Every time I watch a Spike Lee movie on HBO, I get nervous. That probably happens to a lot of white people, and I suppose that’s sort of the idea. But my reason for getting nervous has nothing to do with the sociocultural ideas that Spike expresses, nor does it have anything to do with fear that a race riot is going to break out in my living room, nor is it any kind of artistic apprehension. My fear is that I know there’s a 50 percent chance a particular situation is going to occur on screen, and the situation is this: A black guy and a white guy are going to get into an argument over basketball, and the debate will focus on the fact that the black guy loves the Lakers and the white guy loves the Celtics. And this argument is going to be a metaphor for all of America, and its fundamental point will be that we’re all unconsciously racist, because any white guy who thought Larry Bird was the messiah is latently denying that Jesus was black. The relative blackness and whiteness of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics (circa 1980–1989) is supposed to symbolize everything we ever needed to know about America’s racial cold war, and everyone who takes sports seriously seems to concede that fact.
But this metaphor is only half the equation.
To say the 1980s rivalry between the Celtics and the Lakers represents America’s racial anguish is actually a shortsighted understatement. As I have grown older, it’s become clear that the Lakers-Celtics rivalry represents absolutely everything: race, religion, politics, mathematics, the reason I’m still not married, the Challenger explosion, Man vs. Beast, and everything else. There is no relationship that isn’t a Celtics-Lakers relationship. It emerges from nothingness to design nature, just as Gerald Henderson emerged from nothingness to steal James Worthy’s errant inbound pass in game two of the 1983 finals. Do you realize that the distance between Henderson and Worthy at the start of that play—and the distance between them at the point of interception—works out to a ratio of 1.618, the same digits of Leonardo da Vinci’s so-called “golden ratio” that inexplicably explains the mathematical construction of the universe?[38] Do not act surprised. It would be more surprising if the ratio did not.
Yes. How could I not be? For ten years—but for only ten years—you had two teams that were (a) clearly the class of their profession, and (b) completely and diametrically opposed in every possible respect. This is no accident. For at least one decade, God was obsessed with pro basketball. And as I stated earlier, everyone always wants to dwell on the fact that (a) the Celtics started three Caucasians in a league that was 80 percent black and (b) the Lakers never had a white player who mattered (the only exception being Kurt Rambis, a role player who seemed artless on purpose, going so far as refusing to purchase contact lenses). But what made this rivalry so universal was that it wasn’t about black and white people; it was about black and white philosophies. Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist. But they do exist. They are unclear and/or unfathomable, but they’re out there. And—perhaps surprisingly—the only way to find those answers is to study NBA playoff games that happened twenty years ago. For all practical purposes, the voice of Brent Musburger was the pen of Ayn Rand.
Perhaps you’re curious as to why we must go back two decadesto do this; obviously, pro basketball still exists. The answer is simple: necessity. I mean, you certainly can’t understand the world from the way the NBA is now. Two years ago, I watched an overtime game between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Toronto Raptors: Allen Iverson scored 51 points and Vince Carter scored 39. As I type those numbers into my keyboard, it looks like I’m painting the portrait of an amazing contest (and exactly the kind of mano-a-mano war NBC wanted to show me on a Sunday afternoon). But it was an abortion. It was like watching somebody commit suicide with a belt and a folding chair. Iverson took 40 shots; Carter was 15 for 36 from the field. It was like those excruciating NBA games from the late 1970s, where collapsing super-novas such as World B. Free and John Williamson would shoot the ball on every possession and David Thompson would try to score 70 points against the New Orleans Jazz before blowing two weeks’ pay on Colombian nose candy. Guys like Iverson and Carter are mechanically awesome, but they don’t represent anything beyond themselves. They’re nothing more than good basketball players, and that’s depressing. Watching modern pro basketball reminds me of watching my roommate play Nintendo in college. In order to remedy this aesthetic decline, the league decided to let teams play zone defense, which has got to be the least logical step ever taken to increase excitement. This is like trying to combat teen pregnancy by lowering the drinking age.
The NBA doesn’t need to sanction zone defense; the smart guys were playing zone when it was still illegal. Larry Bird played zone defense every night of his career. What the NBA needs to do is provide a product that will help us better understand ourselves and foster self-actualization. Granted, this is not an easy goal to legislate. But that’s the only solution that can save this dying brachiosaurus. I didn’t need Michael Jordan to come back; I need to watch a game that tells me who to vote for.
Here’s what I mean: I never understood partisan politics until I watched the last epic Lakers-Celtics war, which happened in the summer of 1987. The contest everyone remembers is game four, which I watched as a high school sophomore at a summer basketball camp on the campus of North Dakota State University. You probably remember this game, too: It’s June 9 at the Boston Garden, and the Lakers lead the series 2–1. Boston has the ball with under thirty seconds left, down one; they dump it to McHale on the right block, who kicks it out to Ainge, who reverses to Bird in the far corner for a three. Twine. Celtics by two. The Lakers come down on offense and Kareem gets hacked; he makes one and misses the second, but it bounces off Parish and goes out of bounds under the rack. Magic takes the in bounds pass, blows by McHale and hits that repulsive running hook across the lane. Lakers lead by one. After the obligatory timeout moves the rock to halfcourt, the Celtics have two seconds to get a shot. Bird’s forty-footer is dead-on, but two inches deep. L.A. wins 107–106; they go up three games to one and win the rings five days later.
This, of course, was like a ten-inch stiletto jammed into my aorta. Magic Johnson is one of my favorite players of all time, but I hate him. I once interviewed Johnson about all those stupid, civic-minded, state-of-the-art movie theaters he’s putting into depressed urban areas, and I was caught between feeling impressed by his suit, nervous about his stature, and overcome by the desire to punch him in the face. However, my personal feeling toward Earvin can’t negate the larger meaning of his heroics, and that meaning is political. Because what I really remember most about that game was that I was just about the only kid at this camp who wanted Boston to win. The only other people who liked the Celtics were the camp’s coaches; I was the only Bird apostle under the age of thirty-five. If you liked the Celtics, it meant you liked your dad’s team. And this is when I came to understand that I was actually rooting for the Republican party.
Regardless of how liberal Massachusetts may seem, the Celtics were totally GOP. Like Thomas Jefferson, K. C. Jones did not believe in a strong central government: The Celtic players mostly coached themselves. They practiced when they felt like practicing and pulled themselves out of games when they deemed it appropriate, and they wanted to avoid anything taxing. They wanted to avoid taxes. And they excelled by attacking the world in the same way they had been raised to understand it: You pick-and-roll, you throw the bounce pass, you make your free throws. If it worked in the 1950s, it can work now. Meanwhile, the Lakers were like late sixties Democrats: They seemed liberal and exhilarating, but Pat Riley controlled the whole show. There were no state’s rights within the locker room of the Fabulous Forum. Government was seen as the answer to all problems, including the problem of keeping Robert Parish off the offensive glass. Riley was a tyrant—a dashing tyrant, but a tyrant nonetheless—and arguably the strongest singular governing force since LBJ. I once heard an apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson and a military helicopter: After addressing some Vietnam-bound troops, he was supposed to get on a chopper and leave the Air Force base, so one of his sycophants asked him, “Sir, which of these helicopters is yours?” Johnson supposedly said, “Son, all these helicopters are mine.” That’s how Riley looked at James Worthy.
Perhaps you think this kind of sweeping generalization is insane. Most people do. If you ask almost anyone about the cultural ramifications of a series of basketball games (some of which happened twenty-one years ago), they will inevitably scoff. I know this, because I’ve tried. “I’m really very hesitant to buy into any theories of this nature,” says longtime Boston Globe writer Bob Ryan, generally considered America’s foremost media expert on the NBA and someone who’s known for buying into illogical theories. “I just think that’s reaching beyond any reasonable limit of logic.” Of course, immediately after making that statement, Ryan spent the next ten minutes explaining why these two teams represented “the conflict between speed and convention.”[39] The fact of the matter is that everyone who truly cares about basketball subconsciously knows that Celtics vs. Lakers reflects every fabric of male existence, just as everyone who loves rock ’n’ roll knows that the difference between the Beatles and the Stones is not so much a dispute over music as it is a way to describe your own self-identity. This is why men need to become obsessed with things: It’s an extroverted way to pursue solipsism. We are able to study something that defines who we are; therefore, we are able to study ourselves. Do you know people who insist they like “all kinds of music”? That actually means they like no kinds of music. And do you know guys who didn’t care who won when the Celtics played the Lakers? That means they never really cared about anything.
I called the Miami Heat’s front office to see if Riley would talk to me about my hypothesis. Much to my surprise, he called back in only two days; much to his surprise, the first thing I asked him about was his hair. What I wanted to know was whether he realized that his hair symbolized the hypermodern, antitraditional paradigm the Lakers used to mock the Celtics’ archetypical simplicity and Greatest Generation morality.
Oddly, Riley acted like he had heard this question before.
“Oh, I was totally aware of that,” he said. “I knew I was being packaged by CBS and everybody else in the media. But I didn’t pay attention to it. If you play in the finals seven times, somebody is going to notice you slick your hair back, and sportswriters make a big deal about things like that. And as those teams go down in history, the myths become more important than anything that actually went down for real.”
I suppose that detached mythology is really what I’m writing about. In truth, these teams didn’t play each other as often as it seems retrospectively. Though there wasn’t an NBA championship series in the eighties that didn’t include either L.A. or Boston, they only played each other three times. They only faced each other in a seventh game once, and the star that night was forgotten antihero Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell. The greatest Celtic team—the 1985–86 squad that used Bill Walton as the sixth man—never played L.A. in the finals, because the Lakers were upset in the playoffs by an inferior Houston team led by underachiever Ralph Sampson. The era’s best Laker squad was probably the one from 1986–87 (Jabbar’s last decent season and Byron Scott’s first good one), but Boston was so devastated by injury that year they essentially played with only five guys (their best reserve was Jerry fucking Sichting). In a way, the rivalry is akin to memories from keg parties from your freshman year at college—it all sort of runs together into one hazy image that never technically occurred, yet somehow feels to have occurred all the time.
But in so many ways, that kind of mythology is the only thing that keeps us alive. Remember when Danny Ainge bit Tree Rollins’s hand in the 1984 Eastern conference playoffs? If you do, you shouldn’t: Rollins is actually the guy who bit Ainge. For some reason, everyone recalls the opposite. This is a big part of why so many people hated the greatest Mormon in league history—because someone bit him. Life is rarely about what happened; it’s mostly about what we think happened.
Riley knew this, too. When I asked him what the ultimate key to beating Boston was, I assumed (and kind of hoped, actually) that he’d start talking about the way Michael Cooper matched up with Bird defensively. Instead, he went into a bunch of crap about the fifteenth-century Boers.
“We had to get over the psychological element of the Celtic mystique,” Riley insisted. “After we choked in ’84, I had to teach my guys exactly who the Celtics were in a historical sense. I mean, the Celts were a cult who did sinister things in secret places. That’s where I took it. I had to teach them who their opponent was originally, because that’s exactly who they were playing in 1987. I don’t know if the Celtic players knew about Celt history, but that’s how those guys played.”
This is probably true, although a bit comical (I like to imagine Riley handing out scouting reports that included such insights as, “Dennis Johnson: no range beyond twenty-one feet, initiates contact on drives to the hole, may have aspirations to sack Iberia”). But it proves that Riley understood that sport (or least the transcendent moments of sport) has almost nothing to do with the concept of a game. Scrabble is a game. Popomatic Trouble is a game. Major League Baseball is a game. But any situation where Bird is boxing out Magic for a rebound that matters is not. That is a conflict that dwarfs Dante. That is the crouching tiger and the hidden dragon.
So this is how I have come to make every decision in my life: I suss out the Celtics and Lakers dynamic in any given scenario, and then I go with Larry. I’m a Celtic Person; for me, life is simple. And just in case you’re blind to the abundantly obvious, here are ten examples of how you can construct a green and gold humanity:
QUESTION # 1—“What kind of car should I drive?”
If you‘re a Laker Person, buy a two-door car, preferably something made in America. I‘d go with a Camaro IROC or possibly a Ford Probe. These are fast, domestic vehicles, just as the “Showtime” automaton was a sleek, streamlined machine that came from the streets of Michigan (which is where Magic was raised). Meanwhile, Celtic People are four-door sedan owners. I lean toward the Chrysler LeBaron and the Chevy Cavalier, the veritable D.J. and Ainge of the automotive universe.
QUESTION # 2—“Whom should I marry?”
If you’re a Celtic Person, you should try to marry the most beautiful woman willing to sleep with you. In all likelihood, you are not attractive, Celtic Fan. Your haircut is ridiculous. You need to marry the equivalent of a model, lest your kids will almost certainly be repulsive. It is the Celtic Way to find that middle ground between the beautiful (i.e., the rotation on Bird’s release) and the ugly (i.e., Kevin McHale’s skeletal structure). If you’re a Laker Person, you need to marry the most understanding, forward-thinking, unconventional female you can possibly find. This is because (a) you will only enjoy a creative relationship, and (b) you will undoubtedly cheat on her, and probably with a hooker.
QUESTION # 3—“What should I have for breakfast?”
There’s sort of a gut reaction to insist that Celtic People should eat pancakes and bacon while they read the newspaper, but nobody does that except lumberjacks and maybe Mark Cuban. A Celtic Person eats cereal, but nothing bland; Cap’n Crunch or Frosted Flakes are the best options, because the empty sugar represents M. L. Carr and the ample riboflavin represents Scott Wedman (i.e., something that is good for you, even though you have no idea what it does). Laker People consume Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts, which heat up in a hurry–a lot like Bob McAdoo.
QUESTION # 4—“Who Should I Believe Killed John F. Kennedy?”
Laker People side with the conspiracy that implicates the military industrial complex, although they also suspect this is why nobody turned on the air conditioners during game five at the Garden in 1984. Celtic People think Oswald acted alone and without justification, just like Philadelphia 76er Andrew Toney.
QUESTION # 5—“What should be my favorite sexual position?”
I don’t want to get too graphic, but here’s a hint: Look at the way Danny Ainge shot his jumper. Then look at the way Jamaal Wilkes shot his. Enough said.
QUESTION # 6—“What kind of drugs should I take?”
Remember the first game of Magic’s career, when Kareem hit a skyhook at the buzzer against the Clippers and Johnson hugged him like a grizzly? The only people I know who behave like that are usually on Ecstasy. Meanwhile, Celtic People smoke pot, just like the Chief.
QUESTION # 7—“David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar?”
This is a tricky one, because Dave was the ultimate California boy and Sammy’s heaviest solo record is titled Standing Hampton, which I think is in New Hampshire (the Red Rocker also looks a bit like Bill Walton, sans headband). Yet upon further review, it’s; all too obvious: Celtic People are Roth People, because that’sthe original, definitive incarnation of a classic archetype. Laker People are Hagar People, because Sammy was in the band longer and ultimately sold more albums (just as L.A. ultimately won five titles to Boston’s three, while Magic won twenty-two of his thirtyseven head-to-head meetings with Bird). Hell, the Lakers weren’t as cool, but they were better, you know?
QUESTION # 8—“Should capital punishment be legal?”
Laker People say no, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a human rights activist who would question the validity of any practice that essentially replicates the original crime. Celtic people say yes, because anybody who’s ever looked into Larry Bird’s eyes knows he’s killer.
QUESTION # 9—“Is Adam Sandler funny?”
No
QUESTION # 10—“What socially irresponsible rap music should I support?”
According to N.W.A., life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money, and James Worthy (arrested for soliciting a Texas prostitute in 1990) would undoubtedly agree. Therefore, Laker People dig Ice Cube. Celtic People go with Eminem, the only white guy who can keep up.
Now, I know what you’re saying: Question #10 is just a race thing, which is exactly what you refuted four thousand words ago. And I’ll admit this is a slippery slope, and something that’s hard to avoid. Bob Ryan was very up front about this. “When the subject of race does come up, there’s one thing you can be sure of,” he told me. “The Celtics were clearly the favorite team of blatant racists. And that’s a sorry commentary on the world, and no fault of the Celtics. But the fact that they had so many great white players made them heroes to racists and people in the Deep South. Even in Boston, there was an element of their fandom that was very happy they had white superstars. Anybody who would deny that is naive.”
So perhaps that’s me; perhaps I’m naive. Perhaps it seems like the Lakers and the Celtics represent everything in life simply because they represent the psychological war between black and white, the only things just about everybody in America can seem to understand. Perhaps the only real reason I worshiped Larry Bird was because he was a God I could create in my own image.
But part of me knows this was really about Pop-Tarts. And about Oswald. And about voting for Bob Dole.
David Halberstam has noted that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were actually raised with paradoxical pathologies: Halberstam insists Magic’s middle-class upbringing was a traditional white experience, while Bird’s impoverished, screwed-up childhood (his father committed suicide when Larry was nineteen) was more stereotypically black. Perhaps this is part of the reason both men could so successfully represent people who have absolutely nothing to do with them. I am not a white person; not really. I am a Celtic Person. That’s my identity, and I’m never going to try to pretend I’m some sort of eclectic iconoclast. This does not mean I’m always right and you’re always wrong, nor does it mean I subconsciously need other people to feel the same way I do about anything. You don’t need to side with the Boston Celtics to be a good person. But you should definitely side with somebody. Either you’re with us or you’re against us, and both of those options is better than living without a soul.
1. This is probably not true.
2. Two entities that—to the best of my knowledge—are not in conflict.