The life of Siler

by Basketball John on Oct 17, 2008 12:00 AM MDT Comment 2 comments

This is why blogs are great. You would never, ever have seen this pre-internet in your local papers. But it's the stuff that everyone wants. Ross Siler gives another inside look at not only his own travails, which are great in amongst themselves, but we see what the players are like behind the scenes. I mean, how did I even follow sports growing up? I saw 5 minutes of sports highlights on KSL. The papers would just give box scores.

Anyway, here are some recent gems from his most recent post about his journey from Denver to Champaign for the game against the Bulls tomorrow night.

I'd like to talk to Deron Williams about his return to the University of Illinois for Friday's preseason game against the Bulls. There's nothing Williams loves more, though, than being a smart ass, and he is pretty impressed with my new digital recorder. "I always wonder why [reporters] got these busted-ass tape recorders," Williams says.

That doesn't surprise me at all.

I guess Miles got a little excited whenever he was interviewed. He was fresh out of high school. Williams strung together about three run-on sentences in a row. Brevin Knight was joking that it sounded like you could go take a shower and come back to find C.J. still answering the same question.

Heaven help us if CJ gets a lot of post-game interviews.

After wrapping up at practice, Jazz p.r. director Jonathan Rinehart walked out with me to my rental car. Talking about the schedule for Friday, we were greeted by a 72-year-old grandfather in red windpants who told us that he'd run 300,000 miles around the fields that used to be in the area in his life.

I am not making this up. He also swore that his friend across the street could vouch for him.

Not being a math major, I wasn't able to divide 300,000 by 72 by 365 on the fly and ask if he really expected me to believe he'd run more than 11 miles a day on average since childbirth. Before going back to running laps around the parking lot, he asked Jonathan and me to both punch him in the stomach just so we could be impressed by his abs.

This guy reminds me of the Mandelbaums from Seinfeld,