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sports nut: The stadium scene.

Minute DetailsWatching the Hawks and Heat do over the last 51.9 seconds of a game they started in December.

By John Swansburg
Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 11:08 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Then again, the Hawks are still in the hunt for a playoff spot, and the team was understandably happy to recover a win that had been temporarily confiscated by the NBA. And Horford may have merely been playing out a role the team had scripted for him, as pitchman for this replay. Recall that the do-over came about because the Hawks statistics crew had incorrectly ejected Shaquille O'Neal from the original game. Rather than hang their heads in shame, however, the Hawks—in a display of not insignificant chutzpah—used the replay to try to move tickets and concessions. The 52-second-long "first game" between the Hawks and Heat was to be followed by a regulation-length game between the same two teams. The Hawks commissioned a video from young Horford, in which he urged fans to show up early and support the Hawks on this "historic day for the NBA"—a hoops doubleheader. As a further inducement, Horford promised dollar sodas, hot dogs, and popcorn to anyone who showed up before 6:30. The first 3,000 fans through the turnstiles would also get a free 2008 A-Town Dancers swimsuit calendar, thoughts of which were not far from my mind as I waited in vain for the fog over LaGuardia to lift.

I was disappointed at not being able to see the event in person, to witness the weirdness of watching fans filing into a game as time expired, to see if the scalpers were jacking up prices on the pretense that fans were getting two games for the price of one, etc. But there was something to be said for watching it on TV; Miami's Sun Sports network had dug up archival footage of the last NBA replay, in 1983, which provided further evidence of the silliness of do-overs and of just how well Pat Riley has aged. Plus, as a patron at Bounce, I was able to ascertain that both women's college basketball and a Devils-Maple Leafs game were of more interest to a New York bar crowd. This was an important data point as I try to determine the place that this historic replay will hold in the collective memory of America's sports fans.

I stuck around the bar for the nightcap, on the off chance something of note would occur—another glaring error from the scorer's table, a shot of Stephen Hawking on the sidelines. Around the second quarter, I noticed that the crowd had thinned out. A waitress produced a bouquet of helium-filled balloons, one of which floated, annoyingly, right in front of my flat screen. A bouncer, meanwhile, had appeared at the door and was turning people away, informing them the bar was closed for a private party. I kept waiting to be asked to leave, but either out of pity or fear of journalistic reprisal (I was taking notes in a reporter's notebook), I was grandfathered into the private function, a pretty classy birthday party. By the fourth quarter, I was rather inebriated—I felt obliged to repay the bar's kindness at not ejecting me by ordering beer after beer—so when the birthday boy started bragging to friends that I was covering the party for TMZ.com, I played along. Seemed like the least I could do.

Final score: Hawks 97, Heat 94. A doubleheader sweep for Atlanta. Don't really remember the details, but I'm pretty sure no one fouled out.

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John Swansburg is a Slate associate editor.
Photograph of Al Horford of the Atlanta Hawks by Scott Cunningham/NBAE via Getty Images.
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