How, in the course of three days, I went from a lonely basketball fan to touching the NBA trophy

I’ve been a Miami Heat fan since its early days, back when the team was populated by lovable palookas and baskets didn’t come easy. This was my dad’s doing: Although I was never a sports fanatic -- I wasn’t popular on my local youth soccer team after I kept sitting down on the field during games -- my dad took me to see a bunch of local teams, and the Heat stuck. I became a die-hard fan, sitting in the car to listen to radio broadcasts when the games weren’t televised. I even wrote fan mail to the team’s mascot, a bird-like thing named Burnie. (He sent me signed photos of him which read, “All my glove, Burnie.”)

But now that I live in Massachusetts, following the Heat is harder. Sports are about community -- about talking of the team in terms of “we” and “us” -- and it’s just not as fun without other people who care. I still watch the nationally televised games and listen to others on satellite radio, and that’s a fine solo venture. But during the playoffs, when excitement was high, I could barely muster friends’ enthusiasm. I had company for a few of the games, but mostly watched them alone, happily pounding the carpeted floor so as to not wake up my girlfriend.

When the Heat won the championship on Tuesday, I stayed up until 2 a.m. talking with a friend in Florida who is also a fan. When we hung up, I decided I needed to go down for the victory parade. If I didn’t, this win -- this first ever success of a team I’ve rooted on since middle school -- would be the experiential equivalent of a good television show. It’d be distant and contained: The last game was won, I turned off the TV and it all went away. It was kind of sad. I needed something to savor.

So I flew down for Friday’s parade -- an event that would go from controlled blandness to beautiful mayhem.

The parade began at 2 p.m., and was planned to loop through hip Biscayne Boulevard. It’s the road leading up to the Heat’s arena, split into opposite one-way, two-lane roads with a wide, park-like medium in between. We arrived at noon and, by 1 p.m., managed to stake out a perfect, front-row spot behind a barricade near where the parade would begin. By start time, hundreds to thousands of people had gathered behind us. Reporters would later say 250,000 people showed up for this thing.

The event began blandly enough, with a bevy of police and firefighters. Then, without announcement, some big hitters showed up: Coach Pat Riley was waving from a truck and Heat owner Micky Arison was in a car holding the trophy. Neat! But then, not so neat: The floats went by quickly, and the players were all packed onto two flatbed trucks like this one:

By the time you figured out where to look, they were gone.

Then so was the parade. Done. Over. So quick. “That was an awful parade,” my dad said, and he was right. We thousands of Heat fans looked at each other in confusion, then looked to the police officer who had been in front of us the whole time. He shrugged. “That’s it,” he said. Then he left.

That was the best thing to happen all day. He left! He stopped enforcing the barricade, stopped caring about what we were doing, stopped being a presence. Some people started walking around the barricade and standing in front of it, and a minute later, about 30 others followed. They waited for a police officer to see them, to send them back. But none came.

So they ran.

They ran across the medium and to the other one-way street, where the front of the parade was just arriving. “Here we go!” I said, and my dad and I ran with them, storming the parade, filling the once-cleared street with a mob of people.

See that guy on the truck, waving in between my arms? That’s Pat Riley. The first time we saw him, he was a safe distance away. Now we were able to walk right up to his float. This parade had gotten a lot more exciting.

More people flooded the streets, completely halting the parade. I recalled that Micky Arison’s car was shortly after Riley’s truck, and looked for him. There he was -- atop a little car, trophy in hand, looking pretty nervous about this turn of events. I thought about how much I’d love to touch the trophy, and then my dad, with no prompting from me, told me I should give it a shot. So I handed him my camera and ran over...

Micky is on the left. The trophy is in the middle. I’m the determined fellow on the right. I reached my hand out, got the tips of three fingers on the head of the trophy and turned around to scream in triumph:

Almost immediately, a female cop materialized and screamed, “Off the car!” I scurried away, giddy and laughing. This made it real: The trophy, the icon of basketball accomplishment, was no longer a thing I saw hoisted up on television. It was something Shaq held high, something Dwayne Wade cradled, something I probably broke a law by tapping. We were both there -- me and the trophy -- because the Heat won. Community complete.

The rest was gravy. Cops managed to clear a pathway for the parade, but didn’t even attempt to get everyone back behind the barricades. The parade’s trucks and cars just rolled right by us, close enough to lick, and we high-fived everyone, regardless of if we knew them or not. What’s up, dude in a car! Hey hey, guy on a truck! Helloooooo, cheerleaders!

You the man, Udonis Haslem!

“This went from the worst parade ever to the best parade ever!” I screamed. And it was true. In the complete breakdown of police presence, a sterile, poorly planned and boring parade turned into an impromptu block party. The parade was supposed to be a connection between the fans and the players, and now it was.

The police eventually regrouped, and with reason: The tail end of the parade contained a few firetrucks, and there was no way they were getting through the thin partition of people. So the cops sprung into action, hording people like cattle as trucks blared their horns. I took a video of the scene, which got pretty squished.

There was more celebration to be had -- a presentation, some speeches, lots of music and dancing -- but we both had enough. I got what I came for.

Posted by Jason Feifer at June 24, 2006 02:14 AM