Yesterday, I offered this tease about an audio recording of the first official basketball game ever played in Dallas’ new $20 million Carpenter Park, which has the first public outdoor court in downtown. Were you teased? Below I bring you a 10-minute play-by-play, along with some court-side interviews with me and my opponent, Matt Goodman. I don’t want to spoil the drama by telling you who won. But I would like to address the quality of the recording and share an important observation about the court itself. First, the court:
One rim is significantly higher than the other. I’d say the north rim is close to the prescribed 10 feet; it might even be a bit high. The south rim, though, stands at about 9 foot 8. I have no idea how the contractor could have screwed this up. Neither does Sarah Hughes, the VP and project director of Parks For Downtown Dallas. When I asked her about the low-rim issue yesterday, it was the first she’d heard of it. Hughes was operating on about three hours of sleep, on account of she’d been working so hard to prepare for the park’s opening festivities. I felt bad about bugging her. It’s like Hughes had just given birth, and I walked up and said, “Your baby doesn’t look right.”
Hughes promised to look into the rim situation and get back to me. When I have more information to share with the basketball community, I’ll bring it to FrontBurner.
OK, now, let’s address the sound quality of this recording, which is so bad that I highly recommend that you NOT listen to it.
Man, it was super windy yesterday morning. And where we normally plug mics into our Zoom H4n Handy Recorder to do our EarBurner podcast, yesterday Zac Crain, our play-by-play man, was asked to work with the unit’s built-in mic. That’s on me. I brought the rig to the court. I was more focused on figuring out how the wind conditions under I-345 would affect my outside shot than I was on how they would mess with the sound.
The pre- and post-game interviews I left unedited, but I chopped the hell out of the game audio so as not to bore you to death. Again, though, you can easily avoid even the risk of boredom if you just do the smart thing and DON’T LISTEN TO THIS AUDIO OF THE FIRST OFFICIAL BASKETBALL GAME AT CARPENTER PARK.
Thank you for your patronage and understanding.
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