THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: Sunday, May 31, 2015
"Who have you got in the NBA Finals?" my friendly neighborhood grocer asked me the other day, as he was bagging up my weekly haul.
He's a Clippers fan. I was going to say he's a "long-suffering Clippers fan," but that's a redundancy.
Anyway, his question was intriguing, in that it's one of the few title matchups where I would be happy with either team winning.
Golden State, because the Warriors are the West Coast team, they haven't been to the Finals since winning the NBA title in 1975, and they boast a "local" tie in Klay Thompson, who was born and raised in southern California, but did spend three years in the Northwest, playing basketball at Washington State.
The Cavaliers, because it would be cool to see LeBron bring home a title to the long-suffering (there's that phrase again) Cleveland fans in his first year back in Ohio after serving his four-year NBA title quest mission in Miami.
Plus, the Cavs also have a quasi-local tie in Kevin Love, who played high school ball in suburban Portland and whose dad, Stan, starred at Oregon in the late 1960s.
Also, the reason Love is not playing in the Finals is because he got tied up with another "local" tie, former Zag Kelly Olynyk of the Boston Celtics, in the first round of the playoffs, and suffered a season-ending shoulder injury.
FUNNY THING about that 1975 NBA Finals, where Golden State swept the Washington Bullets. Because Golden State's normal home court, the Oakland Arena, was not available, the Warriors' home games were moved to the Cow Palace in Daly City, near San Francisco. But the Cow Palace was also unavailable for a few days during the Finals.
So, instead of the normal 2-3-2 or 2-2-1-1-1 format for a seven-game series, Washington hosted the first game, but the next two were played at the Cow Palace.
The Warriors won at Landover, Md., then won twice at the Cow Palace to grab all the momentum, then finished off the Bullets back in Landover.
(That's how "big" the NBA was then. Could you imagine the Finals schedule jacked around these days, because an arena wasn't available?)
And, of course, the Bullets have since become the Wizards, the Bullets as a mascot eventually becoming not exactly politically correct.
LOCAL TIES are whatever you want to make of them.
The Eagles, who played to a packed house at the Spokane Arena on Friday night, have a local tie of sorts, as Glenn Frey stayed at Gozzer Ranch a few years back and went fishing while there, the story goes.
No word on whether the band hung out there while in town for Friday's three-hour show, which was quite entertaining and energetic for a bunch of guys who are now in their 60s, and have been doing this sort of thing for more than 40 years.
In the past, Eagles concerts consisted mostly of a lot of well-played music, but little interaction with the crowd. But on Friday night, Frey and Don Henley and Timothy B. Schmit spent chunks of time talking to the crowd, telling the story of the Eagles (after all, the tour was titled "The History of The Eagles").
The band played nearly all of the old favorites, even tweaking the arrangement to hits "Witchy Woman" and "Heartache Tonight."
Bringing back Bernie Leadon, an original Eagle who played on the first four albums, to play on some of the early hits was a pleasant surprise as well.
Interestingly (thankfully?), nothing from their last album, Long Road Out Of Eden (2007), was played.
Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.