When the Game Was Ours (17 page)

A new era was dawning, and the future stars of the NBA were tuned in.

H
E COULD HAVE SHUTTERED
the curtains and cranked up the volume of the television. Instead, Magic Johnson acted on his perverse need to witness the celebration that was unfolding around him, staring blankly out the window of his Boston hotel, fixated on the sea of green below.

Thousands of fans clogged the streets, many wearing shamrock-colored T-shirts, creating a gleeful gridlock of traffic in the already historically congested city. Car horns honked, fireworks crackled, and grown men danced Irish jigs in celebration of the Celtics' Game 7 victory over the Lakers to win the 1984 NBA Championship.

"It was bedlam," Magic said. "I made myself watch it. It made me feel worse, but I deserved to be miserable."

His two close friends, NBA stars Mark Aguirre and Isiah Thomas, remained sequestered in the room with him, attempting to console him. Back then, there were no team charters to whisk professional athletes home immediately after the game. The Lakers flew commercial and were forced to wait until morning before they could escape Boston and their glaring errors, which were highlighted hourly on the local news channels.

Aguirre turned off the television, and Thomas ordered room service: a feast of chicken, ribs, mounds of fruit, and baskets of rolls and pastries. Most of it went untouched. Johnson had no appetite for anything except self-loathing.

His friends broached various topics with the aim of distracting him—music, cars, women—but as the hours droned on, Magic kept doubling back to missed free throws, errant passes, and dribbling out the clock.

"We should have won that series," Johnson said quietly. "I've always prided myself on getting it done in crunch time. What happened?"

He already knew the answer. Larry Bird happened. His rival dominated the series, copping the Finals MVP trophy with timely shooting, relentless rebounding, and uncanny court vision, a trait he and Johnson shared from the moment they lined up opposite one another.

By morning, Magic had been saddled with a new nickname for himself (Tragic) and his team (the Fakers). That was humiliating enough, but something gnawed at LA's normally ebullient star beyond that, something he wouldn't even share with his trusted confidants.

"It was losing to Larry," Magic admitted. "That was the most crushing part. It was my first time in an LA-Boston series, and he got the best of me."

Three miles from Magic's hotel, in a team van driven by the Celtics' assistant equipment manager Joe "Corky" Qatato, Larry Bird and teammate Quinn Buckner were mired in the celebratory traffic. Their plan was to ride in the van to Hellenic College in Brookline, where their cars were parked, then drive back downtown to join the team celebration at Chelsea's, a local watering hole in a tourist section of the city called Faneuil Hall.

But the traffic wasn't moving, and Bird was impatient. He reached across the driver's seat and thrust the van into park.

"C'mon, Quinn," Bird said. "We'll get our cars later."

The MVP of the '84 Finals leaped out the van, crossed over by foot to the other side of Storrow Drive, a major Boston thoroughfare, and began hoofing it back downtown.

A bemused Buckner followed behind, chuckling at the absurdity of their actions.

It was only a matter of seconds before they were recognized. A car with three fans driving inbound stopped in amazement when they spotted their franchise forward striding along the curb.

"Larry Bird?!!!" the driver asked.

"Sssh," Bird answered. "Listen, you got any room in there for Quinn and me?"

The young man opened the door and motioned for his companions, resplendent in their Bird team jerseys, to move over for two of the city's newly crowned champions. As Buckner and Bird crammed their oversized basketball frames into the back of the economy car, the passengers howled with delight and astonishment.

"Larry Bird is in our car!" shrieked the driver, pounding the steering wheel for emphasis.

"Oh, my God, are you kidding me?! This is unbelievable!! I'm wearing your shirt!!!" howled the passenger in the rear seat.

"All right now, calm down," Bird said. "If you want us to stay, you gotta keep quiet."

They tried. But as they weaved through traffic with the object of every Celtics fan's desire lounging in the back seat, it was impossible not to holler out "MVP!" or "Lakers suck!" They were traversing the heart of downtown Boston with the most famous and popular athlete in the city.

"So, Larry," said the driver, as they approached Chelsea's, "can we come with you?"

"Sorry, champions only," declared Bird, punching Buckner in the shoulder.

When Bird and Buckner reached Faneuil Hall, they thanked their blue-collar chauffeurs and skipped through the roped security entrance to Chelsea's.

Inside, the two players clinked beer bottles and toasted to their title. Bird, normally reserved in victory, disarmed Buckner with occasional gleeful outbursts of "We did it!" Hours later, amid the singing and the drinking and the reveling, Bird grabbed Buckner and slung his arm around him.

"I finally got him," Bird said. "I finally got Magic."

The Lakers and Celtics began the 1983–84 season with unfinished business to address. Los Angeles had cruised to the Finals the previous June but was unceremoniously dumped by Julius Erving, Moses Malone, and the Philadelphia 76ers in four straight games. The Celtics had suffered a shocking sweep of their own, falling to the Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals.

Bird bitterly referred to the 1982–83 campaign as a lost opportunity to capitalize on a nucleus of talent that should have, in his opinion, yielded a championship. It further irked him that Los Angeles would have been the opponent in the Finals had the Celtics advanced. It was (and had been since his arrival in the NBA) his fervent wish to battle Magic and LA head-to-head for the title, yet four seasons into their professional careers, that matchup had not materialized. Bird was acutely aware of what his nemesis was accomplishing on the Other Coast, even though he rarely acknowledged it.

"Did you see Magic had 21 assists the other night?" Larry's teammate Chris Ford asked.

Bird didn't respond, but he already knew about Magic's numbers. He had checked them first thing in the morning.

"I was keeping my eye on him," Bird admitted. "It got to a point where I really didn't care about anyone else. The focus had to be Lakers, Lakers, Lakers."

Two thousand eight hundred miles away, Magic Johnson woke up each morning, poured himself a glass of orange juice, spread out the newspaper, and checked the paper to see how Larry Bird and the Celtics had fared the night before. He painstakingly charted not only his rival's points but also his assist count.

"When those assists started going up," Magic said, "I knew he was doing what I was doing: making everyone better."

In 1984 it became increasingly apparent that Los Angeles and Boston were on course to meet in the Finals. Bird was submitting MVP numbers, and Magic was orchestrating a transition game that ran rampant over alleged Western Conference rivals. The Celtics and the Lakers crushed opponents in their respective conferences with one eye on the other.

"You knew pretty early on it was going to be one of the greatest rivalries in sports," said former Lakers guard Byron Scott. "There was an edge to the games. You had two teams that genuinely disliked one another, and then you had Magic and Bird, who wanted to beat each other's brains out."

The Lakers objected to Bird's cold stare, his trash-talking on the floor, and his stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge LA's accomplishments. The Celtics dismissed Magic's toothy smile, his flashy fast-break baskets, and what they perceived to be his false cheerfulness.

"We hated Magic Johnson," confirmed Celtics forward Cedric Maxwell. "All that Showtime, the Hollywood glitz, the phony smile. He was all style, and we were all substance."

That summation of the Lakers was precisely what had rankled coach Pat Riley to the point of fury. Riley had worn Lakers purple and gold for nearly six NBA seasons, establishing himself as a hard-nosed, intelligent player. When he became head coach of the Lakers, he established a demanding, unrelenting practice regimen that required both physical and mental stamina.

"For anyone to suggest we were soft, that we were 'Showtime,' I'd like to see them get through one of our practices," Riley sniffed.

Yet even he understood that until the Lakers reversed their fortunes against Boston, the perception, however erroneous, would stand. Riley, Magic, and Kareem were all trying to buck a historical trend that had come to define both franchises.

From 1956 to 1969, the Celtics won eleven championships in thirteen seasons. They met the LA Lakers in the Finals six times and won all six. The misery was etched into the faces of Lakers general manager Jerry West and Riley, both of whom were a part of the franchise's futile attempt to exorcise the demons of Celtics patriarch Red Auerbach's arrogant victory cigar.

For fourteen seasons, West excelled with such precision that the NBA logo was modeled after his likeness. He scored 25,192 career points, dished out 6,238 assists, and was nicknamed "Mr. Clutch," but he won only one championship—in 1972—at the tail end of his distinguished career. He retired having never beaten the Celtics in the NBA Finals.

There were many occasions when he came excruciatingly close. West and Elgin Baylor, the skilled forward who averaged 38.3 points and nearly 19 rebounds a game, anchored a 1961–62 Lakers team that had it all: shooting, defense, and versatility. But midway through the season Baylor was called into the army reserves in Fort Lewis, Washington, and was relegated to playing only on weekends or with an occasional day pass. In preparation for the Finals against Boston, the Lakers set up shop in a local gym adjacent to Baylor's army base so he would be able to practice with the team.

The series came down to a winner-take-all Game 7 at Boston Garden, and a tie score with the clock down to 0:05—five seconds. Franklin Delano Selvy, named after President Roosevelt, was charged with getting the ball inbounds to his Lakers teammates. Celtics guard Bob Cousy's assignment was to distract him as much as possible.

"Arnold [Red Auerbach] told me to jump up, scratch, wave my hands, shout, whatever I had to do," Cousy said.

Cousy leaped into the air, flailing his arms. Selvy waited until Cousy reached the top of his jump, then dumped the ball in to "Hot Rod" Hundley and quickly sprinted to the left corner, his favorite spot on the floor. By the time Cousy landed, then raced after Selvy, he realized he was a step behind.

"Oh, God, I blew it," Cousy thought to himself. "I'm going to be the guy that cost us the championship."

Hundley was supposed to deliver the ball to either West or Baylor, but both were smothered by Celtics defenders. He was startled to see Selvy alone on the baseline. West, struggling to free himself from a double team, was also encouraged to see one of his team's best shooters with the ball in his hands and a chance to win it.

"It was about as good a look as you could hope for," West said.

Selvy, a two-time All-Star, launched his 12-foot shot just before Cousy arrived to challenge it. (Selvy later claimed Boston's guard pushed him, but there was no call from the referee.) The jumper bounced high off the back rim—then out. West held his breath as the shot hit iron—then exhaled in disappointment as Celtics center Bill Russell gathered in the rebound. The buzzer sounded, the game went into overtime, and Boston prevailed.

As the Celtics players jubilantly hoisted Auerbach onto their shoulders, the Boston fans streamed out of the stands and swarmed the court. West tried to skirt away from the oncoming crowd, which barreled past Baylor and Selvy and him as if they were invisible. Once safely ensconced in the cramped visitors' locker room, West remained in full uniform, replaying the final possession in his mind. "If it goes in," West said ruefully, "then history is altered."

For years afterward, Hundley intermittently picked up the telephone and called his old Lakers pal.

"Hello?" Selvy would say.

"Hi, Frank. Nice shot," Hundley would answer. Then he'd hang up the phone.

And so it went. Each year the Lakers believed it would be different. Each year it wasn't. In 1968–69, with Cousy retired and Russell in his final season as player-coach for Boston, the Lakers acquired Russell's chief rival, the irrepressible Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain, who once scored 100 points in a game, enabled Los Angeles to win 55 games and capture home-court advantage throughout the Finals against—who else?—Boston. Predictably, the Lakers-Celtics showdown went seven games, but this time the new champion was to be decided on the Lakers' home court, the Forum.

Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke felt so confident about his team's chances that he ordered thousands of purple and gold balloons and perched them high above courtside in the rafters, nestled in netting, waiting for the perfect moment to release them and ignite the Lakers' celebration.

As West ran out for pregame warm-ups, he noticed the balloons above and shook his head. He was embarrassed by his owner's arrogant gesture.

"The Celtics deserved better," West said.

With a minute to play and Boston clinging to a one-point lead (103–102), West poked the ball free. In the frenzied scramble that followed, Celtics sixth man Don Nelson picked up the loose ball and lofted a shot from just beyond the free throw line. It clanged off the back rim and shot straight up into the air—but, unlike Selvy's jumper, the Boston player's shot dropped through the strings.

The Celtics won. The Lakers didn't.

Again.

West dropped to his knees as the buzzer sounded. He looked up one more time at the balloons before he shuffled to the dressing room. He had played the final three games of the series with a strained hamstring, and his leg was throbbing. As he stood in the shower with cascades of water streaming down his body, West briefly contemplated quitting.