The Ball

At the end of the night, everyone is real. It’s like how it is after sex, when you’re honest, and your voice is a little hoarse, and you just sit there and talk. That’s what happens when you work in a bar or a club, and it’s my favorite time for this reason, not just because I’m about to go home.

We sit in front of a TV when we’re waiting to get paid. Sometimes it shows silly, pretentious industrial-type stuff. I don’t know why places do this. Maybe they want us thinking we work in a Stalinist collective, like we’re on a five-year plan to meet their quota for dirty shit. Sometimes, on the good nights, they turn that crap off and we watch ESPN. That way, our minds click off and we can just relax and wait for the word.

When we watch ESPN, SportsCenter is always playing in a repeating loop with no sound. This means we get to see the Top 10 Plays of the Day, which is good because then we all sit and talk about them. Most of these comments can’t be repeated here, because that’s the way things are with a group of grown men. We say and do things that don’t jibe with what’s considered appropriate. I prefer it that way.

Last week we talked about how silly sports are, and how the highest paid government employee in Connecticut is a basketball coach, and how ridiculous that is because we’ve made it so important to be good at doing things with a ball.

One of the big plays on SportsCenter showed a college basketball player named Blake Griffin diving over the scorer’s table to save the ball before it went out of bounds.

“THE BALL!” we shouted. “SAVE THE BALL!”

This became a theme. On every highlight, we yelled about the ball. When we saw a player celebrating, we screamed, “I’M BETTER WITH THE BALL THAN YOU ARE!” When we saw someone fail, we said, “I can’t believe I didn’t get THE BALL.”

You should try this when you’re watching sports. It will put things in perspective.