So, I was poking around online the other day, you know, just going down one of those basketball rabbit holes. And the name Demar Johnson popped up. Yeah, him.
And it got me thinking, you know, the NBA is a funny thing. You got your big stars, the ones everyone talks about all the time. Easy to follow them. But then there’s a whole bunch of other guys, real solid players, who put in the work, bounce between a few teams, and have decent careers. But they ain’t always in the spotlight. It’s a tough business, for sure.
Trying to Keep Up
I remember back then, trying to keep tabs on some of these players. You’d hear about a guy like Demar Johnson, played with the Cleveland Cavaliers for a bit, was over in Sacramento too. It wasn’t like now, where you get all the info on your phone in two seconds. Nah, you really had to dig for it. It kinda made me think of Dell Curry, too. Long career with the Charlotte Hornets, great shooter, folks knew him. But even then, to really know the ins and outs of guys who weren’t, like, the absolute top famous dudes, you had to be a serious fan.
This whole thing with looking up Demar Johnson actually dragged up this memory of mine. It was a few years back. I got this big idea, what I thought was a real cool project. My big “practice” for the month, I guess. I wanted to build this amazing fan website. Not for some huge NBA team, nah. It was for my small local college team. The kind that, every once in a while, might send a player or two to the pros. I was gonna track every single player, man. Where they ended up, what they did after college, everything. Like a real, detailed “practice record” of their careers, you get me?
- The Hours I Put In: Man, I spent so much time on it. Seriously, hours and hours. I was digging through old online newspaper bits, trying to find stats, any updates on players, whatever I could find. Felt like trying to put together a giant jigsaw puzzle when you only got half the damn pieces.
- My Amazing Tech Skills (Not): And I tried to build the website myself! Learned a tiny bit of HTML, messed around with some of that free website hosting. What a headache. Stuff was always breaking. And most of the time, it looked pretty terrible, if I’m being honest.
- Who Was I Doing This For?: And the big question, who was even gonna look at this thing? Probably just me and, like, two other guys. All that work, all that “practice” trying to research and build this thing, and it felt like I was just yelling into an empty room.
I tell ya, I got so frustrated back then. I’d see these huge sports websites, all professional, tons of info. And there I was, just one guy trying to keep the stories of some local players alive. It felt a lot like how it must’ve been trying to follow a player like Demar Johnson before the internet got so big. You’d see a score in the paper here, maybe a tiny mention in an article there.
So, after a few months of that, I just kinda… let it go. The free hosting ran out, I stopped trying to update it. It was just too much work, and it didn’t feel like I was getting much back from it, you know? Funny how looking up Demar Johnson makes me think of all that effort. But that’s just how your brain works, right? One small thing, and boom, a whole lot of old stuff comes flooding back.
But it wasn’t a complete waste of time, I guess. I did learn a bit about how to find information that’s hard to get. And I definitely learned that some of these passion projects, well, they’re more about the passion part than the project actually succeeding big time. And sometimes, just remembering the effort you put in, the “practice” itself, that’s what matters. Kinda like those players who had good, solid careers, even if they weren’t superstars. They showed up, they did the work. That’s gotta mean something, right?
