Celtics-Lakers doc highlights uncivil war
His Cleveland Cavaliers are still hanging on by a thread in the NBA final, but LeBron James already tipped his hat to his rival in the lead-up to Friday’s blowout Cleveland win that sent a 3-1 series back to Oakland.
Perhaps humbled by the three straight losses that opened the series, James dubbed the Golden State Warriors “the best team in the league the past few years” — a curious thing to say for a guy still trying to beat the Warriors in this rubber match that is their third consecutive meeting in the championship series.
James’ words brought to mind how much the NBA has changed over the past few decades. We’ve seen the rise of the three-pointer, the ensuing slow death of the traditional big man, the birth of the super team. And we’ve also seen a massive bump in deferential respect among peers, or at least the illusion thereof.
At least that’s one of the changes that jumps out at you when you watch ESPN’s new 30 for 30 documentary on the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, The Best of Enemies. You don’t need to sit through the entire five hours of the three-part film to see umpteen moments of athletic ungraciousness — each of which seems egregious enough by today’s standards to overwhelm a socialmedia server or two. One generation’s hard foul is another’s capital crime.
There’s that time in the 1984 championship series, the first of the three meetings between Larry Bird’s Celtics and Magic Johnson’s Lakers, when a normally mild-mannered Celtic named Kevin McHale clotheslines L.A.’s Kurt Rambis as Rambis drives to the rim. As Jack McCallum, the Sports Illustrated writer who covered the era, notes in the documentary: Today the NBA would have arrested McHale for such an outrage. All those years ago the league didn’t so much as whistle a technical foul.
But McHale’s assault on Rambis is hardly the only bit of action that leads to all-out wrestling matches on hardwood floors. There is trash talking to the extreme. The Celtics call the Lakers “Fakers,” not to mention “chokers” and “sissies.” They call Magic Johnson “Tragic Johnson” after Johnson’s late-game hiccups. And the Lakers throw the venom right back. Even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the thinking man’s legend, is seen swinging vicious elbows at Bird.
“White boy — I’ll kick your ass!” is the gist of Abdul-Jabbar’s hardbarked warnings in one moment of rage, at least if you believe the present-day retelling of Celtics forward Cedric Maxwell, a noted bleep disturber.
As the film’s L.A.-based narrator, the rapper and actor Ice Cube, says in his menacing deadpan: “Speaking for Laker fans, we straight up hated (the Celtics).”
The game is better now. Contrary to Johnson’s recent assertion that the Showtime Lakers would sweep the Warriors in a theoretical meeting of the powerhouses, the players are better now, too — no doubt better shooters by a mile. And they’re certainly better conditioned. (As then-Celtics guard Danny Ainge jokes, Maxwell’s off-season training regimen once amounted to switching “from Miller to Miller Lite”).
But as for the actual games — as multi-layered dramas superbly crafted to captivate a nation — watching the Warriors blow through this year’s alleged competition hasn’t exactly been as riveting as looking back on the culture clashes of the Bird-Magic era. Those gloryyears series weren’t just East-West squabbles. They were bigger than that, in part because the Lakers’ best players, like their core constituency of fans, were African-Americans, this at a moment when the Celtics boasted multiple white regulars in a city known for a problematic history of racist incidents.
“It’s black versus white . . . It’s our national story,” says Wynton Marsalis, the musician who’s among the documentary’s most articulate voices.
Other chapters of the LakersCeltics saga are explored in the film, including the early days of a rivalry that lacked much back and forth. The Bill Russell-led Celtics never lost to the Lakers in the midst of their unmatched run of 11 championships in 13 seasons — a run, the film tells us, punctuated by Russell requesting that only his teammates, and not the Boston public, be invited to his number-retirement ceremony.
But the centrepiece begins in 1984, when Magic’s favoured, uber-athletic Lakers are dragged into a backalley wrestling match by various acts of Boston thuggery and lose their cool — and the championship — as a result. Magic and his teammates get their revenge, of course, beating the Celtics in 1985 and 1987. And that’d be it for the legendary tete-a-tete of the NBA’s two dominant franchises until Paul Pierce and Kobe Bryant helped rekindle the quarrel in 2008 and 2010.
In the interim, the game has grown far more civil. Imagine the scandal today if an NBA team booked practice time for a visiting opponent in a local gym, only to have the visiting opponent show up to locked doors and no possibility of a workout. As Lakers coach Pat Riley recalls in the documentary, that happened to the Lakers in Boston in the 1980s. Ditto a 3 a.m. fire alarm at a Boston hotel. Ditto a constant suspicion that the cross-country rival was scheming to sabotage L.A.’s chances.
Says James Worthy, the Lakers great, of spending time in Boston: “You were scared to order room service.”
Graciousness was rarely on the menu. When Celtics patriarch Red Auerbach accepts the 1984 championship trophy in the wake of that epic slugfest, his first words are a sarcastic barb at the media for suggesting the Lakers would win in a breeze: “Whatever happened to the Los Angeles dynasty? You guys have been talking about a dynasty. Here’s where it is, right here (in Boston).”
Seen all these years later, watching the Warriors rule the league after embracing former rival Kevin Durrant as one of their own, it’s amazing to think about how much the rules of pro-sports engagement have changed, the occasional Draymond Green outburst notwithstanding. Maybe there’s deep competitive hatred buried somewhere in today’s NBA. Three decades ago it was above-surface, clenched-fist stuff.
Even today, Magic Johnson can look into a camera and deliver a believable truth: “If there’s one thing I hate in life, it’s the Boston Celtics.”
Which is not to say he doesn’t respect them, and them he. At the end of the 1987 series, with Magic hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy after beating Bird in what turned out to be the rubber match of their career final best of three, it’s Bird who drops jaws with an out-ofnowhere pronouncement.
“Magic’s just a great basketball player. He’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Bird says.
Then and now, the greats know when they’re beaten.