Brandon Roy's Jordan Moment

Portland Lumberjax

The Portland Lumberjax professional indoor lacrosse team played their final regular season game last night. It was fun seeing a typically outdoor sport being confined in a hockey style rink. The hits against the boards were pretty legit, and I could feel them shaking the bleachers in the second row.

To me, lacrosse is still a 'back east' sport, even though it has been wildly popular out here for years. And I still have a bit of an adversarial outlook towards it, being a spring sport that competes with the flow of athletes to the baseball diamond.

It is funny to see how a sport that was essentially a preppy boarding school sport, cultivate this punk/skater edge that the indoor professional game has. The entire game is narrated by some guy with a burly skater dude voice, soliciting the crowd to 'give it up.' The entire game is also sonically plastered in a soundtrack of Marylin Manson, Nine Inch Nails and other hardcore rock riffs that allow for little breathing room.

The result is a game that gives middle schoolers an excuse to yell, be crazy and approximate the general fervor that their middle school counterparts in the 1990's and before had for football and basketball. With hockey on a year to year death watch, I wonder if one of these second tier professional sports leagues (lacrosse, major league soccer) could legitimately vie for the fourth major league sport in America.

Time will tell, and Marylin Manson can keep our feet tapping in the interim.

Love of Basketball

I kind of forgot how much I loved basketball after this past season playing in a city rec league. Unlike baseball, which I can only accept in the most formal setting (umps, full rosters, full schedules, playing for something) basketball has always been a game that I have loved in its most raw form.

Give me ten guys on a dirt court and lets shoot up teams.

Take away the distraction of over-pious officials hellbent on leaving their fingerprints on every game. Take away these burly clowns in opposing jerseys that swing for your head on every drive because they know they won't get whistled. That's not basketball.

Give me your best five versus our best five on a sunny Saturday afternoon and we'll see how it goes.

Here are my favorite basketball memories growing up:

1. Playing neighborhood games to 100 for the rights to pick which song would play on repeat during the next 100 point game. My team had Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' looped onto a cassette tape and our rivals had Michael Jackson's 'Black or White.' Does it get more 1991 than that?

2. Upon being asked to pay for pulling down the 7-foot rim in 6th grade, I wrote up a 'legal brief' detailing everyone else in the school who had touched the rim and suggested that they contribute equal parts to the purchasing of a new rim. The school ended up paying for it.

3. Arguing over who got 'to be' Air Jordan in our neighborhood games. Everyone was appeased as soon as MJ retired and we decided as a group that a pre and post-retirement Jordan could exist. Eventually we had a Jordan for every year and I had to buy more red duct tape making jerseys for everyone.

4. In 6th grade we were challenged to a game by some 8th grade suburban hooligans who called themselves 'Eddie and the Cruisers.' We'd chickened out of many a dirt clod and rock fight with these guys and were way too intimidated to play well when it came down to it. Even though they weren't athletic and had zero game in retrospect, we got tooled. I was 0 for the game. Dammit.

Original Hotcake House

The urban legend surrounding the Original Hotcake House, located on the east side of the Ross Island Bridge, is that it serves as a late-night mecca for national hip-hop acts when they pass through the Rose City. Reports of rap mogul sightings from Ice Cube and Busta Rhymes all the way to Nelly and his St. Lunatics center around the 50-year old Portland all-night dining institution.

Atmosphere: If Tarantino's next film were based in Portland, this is the diner where the main characters would engage in a riveting and vulgarity strewn debate on some obscure nuance of pop-culture.

Must Orders: There is a reason 'Hotcake' is in the name of the joint. To round out their signature hotcake batter, they actually whip heavy whipping cream and then mix it into the rest of the batter. The results are plate sized airy hotcakes that go down smooth. Here, butter and syrup, (or strawberries and whip cream) are gluttonous overkill to a virtually perfect breakfast order.

On most nights, when you approach the five-acre skillet behind the counter, two of those acres are devoted to the house hashbrowns. Each order consists of two potatoes worth of thickly hashed, perfectly butter goldened browns. It is recommended that you smother them in a side of the homemade gravy.

Biscuits and Gravy. The biscuits are perfectly fluffed, deliciously buttered and amply covered in the aforementioned gravy. It is a near perfect breakfast order.

Worth going for: To witness the late night college study groups on study break as they approach the jukebox for a ten minute rock history debate, only to invariably end up selecting either 'Sweet Home Alabama' or 'Stairway to Heaven.' Every. Time.

To observe the street poets that line up in the booths along the far window clutching journals and notebooks with fingerless gloves, as they try out lines not quite audible enough to betray their genius.

To observe the social hierarchy of a pack of high schoolers, ascending in line from the loudest of the bunch to the eventual one or two wallflowers steadfastly focused on not talking to strangers.