Regrets, I’ve Had a Few: Missing One of the Greatest Moments in Sports History

Hey, we all have regrets, right? Dumb things we’ve done that we wish we could do over? God knows I do. What follows is one of the dumbest decisions I ever made, not including relationship mistakes of course. If I included those this one would be knocked down to about #79. Anywho, I shall now take a deep breath and come clean . . .

Back in 1988 a friend of mine had a buddy who worked for CBS Sports. This guy got us tickets to the 1988 NBA All-Star Game in Chicago. We had passes for the dunk contest, the whole works. Well, by the time we checked into The Omni in Chicago that Saturday we were, uh, having a little too much fun. Later on we were in a bar near the stadium and were having such a good time that we decided, in our infinite wisdom, to stay there and skip the dunk contest. Hey, screw some dumb contest! We’re in Chicago! Plus they don’t have bars back home in Ohio, right?

Sigh.

Kids, I’m embarrassed as hell to report sad to report this would turn out to be the contest where Dominique Wilkins and some loser named Michael Jordan would have their legendary showdown. You know, the one where Jordan came in from the side, looking down on the basket, and nearly ripped the rim off? The one where Jordan jumped from the free throw line to win?

Yeah, that one. Personally I thought Wilkins won, but what the hell did I know? I was in a bar 3-blocks away barely paying attention. To put a cap on things, as we were walking into the stadium for the All-Star game the next day some guy offered us $300 for our tickets. Of course we promptly sold them. What can I say? We were idiots. But hey, it wasn’t like that game wasn’t memorable or anything.

I mean, Jordan only scored 40-points that night, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar became the all-time leading All-Star scorer in history, and the teams included, in addition to Jordan, Wilkins and Kareem, some losers by the names of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Moses Malone, Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, Clyde Drexler, Karl Malone, Hakeem Olajuwon, and James Worthy.

Man, that paragraph actually hurt to type, let alone read.

Dumb decisions? I’d like to see you top that one.