This month, a joyful 25-year reunion was on the menu at the Rose Garden in Portland, where the current Blazers play. The guys attending for the most part, didn't have to travel far. Most of them still call Portland home.  All of them get along really well and share a common smile, that smile a product of winning the NBA championship in June of 1977.   Were you there?

   Part of the statewide celebration that media whizzes deemed "Blazermania?"  I guess most of us old enough to speak to 1977 have vivid recollection of that fun ride that we all took on the backs of a basketball team.
   The reunion should have been held down the street at Portland Memorial
Coliseum. That's where 12,666 of us gathered about 50 times to see if the
roof would finally blow off, when that Blazer team made one of its
patented  runs. In the process of two minutes, they would go on 18-point
spree and the place would be so loud that opposing coaches couldn't summon timeouts before it was much  too late.  Once they scored 8 points in the final 46 seconds to keep the longest home winning streak in the NBA alive. 
   The team got better as the season progressed. The  red-pony-tailed wildman in the middle, Bill Walton, who was either reviled or revered, for his lifestyle, was the driving wheel of a budget-priced group of overachievers.  Walton, with eyes in the back of his head, made every player a step better. That's what they said anyway. They won, exactly like this year's team, 49 games and lost 33 in the regular season. The lineup was made up of the now-defunct ABA,  some NBA minimum-salary sleepers, and each of them elevated their game, due to precision passing and camaraderie that is no longer evident in Portland.

   You would see them on the street, at the golf course- in my case, a few
were customers at my import record store in downtown Portland. They would stand around outside the locker room for a long time and sign autographs for their tiniest fans. Nobody talked trash. They embraced Portland and Portland embraced them. They played hurt. All the time for some of them.  Myself and three friends saw every regular-season game for $5. We mail-ordered "standing room only" tickets that placed us on the railing, against the wall, of the halfway perimeter. Despite the $5 price, the SRO tickets represented the best "seats" in that building. You were close
enough to hear the players, and just under the maelstrom of the noise
explosions that came from above, in the cheap seats, where the real crazy
fans lived. 

   It got trickier at playoff time. We had to close businesses, haul sleeping
bags, tents, barbecues and reading material over to the Coliseum, usually
two days ahead of the playoff tickets as the availability developed for
the team to advance. Four times we lived in a crowd of rabid fans for two
or three days, selling "Blazer Burgers" off the grill to other campers, or
trying to sleep on the concrete ramp we were residing on. Players would
come by and handshake the crowd before practices. 
   We saw the whole ride. Watched the redhead rip his jersey off and throw it to the crowd on June 6, when the clock expired. Portland 109, Philadelphia 107. World champions. 
   The party went on in Portland for days,  and most of the time, players were right in the middle of the more visible celebrations. And the most I ever spent for a ticket was $16.50,  for the championship game. I sat in the seventh row center-court that afternoon.

   Fourteen years later, while working at The Oregonian, Bill Walton wandered in around midnight and needed someone to help him with a column he was providing the paper during the playoffs which had just started. I made myself available and had the pleasure of sitting down afterward with Walton 
and longtime basketball beat writer, Bob Robinson. They had memories and the stories began to flow. It was only when I started sharing what it was like being a fan back then, that the laughter started to roll.I told Walton about a friend who had dislocated every rib when he jumped in sheer joy, reacting to what was happening on the court. I told him who the fan was who used to stop him on his way to midcourt, as a quarter opened, and give him some obscure Grateful Dead relic. He remembered the fan, and said, "That guy really made my night sometimes." In short, he cared about the fans.

   They all did.
   Now, for $60 a night, you can  go to the Rose Garden, watch one of the
highest-paid teams in professional sports pout, rant, refuse interviews
and set an NBA standard with their seventh first-round exit. Want an
autograph? Bring your checkbook. 
   You can even be invited to someone's corporate skybox, where dessert 
carts are brought by hourly, there's a closed-circuit TV in the bathroom and hardly anyone is watching the game. The idle rich, parked right in the middle of where the cheap seats should be, with the real fans that would inhabit them, priced out of the building.

We've got Rasheed Wallace, a gifted individual who won't talk to the
press-period. He has set his own standard - being thrown out of games. 
Leads the league in disciplinary fines. The only way you would have seen
him on the floor, during the recent LA series, would be if Jack Nicholson
had dropped his wallet.
   We've got Damon Stoudamire, the floor leader, waiting to hear the results
of the news that a pound of dope was found in his house.  Sulked his way
right through the series. 
   We've got Bonzi Wells, who got his 15-minutes of fame by asking, "Why
should we care about our fans, we're only here for a short time anyway."
Sean Kemp? Need I say more?  The man continues to force the league to
reconsider its drug policy, as he moves in and out between suspensions. 
There is no leader here, no heart. There will be no championship, no
reunion in 25 years.

   In game two at LA, with its season on the line, Portland was out-hustled
for every loose ball, every key rebound and reacted to every foul with
whining and disgust. Their behavior prompted LA coach Phil Jackson to
comment, " I can't imagine how their own crowd can root for them, judging
from the behavior they exhibit on the court." He had me there.
So, to "Trader Bob" Whitsett, who continues to recruit bad actors and
whining scofflaws for this ridiculously overpaid franchise, the suggestion
(hope) here is, please resign. It has taken Seattle five years to recover
from similar character-flawed players, that he placed there, and Portland
is 'Exhibit B."
   Get rid of these guys while they're still upright and worth anything. 
   Find a general manager and player personnel director who can find athletes that play well together, and appreciate the opportunity to be doing it.  That 
have a few seconds to give an 8-year-old kid after a game.
   I hope watching this team blow a five-point lead in the final 35-seconds,
to be swept out of the playoffs, is the last time I'll see them on the same floor, in the same uniforms. To me, it was sweet poetry. 

© 2002  Michael O'Brien    Bill Walton photo is a link to his personal website.