All-Star

This weekend I took the girlfriend to downtown Phoenix for the 'NBA All-Star Jam Session'.  We took the new Light Rail and I must say I am impressed. If I am getting from point A to point B, it works very well. And there are in fact a number of point B's along the tram route that I end up visiting fairly often. It doesn't hurt that it starts about 2 miles from my house and goes right past Sun Devil Stadium, Bank One Ballpark and US Airways arena. Good planning!

Anyway, we lucked out because as we were buying tickets we got approached by a group trying to offload a couple early tickets because the rest of the group had later tickets. Normally I'm suspicious and angry because this is a scam, but this time it turned out OK and we saved 2 or more hours of waiting in line. So that started off lucky.

One inside the convention center we wandered around the ginormous area and looked at all kinds of shit. That's about all I can say about it. There are about 200 different stations where you can shoot various types of basketballs in various ways. Slingshots, trampolines, mini-hoops to jam on, all kids of shit but every one of them had 500 people in line waiting. So we just walked around. We saw:

A.C. Greene and his son walking around

John Starks sign a baseball (?) for someone while waiting in line at the NBA Store

Dikembe Mutombo and his family--we were playing NBA Live 09 at the booth they had setup and these guys took the booth next to us. I was no more than 5 feet away from the guy and had to look almost straight up to recognize him. The kids picked the Rockets and wanted to put Dad in the lineup, and the guy at the booth was like umm....I think he may be in there somewhere as an alternate....ummm....

My favorite--Yao Ming and Gheorge Muresan putting on a clinic for a couple kids' teams. One giant guy with a tiny head and one giant guy with an enormous head lumbering around the court with a bunch of ants racing around high-fiving them.  Pretty cool stuff.

That's about it for the players we saw. There were a few more guys putting on shows in the booth but we could never get anywhere near them. Kevin Garnett and Kevin Durant are the two I remember.

Unfortunately I do not have any pictures. The girlfriend kept bugging me, especially about A.C. Greene, but I am the guy who always says, 'The guy is here with his fucking kid. Just leave him alone. I am not going to go hassle him for a photo.' And then I see 20 other people walk up and hassle the guy for a photo and i'm like, fuck. I should have just done it like the rest of these assholes'.

Also ASU is tearing it up basketball-wise. A sweep of UCLA? Hell yeah!!! This weekend I saw 2 awesome games. Keep it up Devils!

Finally, since this is just a random blog about shit, let me say I am looking forward to the Southwest LAN event going on this weekend. I have the girlfriend on standby taxi service so I am set. But the question is--is the Southwest LAN ready for a Mike the Knife ready, willing and able to drink for an entire weekend?