NBA Campfire Presents: Throwback Tapes
To explain what exactly Throwback Tapes is, I need to tell a brief personal story.
As a kid, I had quite a bit of anxiety. I am a Millennial, after all. And although I did a fairly good job of masking this anxiety, there were a handful of tell-tale signs that my central nervous system was often as cooked as Shaquille O’Neal was on the Boston Celtics in 2011. I was chewing on my fingernails long before LeBron James was being criticized for doing so on the Cleveland Cavaliers bench. I was an excessive planner, so much so that as I was recently re-reading the David Halberstam book The Breaks of the Game, mentions of how meticulous, controlling and overly-organized Portland Trail Blazers head coach Dr. Jack Ramsay was made me realize that he and I are not all that different in that regard. In fact, I found the late Ramsay more relatable than most of the players spotlighted in the book, a somewhat sobering realization that made me feel very, very old.
But the clearest sign could be found in my childhood bedroom, where right alongside my television you could always find a stack of VHS tapes about a foot high. Now to the naked eye, this leaning tower of VHS tapes might not necessarily register as a clear-cut sign of anxiety, but it very much was. It was my desperate attempt at finding an antidote to the mere thought of waking up in the middle of the night without having something on the television to soothe me back to sleep. So accordingly, I made sure to have at least 10 hours worth of back-up options right next to the TV — and yes, I did the math in my head to make sure the run time reached that exact number — readily available to pop into the VCR, just in case I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep for half a day’s worth of time.
This method of calming my nighttime nerves worked with a decent amount of success, but what often helped the most was imagining that this stack of VHS tapes was nothing but old NBA games. As I closed my eyes to go to sleep, I would envision inserting a tape into the VCR, and on would come a game from 1981. Celtics vs. Sixers. NBA Playoffs. I had the lineups of both teams memorized, and now instead counting sheep, I was counting Larry Bird’s midrange jumpers, Julius Erving’s drives to the basket and Kevin McHale’s up-and-unders. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I would imagine putting in another tape. 1992. Jazz vs. Sonics. Pick and rolls run to perfection by John Stockton and Karl Malone. Shawn Kemp putting helpless Utah defenders on a poster.
Ahhh. There’s that peace I was longing for.
Over the years, I was vigilant in my quest to accumulate games, recording them on blank VHS tapes whenever they popped up on ESPN Classic or NBA TV, borrowing from my Uncle Rock, whose collection of old recording sporting events has always left me envious, or even recording present-day games, which is why somewhere at my parents house, in a bin of all of my old belongings, there’s a tape of one of Dwight Howard’s high school games, which is both sad and also very intriguing if you’re a basketball sicko like I am. Because of this dogged pursuit to get as many games on tape as I could, eventually this stack of VHS tapes was made up entirely of old NBA games, and I soon started sleeping little better. Now thanks to YouTube, just about any old NBA game you could imagine is available with just one simple search. Hell, that very same Dwight Howard high school game might even be on there for all I know, and if it isn’t, that means I may have the one existing copy, which is a fact that brings me an odd amount of satisfaction.
Over the years, I’ve taken full advantage of YouTube’s endless library of vintage games… so much so that I co-created and co-host a Podcast series that is focused on re-watching and celebrating the greatest NBA games of the first quarter of the 21st Century. But the podcast was only the first step toward fully submerging myself in this fantasy that started as a pre-teen and still wafts around in the grooves of my brain from time to time even though I’m now as old as Dr. Jack Ramsay. Or 34. Same difference.
Throwback Tapes will be a weekly series here on NBA Campfire in which I watch an NBA game from the past and write about it. The first collection of Throwback Tapes will released in two parts:
Volume I will consist of 15 games, and it will run on Thursdays (starting July 2nd) from July through October.
Volume II will consist of another 15 games, and will run on Thursdays (starting January 7th) from January through April.
Now while I won’t tell you exactly what games I’ll be covering throughout this inaugural run of Throwback Tapes, I will provide you with a hint in the form of a visual that is similar to one I got so accustomed to seeing as a kid.
