Adam Morrison is probably somewhere in Istanbul, Turkey feeling Chris Bosh’s pain right about now.
You’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t remember where they were when Morrison – then a junior playing for Gonzaga – broke down in tears and sobbed uncontrollably on the floor at the Oakland Coliseum after a late game March Madness loss to UCLA in 2006.
The same can probably be said about Bosh.
Footage of the Miami Heat forward doubling over crying and being consoled by Dwyane Wade and Erick Dampier as he walked toward the Heat locker room after the Game 6 loss to Dallas in the NBA Finals was viewed and discussed in excess.
Now Bosh takes us through the history of that emotional state in a sit down interview with Mark Anthony Green of GQ, where he discussed playing alongside Wade and LeBron James and the criticism both the team and particularly he’s faced over the last year.
“The NBA Finals. Everybody saw that. Everybody made a big deal out of it, and that’s what bothered me the most,” said Bosh, when asked about the last time he cried.
“It’s like, ‘Dude, if you’ve never cried over basketball as a grown man, you’re lying. I don’t care what you’re saying, you’re lying.’ I lost at the ultimate level, you know? If the guys don’t understand that, they’re either lying or they don’t have a pulse.”
Flashback to last March when head coach Erik Spoelstra said in a press conference after a loss to the Chicago Bulls that, “there are a couple of guys crying there in the locker room,” only to turn around days later and decry the local and national media for turning his comments into “sensationalism”. From this, “Crygate” was born and it’s probably safe to assume some of the tears flowing in the locker room that day belonged to Bosh.
It happens.
Regardless if you Kevin Garnett down on all fours barking at a point guard or clapping in an opponents face, or Dwight Howard racking on technical foul after technical foul, emotions flow and come out in various forms for different players around the league when it comes to basketball, or sports in general for that matter.
Put it like this: Bosh cares.
“Yeah. I hate to lose. When I was a kid, I used to cry every time I lost a game, up until, like, the 8th grade. I used to go ballistic. I used to go crazy. If I cried it’d be like, ‘Ah, Chris is crying again… damn it… come on, get in the car.’ All that over one game. I hated to lose.’
“I had gotten rid of the crying when I got to high school, though it happened again when I was a junior. We lost in the state championship. It was kind of the same situation, camera in my face, and then that’s when I realized it was over I had my moment. But we won the next year, then the other people cried.”
This season for Miami, Bosh is averaging 19.4 points and 8.1 rebounds per game. There has been no talk – or sensationalized headlines – attributed to Spoelstra about guys in the locker room crying and with the Heat possessing the second-best record in the Eastern Conference at 8-3, go ahead and hide the Kleenex.
No tears here. Just talk of a little payback for Dallas.
“It would feel great to get the Mavs back but I wouldn’t do it for those reasons,” Bosh started, “because I think sometimes you can get caught up in all that, instead of enjoying the moment.
