I Miss Caring About NBA All Star Weekend

Things change as you get older. The stuff you cared about as a kid just fades away. Wrestling for most of us, bike riding, collecting baseball cards, and you bid farewell to activities you did religiously like playing wiffleball, man hunt, and walking around the neighborhood to different friends houses. While those things go away, you add new things to your life to care about. Some you want to care about, some you have to care about. Girls, drinking with your friends, partying are things you want to care about. Your job, your cholesterol, your credit score and your 401k are things you have to care about. 

Whatever the case, there's always a few moments you have as an. adult when you get a flashback to times as a kid and can't help but smile. Like seeing kids playing touch football in the park, or EL Fudge cookies on a supermarket shelf which you haven't thought about in 10 years but now have to have. NBA All Star Weekend is one of those things I used to care about and miss every time it comes up. 

As a kid you had to pull me away from the television to stop watching. Friday night for the celebrity game, Saturday morning with Inside Stuff covering the weekend and having wacky events like mascots dunking, and then the big show ... Saturday night. No matter what kind of dumb thing they worked in there (2-BALL, the skills competition etc), the 3pt contest and The Dunk Contest were the bread and butter. My dad would watch down in the basement with us while we went to the fisher price hoop and mimicked every dunk we saw, or if your parents decided to make. it a date night ... they set you up with pizza and the sitter was essentially stealing money because unless a bomb went off in the bathroom we weren't coming up stairs. When you got to 11-12 it was almost always a group party at someone's house, or a massive sleepover. The entire time locked into the festivities. Knew every player, knew every team, knew everything. 

Now... 

I won't watch a second. And I'm not making this a thing like I'm too good to watch the contests, nor that it got worse over the years (it kind of did), it's more of what I was saying to open the blog ... sometimes things just go away. And for me one of those things is my care or interest in watching All Star Weekend. I wish I could pinpoint exactly what the core reason for that, as it would make it easier to pinpoint why I don't care but it might just be timing and wow factor, You get older you realize you can't watch everything, there's just not enough hours in the day. So if you are asked to go to dinner by your significant other you agree. 

But I think the real main reason for losing interest in a night like this is wow factor. What I mean by that is as a kid you are a blank canvas. When you see something new it amazes you. A 360 dunk, a behind the back pass in the all star game, or a run of eight 3's made in a row will change your life. As an adult you lose that wow factor. A guy does a 360 you immediately go "ehh I've seen better" or "I've seen that 100 times." It's natural. You can't fake excitement like you have when you're a kid ... but man sometimes i wish I could. I wish I cared about tonight like I did when I was 9. I wish I could be astonished by a move or a dunk I'd never seen before. I guess it's just one of those things I'lll miss forever.