SUNS UP



One of the perks of our ASU job is getting discounts and freebies. Recently, AECP teachers were offered free pre-season tickets to a couple of Phoenix Suns games. I signed up for the tickets last night against the Charlotte (NC) Bobcats.

Just to show you how out of the sports thing I really am (not that any of you are in any doubt!), I drove downtown to Chase Stadium for the 7:00 game and then wondered why the baseball stadium was all dark and there were no streams of people heading towards it! Then I noticed the D-Backs (Diamondbacks) signs everywhere, and it finally hit me: aha! The baseball stadium is for Phoenix's baseball team, the Diamondbacks. The Suns must be playing some other kind of sport. (Very smart, this Dr. Sundberg!)

Fortunately, the US Airways Center was on the other side of the parking structure. I just decided to follow the crowds, passing the Center's Bacardi Rum Bar, the Bud Light Paseo, the Casino Arizona Pavilion, a Starbucks and voila! There was the box office to the basketball stadium, where the basketball team was to be playing!

I've never attended a professional basketball game before, so I wasn't quite prepared for the A.D.D.-centered, entertainment-based spectacle that professional sports has become. (Don't remember Dodgers Stadium in LA having this commercialized and multisensory blitz.) Not only were there the usual corporate sponsor billboards all around the top, but there was a big-fat band of screen all around the stands on which - variously - ads, flaming sunspots, blinding flashes - were broadcast. Then, hovering far above the court like some wheel-within-a-wheel chariot, was the scoreboard - also with changing ads for Macdonalds, etc. Then during the breaks in playing (every two minutes, it seemed), came on-court commercial spots and spectacles, like the pizza give-away from Peter Piper Pizza.

The soundtrack was non-stop. Every 15 seconds, approximately, the thumping music and synthetic muzak cheer-leading beats changed to something equally LOUD and thumping. If I were an epileptic, I'd have been having fits! I don't remember college basketball games being this much of a sensory overload. In fact, I could barely recognize all the media blitz as a basketball game at all.

The Suns lineup was interesting: an aging Shaq (O'Neal), new afro-Brazilian star Leandro Barbosa, a newbie 6-foot-infinity Latino player named Robin Lopez with frizzy blond hair, and local celeb point-getter Amare Stoudemire, among other almost ant-like blips on the tiny court below. Balls were passed, baskets made somewhere down there in all the blitz.

The Suns beat the pants off the Bobcats 111-108 in double overtime. (I left before the end.) But this was just a pre-season game.