Roger Collier

T hough I may lose my citizenship for admitting this, I must confess: I don't like hockey. At all. I have never watched an NHL game on television. Not once.

Yes, I am fully Canadian (Newfoundland born, Timmies patron, multiple toques) and fully male (receding hairline, furry body, requisite appendages). I'm also a sports fan. But the sport I love is basketball, not hockey.

Following professional basketball in Ottawa, or anywhere in Canada, is a lonely affair. Sure, there are hoops fans out there, but not many. Just try getting a sports bar to devote one of its many screens to an NBA game during the NHL playoffs.

Once, a buddy and I asked a bartender if we could watch a Toronto Raptors game and were put in a separate room by ourselves. The servers forgot about us. Next time I'll bring my own beer, a deep fryer and some frozen chicken wings, just in case.

Need more proof? Check the newspaper. Last Tuesday, Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls, the youngest MVP in NBA history, led his team to victory over the Atlanta Hawks to take a 3-2 lead in their second-round playoff series. The game was briefly recapped on the last page of the Citizen's sports section the next day.

The preceding pages in the sports section contained 10 articles, all about hockey. Five described playoff games in various leagues: NHL, CHL, AHL, OHL. (Hockey executives have mastered prefixing "HL" with a letter from the alphabet.) One was about the Ice Hockey World Championships, another about a hockey summit in Quebec.

Then there were stories about an injured NHL player who was "doing better," a company that pulled out of ownership talks with the Phoenix Coyotes and, finally, a sports agent who tweeted his disappointment over a hockey player's support for gay marriage.

Good thing the kids on my street didn't play road hockey last Tuesday. Coverage of that event would have bumped the NBA right out of the paper.

Of course, the Citizen, like every other paper in the country, is just giving readers what they want: hockey, and lots of it. Same goes for sports programs on Canadian television and radio.

I genuinely wish I enjoyed watching and reading about hockey, living as I do in this puckhead Shangri-La, but I only follow sports I play. And I've been playing basketball, to varying degrees of ineptitude, for most of my life. During summers in my youth, I played basketball outside with friends until dark -- or longer, if the moon was bright. We even played in winter, going two-ontwo in mittens and five-pound Kodiaks.

When I was 12 or so I gave hockey a try, but the other kids had already been playing for ages and I couldn't keep up. I stuck it out for a year, improved some, though not much, and retired my Bauers with the blades still sharp.

In high school I dabbled in other games -- softball, volleyball, Donkey Kong -- but basketball was my favourite, probably because I was better at hoops than at any other sport. I wasn't that good, mind you. I had the foot speed of a statue and could barely jump over a piece of paper. Still, my jump shot was above average and, standing a smidge over six feet, I was one of the taller students in my class.

My love of basketball was obvious to anyone who entered my bedroom. Its walls were festooned with posters of NBA stars, like Charles Barkley (The Round Mound of Rebound) and Michael Jordan (the GOAT: Greatest of All Time). My single non-basketball poster was of Heather Thomas, from the 1980s TV show The Fall Guy, wearing only a pink bikini and a smile. My mother made me take that one down, though it didn't seem to bother my father.

Today, I still think professional basketball players are the most amazing athletes on Earth. These guys are giants, yet still nimble, still graceful. All professional athletes are incredible physical specimens, of course, but NBA stars are something more. They're genetic aberrations -mutants who like rap music, own 14 cars and jump three feet off the ground.

That's why I remain a fan. And though living in a hockey-mad town can be lonely for a hoops junkie, it has one major advantage. Sometimes I miss an NBA playoff game and watch it the following evening online, which means I have to avoid news about its outcome. In hockeyland, fortunately, avoiding basketball news is easier than an empty-net breakaway.