Life Before League Pass

I was first introduced to the NBA by a funny little man named Alton Byrd.

It was sometime in the early-‘90s and Byrd, a star of British basketball, was fronting a show called NBA Jam Session, a highlight package of 50 minutes or so, which aired on a Sunday on ITV.

Other than Byrd’s fetching moustache, my memories of the programme itself are hazy – I was around 10 or 11 at the time.

What I do remember quite distinctly, however, was how it profoundly altered my take on basketball.

Up until then my exposure to the game had been brief. It pretty much consisted of watching my primary school teacher clang layups off the underside of a hoop in a well-intentioned but misguided effort at instruction.

Not a romantic introduction to the game, to say the least.

Then I stumbled across Jam Session. While I have no specific memory of a game, team or player, I recall watching these big black guys in baggy shorts hurtling down a shiny wooden court, zipping the ball around like it was nothing, dunking and strutting, and generally being bad-ass.

Basketball, for me, was suddenly the coolest thing on earth. A sport I had previously given nothing but a fleeting consideration now consumed me.

Living in England, this would prove to be problematic.

By the time I had started secondary school Jam Session had wound down and, aside from a few videos - Superstars Vols. 2 and 3, Furious Finishes, Dream Team Vols. 1 and 2, Sir Charles, and those cheesy MJ tapes - NBA footage was like gold dust.

Occasionally a rumour would circulate about someone possessing a full-length NBA game taped from an elusive German Sky channel (always German for some reason) but, invariably, the cassette would never materialise.

Times were tough. At this point I had probably never seen an NBA game in its entirety. I remember watching and re-watching the basketball scenes in White Men Can’t Jump. The voice of Rosie Perez haunts me to this day.

Thankfully, in 1995, the basketball Gods took pity and delivered a gift in the unlikely form of Mark Webster.

Channel 4 had picked up the rights to the NBA in a three-year deal and Webster, along with then Slam Magazine writers Scoop Jackson and Dave Lewis, hosted a game weekly on NBA XXL and presented its sister programmes NBA 24/7 and NBA Raw.

Although Channel 4 would forego the first half of each season, with coverage only picking up at All-Star weekend, those were halcyon days.The programmes were slick, the analysis informed and, more than anything else, it was the NBA on our screens each and every week.

Sadly, the deal was never renewed. ITV went on to become the sole provider of NBA content on terrestrial TV and it churned out the vastly inferior NBA ’99, a half hour show presented by Beverley Turner and former Olympic athlete Derek Redmond.

After Channel 4’s deft analysis and full-length games, watching ITV’s 30 minute highlight reel was like swallowing a jagged pill, but there was nothing else to take.

The format continued unchanged (although Redmond did disappear pretty quickly) for three years, before concluding in 2001, after which all terrestrial coverage ceased until 2004 when Webster made a return to basketball to present live NBA games on Five.

By that time, however, it was getting easier to watch the NBA in Britain. With coverage on Sky Sports, NASN and Five, there were usually two or three games aired each week, maybe a few more during the Playoffs.

There was also Pontel, a Swiss-based DVD service, from which - if you were prepared to pay the money – you could actually select the games, the teams, the players you wanted to watch. Choice was now an option, albeit an expensive one.

For British viewers, there was more NBA basketball to be watched in the mid-2000s than at any other time, and this was pleasing; slow, faltering progress was better than no progress at all.

But a handful of games a month (even Pontel only delivered weekly) was never going to be ideal. Every morning I would crank up my PC to peep the highlights, read the reports and pore over the box scores on the internet, yet it would never be the same as actually watching the games.

For years, following (or, more correctly, trying to follow) the NBA in Britain, was wholly unsatisfying. It was as if I was perpetually dieting; never sated, always hungry and, when it finally came time to eat, forced to choose from a heavily edited menu.

When the NBA extended its broadband package to the UK in 2008, it finally put an end to the frustration and disappointment, despite the buffering and blackouts.

It’s easy to take things for granted. Everyone does it. How can you not with the abundance of cool-when-you-think-about-it shit we encounter daily (“You’re sitting in a chair…in the sky!”)?

But with League Pass, it’s different. I’ll never have to diet again.