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An Awesome Valentine’s Day

For Valentine’s Day, Ariele got me two tickets to the Houston Rockets-Los Angeles Clippers basketball game here at the Staples Center last night. Because tipoff was at 7:30pm local time, we had to do a quick dinner, so we hit up Baja Fresh before driving downtown. Burritos and basketball…is there a better way to spend Valentine’s Day?

Parking was not the nightmare I had anticipated, which was a good thing, because we made it to our seats about ten minutes before the national anthem began. We were sitting at midcourt on the uppermost level, row 1, seats 1 and 2. It took a little while before I got over the height issue (being afraid of heights and all). After twenty minutes of having sweaty palms, the game distracted me enough to make it comfortable the rest of the evening.

I went into the game saying that I didn’t care who won. The Rockets are my original hometown team, and the Clippers are my newly adopted hometown team. I’ve been in Los Angeles for two and a half years now, and I have an utter disdain for the Lakers, so the Clippers seem the obvious choice. After about two to three minutes of impartial cheering, it was clear that I was rooting for the Rockets. Fortunately, I was not the only one, by far, applauding when the Rockets scored. Maybe Yao Ming brought out a bunch of fans, based on his pregame ovation, but it was nice not to feel as though I was sticking out like a sore thumb.

There were a couple of moments of conversation between Ariele and I that I found pretty amusing. The first?

Me: We just changed 60% of our lineup.
Ariele: What?
Me: The Rockets just substituted for 3 of their 5 guys on the court.
Ariele: We?

Then there was my verbal gaffe early in the evening. The Clippers have a cheerleading squad known as the Clippers Spirit. As you would suspect, the Clippers Spirit is a group of a dozen or so attractive women who dance for a minute or two during a timeout or between periods. They receive a fair amount of catcalls on their way to the floor each time, which is probably to be expected. After their first performance, right before I start clapping, I say, “I’ve gotta applaud that.” Maybe I should kept that one to myself. Especially on Valentine’s Day.

The absolute coolest thing that I saw all evening was a guy dressed in a suit that was solid red on the left half of his body and solid blue on the right half (with red and blue being the Clippers’ colors). He was sitting about 120 degrees around the stadium from us, and he was sitting down in the first level of seats. There was a pretty fair distance between him and us. Every ten minutes or so, he would get out of his seat, stand in the aisle, and yell, “Let’s go Clippers, let’s go!”, followed by basically all of the people in the nearest four or five sections of seats clapping twice. Why is that awesome? He was across the stadium from us. And we could hear him plain as day. You could tell he was hollering his ass off, but how cool is it that single-handedly he could generate that much of a reaction from that many fans? Very cool stuff.

Of course, the Rockets won. And won big. The final score was 128-97. It seemed like the Rockets could do no wrong and the Clippers could do no right. Tracy McGrady looked really good, and Rafer Alston played one of the better games of point guard I have seen from the Rockets in quite some time. It was a pretty thorough domination, which was a tad surprising being that the Clippers are second in their division and the Rockets are last in theirs. But I must say that I had a great time.