Wednesday, April 11

Outcasts

I got a cold slap in the face this morning upon opening the Vancouver Sun. As most of you are unlikely aware, the Canucks kick off their run for the Stanley Cup tonight in Vancouver with a game against the Dallas Stars.

To commemorate the occasion, the Sun blasted out a special section, chock-full of full page color photos, graphics, and all sorts of other things that give copy editors wet dreams.

I didn't read the section (I've lived in Vancouver for 10 years, and I still don't give a damn about hockey), but it made me nostalgic for the days when the Sonics were honored with sections like that.

You remember them: a graph detailing points per game, free throw percentages, turnovers there; a chart showing the matchups at the various positions here; a list of past playoff performances over in that corner. All in glorious, splendiforous color, to be pored over with eager anticipation by teenagers and middle-agers alike, the entire city giddy with the possibility of victories in spring.

Instead, rather than full color celebrations of glory, we have black and white agate of failure. This, sadly, is the Sonics circa 2007.

There's a line in James Joyce's A Painful Case, one of the dozen or so short stories included in Dubliners. The story is about James Duffy, a woeful man who tries to glide through life without any interest in anyone, to prevent himself from feeling the nick of sadness. When Duffy finally musters the courage to fall - somewhat - in love with a woman, it ends terribly. Joyce's description of Duffy is apt for a certain green and gold basketball team:

"He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life's feast...He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast."

That's us, folks. The 2006-07 season has been an abject failure, and the Sonics are now outcast from the marvelous playoff buffet. While other teams have their entire rosters down to the last man on the bench examined and re-examined by a host of experts, no one will examine the Sonics' roster, because to do so would be a waste of ink.

So long, special section, we miss you so.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

So I'm guessing they did the Offense, Defense, Goalkeeping, Coaching, Bench....did they do intangibles? And did Vancouver win it???

Anonymous said...

They did include those, but you're forgetting Fighting, Checking, Neutral Zone Trapping, Length of Mullet, Prime Minister Trivia, and Knowledge of Canadian Provincial Capitals.

When you figure it all in, it's 'Nucks in 7.

Anonymous said...

Ever wonder how many pages the paper would run if Vancouver made it to the Finals? If they run something like this for the first round, you know it's only going to get bigger. Ought to help the lumber industry if they go far enough!

Anonymous said...

I think I miss most the urgency of the playoffs. Just the way your stomach feels on every possession and the joy when yoru team takes a 3-point lead in the final seconds.

Man, it would really be a shame if the team left after next season, and we went 3 straight years with no playoffs. That would royally suck.

chunkstyle23 said...

Didn't the Oregonian used to run full-color, 2-page spreads for every single Blazer game back in the Drexler-Porter-Kersey heyday? Or do they still?

More importantly, what happened to the fat kid who sat behind the visitor's bench in Memorial Stadium, whose parents used him as a billboard for Shilo Inns? As a onetime husky-sized child, the question haunts me to this day.