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"&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\n\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;When Heat star Dwyane Wade got dunked on by Taj Gibson of the Bulls in Game 1 of the NBA Eastern Conference finals on Sunday, I instantly thought of Bobby Gross of the Blazers, feebly waving as Julius Erving dunked on him in the poster Scotch-taped to my bedroom door as a kid.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do they say about chocolate? A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips? Getting posterized was like that for Gross: A moment on the floor, a lifetime on my door.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I had a three-poster bed. Which is to say, a bed with a view of three posters. Doc was on the door's exterior, so that I saw him at night, when the door was open, guarding my dreams. This is more than can be said of Gross, who wasn't guarding anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alan Page was on the door's interior, so that I only ever saw him when the door was shut -- and it was only ever shut when it was slammed shut, which explains why I long associated the Vikings' defensive tackle with brooding. His was the image I saw when banished to my room while dinner went cold.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;That poster was a perfect vessel for unfocused adolescent anger, as Page was about to hammer a hapless -- and soon-to-be capless -- Browns quarterback, probably Dave Mays. It's impossible to say for certain, because the QB's number isn't entirely visible. Whoever he is, he's going to get sacked -- posterized and posterior-ized in one instant made eternal on the B-side of the bedroom door.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, next to the dresser, the third poster -- but the first one to go up: Reds second baseman Joe Morgan, whose left arm made a flapping motion at the plate. When replicated in the backyard, with your right hand inserted under your left armpit, the arm-flapping produced the satisfying sound of flatulence, which partly explains why Morgan was my first baseball hero, and first poster of any kind.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Considering that we spend a third of our lives in bed, and I spent a third of my life aged 14 or under, then I spent one-third of one-third of my life in my three-poster bed -- my Sealy Poster-pedic -- about to get dunked on by Dr. J, concussed by Alan Page or drilled by a Joe Morgan line drive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was this healthy? Suffice to say that I flinched a lot growing up, and still do: When Gibson dunked on Wade the other night, my first instinct was to duck and then step out of the photographer's frame, even though I was on my couch.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's probably for the best that the Golden Age of Sports Posters -- the late '70s and early '80s -- is long past, though you can still find, fairly easily, those classic staples of Reagan-era bedroom d&amp;eacute;cor.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who thought it was a good idea to photograph Moses Malone parting an Orange Sea of basketballs while holding a staff shaped like a swoosh? Why Nike did, of course, though that doesn't explain the burlap bathrobe Moses wore over the kind of generic basketball uniform -- numberless, logoless, replete with piped jogging shorts -- that Shaq still wears in Icy Hot commercials.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;And yet half my friends had that poster, or the Nike poster of Darrell Griffith, Dr. Dunkenstein, carrying half a steaming basketball in either hand, while wearing a white coat, so that he appears less to be conducting a science experiment than serving soup at the Carnegie Deli. Twenty-five years ago that poster screamed basketball. Today it screams, \"Who ordered the Matzoh Ball?\"&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The one Nike poster that looks as good today as it did three decades ago is The Iceman's: George Gervin -- on a throne of ice, on what appears to be Krypton -- crossing his legs in a silver sweatsuit, worn as a precaution against perspiring too profusely on a frozen throne on a frozen planet.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Like Nora Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, The Iceman's still big -- it's the posters that got small. Like Joe Morgan, the posters got nibbled at the corners -- the corners where we taped or tacked them up (and then re-taped and re-tacked them, each time the corners eroding a little more).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, at 14 or so, I moved into a room with my brother Tom, who already had his own posters up, most prominently the famous Farrah Fawcett. The best-selling poster of all-time, it came with most houses in the 1970s, along with the wall-to-wall shag and the avocado fridge. As a sign of my newfound sophistication, I put up a poster of my own, adorning a wall with Earth, Wind &amp; Fire, a dozen men in dashikis. It's at least possible that it was the only EWF poster on our block of Amundsens, Caspersons and Petersens.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As for Dr. J, Alan Page and Joe Morgan: My mom would have rolled them up while I was at school and kicked them to the curb, consigning them to the garbage man and what Trotsky called \"the ash heap of history.\"&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Still, every once in a while, when some poor schlub like Wade gets posterized on TV, I picture my old bedroom and think: If those walls could talk.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But of course they did, and still do.&lt;/p&gt;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.si.com/more-sports/2011/05/18/posterized>