Understanding how the elderly people thought about the “new-age” athletes used to boggle my mind.

Every time I talked to one of them, it used to be, “Nowadays, the players can’t even shoot a jump shot, and they don’t even have the fundamentals to do anything.”

Of course, I would answer the statement with something like, “Yeah well, that’s just because your old-school fools who played ball couldn’t jump and dunk it 10 feet from the hoop.”

The arguments would grow a little testy and I would end up saying something truly ignorant such as, “Old people suck and you are in some kind of loser denial.”

Let me remind you that I am only 18 years old, and the fact that 25-year-old people used to seem like the elderly to me. I am not talking about some guy with gray hair blabbering about the old days to me on his death bed.

But I could never understand why anyone would ever talk like that, until I went back and took a look at my columns over the past year.

I almost felt sick at how I am trying to tell a story of how bad things are now.

Everything from how there aren’t any clutch players all the way to the Super Bowl being the most boring game on the planet, and how I would basically head to a place that was a threat to nuclear assault rather than watch it.

Oh, by the way, I did both things. The Rams lost and I almost was in a plane crash. Guess I got the worst of both worlds with that one.

I finally realized why older people talked to me that way.

Denial.

Denial of changes in the game. Denial of the fact that people just do things more efficiently in a different way, due to the change in the times.

But don’t think that me realizing my problem means that I will fix them.

Ignorance is bliss.

Now that I have noticed my problem in my columns, I have found that I even give the third degree to every single other younger person I see, that either makes a basketball team, or tells me that Kobe will be the greatest basketball player of all time.

“It’s easy to make a basketball team; when I was there, a good two years before you, the talent level was off the hook.” That’s the exact wording I would give the person that would make the team. It would make me feel good, since I had no shot to make the team when I was in high school.

To respond to someone telling me that Kobe is going to be the greatest, I would say, “Kobe can’t play in the clutch and all he has is Shaq; If he didn’t have Shaq, he would suck.” This would be right after Kobe just buried about 10 shots in a row.

Don’t think this is me accepting that Kobe is the greatest, but just me accepting the fact that he is a good player; that is all. All he is is hype, and people will realize that when he meets the Mavericks in the conference championships.

I have just become more and more irritable, and I can see it growing exponentially over the next few decades of my life.

Imagine what the old-school Asad Kudiya is going to turn out to be. Probably some homeless bum chasing kids out of elementary school and trying to scare them for fun.

Possibly interrupting sporting events, going on the field in my poncho, yelling how the game has lost its flavor and how we need to go back to the old days.

That’s what The Chrony has instilled inside my brain this year. Just more and more denial that has been pushed over the brink.

So how do I respond to The Chrony doing this to me?

“Thank you.”

Asad welcomes feedback at: [email protected].