Freivalds: Leave the chihuahuas at home

We shared the elevator from the parking ramp to Target Center with a doting grandmother. She was taking her 10-year-old grandson to his first basketball game.

As we walked into the Target Center a guy was standing on a wooden platform surrounded by well-wishers yelling, “Repent!” They probably had the right idea.

Once inside, you were then greeted with ear-splitting hip hop music to the point you could not hear the person next to you talk. Then glaring wrap-around advertising messages surrounded you and every second was filled with something: the award-winning danceline of 12-year-olds, a Cub Scout honor guard, a tenor testing his pipes on the national anthem, a war veteran, several civic awards for this and that, a T-shirt throw and, all along, messages to go get a $10 beer and $17 hamburgers.

The grandmother and I were disgusted as the basketball game was an afterthought to the schlock surrounding the event. In fact, every public event has been reduced to its lowest common denominator; football games have been reduced to sausage eating and beer drinking tailgating, the even once proud state fair in now known for its "food on a stick" and the nausea- inducing rides on the Midway — forget about Aunt Nelly’s pickled cucumber awards. And all the talk about the last Super Bowl was about the halftime show and which advertisements were the most notable. This is what Minneapolis looks forward too. P.T. Barnum, who started the Ringling Brothers circus, got it right when in 1870 he said ”nobody lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.”

But the halftime show at this game even reduced someone I know, who is in the advertising business, to write "I was embarrassed for everyone watching the halftime show. It was a shirtless man in tights who was a professional hand-stander. He balanced on weird contraptions and held his body in anti-gravity positions. Then it got extra weird when his chihuahua came out and started walking all over his half-naked body while he did even weirder positions." You can’t make this stuff up.

Did I mention the purpose was basketball? In Europe it is the soccer fans who make the noise; here it is the synthetic organ player who has to block out every sound of the game. You can’t hear a dribble, the screech of sneakers on the court, the players calling out plays, the coach barking at the players and the ball going swish through the hoop. And the scoreboard screamed at you to make noise whenever an opposing player shot free throws. Minnesota Nice?

We left after halftime and got home in time to watch the fourth quarter on TV, which was wonderful with no blaring noise, just the game. We can’t get rid of the event atmosphere but for us that still like the game of basketball, how about an “old fashioned day” where just basketball is the only feature. Leave the chihuahuas at home.