Tall Tales and Loose Balls

Posted by Laurie Nylund on October 22, 2007

With fresh snow falling and the Jazz in the middle of a preseason break in the action, I decided to take advantage of the lull and get a start on my Christmas shopping over the weekend. Only 64 days left, people! Having spent many years in retail, facing the crowds and dealing with the weather is not something I relish. My favorite brand of shopping involves my trusty mouse, my oldest sweats, and multiple cold beverages.

Last year I logged a lot of time in that activity and probably did 80% of my Christmas shopping on-line. This year I am going for it all. The upside to on-line shopping is the ease of making price comparisons quickly and feeling good about getting the best deal available with just a few clicks. The downside is that you still have to come up with what to get in the first place. I have found that if I pick a theme for the year, it makes it easier to generate ideas. With basketball currently at the forefront of my mind, it was a natural choice.

So I started off at the NBA.com store. Alas, no, there aren’t any discounts or kickbacks for Jazz bloggers-it just seemed an obvious place to look. I thought it was kind of funny to find hip flasks and cocktail shakers in the Jazz part of the store. Wonder how many of those they sell in this market? I did pick out a few nice T-shirts and jerseys-like this one – and found some novel stuff like the Jazz Mr. Potato Head that my nephew will love, and some funky but comfy looking Jazz slippers for Grandma. Fortunately neither Grandma nor my nephew are web-enabled, so no worries about giving away that surprise. On the other hand, the son and hubby are Jazzbots readers now, so no mentions here of what I got them. Sorry boys.

Looked in the Suns section for my brother, who has lived in Phoenix as long as I have lived in Salt Lake, but I decided against feeding that addiction. One of the highlights of last season was trading email zingers back and forth about our respective favorite teams, especially given the cold start by the Suns. I must note however that I was a big enough person not to revel in his team’s playoff loss to the Spurs, especially after that suspension nightmare. But obviously he is not as mature as me, as I didn’t get any congratulatory messages about the Jazz making it to the WCF.

So I decided rather than looking at more logo gear, I would check out some good books instead. A quick search on Amazon.com returned 84, 053 hits in the book department about basketball; I needed to narrow the hunt. I used Listmania, which I highly recommend as a great way to find gift ideas from people who have actually bought the thing in question. Unfortunately, rather than eliminate some more people from my shopping list, I ended up buying myself a couple of books by Terry Porter (no, I don’t have anything to do with him either). One called Tall Tales about the 50’s and 60’s glory days and another called Loose Balls about the history of the ABA. Well, after all, I had been shopping hard and deserved a little something for myself. But I’m still looking for some more gift ideas and great basketball reads, so please post any suggestions you have here.

That purchase did put me in mind of a story that made the rounds a couple of years ago, so I thought I would share it here in case you missed it. It did involve a loose ball, but it wasn’t a tall tale.

Pretty amazing huh?