Potpourri of ponderings

Some day-after thoughts and highlights from the Jazz’s NBA season-opening 98-94 win over the Denver Nuggets:

— The new-and-improved pregame festivities were pretty fun to watch and definitely will generate some business for ear doctors in the area. Man, that was LOUD!!! Or am I just too old suddenly? I might shove some glow sticks in my eardrums next game.
Anyway, the pregame party included AC/DC blasting on the arena’s 100,000-watt speaker system — the music coming from Larry H. Miller’s MP3 collection, no doubt — and booming cannon shots that made it sound like Utah was attacking Colorado.
The national anthem was one of my favorite parts of the pregame pageantry, personally. National Guard servicemen brought out a ginormous U.S. flag that covered nearly the entire basketball court. Following that, country singer Collin Raye belted out the national anthem, singing it in a way it should be: great-sounding, smooth and simple. He even got the words right. Sign him up all season. Oh wait. The Dee Events Center already did.
(On a personal tangent: I heard Collin Raye sing about the note his grandma wrote back in 1923 at Ronnie Price’s alma mater this summer, and he puts on a great show. Too bad he didn’t give a post-game concert, or maybe he did and I was just busy writing about Carlos Boozer.)

We now bring you back to your regularly scheduled blog….

— Speaking of Carlos Boozer, he and Deron Williams both helped Jazz management come up with ideas for the pregame show. Too bad for D-Will, he only got to watch the extravaganza. Too bad for Boozer, the cannon didn’t go off after he was introduced like it did for fellow starters Ronnie Price, C.J. Miles, Ronnie Brewer and Mehmet Okur. He still gave the show a thumbs-up.

— Bear was at center court when the hard-rock song “Hells Bells” rocked the arena. What was missing: the big golden bell. It was there during Tuesday’s dress rehearsal, and the Jazz mascot was supposed to gong it. Maybe his timing was just off in practice. Or maybe he gonged it too hard and cracked the bell? Or maybe we’ll never know….

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The next time you’re tempted to write on the comments section about what a moron I am — yes, I read them (sniff, sniff) — keep in mind the charitable act I did at Wednesday’s game.
A Jazz dancer or Bear or somebody threw a mini-ball to the crowd in my area of the arena. The ball didn’t quite it make it into the fans’ seats and landed between myself and Salt Lake Tribune columnist Kurt Kragthorpe. We wrestled, battled, scraped and pulled each other’s hair until I finally ended up with the ball in my well-deserving if not powerful hands. (Or I just picked it up as watched me without trying to get it, but that doesn’t sound as exciting….)
Anyway, to make a not-so-short story longer, after manhandling Kragthorpe for possession of the ball — OK, I’ll stop exaggerating — I looked around at the crowd. For two reasons really:
First, I wasn’t sure if a commenter who wanted to call me a “moron” actually threw this ball at me instead.
Second, I didn’t want to get booed so I tried to find a kid who was worthy of receiving my prized possession that I’d worked so hard to get.
Turns out, three kids were right behind me, and I made one happy by throwing it to him. The other two kids, however, will likely now call me a “moron” on the comment section for the rest of their lives.
I might not have been quite as generous had it been the $100 ball, of course.

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Jazz fans have to be wondering if they’ll ever see Greg Oden play in Utah. He sat out the preseason finale last week, and now word out of Portland is that he’ll miss the next 2-4 weeks with a “mid-lateral foot sprain.” At least it wasn’t a BCS-lateral sprain. But it’s too bad for spectators in Utah who hoped to see the 2007 No. 1 draft pick, who missed all of last year to heal from knee surgery, next Wednesday at the ESA.

Deron Williams might return that night, though. I think Jazz fans will settle for that.

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One well-intentioned Jazz fan needs to work on his penmanship before he makes another sign to display publicly in games.
His sign read: 3-SHOT KORVER.
Only problem? The “O” in SHOT looked a whole lot more like an “I” because the whole in the middle was nearly all colored in.
As you can imagine, fans sitting around him had some strange looks on their faces as they looked at his sign.