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Sept. 25, 2008

How the Nets Acquired a Couch

What's good, Nets fans? This is Ben Couch checking in with an inaugural View from the Couch. I'll be covering the Nets all season here at NJNets.com, and while we’re officially kicking this off with a Media Day post tomorrow, I wanted to give all you crazy kids (sports fans are young at heart, and we know this) some background of who I am and how I got here. Yes, it's the dreaded intro post.

I'm a 25-year-old Brooklyn native who grew up [Pulls collar away from neck, looks both ways cautiously. Whispering.] a Knicks fan. I repeatedly watched Michael Jordan and Reggie Miller ruin my childhood, and I might have cried teared up when Patrick Ewing came up short on that finger roll in 1996. For the record, Charles Smith’s layups and John Starks’ Game Seven never happened. “The Dunk,” however, did. And it was glorious.

Also, it was awesome when the Nets traded my fellow Brooklynite (and then-favorite of my basketball bible, SLAM) Stephon Marbury for Jason Kidd and promptly made back-to-back Finals appearances. Of course, by “awesome,” I mean “not at all.”

As for my playing experience, I hooped it up daily during junior high with buddies Akie, Anwar, Andrew, Kareem and Shapel after school, though our different high schools and my football practices killed that momentum. I played pretty frequently in college, and uh … well, we won’t talk about my exercise habits since.

College meant leaving Brooklyn in 2001 for Chapel Hill, N.C., where people did weird things like smile and say “Hi!” when they walked by. Also, they might have had a passion for basketball … or so goes the rumor, ha. Something about three NCAA championships, 15 Final Fours, and a slew of All-America players, including some Jordan guy I had to learn to grudgingly respect if I didn’t want to spend four years holed up in a basement dorm room hoping no one on campus would see me and throw things.

Go figure the team promptly suffered its worst season ever, finishing the year 8-20. After years of watching other teams win championships, I was pretty sure I was about to inflict the same fate upon one of college basketball’s premier programs. But the next year’s recruiting class brought Sean May, Raymond Felton and Rashad McCants to Tobacco Road, and when Roy Williams joined on as coach a year later, Carolina was officially on the come up.

My own growth as a sportswriter mirrored the team’s. Joining The Daily Tar Heel as a freshman, I spent two years covering golf, softball, gymnastics and volleyball before stepping up to edit SportSaturday, our supplemental tabloid for home football games as a junior. After a spring semester abroad in Berlin, Germany, I returned for my senior year as the paper’s first weekly sports columnist.

And then … then it was time. For me to tackle the top of the DTH sports pyramid, and for the Tar Heels to build upon a second-round exit in the 2004 NCAA Tournament. After covering games at the ACC Championship and the Tournament’s first two rounds, due to our three-reporter rotation, I had to sit out and watch the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight from the couch. Outside of the players and coaches, I don’t think there was a single person rooting harder for that squad to advance to the Final Four.

Which they did.

We know the story from there: Tar Heels blow out Michigan State in the second half of the first game, then weather a furious Illinois comeback in the championship. Roy Williams cuts down the nets for the first time, and Felton (No. 5), May (No. 13), McCants (No. 14) and freshman sixth man Marvin Williams (No. 2) are all selected in the lottery of that June’s NBA Draft, marking the first time four players from the same team went off the board that early.

As for me, well, I didn’t quite get drafted in the first round of sportswriting jobs. Or any round – I was rejected by more than 50 internship-offering news organizations. But after being spurned by an earlier selection, MLB.com offered to pick me up as an unrestricted free agent. And despite hesitation regarding my lack of experience, they stuck me in New York, assisting the beat writers for the New York Yankees (boo!) and the New York Mets (huzzah!)

I spent that summer alternating between the teams for roughly two weeks at a time, depending on who was home at the moment. I made mistakes, once previewing a game against the “New York Giants,” which would have been accurate 50 years ago. But I gained the day-to-day experience of dealing with the seasonal grind, earned an extension through the end of the season, and then … had to live at home and work at Barnes & Noble for eight months because sportswriting is hard to break into. On the plus side, I read many books.

The MLB.com connection eventually paid off, and I joined the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum as their in-house writer in May 2006. After 19 months at the Hall – and learning more about baseball history than anyone could possibly retain – a college buddy did me right and forwarded a resume to the fine folks at NBA.com. Two interviews later, I was returning to the NYC-area and covering the sport I grew up with.

Last season, I wrote and produced a slew of articles and blog posts for NBA.com, most prominently writing the “BLINKS,” our daily links roundup, covering events like the 2008 Draft at MSG and the 2008 NBA Summer League in Las Vegas and interviewing players like Tony Parker, Monta Ellis and Emeka Okafor. During the summer, a full-time position (for an "Interactive Marketing Manager") opened here with the Nets, and I’m sure y’all can figure out the rest.

So what you should take away from all this is that I probably know more about baseball than your average basketball writer, and I’m pretty confident I know the basketball, too. And pursue your dreams, motivation, motivation, you can do it, keep trying. Sometimes the magic happens.

Even if I’m still annoyed Starbury hasn’t worked out for either team in the area. Ugh.

--Posted by Ben Couch on Sept. 25, 2008 at 1:34 p.m.

September 2008

The Current View from the Couch