A Reason to Watch

My favorite professional sport will always be baseball, as opposed to my favorite sports.  Those would be baseball and softball, whichever my daughter was playing at the time.  Those games I watched intently from start to finish.  With the pros, only baseball deserves that kind of attention.

Bears’ games I’ll watch from the start because I’m on the exercycle at noon on a Sunday, but if the monstrosities of the midway are tanking it, I’m off doing something else as soon as my time on the cycle is done.  With the Bulls, I mostly watch the end of the second quarter and then check the score at the end of the third; if there’s cause for optimism, I’ll watch the fourth quarter, which is what happened last night with the Nets at the United Center.

My, did Jimmy Butler put on a show, scoring 40 points to lead the team, his team, to a 101-99, come-from-behind win.  Butler scored the game-winner on a buzzer-beater jump shot from the top of the key (and isn’t it fun to write those words).  Even more impressive, Butler prevailed despite rolling an ankle late in the game.  If you had told me something bad had happened to his knee, I’d have believed it from the looks of things.

Standing there with a mic in his face maybe 90 seconds after the game ended, Butler answered a question about the ankle, saying, “Yeah, I can feel it, but it’s still attached to my body.”  Never would it occur to Derrick Rose to say that because never would it occur to Rose to play like that.