The Saskatchewan Rattlers improved to 2-1 on the
season with their first win at the SaskTel Centre, an authoritative 113-95 decision over the
Hamilton Honey Badgers.
The win was, in a word, stabilizing. There has been
more than just trace amounts of uncertainty in Rattlers Nation over the past week.
The CEBL website, for instance, was not able to provide statistics from its
first week, and issued an apology to concerned nerds. Kevin Mitchell of the Star Phoenix, Saskatoon’s local
reek-rag, painted a picture of precariousness vis-à-vis the incipient league when
he wrote in his game-day column of how the CEBL was “chewing things over” and “feel[ing]
its way forward”, with the Rattlers “a little more settled” in Saskatoon, “waiting
to see what kind of crowd awaits them on Thursday.” Reading between the lines, the tone was at least a
little bit foreboding.
Your correspondent must confess that he himself was not without apprehension. The Rattlers’ ticket office called mid-week and explained
that they were reconfiguring the seating into a horseshoe pattern, rather than
attempting to fill the lower bowl as they had for the home-opener. This meant
that the season tickets of your correspondent and his associate would be moved
to the other side of the arena. Ostensibly, the seating rearrangement would make
the crowd appear less spread-out. But it also raised some questions. Did this
mean that the Rattlers organization—or the league itself—was in trouble? Never
fear, the team rep explained—they still had their sponsors.
Thankfully, the new seats were an improvement over the old ones,
tighter to the hoop at an angle like unto that of the old 16-bit NBA Live games. Your correspondent’s personal
parallax was not the only alteration of the evening. The Venom Girls had undertaken
a costuming change, their white pants replaced with black. And while your correspondent
claims no aversion to trunk-junk, the slimming black brought the excess back
under control, looking on the whole a lot less trashy than the white.
Gregor the hype-man had also undergone a wardrobe
change. His jeans, shredded on the thighs, fit with considerably more contour
than the dad denims he’d rocked the previous week. Seizing on the Hamilton Honey
Badgers’ team name—which is not a bad place to start—he opened his ongoing
in-game monologue with a squalling quotation from the dotty 1989 Weird Al vehicle UHF.
Your correspondent did not get the allusion and, gauging from the tepid crowd
response, neither did most in attendance. Mercifully, Gregor explained the
reference, which is always a great summation to a joke. Gregor then welcomed Swish,
the Rattlers’ mascot, onto the court. Swish made a sprint out to center court,
fanged grin bobbing all the way, while the inscrutable attendees greeted him
with a golf clap.
Attendance appeared to be down from the home opener. But don’t take your correspondent’s word—take that of the loud-talking mother-of-three behind him, who pronounced very early on (and with a hint of satisfaction) that there were “less people tonight”. An
official figure was never announced, so the extent of the drop-off remains in the realm of
speculation.
However, even if some of the intractable Saskatchewanese
have given up on the team already, some of the new Saskatchewanese are at least
giving it a chance. Seated in front of your correspondent were two full rows of
East Asian and Sudanese expatriates. They were under the stewardship of an ebullient young woman, exceedingly
pretty in a non-venomous way, affiliated with something called the “Global
Gathering Place”, which apparently does Yeoman’s work for immigrants and refugees. The group seemed very enthused by the game, which could not
always be said for the locals…at least not early on.
The Rattlers took to the court in their green jerseys,
the Honey Badgers in their natty yellow with black pinstripes. The biggest cheer
early in the evening came not for Swish or for the various Rattlers as they entered,
and certainly not for anything Gregor said, but rather for Charleston Hughes,
defensive lineman for the Saskatchewan Roughriders. He was entrusted with the
ceremonial opening tip, and, after being announced, getting all the cheers, and
waiting for two to three minutes to receive some sort of prompting, he finally just
went ahead and did the tip-off. After he strode off the court, the game began in
earnest.
Early on, the Honey Badgers demonstrated some estimable hustle
on the hardwood, pounding the paint and building an early lead. Meanwhile, DJ Charly
Hustle pounded the AC/DC during the game-play, “TNT” and then “Highway to
Hell” in the first quarter alone. It was as if the fan focus groups after the
first game had come back loud and clear: “too much hip-hop.” Again, prairie
folk can only handle so much beat and not much bass.
The Rattlers were a bit out of sync in the first quarter. Marlon Johnson, who had eschewed the headband-and-cornrows look in favor of going full fro, missed an early dunk attempt, much to the disappointment of the fans, who seemed to be set on seeing him recapitulate his tomahawk slam from the home opener. Also out of sync was Gregor, who made (without exaggeration) seven or eight attempts at getting a “Let’s Go Rattlers” chant going, with nary a success. Of course, in the first quarter, there wasn’t much to cheer about for the home fans, as it ended with the Rattlers down four.
The Rattlers were a bit out of sync in the first quarter. Marlon Johnson, who had eschewed the headband-and-cornrows look in favor of going full fro, missed an early dunk attempt, much to the disappointment of the fans, who seemed to be set on seeing him recapitulate his tomahawk slam from the home opener. Also out of sync was Gregor, who made (without exaggeration) seven or eight attempts at getting a “Let’s Go Rattlers” chant going, with nary a success. Of course, in the first quarter, there wasn’t much to cheer about for the home fans, as it ended with the Rattlers down four.
The Rattlers got down to brass tacks in the second
quarter. They put up 30 points, in no small part due to innumerable
ball-battles won by Bruce Massey, and key threes drained by Negus Webster-Chan.
Charly Hustle continued to go to the AC/DC well too often, though Marlon Johnson
redeemed both himself and the DJ when he slammed home an alley-oop with “Back
in Black” as the backing track. Charly Hustle helped his own cause by way of a
mashup of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” with The Sheepdogs’ “Feelin’
Good.” (At least your correspondent assumed it was a mashup—the two songs have remarkably similar chord progressions.) Gregor persisted at trying to accomplish the “Let’s
Go Rattlers” chant, and he continued to fail. I realize the CEBL website has
had its difficulties with stats tracking, but when and if that all gets that figured
out, I’d be interested in knowing how many times Gregor attempted that chant over the course of the game.
Eventually, Gregor would turn his attention to other
distractions. First off, he staked himself in section R and implored the crowd to “dance”.
It’s a rough estimate, but your correspondent would guess there were maybe two
or three people in attendance who actually followed Gregor’s somewhat stilted lead. “Your
dance moves need some work,” he intoned as he ended the segment. After that, he
called upon crowd members with offspring to hold up their children. When a few
people responded, gripping their infant spawn under the armpits and holding them out at full span for the camera, Charly Hustle dropped the needle on the Lion King theme, which
occasioned many a titter throughout the crowd.
By the end of the quarter, Hamilton needed a savior to emerge. Their
three-point attempts just weren’t falling; in fact, one even got wedged between
the hoop and the glass. Pacing the sidelines as halftime neared was the Honey
Badgers’ coach, Chantal Vallée, her team down by 13. And yes, you have read
that name and the pronoun right—both are gendered feminine. It is, of course, progressive
and reassuring to see a woman coaching a professional sports team. At the same
time, there’s a certain pang of ambivalence elicited by the stark contrast between the singular,
powerful woman clad in a pants-suit on the sidelines and the pom-pom pistoning plurality of exploitatively
clad Venom Girls all around the perimeter behind her. But who is your
white-male correspondent to judge? Self-determination for all!
Early in the third quarter, another Hamilton shot got
stuck between the hoop and the glass. The Honey Badgers couldn’t buy an honest bucket,
so they at least tried to steal some free throws. When forward Ricky Tarrant
Jr. came up against Bruce Massey’s elbow in the paint, he went down as if shot. The crowded
booed roundly, and the barrel-chested Indo-Iranian man two seats down from your
correspondent was prompted to scream “We’re way past Oscar season, buddy!” The Honey Badgers
managed to cut the deficit back a bit, but the Rattlers were coalescing,
conjoining, and cleaving through the D. The game was theirs; the only real
debate was whether or not Gregor could get the “Let’s Go Rattlers” chant going. Periodically throughout the third, Charly Hustle was playing a pre-recorded “Let’s Go Rattlers”, which sounded like it had been laid down by a bunch of unconvinced Saskatchewanese (oh, to be in the booth for that session). Gregor and Hustle even collaborated
on working a chant into “Thunderstruck” (song #4 on the AC/DC tally), the hype-man
substituting “Ratt-lers!” for “Thun-der!” as the song made its build towards the first
verse. It did not take.
But that’s not to say the crowd wasn’t into it. The
Rattlers’ successes on the court did far more for crowd involvement than the chant, Gregor’s
personal white whale. After one particularly smooth alley-oop layup, Bruce Massey threw
up his hands, waving them around so as to beseech the crowd to screech. And screech
they did.
 |
| Bruce Massey (13), on the verge of draining a free-throw |
Kiss Cam made its cursory tour around the horseshoe.
It eventually cut to Swish, who was standing next to a Venom Girl. He immediately
swallowed her whole blond head in his cotton-fanged mouth while she writhed, presumably jokingly. While this development may run counter to the spirit of our ongoing
queer reading of Swish, it doesn’t necessarily obviate that reading either.
As the fourth quarter progressed, it became obvious
that Hamilton was tiring. The Rattlers’ energy, meanwhile, was only burgeoning.
Bruce Massey executed a beautiful spin layup to make it 89-76, and then stole
the ball on the Honey Badgers’ ensuing inbound, promptly splashing in an easy
jumper. That was the dagger. The dying minutes consisted mostly of Massey just
sprinting past the D to get easy buckets. He put up 30 points, tied for the team
lead with Tavrion Dawson, and seemed to be in considerably better spirits than in
the last home game. Massey was a microcosm of the arena. The mood was upbeat in the
SaskTel Center.
As the Rattlers dribbled down the clock, the
crowd voiced its approval for a game well-played, a well-earned 22 point win.
The fans could not pooh-pooh the product no matter how hard their ingrained prairie
pissiness insisted that they had to. The people who attended, though there may
have been less than last game, unmistakably liked what they saw. Two
fireworks shot off simultaneously to celebrate the victory. The sustained
cheers, however, said something the paltry, impotent fireworks could not:
basketball is back in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and it might just stay for more than a couple weeks.
