Anyone else not miss the NBA?

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Chris Jackson

This year, though, there are no NBA training camps opening while baseball charges into the postseason, hockey does its preseason thing and football kicks into high gear.

And I couldn't care less.

Maybe it's because Pittsburgh, my adopted sports city, courtesy of my parents, has no NBA team.

But anyway, even if it did, I wouldn't cheer for it.

The NBA lost me as a fan a long, long time ago. It's a league where trash-talking, showboating and everything wrong with sports has been fully accepted.

Some of the players run around acting like a bunch of punks when most of them have houses the size of Belgium miles away from the inner cities they grew up in.

And maybe that's the biggest problem. I don't think anyone in the NBA has grown up.

Did you read the Sports Illustrated story about players having kids out of wedlock and abandoning them? Most were NBA players.

Now before anyone gets off on a "this is just some white kid being racist toward black players" rant, I'm sure there are plenty of Anglo-Saxon-descended imbeciles - Christian Laettner for one- on the court, too.

Though, if I could pin down a moment where the NBA completely lost my respect it would be in the aftermath of the Sprewell incident.

The league did the right thing in suspending him and ripping up his contract. But in comes the players' union, which I blame for this lockout even more than the owners who actually initiated it, and tells the NBA it can't do that to Sprewell.

But not Sprewell, the millionaire idiot savant.

That was the worst example of sportsmanship ever, and yet the NBA ultimately had to let him back in.

And then when a federal judge dismissed Sprewell's suit, then back come Sprewell's lawyers with an appeal. Ack.

Enough with Sprewell. Enough with the NBA. David Stern and company can sit there and act like children for the rest of the year.

After all, they are all children.

I'm gonna go watch some baseball, football and hockey. Real sports, with real athletes and no attempted coach murders in the past 50 years.

Chris Jackson can be reached via e-mail at Chris.Jackson@wildcat.arizona.edu.