On Sunday, after dinner, I phoned my mother in Indiana. She had read the article before me. Anthony Edwards, of the Timberwolves, has warned the NBA: opponents should expect no friendly treatment this season. When the Wolves come to town, everybody has to be on their guard. It was in BasketNews.
She asked what I thought. I thought of 2000.
Let me tell you: when I arrived in Charleroi, with one bag and a one-year contract, I wanted to do the same. First game, a hall with badminton lines on the floor, I told the opposing centre he wouldn’t get a rebound. He smiled at me. After the game he bought me a coffee at the club bar and explained how they say septante here. We played against each other for six seasons. He took quite a few rebounds.
Edwards also said his team this season was “a bunch of boys”, and he urged the fans to buy their season tickets: anyone who misses a game is missing something. My mother liked that. She had a season ticket for twenty years, at our high school.
Then I told her about LeBron James. On the Mind the Game podcast, Steve Nash asked him what he thought of Edwards’s Adidas ad. “First of all, I did not watch the spot,” he answered. My mother laughed. She never watches the ads either. She goes to fill the kettle.
So I asked her the question. A team that announces it will be nobody’s friend: is that good news?
She thought about it. She said: “Not being friends gets said in October. Defending gets done in April. Call me back in April.”
That’s fundamentals too. I wrote it on the fridge, for my U10s. She said: see?
It’s true, we checked: BasketNews.
