Shred on a rival
ESPN to air C’s-Lakers battles from ‘golden era’
Those who want to live a slice of what it was like in Boston Garden during the Finals games with the Lakers will get their opportunity tomorrow and Wednesday nights.
Just close all your windows, turn up the heat and dive into “Celtics/ Lakers: Best of Enemies,” the latest ESPN 30 for 30 documentary. With three hours the first night for parts 1 and 2 and two more hours Wednesday for part 3, viewing will be an endurance test of sorts as it reminds/educates one on the history of the rivalry from the 1960s through the two Finals meetings in this century. Most of the attention is given to the 1980s wars, likely because there is more and better video to support the story and because the 2008 and 2010 renewals didn’t have nearly the same passion.
But “Best of Enemies” is more than just Celts-Lakers, West-Russell, Bird-Magic and, as voiced by narrators Ice Cube and Donnie Wahlberg, LA-Boston. It hits on the history of the NBA and its rise and the ways the game changed. Be prepared, too, for a heavy examination of race, both in the two cities (the Watts riots, busing) and how the makeup of the clubs impacted their perception among the public at large.
Cedric Maxwell gets off most of the best lines in the epic, his humor-laced honesty shining through — on the racial matters, as well. On the skepticism that accompanied the arrival of Larry Bird, Max said, “Guys were asking me: He’s not that good. I said, ‘ You’re going to find out here in a minute. It’s not going to take long.’ ”
Later, Maxwell was referring to Bird and Kevin McHale when he added, “God did something to me that opened my eyes to saying, ‘White people can play.’ As a person, I was very biased, very ignorant, and God punished me by putting me in the team with the two greatest white players playing together at one time on one team — ever. Ever.”
But the ’80s battles were defined more in terms of the geography and what it allegedly implied. Even though Bird and Magic Johnson came to embody their cities and their coasts and the respective lifestyles of each, they were just two guys from the Midwest.
Jerry West, a great source for the documentary, having taken hard the Lakers losses to the Celts in the ’60s and then stayed with the franchise to help build the Showtime edition, laid out the pitch.
“If you wanted to go see Circus de Soleil (sic transit), you came to see the Lakers,” he says. “If you wanted to go dig a ditch, you went to see the Celtics.”
Clearly, Johnson was the show in LA. As West put it, “When you’ve got Earvin on your team, if he smiled, the building lit up. He played the game with a flair. He played the game with a zest. In one fell swoop, they got a crowdpleaser, they got a ticket-seller, and they got a winner.”
Wahlberg, doing the Celtic side of the narration, countered, “Yeah, Magic made a good team better, but Larry took a bad team and made us the Celtics again.”
“Best of Enemies” delves, too, into the problems each club encountered in the ’80s. It shows Magic being booed in his first home game after he got coach Paul Westhead fired. And there are the details on the heavy handedness that led Bill Fitch’s dismissal from the Celts in 1983.
The 1984 series gets perhaps the greatest attention, with McHale’s takedown of Kurt Rambis, M.L. Carr’s trash-talking and the stated belief of the Celts that they’d managed to defeat a more talented team.
Maxwell spoke of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar losing his cool, saying, “When we got into the intellectual’s head, the rest of them, they were chopped liver . . . We got into the Lakers’ head, and once we were there, we were like a bad headache. You could take as many aspirin as you wanted. You could drink water. You could go to sleep. ‘Damn, I still got the headache. I still got the headache.’ ”
There was basketball, too, with Michael Cooper relating that Bird told him during Game 4, “I’m getting ready to wear your (butt) out.”
Carr, who played a total of 28 minutes over just four of the seven games, applied the punctuation with a steal and dunk. Said Ice Cube, “I didn’t bleed with the Laker fans during the losses to the Celtics in the ’60s, but I can’t imagine a more brutal moment than watching that bench-warming M.L. Carr seal Game 4.”
The Lakers, of course, evened the heads-up score for the decade the next year, with audio of Johnny Most saying of Abdul-Jabbar, “He has been truly magnificent.”
While I remember Kareem at the time comparing it to his Brooklyn Dodgers finally breaking through to beat the Yankees in the 1955 World Series, he says in the documentary simply, “I got to raise my finger in Boston Garden, and that was a very special moment for me.”
Added Bob McAdoo of the scene after the Game 6 clincher, “In ’84 when we got on the bus, and we were leaving out of the Boston Garden, the fans were throwing stuff at the bus, cursing at us at stuff, versus ’85 we got pure respect. They waved at us, said, ‘Job well done.’ They respected us, and that was it.”
The next year’s Celtics get a full treatment, as does the story behind the Lakers’ failure to meet them in that season’s Finals. (Bird: “I probably had more fun that year. With the addition of Walton, it was probably our greatest team, and we were almost unbeatable.”)
After another big dig into the Laker defeat of the Celts in the ’87 championship series, the documentary interviewees get to look back on the decade with perspective.
Said Byron Scott, “I can always say until the day I leave this earth that I played in the greatest rivalry of all time. And that was the Lakers and the Celtics.
“’Cause we truly did hate each other,” he adds with a laugh.
“What a cool time that was,” says McHale. “So many people look at that as almost the golden era of basketball.”
Magic and Larry get in their looks, the former saying, “I love to play when I played, because I got to play against Larry Bird and the Celtics,” and Bird stating, “For me, being able to be in that competition and being able to battle every day against the best in the world was a great honor.”
In the larger tale of what those two did for the game as a whole and the NBA as an entity, Maxwell looks back at the troubled circuit he entered and the healthy one he left, saying, “Larry and Magic had a way of healing the league that transformed it.”
“Best of Enemies” likely won’t transform the way you look at the rivalry, but it’s a strong historical piece that will easily make you appreciate it more.