Blazer Boycott

A sheet of paper slid from the office fax machine the other day bearing the bold black headline: "Blazer Boycott Begins."

My immediate reactions were to wonder why it took someone so long to get around to this, and, in a related vein, why they didn't strike several years when the Trail Blazers led the NBA in arrest warrants per game. And it wasn't even close.

My personal dissatisfaction with the Blazers, however, predates the franchise's most felonious era.

I haven't been able to tell you the Blazers' win-loss record, at any given time, since the first Bush administration. I never thought of my indifference as a boycott, though. I've always figured a boycott was supposed to influence whatever it is that's being boycotted, but so far as I can tell the Blazers, and NBA basketball in general, is basically the same tedious, though unquestionably athletic, exercise that it was a decade ago.

In any case, despite my years of faithfully spurning them, the Blazers continue to take the court, which suggests to me that my crusade, as it were, has failed to prompt even one special meeting of Blazer brass at the Rose Garden.

As I read beyond that bold headline, though, it became clear that the people behind this Blazer boycott, in contrast to me, actually like watching the Blazers.

But they don't get to watch the Blazers as often as they'd like, and it seems that they're pretty mad about this. Mad enough to send faxes to non-fans, anyway.

The instigator of the boycott, according to the fax, is the Blazer Fan Access Coalition. The document doesn't say how many people belong to this coalition, but I'd wager that someone in the outfit has more than a scant knowledge of propaganda. This boycott is about a basketball team, yet the first paragraph of the fax includes a few phrases that a human rights group might employ to prod the United Nations into dispatching peacekeepers — namely, "disenfranchised by the big money deal" and "discriminated against" and "denied access to."

I kept reading. By the third paragraph I not only understood what the boycott was about, but was ready to grab a sign and man a picket post.

It turns out that these Blazer fans and I, though we traveled different routes to reach our current state of indignation, share essentially the same gripe: Although our country boasts a ridiculous wealth of media outlets devoted to sports, we live in a place where the choices are more Outer Mongolia than inner city.

In this, though, the Blazer Coalition is merely crashing the party that I threw more than a decade ago.

The Coalition got riled when the Blazers signed a deal that ensures most of the team's games are shown on the sports channel that Comcast Cable debuted in November.

That's quite a coup — if Comcast is the company that pulled the coaxial cable through your walls. But unless you live in the Willamette Valley, that's probably not the case.

According to the fax from the Coalition, about 25 percent of the team's fan base lacks access to Comcast. That tally includes, as you likely know, Baker County and the rest of Eastern Oregon. The heavily publicized unveiling of Comcast's new channel must have made that minority of Blazer fans feel like Charlie Brown as he sails through the air, the football still on the ground, held in place by Lucy's finger.

I know that feeling. But I'm also used to it. And so I accepted the news about the Comcast sports channel's limited range with the silent resignation of a person who expects to be left out, rather than the surprised anger of a customer who, having profited from every previous advancement of technology, has no reason to doubt his good fortune will continue.

Here's the thing: I like the Oregon Ducks. I took my degree from the University of Oregon. Before I was even old enough to consider colleges to attend, I rooted for the Ducks.

But Baker County, which is in almost every other respect an ideal place to live, is, so far as the Ducks are concerned, a broadcast desert.

Comcast, which will air more than a dozen Duck basketball games this season, is only the latest outlet to jilt me.

Yet television isn't the medium that really irritates me.

Radio is.

For at least the past dozen years, no radio station in Baker or Union counties has broadcast Oregon basketball or football games.

To overcome this absence of close-by kilohertz I have, among other ill-conceived feats, slogged an asthmatic old International Scout through bumper-high snow drifts to get to Elkhorn Summit so that I could listen, via a Pendleton station, to a Duck football game.

I have sat in my car (not the Scout — I distrusted its battery) in the driveway for three hours on a chilly autumn night, trying to decipher the play-by-play man's words as they emerged, in scattered bursts, from the shifting static that plagues distant AM stations after sunset.

What particularly galls me about this disdain for the Ducks among radio stations, though, is that it is, basically, a local phenomenon. A radio station in John Day has Duck football games. Also Lakeview. Also Burns.

Now if you live in, say, Seneca, you understand that to partake of certain amenities you will have to travel to a place of some substance. And compared to Seneca, John Day has substance. So do Burns and Lakeview (although Lakeview still lacks the essential ingredient of the truly American city — a McDonald's).

Baker City is no Seneca.

Baker City is, in fact, bigger than John Day and Burns and Lakeview — combined.

We have an interstate, lots more stores and restaurants, and a bigger dot on the state highway map.

But they've got the Ducks.

This bothers me, but not enough to join the Blazer Coalition's boycott.

Oh, I hope they get somewhere.

If Comcast shared its new sports station with Charter Communications, for instance, I'd be awash in Duck basketball games.

If, on the other hand, someone ever starts up a boycott against the Beavers, well, then I'll boycott to the best of my ability.

Of course you can't get the Beavers on the radio around here, either.

Jayson Jacoby edits the Opinion page for the Baker City Herald.