Friday, March 12, 2010

Watching a live basketball game

I was at the Oracle Arena last night to watch a basketball game between Warriors and Blazers. This is my first time in a basketball court. I've watched 2 baseball games, but other than that, I've never been to any games. I enjoyed the game, but more than that I enjoyed watching the spectators(not all of them looked like fans).
In the first half, I was surprised to see that people were not very excited about the game. Some of them looked like they didn't have anything better to do on a Thursday evening, so decided to come here. They didn't seem much interested in the game. However, this changed in the 2nd half - one small group of Blazers fans were making lot of noise. So the whole stadium started making noise supporting the Home team.
During the break, I noticed that balloons were distributed to fans in one section. These people were sitting right behind one basket. Later I realized that this was a deliberate move to distract the Blazers from scoring points. Whenever, the Blazers team were trying to score a point, the fans would wave the balloons to distract the player.
Also, the music that was played when the teams tried to score was different - a motivating cheering music for the Home team and a boring drum beat for the Blazers.
When the home team got a 3-pointer, it was flashed on the screen, but when the visiting team scored a 3-pointer, nothing happened, just their score was updated.

All this was really shocking to me, I was fine with the fans supporting their home team, but the whole environment was against the Blazers. It was funny though when I realized what they were doing.

Cheerleaders, dancing girls, the Flying Warriors(who jumped on a trampoline, did some acrobatics before throwing the ball into the basket) and some clown like people entertained the fans during breaks. There were free t-shirts, pizzas, sandwiches and other gifts that were thrown randomly to fans who made the biggest noise.

The game as such was good - Warriors were in the lead mostly, but towards the end lost by 5 points. It was a good experience on the whole :)

3 comments:

Deepak said...

Ramsi commenting on a basketball game.
Not sure what else I should expect!

Ramsi said...

@Deepak: Correction - not on the game really, it's everything else :)

ME said...

well clarified, Ramya:-)
I so like the new you! Not that I did not like the old one, ahem.