Bring Back the Lockout!

Forgive me, but I hate this game.

A mere six days into the brand-spanking-new NBA season, the basketball league-cum-soap opera I've come to know and resent is up to its old tricks.

Dikembe Mutombo has broken two noses in three games. Charles Barkley was fined $5,000 for "directing obscene language" at the Forum crowd. Steve Smith and Kendall Gill carried an on-court scrap into the tunnel at the Georgia Dome, earning each a $2,500 hit in the paycheck.

Meanwhile, the already depleted Eastern Conference's superstar fund has taken a beating, as New York's Latrell Sprewell, Miami's Jamal Mashburn and Voshon Lenard and Charlotte's Glen Rice and Anthony Mason have all sustained major injuries shortly into the reduced 50-game slate.

Platitudes about regaining the fans' support notwithstanding, professional basketball is putting out an inferior product, riddled with ugly structural crises and unwanted addenda to Dr. Naismith's game.

That the oft-mentioned fans don't seem to mind is unsurprising--NBC got better ratings on its opening weekend than it did for its 1997 Christmas Day opener, which featured the still-intact Bulls. After all, the NBA's full-court media press always seems to reel in the doting and the deeply needy.

I'll confess up front that I count myself among the latter. I'm constantly conflicted about my on-again, off-again relationship with the NBA, but more often than not I've come back to the game that has always succeeded in making me miserable.

I suspect that being a Manhattan-born Knicks fan plays a major role in my complex. I grew up regaled with tales of heroics on the Garden floor--Willis Reed versus Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Bradley, Earl the Pearl, and the whole cast of characters that brought two titles to 32nd and 8th long before my conception. Becoming a fan was assumed, indeed required.

From that storied past, I've come to know the Knicks of Charles Smith, Greg Anthony and Don Nelson. I have a war wound from the crumbling ending of every playoff series since I hit puberty--Smith's missed lay-ups against Chicago, John Starks's 2-of-18 debacle in Houston, Patrick Ewing's bricked runner against Indiana.

And every May, the Knicks manage to infiltrate my life in some new, highly painful way.

My freshman year in high school, a friend came into school the morning after the Smith incident wearing a sign around his neck that read, "I am NOT talking about the game."

Two years ago, 12 hours before a anxiety-filled final in a Science core, an acquaintance frantically called me over to a Loker Commons television to watch Charlie Ward duel P.J. Brown in the Knicks' most Pyrrhic of victories.

My lone consolation is that my misery is communal. One night in a New York bar, when Charles Smith's smiling visage appeared on the TV, pitching some charitable cause or other, he was showered with boos and obscenities from everybody in the place.

So why do I keep coming back? It's a question I puzzle over regularly, likening my allegiance to the Knicks to alcoholism or a similar addiction. I know it's bad for me, I know the Knicks will disappoint, and yet I watch anyway.

Inertia of the same kind has befallen fans nationwide. For six of the last eight years, the championship was a given and ratings were high. For four months, teams of lawyers, cell-phone-toting players' union representatives strung us along us along, finally gracing us with a season when the financial consequences of doing otherwise were too grave to bear.

And true to form, we eagerly tuned in again, just happy that some familiar faces in new uniforms were back on the hardwood. So happy that we'll let Barkley get away with his latest potty-mouth antics. So happy that we'll drool over the next Atlanta-New Jersey brawl as the NBA spins it to be the new Eastern Conference rivalry.

Like my own Knicks malaise, watching the NBA is an extended exercise in how long one's tolerance will hold out before snapping, an exercise everywhere shot through with impatience and bitterness. And as the league continues to look more and more like daytime drama, the expectations it has for its fans approach indolence and a wit slower than a Buck Williams drive.

What other conclusion can we draw from attempts to palliate our collective indignation with $10 nosebleed seats, or the persistent dumbness of Ahmad Rashad, Bill Walton and the rest of NBC's cozy broadcast ensemble? Being an NBA fan implies malleability in the hands of the corporate machine. Failing that, masochism.

I'm coming to grips with the reality that the Knicks will not win the title this season; that in all likelihood they will not make the Conference Finals. But I'm equally certain that they'll persuade me along the way that they have a legitimate chance, they'll sucker me into devoting hours of bright spring afternoons to brawny, sloppy Knick-ball.

And when the final blow comes--whether Larry Johnson whiffs on a dunk, or Charlie Ward loses his dribble in the paint, or Ewing's ungracefully aging knees finally give out--I'll store up the memory and trot it out years later, maybe the way Red Sox fans grumble and whisper, with repressed pride, of the Curse.

Until then, I'll hate myself for watching.