Wednesday, April 21, 2021

This Basketball Season is Missing One Thing: Prince

 You can keep your ticker-tape parades, your detours for Vegas debauchery, your drunken laterals of the Lombardi Trophy. If there were championships for celebrating championships, the Minnesota Lynx wouldn’t just win—they’d retire the trophy.

In the fall of 2015, the Lynx played in the WNBA Finals for the fourth time in five years, with the decisive Game 5 against the Indiana Fever playing out at Minneapolis’s Target Center, before 18,933 fans. Among them: a prominent local man, then 57, who used his considerable pipes to cheer vocally. This particular superfan had been attending Lynx games for years, sometimes sitting courtside, other times seated inconspicuously in the crowd. But there was something about the cohesion and synchronicity of this particular squad—“the ladies move the ball,” he enthused to a friend—that held him in thrall. When Minnesota won the game, and thus the title, he contacted a team executive: He wanted to hold a small victory party that night to honor the players.

Word of this invitation rocketed around the locker room. And so it was, after celebrating downtown, the players piled into a bus and headed to a party in Chanhassen, a suburb west of Minneapolis, just off the shore of Lake Minnetonka. There they were ushered inside a 65,000-square-foot … well, what was it? On the outside it looked like a nondescript, boxy warehouse—not dissimilar to the General Mills plant across the road. But inside it was (and is today) something of a cross between Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and Graceland, a purple-themed, quirkily decorated recording studio and soundstage. This Lynx superfan lived there as well.

As the players entered, they were asked, gently, to hand over their cellphones. To maintain the privacy and mystique of the place, there would be no photos, no videos. The guests milled around in the so-called NPG Room—for New Power Generation—in front of a projected graphic congratulating them on their title. And at some point the host emerged, flanked by a full band. He congratulated the players and then launched into a concert. For more than three hours he launched into his catalog of hits. “Let’s Go Crazy.” “Kiss.” “Raspberry Beret.” “Little Red Corvette.” He also played some deep cuts and experimental songs he’d never released. It was all remarkably intimate, especially for a performer accustomed to selling out the world’s biggest stadiums.

Throughout the night, the Lynx players danced and sang along; it was all so transfixing and surreal that they almost forgot they’d won a championship a few hours earlier. Except that the host-performer kept reminding them. He peppered his songs with praise about their season and their performance in the finals. Playfully, he’d insert players’ names into his songs, replacing the likes of Mr. McGee and Old Man Johnson.




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