PROLOGUE
A FOUR-DOLLAR TICKET
DURING THE SUMMER of 1973, with Watergate unfolding and Willie Mays redefining the phrase “stick a fork in him,” my father was wavering between a new motorcyle and a single season ticket for the Celtics. The IRS had just given him a significant income tax refund of either $200 (the figure Dad remembers) or $600 (the figure my mother remembers). They both agree on one thing: Mom threatened to leave him if he bought the motorcycle.
We were renting a modest apartment in Marlborough, Massachusetts, just twenty-five minutes from Boston, with my father putting himself through Suffolk Law School, teaching at an all-girls boarding school, and bartending at night. Although the tax refund would have paid some bills, for the first time my father wanted something for himself. His life sucked. He wanted the motorcycle. When Mom shot that idea down, he called the Celtics and learned that, for four dollars per game, he could purchase a ticket right behind the visitors’ bench. Nowadays, you can’t purchase four boxing pay-per-views or a new iPod for less than $150. Back then, that money secured a seat five rows behind the visitors’ bench at the Boston Garden, close enough to see the growing bald splotch on Kareem’s head.1
My father pulled the trigger and broke the news to my mother that night. The conversation probably went something like this:
DAD: Good news, honey. I bought a season ticket for the Celtics. I’ll be spending thirty-five nights a year inside the Garden by myself,2 not including playoff games, so you’ll have to stay home with Billy alone on those nights because we don’t have enough money to get a babysitter. Also, I used up nearly the entire income tax refund. But I couldn’t resist—I think they can win the title this year!
MOM (after a long silence): Are you serious?
DAD: Um … I guess I could take Billy to some of the games. He could sit on my lap. What do you think?
MOM: I think we got married too young.
If she did say that, she was right; my parents separated five years later. In retrospect, maybe the motorcycle would have sped things up. But that’s how close I came to missing out on a childhood spent inside the Garden.3 If Mom had agreed to the motorcycle, maybe Dad would have wiped out and become the next Gary Busey. Maybe we would have missed five championship seasons. Maybe I wouldn’t have cared about basketball as much. Maybe you wouldn’t be kicking yourself for spending $30 on this book right now. Life is strange.
We bought into Celtic Pride at the perfect time: they were coming off 68 wins and an unlucky break late in the ’73 playoffs, when John Havlicek separated his shooting shoulder running through a screen and Boston fell to an inferior Knicks team. Despite the lost championship and a wildly popular Bruins squad that shared the Garden, the Celts had gained local momentum because of Havlicek and reigning MVP Dave Cowens, a fiery redhead who clicked with fans in a way Bill Russell never did. After struggling to fill the building during Russell’s astonishing run (eleven titles in thirteen years from 1957 to 1969), the Celtics were suddenly flourishing in a notoriously racist city. Was it happening because their best two players were white? Was it happening because of the burgeoning number of baby boomers like my father, the ones who fell in love with hoops because of the unselfishness of Auerbach’s Celtics and Holzman’s Knicks, who grew up watching Chamberlain and Russell battle like two gigantic dinosaurs on Sundays, who were enthralled by UCLA’s win streak and Maravich’s wizardry at LSU? Or was Cowens simply more likable and fan-friendly than the enigmatic Russell?
The answer? All of the above.4 Maybe the city would have accepted an African American sports hero in the fifties and sixties—eventually it accepted many of them—but never someone as complex and stubborn as Russell. The man was moody and sullen to reporters, distant and unfriendly to fans, shockingly outspoken about racial issues, defiant about his color and plight. Russell cared only about being a superior teammate and a proud black man, never considering himself an entertainer or an ambassador of the game. If anything, he shunned both of those roles: He wanted to play basketball, to win, to be respected as a player and person … and to be left alone. Even when Auerbach named him the first black professional coach in 1966, Russell didn’t care about the significance of the promotion, just that there was no better person for the job. Only years later would fans appreciate a courageous sports figure who advanced the cause of African Americans more than any athlete other than Muhammad Ali. Only years later would we fully empathize with the anguish and confusion of such a transcendent player, someone who was cheered as a basketball star and discriminated against as a human being. Only years later would Russell’s wary, hardened demeanor fully make sense.
Unlike Russell, Cowens didn’t have any baggage. There was nothing to figure out, no enigma to be solved. The big redhead dove for every loose ball, sprinted down the court on fast breaks, crashed the offensive boards and milked every possible inch of his talents. He hollered at officials with a booming voice that bellowed to the top rows of the Garden. He punctuated rebounds by grunting loudly and kicking his feet in different directions, which would have been fine except this was the Tight Shorts Era, so everyone constantly worried about his nuts careening out of his shorts like two superballs. When he stomped to midcourt to jump center with the towering Abdul-Jabbar, his nemesis and the league’s best player at the time, Cowens always looked like a welterweight preparing to trade punches with a heavyweight. There was something fundamentally unfair about the matchup, like our real center had called in sick. Then the game started and we remembered that it wasn’t a mismatch. Cowens lured Kareem away from the basket by draining 18-footers, robbing Milwaukee of its best shot blocker and rebounder. Defensively, Cowens made up for an eight-inch height difference by wearing Kareem down and making him work for every field goal attempt. Over and over again, we’d watch the same bumpy dance between them: Jabbar slinking toward his preferred spot on the low post, a wild-eyed Cowens slamming his chest against Kareem’s back and dramatically refusing to yield another inch, finally digging in like a Battle of the Network Stars competitor in the last stages of a tug-of-war. Maybe they didn’t make sense as rivals on paper, but they brought out the best in each other like Frazier and Ali—Cowens relishing the chance to battle the game’s dominant center, Kareem unable to coast because Cowens simply wouldn’t allow it—and the ’74 Finals ended up being their Thrilla in Manila. The Celtics prevailed in seven games, with the big redhead notching 28 points and 14 rebounds in the clincher. So much for the mismatch.5
The ultimate Cowens moment happened when Mike Newlin flopped for a charge call against him. You didn’t do these things to Cowens; nobody valued the sanctity of the game more than he did.6 He berated the referee under the basket, didn’t like the guy’s response, screamed some more, then whirled around and spotted Newlin dribbling upcourt. Sufficiently enraged, he charged Newlin from behind at a 45-degree angle, lowered his shoulder like a football safety and sent poor Newlin sprawling into the press table at midcourt. Watching it live (and I happened to be there), it was a relatively terrifying experience, like being ten feet away in Pamplona as a pissed-off bull targets an unsuspecting pedestrian. And that wasn’t even the best part. While pieces of Newlin were still rolling around the parquet floor like a shattered piggy bank, Cowens turned to the same referee and screamed, “Now that’s a f*cking foul!” So yeah, Cowens was white and Russell was black. But Cowens would have been worth four bucks a game if he were purple. Same for Havlicek. Because of them, my father stumbled into a Celtics season ticket and never looked back.
Our first season coincided with the Celtics winning their first title of the post-Russell era and the suddenly promising Simmons era. My memories don’t kick in until the following year, when we moved to Chestnut Hill (fifteen minutes from the Garden) and Dad started bringing me more regularly. The people in our section knew me as a miniature sports encyclopedia, the floppy-haired kid who chewed his nails and whose life revolved around the Boston teams. Before games, the Garden’s ushers allowed me to stand behind our basket on the edge of the court, where I’d chase down air balls and toss them back to my heroes. I can still remember standing there, chewing my nails and praying for an air ball or deflected jump shot to come bouncing toward me, just so I could grab it and toss the ball back to a Celtic. When I say this was thrilling for a little kid … I mean, you have no idea. This was like going to Disneyland forty times a year and cutting the line for every ride. I eventually built up enough courage to wander over to Boston’s bench7 and make small talk with the amused coaches, Tommy Heinsohn and John Killilea, leading to a moment before a Buffalo playoff game when a Herald American photographer snapped a picture of me peering up at an injured John Havlicek (wearing a baby blue leisure suit and leaning on crutches), then splashed the photo across the front page of its sports section the following day.8 By the time I turned six, you can guess what happened: I considered myself a member of the Boston Celtics. That spawned my racial identity crisis in the first grade (fully described in my Red Sox book) when I gave myself the Muslim name “Jabaal Abdul-Simmons.” I didn’t know any better. I wanted to play for the Celtics and most NBA players were black. Besides, I had more in common with them—my favorite sport was black, my favorite player (Charlie Scott) was black, my favorite comedians (Flip Wilson, Jimmie Walker, and Redd Foxx) were black, most of my favorite TV shows (Sanford and Son, The Jefferson, Good Times, The Mod Squad) starred blacks, and I even made my mother take me to Roxbury in 1975 to see Keith Wilkes’ one and only movie, Cornbread, Earl and Me.9 It pissed me off that I was white. So I made my first-grade teacher call me “Jabaal,” wrote “Jabaal” on my homework and tests, colored my own face in drawings, and that was that.
Meanwhile, the ’76 Celts were hanging on for one last championship run. Silas and Havlicek had seen better days. A washed-up Don Nelson—that’s right, the same guy who later coached Milwaukee and Dallas—was playing with a protruding potbelly that made him look like the beleagured dad in about ten different seventies sitcoms. Every key player (including Cowens and Jo Jo White, the best guys on the team) had already peaked statistically, only we didn’t have young legs off the bench because Auerbach had uncharacteristically butchered a few draft picks. Golden State looked like the prohibitive favorite until the defending champs self-destructed in Game 7 of the Western Finals under bizarre circumstances: in the first few minutes, Phoenix’s Ricky Sobers jumped Warriors star Rick Barry and landed a few punches before teammates pulled him off.10 At halftime, Barry (a notorious prick) watched the tape and realized his own teammates hadn’t leaped in to save him. Fuming, he spitefully refused to shoot for most of the second half—no lie, he refused to shoot—playing hot potato anytime someone passed him the ball. And that’s how a 42–40 Suns team advanced to the Finals, upsetting the defending champs on their home floor as their best player played an elaborate game of “eff you” with his teammates.
So that was one break for the Celtics. The other one happened organically: this was the final year before the ABA/NBA merger, the league’s weakest season for talent since the Mikan era. For most of the decade, the ABA had been overpaying talented prospects from high school and college, including Julius Erving, Maurice Lucas, Moses Malone, David Thompson, and George Gervin, all breathtaking athletes who would have pushed the rigid NBA in a more stimulating direction. Each league offered what the other was lacking: a regimented, physical style highlighted by the selflessness of its players (the NBA) versus a freewheeling, unpredictable style that celebrated individual expression (the ABA). When the leagues finally merged, three years of disjointed basketball followed—team-first guys awkwardly blending their talents with me-first guys—until everyone worked out the kinks,11 the league added a three-point line, Bird and Magic arrived, and the game landed in a better place. The ’76 Celtics were too old and slow to make it after the merger, but we didn’t realize that yet. We also didn’t realize that white guys like Nelson had a better chance of eating the shot clock, digesting it, and crapping it out than guarding the likes of Erving and Thompson. The game was changing, only nobody could see it yet.
After Boston and Phoenix split the first four games of the Finals, Game 5 started at nine o’clock to accommodate the wishes of CBS, a network that didn’t totally care about the league and had no problem tape-delaying playoff games or moving them to wacky times. Know what happens when you start that late for a crowd of loony Boston fans during a time when anyone could afford a ticket to the NBA Finals? You end up with the rowdiest, craziest, drunkest Boston crowd of all time. With four full hours to get plastered before the game and another three during the game itself, not only will the collective blood alcohol level of the crowd never be topped, neither will the game. I’d tell you more, but I snoozed through the fourth quarter, Phoenix’s remarkable comeback, and the first two overtimes, sprawled across my father and the gracious people on either side of him.12 With seven seconds remaining in double OT, I awakened with the Celts trailing by one and everyone standing for the final play. (In fact, that’s why I woke up, because everyone in our section was standing.) Almost on cue, I watched Havlicek haul in the inbounds pass, careen toward the basket (dribbling with his left hand on a bad wheel, no less), then somehow brick home a running banker off the wrong foot just before time expired, leading to the scariest moment of my young life: thousands of delirious fans charging the court, with many of them leapfrogging people in my section to get there. It was like a prison riot, only a benevolent one. And I was half asleep when it happened.
You know the rest: the officials ruled that one second remained, referee Richie Powers got attacked by a drunken fan, the Suns called an illegal time-out to get the ball at midcourt, Jo Jo drained the technical free throw, Gar Heard made the improbable turnaround to force a third OT (I remember thinking it was a 50-footer at the time), then the Celtics narrowly escaped because of the late-game heroics of Jo Jo and an unassuming bench player named Glenn McDonald. Even though I slept through some of the best parts, Jabaal Abdul-Simmons became the coolest kid in school the following day—not just because I attended the most famous basketball game ever played, but because my parents allowed me to stay awake until one-thirty to see it.13
We clinched the franchise’s thirteenth championship in Phoenix two days later. Within two years we devolved into one of the league’s most hapless teams, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for the Simmons family: not only could Dad (barely) afford a second ticket by then, but thanks to a fleeing base of paying customers, they upgraded our seat location to midcourt, right alongside the Nancy Parish Memorial Tunnel (I’ll explain later), where players, coaches, and referees entered and exited the arena.14 My seat happened to be two rows in front of Dad’s seat—we couldn’t get two together unless we moved away from the tunnel, which we didn’t want to do—but I could hop under the railing, stand in the tunnel, and chat with him during time-outs. Even better, a bizarre collection of injured players, old-timers, and media personalities gathered in the tunnel and watched a quarter or two, leading to one of my favorite childhood memories: a washed-up Marvin “Bad News” Barnes standing eighteen inches away from me, milking some bogus injury, wearing a full-length mink coat and leaning against my railing. Every few minutes, after a good Celtics play, he’d nod at me with one of those “What it is, Tiny White Dude!” smiles on his face. And since I wasn’t over my racial identity issues yet, I spent the entire time marveling at his coat and hoping he’d legally adopt me. Didn’t happen. Although we did have this exchange:
ME (finally mustering up the courage after three quarters): Mr. Barnes, when are you coming back?
BAD NEWS (gregarious): Wrgrghjsdhshs nmdmakalkm nbbd jsjajajp ldksaksjhj, lil’ man!15
The News only played thirty-eight games for us, but that exchange personified everything. Celtic Pride had been tossed out the window in less than twenty-four months. Nelson and Hondo retired. Silas and Jo Jo were dumped under bitter circumstances. A miserable Cowens lost some of the fire that made him special. Heinsohn was canned so that he could realize his potential as the biggest homer in the history of sports announcing.16 Worst of all, Auerbach nearly jumped to the Knicks after owner John Y. Brown recklessly traded three first-rounders for Bob McAdoo without telling Red first. In the old days, head cases like Barnes and McAdoo never would have sniffed the Celtics. We had become just another struggling team in a struggling league, a desperate franchise making desperate moves and searching for an identity. Then, just as quickly, everything changed. Auerbach won the power struggle with John Y.,17 drafted Larry Bird as a junior eligible in 1978, and had the foresight to wait a year for Bird to graduate from Indiana State.18 Even as the franchise was going to hell, we had a potential savior on the horizon. Following an acrimonious contract dispute, Bird signed for a then-record five-year $3.25 million deal, strolled into camp, and transformed a 29-win laughingstock into a 60-win juggernaut within a few weeks. As far as reclamation projects go, it happened even more quickly than Swayze cleaning up the Double Deuce (and we didn’t even have to hire Sam Elliott). We mattered again. Larry Legend would capture three championships and three MVP awards, help save the NBA and become the most popular Boston athlete ever. During that same time, I hit puberty, graduated from high school and college, and started living in Boston on my own. By the time Bird’s career ended in 1992, my life was just beginning.
Now …
Consider the odds. From the time I could walk, my love for playing and following sports dwarfed everything else. I developed a special connection with basketball because my father bought a single season ticket only after my mother vetoed his motorcycle career. After catching two titles in our first three years, a calamitous chain of events crippled the franchise and frightened off so many fans that my dad and I leapfrogged into the best possible seats in the best basketball arena in the world, and as if that weren’t enough, our seats got upgraded right before one of the five greatest players ever joined the team. This wasn’t just a lucky chain of events; this was like winning the lottery three different times, or better yet, like Justin Timberlake banging Britney Spears, Jessica Biel, Scarlett Johansson, and Cameron Diaz in their primes, only if he had added Lindsay Lohan, Angelina Jolie, and Katie Holmes19 for good measure. I spent my formative years studying the game of basketball with Professor Bird and relishing every subtle nuance that went with it. There was something contagious about watching someone constantly look for the extra pass; by osmosis, his teammates became just as unselfish, even potential black holes like McHale and Parish. It was like watching a group of relatively humorless guys spend time with an inordinately funny guy; invariably the inordinately funny guy raises everyone else’s comedy IQ.20 When you watched Bird long enough, you started to see the angles he was seeing; instead of reacting to what had just happened, you reacted to the play as it was happening. There’s McHale cutting to the basket, I see him, get him the ball, there it is … Layup! Bird gave us a collective sixth sense, a more sophisticated way of appreciating the sport. It was a gift. That’s what it was.
And that’s why you’re reading this book. I grew up watching basketball played the right way. Guys looking for the open man. Guys making the extra pass. Guys giving their best and coming through in big moments. By the time Bird retired, I had earned my Ph.D. in hoops. When your favorite team lands a transcendent player in your formative years—Magic on the Lakers, M.J. on the Bulls, Elway on the Broncos, Gretzky on the Oilers, or whomever—it really is like winning the lottery. Even twenty years later, I can rattle off classic Bird moments like I’m rattling off moments from my own life. Like the time he sprang for 60 as Atlanta’s scrubs exchanged high fives on their bench,21 or the time he dropped 42 on Dr. J in less than three quarters, frustrating Doc to the point that they started strangling each other at midcourt.22 I have a hundred of them. Bird’s greatest moments also became some of mine. Funny how sports work that way. I find myself missing those buzzworthy Bird moments more and more, the ones where everyone in the Garden collectively realized at the same time, “Uh-oh, something magical could happen here.” Suddenly there would be a steady murmur in the arena that resembled the electricity right before a rock concert or a championship fight.23 As soon as you felt the buzz, you knew something special was in the works. You probably think I’m a raving lunatic, but I’m telling you, anyone who attended those games knows exactly what I’m trying to describe. You could feel it in the air: Larry’s taking over.
For nearly all of his first two seasons (’80 and ’81), there was a barely perceptible distance between Bird and Boston fans, a wall erected from his end that we couldn’t break through. Painfully shy with the press, noticeably unsettled by prolonged ovations, Bird carried himself like a savant of sorts, someone blessed with prodigious gifts for basketball and little else. This was a man who didn’t mind that one of his nicknames was “the Hick from French Lick.” We assumed that he was dumb, that he couldn’t express himself, that he didn’t really care about the fans, that he just wanted to be left alone. This changed near the end of Game 7 of the Eastern Finals, the final act of a remarkable comeback trilogy against Philly. Unequivocally and unquestionably, it’s the greatest playoff series ever played: two 60-win teams and heated rivals, loaded rosters on both sides,24 two of the greatest forwards ever in starring roles, four games decided on the final play, the Celtics winning three straight elimination games by a total of four points. Everything peaked in Game 7, a fiercely contested battle in which the referees tucked away their whistles and allowed things to morph into an improbable cross between basketball and rugby. You know the old saying “There’s no love lost between these two teams”? That was Game 7. If you drove to the basket for a layup or dunk, you were getting decked like a wide receiver going over the middle. If you snuck behind a big guy to potentially swipe his rebound, you were taking an elbow in the chops. If you recklessly dribbled into traffic hoping for a bailout call, better luck next time. If you crossed the line and went too far, the other players took care of you. This was a man’s game. You’d never see something like it today. Ever.
Meanwhile, the fans weren’t even fans anymore, more like Romans cheering for gladiators in the Colosseum. Leading by one in the final minute, Philly’s Dawkins plowed toward the basket, got leveled by Parish and McHale, and whipped an ugly shot off the backboard as he crashed to the floor. Bird hauled down the rebound in traffic, dribbled out of an abyss of bodies (including three strewn on the floor, almost like the final scene of Rollerball), and pushed the ball down the court, ultimately stopping on a dime and banking a 15-footer that pretty much collapsed the roof. Philly called time as Larry pranced down the floor—arms still raised, soaking in the cheers—before finally unleashing an exaggerated, sweeping fist pump. Bird never acknowledged the crowd; this was the first hint of emotion from him. He finally threw us a bone. We went absolutely ballistic and roared through the entire time-out, drowning out the organ music and cheering ourselves when the horn signaled the players to return to the floor.25 When the Celtics prevailed on a botched alley-oop and everyone charged the floor, Bird remained there for a few seconds at mid-court, jumping up and down like a schoolgirl, holding his head in disbelief as fans swarmed him. Of all the great victories from the Bird era, that’s the only nontitle time where Boston fans loitered outside the Garden for hours afterward, honking horns, exchanging high fives and hugs, chanting “Phil-lee sucks!” and turning Causeway into Bourbon Street. We wanted Bird to be the next Russell, the next Orr, the next Havlicek. For the first time, it looked like he might get there.
Nothing that followed was a surprise: Bird’s first championship in ’81; his first MVP award in ’84; his memorable butt-kicking of Bernard and the Knicks in Game 7 of the Eastern Semifinals; and then a grueling victory over the despicable Lakers in the ’84 Finals that featured the definitive Larry performance, Game 5, when it was 96 degrees outside and 296 degrees inside a Garden that didn’t have air-conditioning. Fans were passing out in the stands. Well-dressed housewives were wiping sweaty makeup off their brows.26 Fat Irish guys had armpit stains swelling on their green Celtics T-shirts. Even the dehydrated Lakers team couldn’t wait to get back to California; Kareem and Worthy were sucking from oxygen masks during time-outs. Of course, Bird absolutely loved the ruthless conditions, ending up with 34 points and 17 rebounds as his overheated minions rooted him on. As Bird was finishing them off in the fourth, the Lakers called time and M. L. Carr started fanning Bird with a towel … and Larry just shoved him away, insulted. Like M.L. was ruining the moment for him. Imagine breaking down in Death Valley on a 110-degree day, only if you were trapped inside your car with seventeen other people. That’s how hot the Garden was that night, only we didn’t care. All we knew was that Bird was God, the Lakers were wilting like pussies, and we were part of the whole thing. We were sweating, too.
Those were the games when Bird and the Garden worked like Lennon and McCartney together. Can you imagine him playing in the TD Bank-north Garden and looking mildly appalled during a time-out as dance music blared and overcaffeinated flunkies fired T-shirts into the crowd with cannons? Me neither. When the Bird era crested in 1986, it was the ultimate marriage of the right crowd and the right team: a 67-win machine that finished 50–1 at home (including playoffs). Remember the scene in Hoosiers right after Jimmy Chitwood made the “I play, Coach stays” speech and joined the team, when they had that inspiring “this team’s coming together” montage? That’s what every home game felt like. The season ended with Bird walking off the floor in Game 6 of the Finals, fresh off demolishing the Rockets with a triple double, his jersey drenched with sweat and the crowd screaming in delight. It was perfect. Everything about that season was perfect. And to think my dad could have bought that stupid motorcycle.
Only one question remained: how many more memorable years did Bird have in him? During his apex in ’86 and ’87, he increased his trash-talking (nobody was better)27 and started fooling around during games (including one time in Portland when he decided to shoot everything left-handed), like he was bored and kept upping the stakes to challenge himself. There was the famous story of the first three-point shootout, when he walked into the locker room and told everyone they were playing for second. Or the time he told Seattle’s Xavier McDaniel exactly where he was shooting a game-winning shot, then lived up to the promise by nailing a jumper right in X-Man’s mug. You could fill an entire documentary with those anecdotes; that’s what NBA Entertainment eventually did by producing Larry Bird: A Basketball Legend.28 As the game-winners and stories kept piling up, number 33 moved onto Boston’s Mount Rushmore with Orr, Williams, and Russell. We thought he could do anything. We thought he was a superhero. When they announced the starting lineups before games, Bird came last and his introduction was always drowned out by an unwritten rule that all Celtics fans screamed at the top of their lungs as soon as we heard the words, “And at the other forward, from Indiana Sta …” We didn’t cheer him as much as we revered him.
When Lenny Bias overdosed two days after the 1986 draft, Bird lost the young teammate who would have extended his career, assumed some of the scoring load and reduced his minutes. The man’s body betrayed him in his waning years, worn down by too many charges taken, too many hard fouls, and too many reckless dives for loose balls. Hobbled by faulty heels and a ravaged back, stymied by a wave of athletic black forwards that were slowly making the Kelly Tripuckas and Kiki Vandeweghes obsolete29—guys Bird always feasted on in the past, by the way—poor Bird could barely drag his crippled body up and down the court. He was doing it all on memory and adrenaline. During his final two seasons (’91 and ’92), he’d miss three or four weeks of the schedule, spend nights in the hospital in traction to rest his back, then return with a cumbersome back brace like nothing happened.30 Invariably, he’d add another game to his ESPN Classic resume. Like the famous Game 5 against Indiana in ’91, when he banged his head against the floor, returned Willis Reed-style, then carried the Celts past the Pacers. Or the 49-point outburst against the Blazers on national TV, when the crowd chanted, “Lar-ree! Lar-ree!” before he obliged with a game-tying three in regulation. This was like watching Bird karaoke. Everything crested during a home playoff game against the ’91 Pistons, when a struggling Bird couldn’t get anything going, then an actual bird flew out of the rafters and halted play by parking itself defiantly at midcourt. The crowd recognized the irony and immediately starting chanting, “Lar-ree! Lar-ree! Lar-ree!” For the only time in the entire series, our crippled hero came alive. He started hitting jumpers, a bunch of them, and the Celtics pulled away for a crucial victory. As we joyously filed out of the Garden, my father asked me, “Did that really just happen?”
It did. I think.
When Bird finally retired in ’92, it happened for the right reasons: his body couldn’t handle an NBA schedule anymore. Unlike Magic, he never came back or lowered himself to an Old-Timers Game.31 Unlike Jordan, he never would have toiled away on a mediocre team past his prime. He walked away and stayed away. The Celtics never recovered. Actually, that’s an understatement. Bias had gotten the ball rolling, but when Bird retired, the Celtics passed away and became something else. Then Reggie Lewis dropped dead, and McHale retired, and the Garden got knocked down, and M. L. Carr screwed things up, and we lost the Duncan lottery, and Rick Pitino screwed things up, and Chris Wallace screwed things up, and Danny Ainge screwed things up, and somewhere during that torturous stretch the Celtics stopped being the Celtics. Three different times after Bird hung up his Converse Weapons, my father nearly gave up his suddenly expensive seats and couldn’t do it. After the 2007 Celtics shamefully tanked their way to 61 losses and still couldn’t land Kevin Durant or Greg Oden, the team sent him a 2007–8 bill for midcourt seats priced at $175 per ticket. Yup, the same price for a single season ticket in 1974 couldn’t cover half of one game in 2008. Nobody would have blamed Pops for cutting ties after such a miserable season; there was one week where he nearly pulled the trigger. In the end, he couldn’t walk away. Had he given up those tickets and watched the Celtics turn things around from afar, he never would have forgiven himself. So Dad renewed and hoped for the fifteenth straight spring that one lucky break would launch us back to prominence, whether it was a trade, a draft pick or Brian Scalabrine developing superhuman powers after being exposed to a nuclear reactor. He hoped for another game like the famous Bird-Dominique duel,32 when Larry had come through enough times that you could literally feel it coming before it happened. After that masterpiece of a sporting event—really, it was a life experience—we were too wired to head right home, so we found an ice cream shop called Bailey’s in Wellesley and ordered a couple of hot fudge sundaes. I don’t think we said anything for twenty solid minutes. We just kept eating ice cream and shaking our heads. What could you say? How could you put something like that into words? We were speechless. We were drained. We were lucky.
You can’t walk away from the potential of more Bailey’s moments, even if the NBA stacks heavy odds against such bliss happening for more than three or four franchises at the same time. Once the league expanded to thirty teams, luck became a greater factor than ever before. You need luck in the lottery, luck with young players, luck with trades, luck with everything. Phoenix landed Amar’e Stoudemire only because eight other teams passed on him. Portland landed Greg Oden when they had 5.3 percent odds of getting the first pick. Dallas landed Dirk Nowitzki because Milwaukee thought it would be a good idea to trade his rights for Robert Traylor. New Orleans landed Chris Paul only because three teams stupidly passed on him. Shit, even Auerbach landed Bird because of luck. Five teams could have drafted him before Boston and all five passed. That’s the NBA. You need to be smart and lucky. When Lewis passed away seven summers after Bias’ tragic death, the Celtics stopped being lucky and definitely stopped being smart. That didn’t stop my father from steadfastly renewing those tickets every summer with his fingers crossed, hoping things would somehow revert to the way they were.
As strange as this sounds, it’s more painful to live the high life as a basketball fan and lose it than to never live that high life at all. Imagine a basketball team as an airplane—if you never flew first class, you wouldn’t know what you were missing every time you crammed yourself into coach. But what if you spent a few years traveling first class, reclining your seat all the way, relishing the leg room, sipping complimentary high-end drinks, eating steak and warm chocolate chip cookies, sitting near celebrities and trophy wives and feeling like a prince? Head back to coach after that and you’re thinking, “Wow, this sucks!” the entire time. Well, that’s what an income tax refund bought my father in 1973: two remarkable decades of basketball, a boatload of happy memories, forty or fifty potentially splendid nights a year, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, a chance to follow the entire career of one of the greatest players ever … and after everything slowed down and the Celtics downgraded from first to coach, the hope against hope that it was a temporary setback and we might get upgraded again. Even if it meant paying first-class prices for coach seats every year, my father didn’t care. He was ready to get invited to the front of the plane again. He would always be ready.
The decision was made: Every spring, he would keep paying that bill.
No matter what.
For anyone who didn’t see Bird in his prime—or Magic, or Jordan, or the ’70 Knicks, or the ’01 Lakers, or any other magical player or team that resonated with fans—it’s difficult to comprehend the meaning of those previous three paragraphs unless you lived through them. Bird’s impact eroded over time, something that inevitably happens to every great athlete once he or she retires.33 Stories and anecdotes endure, as do YouTube clips and ESPN Classic cameos, but collectively, it’s never enough. In the spring of 2007, I stumbled across NBA TV’s replay of Havlicek’s farewell game, which was showing on a Sunday morning when the only people watching were probably me and the Havliceks. Two things stood out about that game. First, the opening tip-off was delayed for eight and a half minutes because Celtics fans wouldn’t stop cheering after Hondo was introduced. Let’s see that happen in 2009 with … anyone.34 And second, according to CBS’ ancient-looking halftime graphics, Havlicek’s statistical resume on April 9, 1978, looked like this:
Most games played (1,269)
Most playoff games played (172)
Only player to score 1,000 points in sixteen straight seasons
Third in career scoring (26,895 points)
Second in career minutes played (46,407)
Seeing those numbers three decades later, my gast was flabbered. Yeah, I remembered Hondo carrying us to the ’76 championship, and I remembered that he was one of the best players of his time, a physical freak of nature, someone who routinely played 42 to 44 minutes a night without tiring. Throughout his final season, I recall opposing teams showering him with gifts at every stop.35 But third in scoring, second in minutes, and first in games played? John Havlicek? I did some digging and found that Hondo made thirteen straight All-Star teams, four All-NBA first teams, and seven All-NBA second teams; he played for eight title teams and won the 1974 Finals MVP; and he earned one of 11 spots on the NBA’s thirty-fifth-anniversary team in 1980. To this day, he ranks tenth in points, eighth in minutes and seventh in playoff points. By any measurement, he remains one of the twenty best players ever. But if you asked a hundred die-hard NBA fans under thirty to name their top twenty, how many would name Havlicek? Three? Five? Shit, how many of them could even spell “Havlicek”?
Which begs the question: does greatness have a shelf life?
A few weeks after that Havlicek telecast, young LeBron James dropped 48 points on Detroit to singlehandedly save the Cavs-Pistons series (as well as the ’07 playoffs, which were on life support). Clearly, something monumental had happened: not only did Marv Albert bless the performance as one of the greatest in playoff history, but it felt like a tipping point for LeBron’s career, the night he tapped into his considerable gifts and lifted himself to another level. When talking heads, columnists, bloggers, and fans raced to put the night into perspective, for once the hyperbole seemed justified. More than a few people played the “MJ was great, but he never had a game like that” card, as if Jordan’s remarkable career had to be demeaned for everyone to fully respect what LeBron had accomplished. In my ESPN.com column the following day, I wrote that Jordan never physically overpowered an opponent the way LeBron ram-shackled the Pistons, comparing it to Bo Jackson wreaking havoc in his prime.
By the weekend, after everyone had calmed down about the “48 Special,” I found myself recalling some of Jordan’s killer moments—how he coldly destroyed Drexler in the ’92 Finals, how he prevailed against the rugby tactics of Riley’s Knicks, how he stole Game 7 against the ’98 Pacers by repeatedly getting to the line, how he ended his Chicago career with the incredible layup-steal-jumper sequence in Utah—and regretting that, like nearly everyone else, I had fallen into the “let’s degrade the old guy to coronate the new guy” trap. I had always sworn never to do that. One of my favorite books is Wait Till Next Year, in which a sports columnist (Mike Lupica) and a Hollywood screenwriter (William Goldman) trade chapters about a particularly crazy year in New York sports. Writing from the fan’s perspective, Goldman submitted an impassioned defense of Wilt Chamberlain’s legacy called “To the Death,” one of my favorite pieces and a major influence on this book. According to Goldman, great athletes fade from memory not because they’re surpassed by better ones but because we forget about them or our memories are tainted by things that have nothing to do with their career (like Bill Russell being a lousy announcer or O.J. being a lousy ex-husband). Here’s the killer excerpt: “The greatest struggle an athlete undergoes is the battle for our memories. It’s gradual. It begins before you’re aware that it’s begun, and it ends with a terrible fall from grace. It really is a battle to the death.”
This piece was published in 1988, back when Bird and Magic were at the height of their superpowers and Jordan was nearing the same breakthrough that LeBron eventually enjoyed in Detroit. Already saddened that we would be poking holes in them someday, Goldman predicted, “Bird and Magic’s time is coming. It’s easy being fans of theirs now. Just wait. Give it a decade.” Then he wrote an entire mock paragraph of fans picking apart their games in the year 2000, complaining that Magic couldn’t guard anyone and Bird was too slow. He ended with this mock quote: “Sure [Bird] was good, and so was Magic—but they couldn’t play today.” Maybe it hasn’t happened yet because of the uniqueness of their games, the symmetry of their careers, and the whole “Bird and Magic saved the NBA” myth (we’ll get there). But with Jordan? It’s already happening. As recently as 1998, we collectively agreed Jordan was the greatest player we would ever see. That didn’t stop us from quickly trying to replace him with Grant Hill (didn’t take), Kobe Bryant (didn’t take), LeBron James (taking), and Kobe again (took for a little while until the ’08 Finals, then stopped taking). Everyone’s willingness to dump Jordan for LeBron in 2007 was genuinely perplexing. Yeah, the “48 Special” was a magnificent sporting event, but it paled in comparison with a twenty-year-old Magic jumping center in Philly in place of an injured Kareem, playing five positions, slapping up a 42–15–7, and willing the Lakers to the 1980 title. If that happened today, pieces of Skip Bayless’ head would be scattered across the entire town of Bristol.36
So what makes us continually pump up the present at the expense of the past? Goldman believed that every era is “so arrogant [and] so dismissive,” and again he was right, although that arrogance/dismissiveness isn’t entirely intentional. We’d like to believe that our current stars are better than the guys we once watched. Why? Because the single best thing about sports is the unknown. It’s more fun to think about what could happen than what already happened. We know we won’t see another Bird or Magic; we already stopped looking. They were too unique. But Jordan … that one is conceivable. We might see another hypercompetitive, unfathomably gifted shooting guard reach his potential in our lifetime. We might. So it’s not that we want LeBron to be just as good as MJ; we need him to be better than MJ. We already did the MJ thing. Who wants to rent the same movie twice? We want LeBron to take us to a place we haven’t been. It’s the same reason we convinced ourselves that Shaq was better than Wilt and Nash was better than Cousy. We didn’t know these things for sure. We just wanted them to be true.
There’s a simpler reason why we’re incapable of appreciating the past. As the Havlicek broadcast proved to me, it’s easy to forget anything if you stop thinking about it long enough, even something as fundamentally ingrained in your brain as “My favorite basketball team employed one of the best twenty players ever when I was a little kid and I watched him throughout my childhood.” Once upon a time, the Boston Garden fans cheered Hondo for 510 seconds. And I was there. I was in the building. I cheered for every one of those 510 seconds and it was the only happy memory of that entire crummy season. But that’s the funny thing about noise: eventually it stops.
So that’s what this book is about: capturing that noise, sorting through all the bullshit and figuring out which players and teams and stories should live on. It’s also about the NBA, how we got here, and where we’re going. It’s way too ambitious and I probably should have stuck to an outline, but screw it—by the end of the book, it will all make sense. I swear. Just know that I’m getting older and the depreciation of sports memories bothers me more than I ever thought it would … especially in basketball, a sport that cannot be grasped through statistics alone. I wanted to write down my memories, thoughts and opinions before I forget them. Or before I get killed by a T-shirt cannon during a Clippers game. Whatever comes first.
Take Bird, for instance. In the big scheme of things, number 33 was an extremely tall and well-coordinated guy who did his job exceptionally well. That’s it. You can’t call him a superhero because he wasn’t saving lives or making the world a better place. At the same time, he possessed heroic qualities because everyone in New England bought into his invincibility. He came through too many times for us. After a while, we started expecting him to come through, and when he still came through, that’s when we were hooked for good. I know this was the case because I lived through his prime—whether I have developed enough credibility in your eyes as a basketball thinker is up to you37—but I’m telling you, that’s how Boston fans felt in the spring of 1987. Unfortunately, you can’t glance through Bird’s career statistics in the Official NBA Register and find the statistic for “most times the fans expected their best player to come through and he actually did.” So here’s a story about his most memorable game-winning shot, a shot that didn’t actually go in.
After winning three MVP awards, the Legend was rattling off the greatest run of his career in the spring of ’87, single-handedly dragging an aging roster through three punishing rounds despite a broken foot for McHale (gamely kept playing), injuries to Bill Walton and Scott Wedman (both out), as well as sprained ankles for Parish and Ainge (playing hurt). Um, those were only five of the best seven guys on the team. When we were finished in the waning seconds of Game 5 of the Eastern Finals, Bird saved the season with his famous steal from Isiah, which remains the loudest I ever heard the Garden in my life, the only time I remember the upper balcony actually swaying because everyone was jumping up and down in sheer delight. That’s the great thing about sports: when you hope for something improbable to happen, 4,999 times out of 5,000 it never happens, but then there’s the 5,000th time, and for God’s sake, it happens. That was the Bird steal. Two games later, he finished Detroit with a variety of backbreaking shots down the stretch, including a ludicrous 15-foot lefty banker that had to be seen to be believed.38 At this point, we were convinced that Bird couldn’t be stopped. He just kept raising his game to another level; how high could he go? Down by one in the final 30 seconds of a must-win Game 4, the Celtics tried to run a play for Bird, but James Worthy smothered him and held his jersey to keep him close.39 Somehow the ball rotated around and back to Bird’s side. Worthy stupidly left him to jump out on Dennis Johnson, leaving the Legend open in the corner for a split second.
(Insert sound of fifteen thousand people gasping out loud.)
DJ swung the ball to Bird, who planted his feet and launched a three right in front of the Lakers’ bench.
(Insert sound of fifteen thousand people pleading, “Threeeeeeeeeee …”) Swish.
(Insert sound of fifteen thousand people screaming, “Hrrrrrrrrrrr-aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!”)
If they stopped the game right there and announced that Bird would walk across the Charles River, not only would I have been the first kid there, I would have brought my camera. We stood and cheered and screamed and stomped our feet through the entire time-out, never thinking we would blow the game after what we had just witnessed. The Lakers ran their patented “let’s get the ball to Kareem and the refs will bail him out” play and got him to the free throw line. He made the first and missed the second, leading to an egregious no-call from Earl Strom where Mychal Thompson slammed into McHale and Parish and caused them to knock the rebound out of bounds. Lakers ball. That opened the door for Magic’s spine-crushing baby sky hook that McHale would have blocked if he wasn’t playing on a freaking broken foot. (Sorry, I’m still bitter. Really, really bitter.) Now there were just two ticks left on the clock and the Lakers were jumping around and blowing each other … but we still had Thirty-three. Everyone in the building knew Larry was getting the ball. Everyone in the building knew we were still alive.
So what happens? The Lakers stick two guys on Bird. Somehow, he breaks free at midcourt (seriously, how the hell does this happen), slides down the sideline, grabs the inbounds pass, controls his momentum long enough to set his feet for a split second right in front of Riley, steadies his upper body for a nanosecond, and launches a wide-open three in front of the Lakers bench. At that precise moment, standing in front of my seat at midcourt with pee probably dripping down my leg, I would have bet any-thing that the shot was ripping through the net. I would have bet my baseball card collection. I would have bet my Intellivision. I would have bet my virginity.40 I would have bet my life. Even the Lakers probably thought it was going in. Watch the tape and you will notice Lakers backup Wes Matthews crouched on the floor and screaming behind Bird in sheer, unadulterated terror like he’s about to watch someone get murdered in a horror movie. You will hear the fans emit some sort of strange, one-of-a-kind shrieking noise, a gasping sound loosely translated as, “Holy shit, we are about to witness the greatest basketball shot ever!” Hell, you can freeze the tape on the frame before the ball strikes the rim. It looks like it’s going in. It should have gone in.
It didn’t go in.
When Bird released the shot, his body was moving directly between me and the basket; you could have drawn a straight line over the arc of the ball and extended it over Bird’s head right to me. Two decades later, I can still see that moon shot soaring through the air on a direct line—it was dead-on—knowing immediately that it had a chance, then feeling like Mike Tyson had floored me with a body punch when the ball caught the back of the rim. Bird missed it by a fraction, maybe the length of a fingernail. It couldn’t have been closer. You cannot come closer to making a basketball shot without actually making the shot.41
Here’s what I remember most. Not the sound in the Garden (a gasp of anticipation giving way to a prolonged groan, followed by the most deafening silence imaginable),42 or the jubilant Lakers skipping off the court like they were splitting a winning Powerball ticket twelve ways (they knew how fortunate they were), or even the shocked faces of the people around me (everyone standing in place, mouths agape, staring at the basket in disbelief). Nope. It was Larry. As the shot bounced away, he froze for a split second and stared at the basket in disbelief even as the Lakers celebrated behind him. Just like us, he couldn’t believe it.
The ball was supposed to go in.
The split second passed and Bird joined the cluttered group of players and coaches leaving the floor. When he walked through the tunnel by me and my father, he seemed just as confused as anyone.43 The rest of us remained in our seats, shell-shocked, trying to regroup for the walk outside, unable to come to grips with the fact that the Celtics had lost. If you saw Saving Private Ryan in the theater, do you remember how every paying customer was paralyzed and couldn’t budge as the final credits started to roll? That’s what the Garden was like. People couldn’t move. People were stuck to their seats like flypaper. We went through the seven stages of grief in two minutes, including my father, who was slumped in his seat like he had just been assassinated. He wasn’t showing any inkling of getting up. Even when I said to him, “Hey, Pops, let’s get out of here,” he didn’t budge.
A few more seconds passed. Finally, my father looked at me.
“That was supposed to go in,” he groaned. “How did that not go in?”
More than twenty-two years have passed since that night … and I still don’t have an answer for him. For everything else, I have answers.
I think.
1. That’s the first of about 300 unprovoked shots at Kareem in this book. Just warning you now. Kareem was a ninny.
2. The C’s played six home games in Hartford each year in a misguided effort to expand their New England fan base. The experiment ended in the late ’80s when they realized three things: the players hated traveling for 47 games a year, they could make more money playing at home, and most important, it was f*cking Hartford.
3. We’ll be referring to the Boston Garden as “the Garden” and Madison Square Garden as “MSG” for this book. Why? Because it’s my book.
4. Boston’s deep-seated racial issues bubbled to the surface one year later, thanks to a divisive decision to proactively integrate Boston’s public schools and all the ugliness that followed. Although, looking back, it was probably a red flag that Reggie Smith and Jim Rice were the only black guys on the Red Sox for like 40 years and everybody was fine with this.
5. Both guys had a defining moment in Game 6: Kareem drained a clutch sky hook to save Milwaukee’s season in double OT, and Cowens stripped Oscar Robertson and skidded 20 feet along the floor going for the ball. No clip defined a player more than that one, with the possible exception of the 340 times (and counting) that Vince Carter went down in a heap like he’d been shot. By the way, if you think Kareem is going to take a beating in this book, wait until we get to Vince.
6. After the ’76 season, Cowens took a leave of absence and found a job at a local raceway, where he had an office and everything. Then he came back at the 32-game mark like nothing ever happened. Later, it came out during the ’77 playoffs that Cowens had been spending nights driving a cab around Boston and collecting fares. The funny thing is, you’re reading this right now convinced that I’m joking. Nope. We need to redo Cowens’ career in the Internet era—imagine message board threads with titles like “Dave Cowens picked me up in a cab last night!”
7. Yes, once upon a time, a little kid could wander onto the court before games, stand next to the home team’s bench, and talk to the coaches and players. Sigh.
8. My dad bought something like 30 papers and did everything but hit our neighbors over the head with the picture. He would have been a great stage dad.
9. Wilkes played Cornbread, a high school star gunned down in the movie. When the murder scene left me bawling, my mom was relieved because she had been worried we might not make it out of the theater alive. She claims that everyone was pissed we were there. I was too young to remember what happened; the only part I don’t believe is Mom’s claim that I played dice in the men’s room afterward.
10. Great subplot: Barry wore a wig that season (these were the days when you could do such a thing without getting mocked on the Internet) and after the fight, Barry seemed more concerned with readjusting his wig than with wondering why Sobers jumped him. If you ever get hold of the Warriors media guide, check out how Barry’s hair recedes each season until the ’76 team picture, when he suddenly has a full head of hair, and then he’s back to being bald in the ’77 team picture again. Now he has plugs. Don’t ask why I love this stuff.
11. Two new wrinkles/problems that we’ll cover in detail later: First, some players stopped giving a crap because they had guaranteed big-money contracts. Second, cocaine became fashionable for a few years before everyone realized, “Hey, wait, this drug is addictive and destructive and expensive. There’s really no upside here!” Back in the late ’70s, nobody knew and the league suffered because of it. We never knew there was a problem until a Nuggets game in 1979 when David Thompson tried to snort the foul line.
12. My father still makes fun of me about this. In my defense, I was six. In his defense, it was the most famous NBA game ever played.
13. When we came home, Dad and I were so wired that we made food and watched TV. A Charlie’s Angels rerun was on—the show that had just taken off a few weeks before—and I remember thinking, “So this is what happens when you’re up late? You can watch TV shows with half-naked female detectives running around?” A future night owl was born that night, my friends.
14. Not only did I spend my formative years sticking my right hand out hoping for famous high fives, but you can see me on TV during half of the great games of the Bird era. I spend more time on ESPN Classic than the Sklar brothers.
15. This was one of my two favorite moments of 1978, along with the time my buddy Reese and I realized that if one of us was holding the feet of the other, we could steal all the change from the bottom of the fountain at the Chestnut Hill Mall and buy hockey cards with the money. Good times!
16. I had a reader joke once, “Tommy is as objective during Celtics games as Fred Goldman when the topic is O.J.”
17. John Y. owned the Braves and “traded” them for the Celtics in a complicated deal that involved seven players, two picks (one turned out to be Danny Ainge), and cash. Boston’s previous owner, Irv Levin, moved the Braves to San Diego and renamed them the Clippers. So if John Y. had forced out Red, he would have been directly responsible for Clippers East and Clippers West. We also probably would have traded Bird’s rights to New York for Toby Knight and Joe C. Meriweather.
18. We had 12 months to sign Bird before he reentered the draft, so everyone in New England jumped on the ISU bandwagon as Bird carried the undefeated Sycamores to the ’79 NCAA Finals. They were more popular in New England than BC and Holy Cross that year.
19. I threw Katie in here for old times’ sake. It’s not her fault that Tom Cruise turned her into a mannequin.
20. When I worked on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, we called this the Adam Carolla Corollary. Carolla always found a humorous angle on anything; eventually, everyone else became funnier just trying to keep up with him.
21. I did not make this up. There were four times in the second half of that game (March 12, 1985) when the Hawks subs either jumped up in delight with their arms raised, fell on top of each other in disbelief or slapped palms.
22. This was the most shocking and improbable sports fight that ever happened. Happened 20 feet in front of me. I will never forget it. Like seeing Santa throw down with the Easter Bunny.
23. I thought about throwing in “the last two minutes right before a girl-on-girl show starts at a bachelor party” here and decided against it.
24. Bird and Erving (four MVPs), Robert Parish (NBA top fifty), Kevin McHale (ditto), Tiny Archibald (ditto), Maurice Cheeks (one of the top point guards that decade), Andrew Toney (most underrated player of that decade), Bobby Jones (best sixth man of his generation), Cedric Maxwell (’81 Finals MVP), Darryl Dawkins, Caldwell Jones, M. L. Carr, Gerald Henderson, Rick Robey … now that’s a playoff series! The lesson, as always: expansion ruins everything.
25. One of the many great subplots of the pre-Jumbotron era: the Garden fans rewarding the team with a standing ovation through the entire time-out. That was our ultimate stamp of approval. Like a “you did that for us, we’ll do this for you” thing. Now we’re too busy watching the kiss cam or gawking at cheerleader nipples.
26. My seat was next to one of those classy Wellesley/Weston housewives who wore great jewelry and looked like she got groomed four times a week. Even she was sweating. I don’t think her sweat glands had ever been triggered before.
27. My personal favorite: Bird once told Indiana’s Chuck Person before a game that he had a Christmas present for him. During the game, he made a three in front of the Pacers bench, turned to Person, and said, “Merry f*cking Christmas.”
28. On IMDb.com, this is also listed as The Passion of the Christ.
29. It’s too bad that Bird’s prime just missed Scottie Pippen, the greatest defensive forward ever and someone who would have been a fantastic foil for Bird. By the time Pippen matured, Bird was on his way out. Our loss.
30. Bird’s back brace made him look fat and misshapen, kinda like Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid 3. He couldn’t move by the second round and still dominated a do-or-die Game 6 against the ’92 Cavs with his perimeter passing (16 points and 14 assists). Then the Cavs realized before Game 7, “Wait, he can’t dribble, all we have to do is hound him when he has the ball and attack him defensively!” They won by 18 and shot 59%. Sad ending for the Legend.
31. Or even worse, in Magic’s case, a Legend/Celebrity 3-on-3 or 3-Ball on All-Star Weekend.
32. Game 7 of the ’88 Eastern Semis: ’Nique drops 47 but Bird explodes for 20 in the final quarter, including one sequence where they swapped five baskets in a row, saving the game and earning a gushing “You are watching what greatness is all about” line from Brent Musberger.
33. Bird’s prophetic quote in 1986: “All I know is that people tend to forget how great the older great players were. It’ll happen that way with me, too.”
34. Eight minutes 30 seconds. That’s longer than “Stairway to Heaven;” Hulk Hogan pinning the Iron Sheik for the WWF title at MSG; the total amount of time it took the Pats to finish their final drive of Super Bowl XXXVI (including stoppages); all of the sex scenes from Basic Instinct combined; Stevie Wonder’s longest Grammy acceptance speech; the amount of time that passed before we stopped believing that Ricky Martin was straight; Act One of the first Chevy Chase Show; the climactic fight scene from Rocky; the amount of time that David Beckham made soccer relevant in America again; and any of Jeff Ross’ roasts on YouTube.
35. The farewell tour for retiring stars was a goofy tradition in the ’70s and ’80s that peaked with Julius Erving in ’86 and stopped after Kareem retired in ’89. There was a ton of emotion both times—with Doc because we were going to miss him, and with Kareem because we were so happy to see him go.
36. Note to anyone reading in 2075: Bayless was a TV personality who took extreme positions until he was fired in the summer of 2010 after LeBron dumped Cleveland to sign with the Knicks and a frothing-at-the-mouth Bayless, in his rush to excoriate LeBron for stabbing Cavaliers fans in the back, briefly morphed into a fire-breathing, eight-foot dragon and killed all 17 people in the studio. You can find the clip on YouTube—just search for “Bayless + dragon.”
37. This is a completely unbiased book except for the ongoing digs at Kareem and Vince. Even someone like Kobe, who could be called a conniving, contrived, unlikable, philandering, socially awkward fraud of a human being in the wrong hands, will be handled with the utmost respect. I promise you.
38. I missed this one because my high school prom was scheduled the night before in Connecticut and I knew I’d be up all night. My uncle Bob sat in my seat and ended up getting shown numerous times on CBS. Also, I didn’t hook up on prom night or even come close. Number of times I’ve regretted not getting up early that Sunday morning and making the 150-minute drive: 280,975.
39. Where were the refs? You got me. I watched this game recently and screamed at the refs after one of their 20 awful calls down the stretch, prompting my confused wife (listening from the kitchen) to ask, “Don’t you already know what happens in this game?” Yeah, but still.
40. Again, no luck on prom night.
41. In one of the kajillion NBA documentaries made this decade, Worthy admits that he still has nightmares about that shot going in. And he won the series.
42. I would put this shot against any moment in NBA history where a crowd makes two of the loudest noises possible that are completely opposite in the span of two seconds: hrrraaaaaaaaaaaa-ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh. There was never a louder hrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-ohhhhhhhhhhhhh moment.
43. You can see me at end of this one, right before James Brown interviews Magic—I’m wearing a blue polo short and kinda look like Kirk Cameron during the second season of Growing Pains. Also, I look like a doctor just told me that I have VD.