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player ready...Between sips, Slats Grobnik jabbed at a pocket calculator, then said: “It’s time to look at the bright side.”
Of what?
“Michael Jordan quitting his job.”
You mean his retirement?
“I don’t like the word `retire’ when I’m talking about some healthy 30-year-old kid. Retirement should be about some white-haired guys who worked most of their lives and now they’re gonna see if they can afford to buy used golf balls with what the Clintons and Congress leave them. Jordan ain’t retired; he just quit a job.”
OK, but what could possibly be the bright side of Chicago’s all-time greatest athlete quitting his job?
“That’s what I’ve been figuring on my calculator.”
What does your calculator have to do with it?
“Lemme tell you. With the playoffs, the Bulls played 101 games last season. How many of those games did you watch?”
I don’t think I failed to see more than 10. So let’s say I watched about 90.
“You became a real nut, huh?”
I admit to that. It was like an addiction.
“Me, too. There was one game I thought I’d miss because I had to go to a wake. But they had the game on in the lounge and we all watched it, except the stiff.”
Let’s get back to your alleged bright side.
“Right. OK, you watched about 90 games. The average game lasts about two and a half hours. That means you spent about 225 hours watching the Bulls.”
So?
“Hey, think about it. That comes to more than nine days. I mean, 24-hour days that you did nothing but sit there looking at some guys in short pants trying to put a ball through a hoop. It’s like if you started right now and did nothing else for a week and two days, all day and all night.”
I’ve never thought of it that way.
“Naturally you couldn’t do it non-stop because you’d keep falling asleep. Especially when Cartwright was shooting. So let’s figure it on a regular workweek-five days a week, eight hours a day.”
And what figures do you have?
“It would be like going to work for five and a half weeks and doing nothing but watching Bulls games all day.”
What about lunch and coffee breaks?
“Maybe during halftime. Now tell me this: What about the season before last? And the one before that. All three championship years.”
It was about the same. Like many Chicagoans, I became obsessive. Rush home from work, dim the lights, wait for the big intro and then wait for Jordan to do something amazing.
“Uh-huh. So that means you put in almost a month of 24-hour days. Or more than four months of working days doing nothing but watching the Bulls. The numbers don’t lie.”
If you say so. But what do these numbers mean?
“What are you, stupid? They mean that Jordan has turned you loose. He has given you freedom. With him gone, they figure to be a second-rate team, not real bad, not real good, sort of blah. Are you going to rush home to see New York blow them out? Or Indiana, which is a depressing thought if I ever had one.”
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Actually, after so many great seasons, this one might be too painful to observe. I just might totally ignore them.
“Me, too. The only highlight this season might be if Will Perdue ever uses his size-22 feet to step on that tiny Muggsy guy.”
Big Will is not that nimble.
“So now you’re gonna have all that time to yourself. Imagine what you can do with those 225 hours. Why, if you got on a jet plane, you could circle this planet about four or five times.”
That would get kind of monotonous. And the food is mediocre.
“You could drive your car at 65 miles an hour and cover almost 15,000 miles. Imagine that: In the time you spend watching the Bulls one season, you could drive from Chicago to the South Pole and back again.”
Just what I’ve always wanted to do. Especially with the kids in the back seat asking if we’re there yet.
“OK, then what if you used those 225 hours to pump iron? You’d look like Sylvester Stallone.”
I don’t want to look like Stallone. He’s real short.
“You could study something like the tricks of trading pork bellies or soybeans and maybe wind up getting really rich.”
Why bother? Hillary will just find a way to take the loot away from me.
“Then look at the big picture. There’s got to be tens of thousands of Jordan junkies like you and me, goofs who watched all those games. But now they won’t. So that means that all of a sudden there’s gonna be hundreds of thousands of hours available. What do you think that is going to do?”
If I had to make a guess, the crime rate will go up. And maybe the birth rate. By the way, what are you going to do with your extra 225 hours?
“Practice shooting free throws.”
Why?
“Who knows, they might need me.”