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Short fiction: Crow’s Feet

“That was the best game we’ve ever had.”

“If you say so,” I gasp staccato between hard-fought breaths. I idly wonder if I’ll ever be able to pick myself up from the sun-baked asphalt feeling cool against my overheated body. Damn, I’m getting old.

And meanwhile Marcel shoots, swishes, grabs the ball, dribbles past an imaginary defender, shoots, misses, snags it before it bounces again, shoots and again the snap of the net cuts through the dry summer air.

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Superheroes Playing Sports is Gallery Of Awesomeness

Heads up on the online find of the week: Check out the excellently-named fan art website Bam! Kapow! for a frackin’ awesome gallery they just had to call “Superheroes Playing Sports.”

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Edward Cullen vs. Pau Gasol: Who wins?

The brainwashed

Since this piece got little to no love over at big sister ‘site BallinEurope.com, BuckBokai reruns it here – search engine voodoo be damned – for an audience perhaps more in touch with the eternal war between the supernatural undead and NBA basketball…

BuckBokai recently read the latest anti-Laker screed basketball column by ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons, an alternately funny and blood-boiling confession-style bit about conditioning one’s children to cheer for the “right” sports team, i.e. Daddy’s sports team.

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21st century sports: Snowboard Basketball

Now that winter’s getting ready to set in over wide swathes of North America and Northern Europe, let’s hope we see a revival of the greatest 21st-century sport invented in 2010: Snowboard basketball.

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Tweets of the Week

Over at BuckBokai’s big sister site BallinEurope.com, this writer’s posting his top tweets of the week and due to technical issues (don’t ask; they’ll be solved soon), BiE needs a metaphorical hand.

Thus, this post of the top 10 basketball-related tweets of the past week — the week in which BuckBokai may have fallen in love with the medium.

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Dirk Nowitzki in Tron, animated form

Dirk Nowitzki’s always been a bit science-fictional, a larger-than-life spieler who remains suspiciously impervious to the ravages of time or physical injury: The lifetime Dallas Maverick has played in 920 of a possible 952 regular-season games, a 96.64% attendance rate, in his 12-year career while maintaining mostly consistent per game scoring averages of 23.4 to 26.6 over the past nine seasons.

In fact, coupled with an accent once frighteningly similar to the Governator’s, one might wonder if Nowitzki is actually a cyborg sent from the future to terminate all NBA scoring records – or at least set a high bar for Europeans in the NBA.

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Review: “The Hotshot Hoopsters”

BuckBokai continues with its 40th-anniversary retrospective on DC Comics’ ultimate mini-series, the “Strange Sports Stories” collection in Brave and the Bold issues 45 through 49, proving today that he loves this blog by slogging through “The Hotshot Hoopsters,” cover story in issue #46. I read this one so you don’t to.

Last season’s Lithuanian Basketball League (LKL) championship series pitted the country’s age-old rivals Žalgiris Kaunas against Lietuvos Rytas for the nth straight time since the first sports missionaries brought the new religion to the country in the 1920s.

This was to be no ho-hum cliché-ridden series interesting only to the country’s citizens, however, thanks to the stark raving insanity manipulation of Žalgiris by team owner Vladimir Romanov. In what was certainly a nearly unprecedented move, Romanov fired head coach Darius Maskoliunas *in the middle of the best-of-seven championship series* with his team down two games to one. Assistant coach Gvidonas Markevičius stomped out a day later, leaving Žalgiris with a coaching staff numbering zero.

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TMQ returns to ESPN.com, makes it so again: Yes!

Not that BuckBokai worships the computer screen upon which his words float or anything, but Gregg Easterbrook, a.k.a. TMQ on ESPN.com, is definitely a role model.

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Kobe Bryant vs. the Martians

If, in fact, the terrifying events speculated upon in Space Jam ever do come to pass, we can rest assured that any would-be alien conqueror (or maybe that should be conquistador, as in the San Diego Conquistadors) will find a Terran team ready with a gameplan.

Though Michael Jordan, having now been enshrined in the Hall of Fame twice to definitively end his basketball career (really), probably wouldn’t suit up for Team Earth, prospective on-court leader Kobe Bryant is ready.

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Ultimate championship: Dream Team vs. Redeem Team

As you may have heard, the 1992 version of Team USA was inducted into the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame last Friday.

Over at BuckBokai’s sister site BallinEurope.com, this writer enthused that “the only two teams … who *might* possibly give the Dream Team a series [were] Dream Team III, with much of Dream Team I plus Hakeem Olajuwon and Shaquille O’Neal, who probably should have been on the roster in lieu of the more politically-correctly chosen Christian Laettner in ‘92; and the Redeem Team of 2008, Generation Y’s own Dream Team.”

Which got BuckBokai to thinking later … Why not face ‘em off through the miracle of the virtual sports time-travel website What If Sports?

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K.C. at the Line

BuckBokai’d been wanting to write this nigh-epic poem for years and during the 2010 NBA/Euroleague playoff season, finally got it up to do so. This didn’t play so well at BuckBokai big-sibling site BallinEurope.com back then, so perhaps this lonely piece of prosody will find a more welcome home here – sorry for the lack of science-fiction, but hey, it’s literary.

(And please be sure to check out “Casey at the Bat,” still a good read. If you prefer your poetry combined with an escape from a straitjacket, plus scroll to the bottom of this entry.)

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Insights from parallel universe: Iverson goes to Olympiacos

Sometimes seemingly minor incidents in the grander scheme of sports history are exactly the opposite, for who can truly know the axis upon which events revolve?

Going into the 2009-10 NBA season, a handful of European news outlets tersely reported a rumor that those freewheeling, free-spending Angelopoulos Brothers running the Olympiacos basketball club had offered one Allen Iverson a huge chunk of change to come play in Greece with the Reds.

Yours truly’s speculation then was that ultimately substituting A.I. for Linas Kleiza – for as things turned out in the market last year, Kleiza was the highest-end free-agent the Brothers could coerce to jump the pond to play hoops – would have gotten the Reds off to the exact same start, namely near the top of the EΣAKE and Euroleague tables. (After all, i argued then, there’s nothing even A.I. could’ve done about the H1N1 that struck several members of the club numb for weeks.)

Now that this unfortunate season for both Iverson and Olympiacos are in the books, we have more details to expand the parallel universe of 2009-10 basketball.

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“It was real”: The Space Jam trailer recut

From the Shameless Cross-Promotion Department comes an excellent YouTube clip BuckBokai stumbled across for his other website, BallinEurope.com.

To quote myself (o how gauche), “one of the greatest phenomena on YouTube is the recut movie preview. BuckBokai believes that this recut Space Jam trailer is the best in the genre since the immortal Shining.” You gotta love the way Charles Barkley is given the lion’s share of trailer time, too.

(Incidentally, YouTube user Royalplinko proclaims the ‘Jam to be “the greatest film of the 90s”: a sentiment which with BuckBokai is hardly prepared to disagree.)

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Captain Kirk’s thoughts on Ricky Rubio

You gotta love David Kahn, GM of the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Why? Well, primarily because you’re not a T-wolves fan, but also because he represents a single brilliant degree of separation between the awesome (or “almost surreal” as the man himself put it) Ricky Rubio and Star Trek.