FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME

FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME The Smoke, the Trash Talk, the Broken Controllers and the Birth of BDA

TRANSPARENCY NOTE: This feature was assembled with AI assistance from interviews with the owners and fans who personally experienced 6105. All historical information comes from their firsthand memories and interactions, not from AI-generated facts. Every image in this article is an AI-generated historical recreation developed from those human accounts, owner and fan feedback, and available reference photographs. HAVE A 6105 STORY TO SHARE? Readers with memories, experiences, photographs or other firsthand accounts from 6105 are invited to contribute to future BDA history pieces. Email [email protected].

There was a time when the BDA had no website, no spreadsheets, no betting lines, no injury reports and no archive waiting to preserve whatever happened next. There were no statistics departments or governance debates. There was a living room at 6105 Boulevard East, an original PlayStation, NBA Live, a television, a few controllers and a group of friends who somehow made video-game basketball matter far more than anyone outside that apartment could possibly understand.

This month, two people from those years celebrate birthdays. Dan Liu turned 52 on August 10, and Mike Barthe turns 53 on August 21. Mike was one of the three original BDA owners. Dan played for a while before settling into a role that ultimately proved just as useful to the league's history: he watched.

Years later, when the League Office described him merely as an early spectator, Dan issued a correction: “I AM the original crowd !!!!!”

He had a point. The original BDA was essentially Mike, Oliver and Ron competing against one another while Dan watched. Three owners and one fan were apparently enough to create champions, rivalries, catchphrases, scheduling problems, broken hardware and memories that have survived for almost thirty years.

There was also a phrase that seemed capable of explaining nearly all of it: for the love of the game.

It could be sincere or sarcastic. Sometimes it described genuine dedication; other times it was invoked to justify behavior that, viewed from a safe distance, probably did not require justification. Winning was for the love of the game. Losing and wanting another shot was for the love of the game. Staying home instead of going out was for the love of the game. A controller meeting the hardwood at high velocity could apparently be filed under the same heading, although that was perhaps taking the concept too far.

That was 6105.

THE THREE-OWNER LEAGUE

Mike and Oliver were already playing NBA Live when Ron entered the picture. Teams had been drafted and the competition was underway. Ron was initially told that he had arrived too late, so rather than demand a complete restart he asked for Dennis Rodman, John Stockton and whatever players remained.

What began as an accommodation became part of BDA's earliest mythology. Stockton became a scoring weapon, while Rodman was used as a rebounder, passer and general source of chaos. Before long, Mike, Oliver and Ron had become the original three owners, and the surviving league history credits each of them with one NBA Live-era championship.

Most of the game-by-game record from those years is gone because nobody thought it needed to be preserved. What survived instead were reputations and stories. That is where Mike's old title enters the record.

Mike still refers to himself as PFP — Pound for Pound. When he recently sent the League Office a wolverine image and asked that it be placed in a newsletter “as a reminder of who the PFP is,” the obvious follow-up was what PFP actually meant.

According to Mike, it represented his versatility across sports games, puzzle games and first-person shooters. He cited breaking 1,000,000 points in Tony Hawk Pro Skater as one piece of supporting evidence. In an era before formal recordkeeping, apparently the man making the claim also served as the archive.

Mike also supplied another phrase from the old gaming vocabulary: “Nobody does the Hong like John Hong. IYKYK.”

The current BDA Archive still does not know exactly what that means. It may be better that way.

Mike's role in the league created a more practical problem too. He often traveled to Virginia on weekends, which left Ron and Oliver back at 6105 wondering whether he would make it home early enough to get his scheduled games played before a backlog developed.

There was no automated scheduler. Nobody was being paid. There was no audience demanding that the Sunday slate be completed on time. Nevertheless, Ron and Oliver would be waiting, and Mike might be on the highway trying to get home quickly enough to keep the schedule moving.

That mattered to them. For the love of the game.

DAN AND THE ONE-MAN CROWD

Dan's own playing career was not as successful. He remembers being drafted at least once and recalls a handicap system involving different star levels that was intended to make games against stronger opponents more competitive. He no longer remembers exactly which side received which setting, and no surviving rule sheet can settle the matter.

What Dan remembers much more clearly is that it did not turn him into a contender. He lost often enough that he now jokes about becoming the first person ever to be “BDA'd” out of the league.

Instead of disappearing, Dan kept watching, and that turned out to be fortunate for the historical record. Owners tend to remember championships and dramatic plays. Dan remembers the room.

He remembers cigarette smoke filling it. He remembers a Sharper Image-style air cleaner trying and mostly failing to deal with that smoke. He remembers coming home to broken controllers, and specifically remembers seeing Ron slam them onto the hardwood floor. He remembers the language people used and the atmosphere surrounding games whose scores have long since disappeared.

Those details are why calling Dan “the original crowd” is more than a joke. He was the witness.

WHAT 6105 SOUNDED LIKE

The room was rarely quiet. A DJ Clue mixtape, Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication, a Rolling Stones greatest-hits collection or The Beatles' 1 might be playing through the stereo while NBA Live ran on the television.

There was no carefully designed soundtrack. Hip-hop and rock simply coexisted with cigarette smoke, controller clicks and several people trying to talk at once.

Oliver contributed one of the room's most recognizable sound effects. Whenever one of his players threw down a dunk, he had a habit of yelling “TOMA!”

It became part of the local vocabulary. You did not necessarily have to be staring at the television to know something had just happened. If Oliver yelled “TOMA,” someone on the screen had probably been dunked on.

The room was small enough that nobody was truly outside the competition anyway. The two people holding controllers were playing, but everyone else was involved. Someone was criticizing a shot. Someone was offering advice that had not been requested. Dan might be trying to avoid the smoke. Oliver might be celebrating a dunk. Ron might be explaining why something that happened earlier proved a much larger point about who was actually better.

Everybody was in everybody else's business. That intimacy probably explains why so many little details survived.

WHAT “FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME” ACTUALLY MEANT

The phrase worked because it could cover behaviors that seemed contradictory.

Sometimes loving the game meant playing whenever possible. Other times it meant refusing to play. If somebody was exhausted and knew he was not going to give a scheduled game his full effort, the game might be postponed. Going through the motions simply to finish the schedule could be viewed as disrespectful to the competition. If you were going to play, you were expected to play seriously.

That too was for the love of the game.

There were nights when heading into the city to drink with Jeff would have been the obvious social plan, but BDA games still had to be played. Staying home won.

Mike racing back from Virginia because there were scheduled games waiting for him belonged to the same category. So did playing another game immediately after losing because the previous result did not sit right.

Then there were the controllers. Dan remembers broken ones and remembers Ron slamming them into the hardwood. Nobody is recommending that particular expression of competitive devotion for future generations, but the old explanation was sitting right there.

For the love of the game. Perhaps too much love.

THE TAPE BESIDE THE VCR

One of the best surviving stories from 6105 involves a VHS cassette that remained near the VCR.

It had originally contained the Sammo Hung kung-fu movie DON'T GIVE A DAMN. At some point, Ron recorded over it with footage from his BDA championship-winning Celtics series.

That Celtics team featured a rookie Kobe Bryant running point, and the surviving BDA history remembers Game 7 ending with Chris Mullin hitting the winning three.

The movie was sacrificed, but the championship had been preserved on tape.

Ron made good use of that fact. The cassette remained close to the VCR, ready to be played whenever he decided everyone needed another reminder about his championship. The tape became part game film, part evidence and part propaganda. Unlike most accomplishments from the era, Ron could actually point to footage.

Rookie Kobe running the point. Mullin hitting the shot. Championship secured.

Ron also did not shut up about it.

Eventually, somebody would get tired of hearing why that old title supposedly settled every current argument. That is where another phrase from 6105 became important: “SET THAT SHIT UP.”

It was the practical answer to excessive talking. If Ron's old championship proved he was better, there was a PlayStation sitting a few feet away. If someone believed a loss was a fluke, the solution was the same. If somebody claimed the matchup would turn out differently the next time, there was no need for a lengthy debate.

Set the game up and prove it.

According to Dan, the phrase was used constantly. It could be an invitation, a challenge or an argument-ending order. In modern terms, it was probably the closest thing early BDA had to a court of appeal.

There was only so much talking anyone could do about who was better when the system was right there.

That is also why the two expressions fit together so well. “SET THAT SHIT UP” explained how an argument got settled. “For the love of the game” explained why anyone cared enough to have the argument in the first place.

THE THINGS A BOX SCORE CANNOT SAVE

During a recent exchange with the League Office, Dan asked a fair question: “What good are these comments and fun facts if they are not shared in the daily newsletters.”

He was right.

A historical archive made only of champions, standings and statistics would miss most of what made the original BDA worth remembering.

A spreadsheet cannot tell you what 6105 smelled like. It cannot tell you that Dan was sitting near an air cleaner trying to survive everybody else's cigarettes. It cannot recreate Oliver yelling “TOMA!” after a dunk or tell you what was playing through the stereo that night.

It cannot explain how a Sammo Hung movie became a championship archive. It cannot show Mike driving back from Virginia with a backlog of video-game basketball on his mind. It cannot explain why somebody would turn down a night in the city because games still needed to be played, or why being too tired to give the competition a real effort could be considered a legitimate reason not to play.

And it certainly cannot explain the broken controllers.

Those details belong to the culture of the room rather than the statistical record. Dan happened to be sitting there long enough to remember many of them.

That is what makes the one-man crowd important. The league had competitors. Dan gave them a witness.

HOW A LIVING ROOM BECAME A LEAGUE

Looking at the current BDA makes the old version seem almost impossibly simple.

Today there are rosters, contracts, transactions, standings, injuries, playoff formats, betting markets, statistics, media archives and permanent stories. A single game can create a box score, a recap, an odds review, archived images and a website page.

At 6105, a game usually produced an argument. Sometimes that argument produced another game. That was essentially the production cycle.

Yet the modern operation grew out of those habits. The original BDA already had competition that people took too seriously, schedules people felt obligated to complete, championships that became permanent ammunition and an instinct that arguments should eventually be settled by playing rather than talking.

Mike represents the competitive part of that history. He was one of the original owners, an NBA Live-era champion and a man who still believes the historical record should reflect that he was the PFP.

Dan represents the memory around it. His own playing career did not last, but he remained close enough to preserve details that otherwise would have disappeared entirely.

Their birthdays arriving eleven days apart makes this a good time to remember both roles.

The BDA did not begin because somebody decided to create a league with a long-term plan. Nobody in the room was thinking about what the organization might look like in 2026. They played because the games were fun, because beating the other guy mattered and because once the competition became important to them, it became difficult to treat it casually again.

That is why Mike hurried home from Virginia. It is why someone might stay home instead of going out. It is why somebody exhausted might postpone a game rather than give it a half-hearted effort. It is why Ron kept that championship tape beside the VCR and why everybody eventually became tired of hearing about it.

It even helps explain the unfortunate controllers.

For the love of the game.

Nearly three decades later, the hardware has changed, NBA Live has become NBA 2K and the three-owner living room has grown into an eight-team league with considerably more paperwork.

The reason for playing is still recognizable.

Happy birthday to Dan Liu, the first man BDA'd out of the league and the undisputed original crowd.

Happy birthday to Mike Barthe, original owner, NBA Live-era champion and still, according to the most persistent authority on the subject, the PFP.

The old room is gone. The VHS is gone. Most of the scores are gone.

The game survived.

For the love of it.