AUBREY BRUCE
If God permits it, I will cross the sixty-year old threshold sometimes during the middle of March. Am I looking forward to it? Hell yeah. Am I going to be confused? Hell yeah.
As a result of my rapid advance toward the bone orchard and my warp speed changing life; do I want to drive off of the showroom lot in a blood red corvette with a 28 year old sitting front seat right? No. Why, well because I don’t really like the color red.
One thing that my advancing age dictates more and more everyday is that I attempt to connect with the public in a more honest and direct way. Well get strapped in because here…we….go. I was looking at a Pitt women’s basketball game a few nights ago. The audience at the ‘Pete’ was a bit less than sparse. The quality of play was a bit above average. At that point, I asked myself the question; where have all the people gone, long time passing? Women’s b-ball has been around long enough to be more popular than it currently is. What is the problem? After the game was over the question began to wear on me. Anyway I called a couple of my “boys,” one coaches AAU girls basketball and the other coaches a boys’ high school basketball team. This is where I have to “punk out” because both said if I used their names and quoted them indirectly or directly I would lose their trust and friendship forever and we might have to exchange a right jab or two. I don’t mind rumbling with them but I have known both of them for more than 35 years and I won’t risk losing their friendship so I am going to just have to rely on you the readers to trust that some of the things that I am about to say are not figments of my imagination.
A large percentage of the verbiage has been edited or deleted because some of it was a bit more “macho” than I felt comfortable writing. I asked coach number one why he thought women’s pro and college basketball doesn’t have the social impact that it has economically. “Well first of all he said, when fans male and female want to see some real hoops they are going to turn on the television or get in the car and go see men playing basketball. There are a lot of women playing basketball that not only want to play like Mike, they want to be Mike and men just have a hard time dealing with that.” I am really naïve now because I asked him the question; what’s wrong with them wanting to be like Mike or being Mike?
About Post Author
