I played for traveling show basketball team. As we were being paid a salary, we were, technically, professional players. But our games were more of the exhibitionist variety, Harlem-Globetrotters like.

In the pro basketball world, game footage is your resume. The more video you have of you playing well, the better you can sell yourself to your future employers. While nowadays everyone has a camera on them, back in the early aughts we were just getting into DVDs.

Early in the season with the traveling team, I’d been asking team managers to get video footage of the games for me. Though this was a show team, and the games were not really competitive, some game film was better than no game film.

Apparently, word got around the organization.

A message came back to me from club ownership that they weren’t very pleased about my scrounging for game film. They knew why I wanted it, and the impression was that I was a bit too concerned about my future playing prospects as opposed to fully focusing on the job at hand.

They were right.