It is awful hard to find someone that wasn’t entertained by the show Major League Baseball put on with its Field of Dreams game on Thursday night. This morning on ESPN’s Get Up!, guest host Dan Graziano asked the panel to take the model and expand it to other sports. If they could see a special event type of game, what would they want?
ESPN’s Senior NFL writer Jeremy Fowler had an interesting answer. He didn’t want the NBA to draw inspiration from a basketball movie. He wanted the league to go back to the playground. He suggested that if the NBA wanted to create a buzz like Major League Baseball did on Thursday, it needs to stage a game at Rucker Park in New York City.
“I want to be there as LeBron James and the Lakers, Giannis, and all these guys get right off the subway and walk up to 155th Street,” he said.
Rucker Park is famous for its annual basketball tournament, which has been the subject of an Emmy-winning documentary and played a major role in the Kyrie Irvine movie Uncle Drew. The Park’s court is also where legends Julius Erving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar grew up playing basketball.
In Jeremy Fowler’s mind, he’d not only like to see the NBA embrace the tournament style that Rucker Park is famous for. He also wants the game to feature “endless trash talk that’s not suitable for children.”
The easy one-to-one comparison with the Field of Dreams Game for the NBA would be to play a game in Hinkle Fieldhouse, where Hoosiers was filmed. The NBA tends to be a little more forward thinking though, so while they may want to recreate the excitement and novelty of MLB’s event, it is hard to imagine the league building a game around a movie that is 35 years old.