I’m not the biggest basketball fan. Never have been, and in all likelihood, I never will be. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that I suck at it. I played Little Dribblers for one single year when I was young, and I was absolutely god-awful. I was always a soccer and baseball kid, and didn’t pay much attention to basketball, outside of Space Jam and NBA Jam on the N64 – both of which I love, mind you.
I do, however, like sports in general. To put it in even more specific terms, I like Dallas sports. I’ve been a Texas Rangers fan my entire life, and when I subscribed to Sports Illustrated for Kids when I was younger, I listed the Dallas Mavericks as my favorite basketball team. So, there’s always been a small corner of my heart reserved for the Mavs. At the very least, I’m not completely a bandwagon fan.
This year, the Dallas Mavericks gave me a reason to care about basketball. They gave me a reason to pay attention to more DFW sports than just the Rangers and Texas Motor Speedway. They put together a campaign so inspirational, so damn genuine, that only the most heartless of individuals couldn’t help but feel something for those guys. And by God, they played it out like a movie.
The Hype – Any good movie must build buzz and hype for itself, lest it be a major box office bomb. The Mavs built their hype through a regular season that was at times beautiful, at times angering, and at times downright baffling. But they did it in style, and they did it with enough power to get people thinking maybe, just maybe, something was brewing on the horizon.
The Red-Band trailer – Red-band trailers for films are those that aren’t approved for all audiences, because they often showcase cursing or nudity that goes on in the film. Moreso, they give a fuller picture to the audience of what to expect from the film. The opening round of the 2011 NBA Playoffs was the Mavericks’ red-band trailer. A dismissal of the Portland Trailblazers was enough to get the “they’ll be gone in one round” talks quieted and the general public good and ready for what was to come.
Act I – Round 2 of the playoffs, the Dallas Mavericks movie started off with the force of a freight train hitting a car. The defending champion Los Angeles Lakers were all but chosen to repeat, or at the very least get to the Finals once more. The Mavericks were simply a stepping stone, a necessary chore that had to be completed before the end goal. In a result that shocked all but the residents of Dallas, the Mavs absolutely manhandled the champs, winning in four straight games and sending Phil Jackson to the most unceremonious of retirement performances.
As with all great movies, the end of Act I set up the main conflict of the story: would the Mavs proceed to win their first NBA championship, in spite of all the talk, all the whisperings that they were washed up, that they didn’t have a great enough leader, that down in South Beach, a powerhouse was being formed that would tear the very fabric of the NBA to shreds and lead to a single dominant team?
Act II – Round 3 brought the intensity. The Oklahoma City Thunder, a dynamic young team led by former Texas Longhorn Kevin Durant, and a team that almost made it to the Finals the year before, posed what some still claim was a bigger challenge than what the Mavs would eventually face. It was a series of high emotion, of blunders by both teams, and most impressively, a series marked by some of the greatest crowds in the history of the game. In the end, the protagonists won out. The Mavs had almost made it. They were in the Finals, four games away from glory. But as Act III began, so did their greatest test.
Act III – The aforementioned powerhouse had made it to the Finals, too, dismissing their challengers under the leadership of “The Big Three:” a man that looks like a lizard/velociraptor/ostrich, etc., a man known as D-Wade who was the epitome of work ethic, and what the city of Cleveland views as Satan incarnate, a man who left them in pretentious, exaggerated fashion, for all intents and purposes pissing on everything they offered him and leaving for greener pastures, or at least beaches.
Nobody, especially not ESPN, expected the Mavericks to put up a fight. They just didn’t have it in them. They were still too old, still too washed up, that giant German guy still didn’t have the leadership skills necessary to take care of business. What happened next was Oscar-worthy.
The Mavericks showcased a closing ability akin to Mariano Rivera in his prime. They entered fourth quarters and the final minutes of games trailing by double-digits, and yet found a way to excel, even while the Miami Heat were shutting down. King James absolutely choked; he failed. He would later defensively shrug off the jeers of those wanting him to fail by implying that those negative-minded individuals would at some point have to face their terrible lives and the real world while he went back to his mansion and money, and yet, I woke up the next day to the real world, and it was damn sweet.
The Heat made themselves villains at every opportunity. King James scoffed and gaped open-mouthed at every call that went against him; even D-Wade began grasping at World Cup-esque tactics by acting as though he was getting fouled by each and every player on the Mavericks. Needless to say, the Mavs were not innocent themselves, but they flopped with less frequency. Then, to top it all off, in reference to a gutsy performance by Dirk Nowitzki in which he finished Game 4 with a 101-degree fever, the King James and D-Wade pretended to cough while walking to the locker room. They hammed it up, they unashamedly insulted the big German, and later blamed the media. James, who less than a year before had self-masturbatorily used the media to drag out what should have been a simple process of which team he would play for next, said he pretended to cough because the cameras were already there and he knew the media would make a big deal out of it. The media did just that, but rather than get caught up in that drama, the Mavericks simply played basketball.
And Sunday night, they vanquished the villains. A team of wily veterans and scrappy Puerto Ricans (lookin’ at you, JJ) defeated the Big Three, the Powerhouse, the South Beach Sultans, in six games and gave Dallas its first NBA championship. They gave Mark Cuban, an owner who was admirably drama-less during the Finals, a trophy and reason to drop over $100,000 on drinks at the afterparty, and they gave Dallas basketball fans a reason to celebrate, a reason to believe and justify all their years of fandom. And they gave me a reason to shed a little more light inside that corner in my heart with the Mavs posters on the walls.
If you’re not from Miami, and you don’t feel at least a little emotional from what happened two days ago, you may not be able to feel at all.
To quote Ramon Ramirez of A Thousand Grams: “Dirk, nondescript Miami nightclub, the smoothest man in the room.”
