Philadelphia won 114-106 against Cleveland, after being down twenty-nine points just before half-time. It’s their first home win of the season. That I understand: the first one at home, for us, gets celebrated at the club bar with whatever tokens are left.
What stopped me was LeBron James. He said: “We got the boos. It was incredible. We deserved them. And then we got the cheers that almost blew the roof off the arena. Quite a night.”
The roof. I can’t see the numbers and I already don’t sleep. At our place, the roof of the council sports hall is three raffles and a letter to the council, mind you. When it pours, we put the bucket under the left-hand basket, the adjustable one, and the under-10s know not to shoot at that end.
He says “we”: the boos first, the cheers after. In between, the third quarter, thirty-seven to twenty-one. Then a thirteen-nothing run at the end. I’m not jealous, I’m a club president: a noise like that, at our place, brings the strip lights down.
My 2,000-seat hall had a roof that made noise all by itself. We didn’t need the crowd.
I’m mostly thinking of the person who goes up the next day to see if everything held. Nobody applauds them. Me, I go up with a torch and the caretaker. I’ve still got the key to the ladder to hand back.
It’s true, we checked: BeBasket.
