shades and playing with my puppy, I’m really sitting courtside in a virtual stadium.

The answer to the first three questions are related to the interwebs. I have been a long time basketball fan, first with the local teams over here (PBA), then the NBA. I got hooked as a kid because my father is a huge basketball fan and used to bring us to the local games. The whole family (except my mother) would go home hoarse for cheering with such gusto, the next day was spent chewing on Strepsils. Dabbling in Fantasy leagues and getting addicted to video games only necessitated the pursuit for more information. I used to devour all readings pertaining to the new NBA season, I could rattle off who got signed or traded to where. Connecting online and having the ability to search anything and everything sports related is a luxury I don’t think I can do without.

Like Freshtuna, I think 3D would be cool and as Bakkie chimed in, the technology is on the way. What I’d like is the improvement on 3D technology where you can pause the game (a la video game), and zoom in/out of the picture, rotate your point of view and review the previous play in super slow motion, all while the game continues in PIP mode in the corner. This capability is, of course, also available when you watch and replay a recorded game. On second thought, what is way cooler would be applying virtual 3D to the blog. Instead of game threads, we’d have virtual arenas. Someone would start a virtual arena of the game and we’d all log in and have our avatars sit on the stands and much like the game thread, we’d cheer and comment about the game, all in glorious virtual 3D.

As a Spurs fan living in Spokane, WA, the Internet is really the only way to keep in touch with the Spurs. Not only can I watch live feeds of the game, but I can talk to Spurs fan like you fine ladies and gentlemen here. This is immensely helpful for me because I am probably the only Spurs fan living in the Pacific Northwest. I would be very sad if the Internet just decided to shut down one day. It would be difficult to live without and I think its the most useful invention for watching and following sports-as well as other things-because of its scope and all-encompassing view of the world.

That being said, I would love to attend a Spurs game for once in my life! Being one sympathetic to Star Trek, I would like to see “beaming” invented. It would be so excellent to just say I will be in San Antonio to catch the game, but only to be there for a maximum of four or five hours. Hopefully it would be free. Thus I could purchase my ticket weeks in advance and on the day of the game I would “energize” all the way from Spokane to San Antonio in seconds! No more stinkin’ airlines!

I feel the best thing about the current technology is the ablilty to converse with like-minded fans about favorite teams. I must say that PtR is the best at intelligent, thoughtful blogs. I fiind it astounding to find and be able to ‘converse’ with fans from all over the world. All of them at least bilingual, which is good because english is my only language. Most Americans are so backward in this area.
The internet is what makes all this possible, so I would vote for it being the technology that makes it all possible. As I am old, the other invention that made sports a world wide issue is television. Radio is OK in a pinch or a car, but….
I would really love to see holographic games, but don’t think this is possible in my lifetime.

As I grew up and fell in love with the game in australia the tyranny of distance was always in full effect.

We had one game a week shipped on tape to Australia so it was a day late. This was aired around midnight on a Friday. I would have to sneak out of bed and watch it on the downstairs tv while the rest of the family slept.

The only way I could keep up on the NBA season was box scores in the major newspapers and most importantly of all PRO BASKETBALL WEEKLY!!!! A broadsheet with colour newsprint. Sam smiths collection of
news and rumors was particularly important to a young human desperate to find out who was going where.

This was my subsistence diet a game a week ( desperately hoping for spurs v anyone) and a broadsheet on a wednesday.

Then the interweb happened.

I can’t describe the joy. The first thing I did when I had my initial foray on Internet was type in “NBA”. My world changed.

I was honestly fired from two low end admin jobs as a youngster for basically spending all day surfing NBA news.

I got to play fantasy NBA games on NBA.com where you actually had a budget and had to hire a coach who gave you points when his team got a win.

To my mates there was no outward change. I surfed, played rugby, started a band, luster after suitable young ladies over eighteen.

To me though the Internet was a revolutionary connection that just appeared and changed my life.

On a sadder note pro basketball weekly become monthly then quietly died. I was gutted, but progress dictated by consumers like me inevitably killed such specialized broadsheets.

I can now watch spurs games online from my own home. I have a spurs driver cover on my one wood that I ordered off some Texan on eBay.

I am a part of a spurs community, channeling daily doses of news and rumor into my frontal lobe, garnered from people I have never met.

The Internet has allowed me to be totally absorbed in this pursuit, without having attended a game or so much as physically interacted with one of the spurs in any capacity.

Astounding.