Believe it or not, I started watching the NBA when I was six, even though I wasn’t really familiar with it, but despite all those years of following this league, my first ever NBA I went to was six months ago. I was born and raised in Taiwan for 16 years, and I just came to America nine months ago. While I was in Taiwan, my favorite team was the Spurs, but after I came to Michigan, I was confronted with a brand new culture: Detroit basketball.
After living in Michigan for three months, my dad and I decided that we should head to Detroit and watch an NBA game, and that’s what we did. Going through the buildings, fans, security, and the arena was actually mind breaking. As a kid, when I watched NBA games, I would never imagine the scene to be like what it was. In my imagination, there was no security, no crazy fans that smoked, drank and screamed, and most importantly, since I was from a small country like Taiwan, I never ever could have come up with this many people in my mind.
After 20 minutes of finding the bathroom and squishing through a blob of basketball fans, we found our seats and sat down, excited for the game to start. After a while of waiting, the lights of the arena flicked and shut down, and there came the NBA players, while the background was blasting music, and the announcer shouting out their names. The thing that stuck out to me the most was the fire that was blasting all across the arena. Before, when I watched the NBA online in Taiwan, there wasn’t any intros shown for the regular season games, and the only time I would see the fire was in the playoff games, so that was what I imagined – only playoff games having that epic of an introduction to a game, but I was clearly wrong, so that was really refreshing to me, and also surprising, being able to pour that much money into an intro for every single game.
After the intro and warmup, the game finally started. With lights flashing from different angles, the tip off of my first NBA game was here, and finally, I got to see NBA players in action in real life. I didn’t memorize every single detail from the game, since it was a regular season game, and the Pistons were facing the Hornets with Lamelo Ball injured. This wasn’t a close game, we led the game by 10 to 20 points from the second quarter, and it was like this until five minutes into the fourth quarter, the Hornets were closing in, with Seth Curry getting hot from the three point line, and the lead was cut to 5 points at some point. That was when things got interesting, and the crowd woke up after Cade Cunningham threw a lob to Tobias Harris, and Tobias slammed a hard dunk, extending the lead to 12 points and potentially sealing the game. The crowd went crazy, and the sound of the arena echoed around my ears, making this moment unforgettable.
Even though this wasn’t an important game, even though this wasn’t a close game, even though this game wasn’t as exciting as I imagined it would be, I still had a lot of fun, in fact the most fun since I arrived in America. It wasn’t just the game itself, it was the crowd, the atmosphere, the arena, and the moment of a dream come true.
