Note: This is a sappy post about my love of the Utah Jazz, not an analysis, or breaking news or reaction to anything Jazz related. If that doesn’t float your boat, feel free to click away. If you decide that you’d still like to read, welcome in!
I started my first full-time, real, big boy job this week. Not a part-time gig, not an internship, not a job where I’m capped off at 39 hours so I don’t get benefits. An actual, legitimate, genuine job.
Now, for the sake of this article, I won’t say where and what I am doing — although, if you search me up on twitter or LinkedIn, it’s not secret information by any means — but it has caused me to move away from Utah, the state I’ve lived in since 2008. For the first time since I was in Kindergarten, I am no longer a Utah resident. It still feels weird to say.
As my dad and I packed our cars full of all my belongings and trekked through a narrow and scarily wet Parley’s Canyon, I realized something: I will likely not attend a Utah Jazz game this year.
I’m sure many of you reading this have never been to a Jazz game, or maybe have only seen a handful in your lifetimes. Many of our readers aren’t even from the United States, much less Salt Lake City. I’ve been fortunate enough to live within a couple of miles of an NBA arena my whole life, and I’ve taken it for granted until this very moment, now that I can no longer make it to a meaningless Tuesday night game against the 13-22 Hornets just because tickets were cheap.
Like a lot of Jazz fans from the Beehive State, my first experience seeing the Jazz live was from the complimentary tickets I got from Jr. Jazz, the rec league basketball program in Utah. My dad took me to the then Energy Solutions Arena to watch the Deron Williams-led Jazz play the Phoenix Suns.
“You see that player right there,” my dad said pointing to an aging Shaquille O’Neal, “that’s Shaq. He’s 300 pounds and over seven feet tall.” My dad knew all the players, and I tried my best to keep up with all the information that he spewed at me over the next four quarters.
Over the years, my dad had to keep up with my knowledge of the Jazz. Back when the Jazz had physical programs at the games — let’s bring those back! Physical media is awesome! — my dad would quiz me on which college each player went to.
“Alec Burks went to Colorado
Jeremy Evans went to Western Kentucky
AlJefferson… didn’t go to college. Trick question.”
Since that 2008 game, the Jazz have changed their colors to blue, yellow and green, to black and neon yellow — AGGGGGGGGHHHHH — and back to the beloved purple mountains. They also came out with the greatest city edition jerseys in NBA history, and the arena has changed its name multiple times.
Utah is coming off of its second rebuild of my fan life, once happening in the years following the Williams-Sloan debacle, and once after the Rudy Gobert-Donovan Mitchell experiment ran its course. The infamous 2021 Terance Mann game sent me into a weeks-long depression, one where I’d hop into my Jetta and go on long, silent drives throughout the valley, questioning how a supposed “loving” God could curse me with being a Jazz fan.
Through all the changes over the past two decades, I’ve been at my spot up in the nosebleeds, watching as history unfolded on the hardwood court below. I saw Mitchell put the clamps on Jayson Tatum in Summer League, I saw Tyrone Corbin’s first game as a head coach, I saw the first full-capacity game after COVID-19, I saw a Derrick Favors career-high, I saw an all-purple court, I even saw Tacko Fall wearing a neon yellow summer league jersey as the Jazz’ starting center.
I saw Gordon Hayward, Carlos Boozer, Joe Ingles, Lauri Markkanen, Paul Millsap, Danté Exum, Rodney Hood, Talen Horton-Tucker, Earl Watson, Tibor Pleiss, Jeff Withey, Justin Wright-Foreman, Rayjon Tucker, Francisco Elson and the list goes on and on.
And now, I will watch from afar, as a new era of Jazz basketball takes place.
If my boss is reading this: I will be taking a month off work if when the Jazz win the NBA Finals.
