A strange potion runs through the basketball blood of Portland. It's stayed hot from the days of games at the Memorial Coliseum, where the Blazers played from their inception in 1970 until 1995.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
During my senior year, there were NBA scouts at my games. At some point, I guess, I started hoping I'd get drafted by a team where there would be a great situation for me. As it turned out, Portland was the best situation for me.
I think probably one of the coolest things was when I went to play basketball at Rucker Park in Harlem. First of all, who would think that Larry the Cable Guy would go to Harlem to play basketball? And I was received like a rock star. It was amazing! There were people everywhere. There were guys walking by yelling, 'Git 'r done!'
In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers.
Going into Portland, I was just trying to not step on anybody's toes, stay quiet, and play my game. I think I was just trying to figure out the kind of sequences I was going to see as a hitter and learn from that.
Basketball is basketball.
The business always gets in the way of basketball.
In 1979, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the league. I remember that. Soon after this, the story began to be repeated ad nauseam: the NBA, a tottering mess in the seventies, was saved in the eighties by these two.
When the NBA adopted their uniform that they had to wear, I thought that was very interesting. And you see the way NBA players dress: It's very cool.
Portland doesn't read like a basketball town, unless you remember what the NBA was like before it exploded into the mainstream in the Eighties: back when cities like Seattle, Baltimore, and Philadelphia moved the needle.
It was a blessing just to play one NBA basketball game.