The Book of Basketball (4 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 you
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—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, singlehandedly 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.
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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.
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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.