What follows is the very beginning of my attempt to once again write something that is not akin to a five-year-old’s homework assignment “write a story. use complete sentences.” Wish me luck.

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Donnie was almost asleep when felt it. He had drifted into that hazy state of semi-consciousness that was as precarious as standing on the edge of the cliff, not quite snoozing but not quite aware of his surroundings either. The state wherein an intrusive pseudo-nightmare could jolt you back to reality: an imagined fall, a charging animal, a gunshot even. But this was none of those things. What Donnie felt was even realer than those terrors.

As was always the case, his left arm had fallen off the side of the bed when he started to drift off. No matter where he started, he’d always travel to the left side of the bed, roll onto his stomach, and the arm would slide right off. He often woke up unable to move the thing for a few minutes because all the circulation had been sealed off. It felt like a lead weight, and several times had made him think he was having a heart attack, or had gotten the thing amputated and not realized it.

At this point in his slumber, though, he had not yet lost feeling. Which is why he felt it. At the tip of his fingers, a soft rush of air, no more than a whisper of a breeze, but concentrated enough to have only come from a mouth. Someone was blowing on his fingers. That, or the can of air he kept in his study and used to blow the dust out of his keyboard had wandered down the hallway, into his room, and begun to operate itself.

The breath he barely registered. When you fall into that state of semi-consciousness, it takes more than a soft tickle of air to bring you back to the real world. But when a hand emerged from the same place as the breath, grabbed Donnie by the wrist and yanked, that was certainly enough to wake him up.

This bad boy will run you about $310

After the typical hustle and bustle that accompanies a home run and people trying to secure the ball for themselves, things started getting pretty heated. Since this was a home run that gave the lead to the opposing team, fans started the typical chant of “Throw it back! Throw it back!” that usually happens if the ball happens to be snatched up by a fan of the home team. This chant went on for a while, and eventually transitioned into an absolute chorus of boos. As people began to sit down, I could clearly see why. The fan who had landed the ball was in fact a Rangers fan, and was decked out in one of the more expensive Josh Hamilton jerseys, meaning he was a die-hard fan or, unfortunately, a recent bandwagoner who also happens to have some money in his pocket.

Now, if you catch a ball at a major league baseball game, it is entirely your prerogative on whether or not you want to keep that ball, give it to a little kid next to you, or throw it back. Yes, if you’re a fan of the home team and you catch a ball hit by the opposition, especially if it’s at a crucial turning point in the game, you’re going to hear from your fellow home fans to throw it back. Whether or not you do that is up to you. In the case of this dude last week though, he decided to become “that guy” in response to the imploring of the crowd. Rather than chuckle, hold up his hands, and show that he’d rather keep a home run ball like this for his collection, he stood up, smiled broadly, and shook his head no. He looked from side to side, making sure everybody who cared could see him, and he held up the ball in the air and made a motion like he was going to throw it back, only he didn’t. He kept this up for an inordinate amount of time, including when a legit dudebro – missing only the Affliction t-shirt – came to the railing of the deck above and yelled at him for a good two minutes to “TAKE OFF THAT JERSEY! TAKE IT OFF! THROW THE BALL BACK! GET OUT OF HERE!” The fan did not relent, continued to taunt, and when the game was over, I lost him in the crowd. I like to think that at some point on his walk back to his vehicle, someone A) ripped off that jersey, B) stole the ball and threw it back onto the field or C) gave that dudebro an Affliction tee.

Let’s examine this a bit further. One of my goals in life is to catch a home run ball. I’d prefer it to be hit by the Rangers, but sometimes you can’t be picky. However, if the case were like it was last week, I’d probably throw it back. As great of a feeling as it is to catch a foul ball or home run ball at a pro baseball game, you cannot beat the feeling of connecting with your fellow fans, especially if that connection involves you as a centerpoint. When your team loses a lead in the ninth, everybody is getting progressively sadder, and you get the chance to offer up something to cheer about, you jump on that opportunity. If you really want to wear that Hamilton jersey, you throw it back.

This girl gets it

There are specific occasions you can keep a ball hit by the opposition. Those occasions are:

1) The home run is hit during a relatively unimportant part of the game. If it’s early on, or if it comes when your team is way out in front, go ahead and keep it. You may get some heckling to throw it back, but just sit down quietly and ignore the jeers, and you’ll be fine.
2) It’s historic. Even if it loses your team the game, if the ball is somehow historic (someone’s first home run, a record breaking home run, etc.) you keep that thing and promptly set about trying to sell it. Don’t keep it for your collection, make some money off of that thing.
3) You’re a legitimate fan of both teams. Usually, you’ve got your one major team you pull for, but there’s often the case where people grew up actually following and rooting for two or three teams. If those teams are playing each other, you can keep the ball even if you’re wearing an opposing jersey. Just be prepared for the backlash.
4) You’re a massive douchebag. Sure, if you’re a tool, go ahead and keep that ball. Go ahead and taunt your fellow fans. Everybody will almost certainly hate you for it, but they’re just jealous of your Ed Hardy shirt and the copious amounts of hair gel you’ve got plastered to your head.

Feel free to add any occasions I missed.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Have a great one.

Check out a brief photographic snapshot after the jump.

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.”

View them here.

http://www.twitvid.com/embed.php?guid=3QWQA&autoplay=0

Vernon’s new album, the self-titled Bon Iver is out on June 21, but is streaming in every nook and cranny of the internet today. I listened through NPR. You can go wherever. The most important thing is that you GO NOW. GO LISTEN!

NPR First Listen: Bon Iver

It’s awesome, and a great way to see some of motorsport’s biggest drivers get back to their roots on dirt. Even if you don’t like racing, this is a great cause, and an awesome thing to check out tonight.

Find out more here.