Book of Basketball

by Simmons Bill

  No. 2: What if Boston had traded Rick Robey sooner? The only NBA player who routinely shut down Bird was teammate Rick Robey, a backup center who doubled as Bird’s drinking buddy and fellow troublemaker. When the Celtics swapped Robey for Dennis Johnson before the ’84

  season, Bird immediately rolled off the best five-year stretch in the history of the forward position. This wasn’t a coincidence. As soon as we master time machine technology, let’s travel back in time and frame Robey for a murder right before the ’82 season. I just want to see what happens.

  No. 3: What if Bird had come along ten or fifteen years later? The dirty little secret of Bird’s success: fantastic timing. His heyday (1980–88) coincided with the last generation of all-offense/no-defense forwards (Dantley, English, etc.), 64 and that’s not counting all the fringe swingmen (Ernie Grunfeld, Gene Banks, etc.) and clumsy power forwards (Kent Benson, Ben Poquette, etc.) torched by Bird on a routine basis. His toughest defenders were Michael Cooper, Paul Pressey and Robert Reid, lanky athletes who made him work for every shot; nowadays, nine out of ten opponents would do that. By the late eighties, the small forward spot was teeming with athletes like Scottie Pippen, Xavier McDaniel, Dennis Rodman, Detlef Schrempf, Jerome Kersey, Rodney McCray, Gerald Wilkins and James Worthy, while the big forward spot featured the likes of Karl Malone, John Salley, Sam Perkins, Horace Grant, Kevin Willis, Hot Rod Williams and Roy Tarpley. The salad days of Tripucka and Benson were long gone. When Bird floundered in the

  ’88 Eastern Finals, we assumed he was worn out and ignored a much more logical reason: maybe Rodman just shut his country ass down. Regardless, nobody realized what happened to forwards until the 1989 draft, when Danny Ferry (number two) and Michael Smith (number thirteen) bombed more memorably than Vanilla Ice’s follow-up album. And the thing is, they didn’t do anything wrong! They were just test cases for a totally different league. Had Ferry and Smith entered the NBA in 1975, they might have made multiple All-Star teams in the Don and Dick era. Going against the likes of Pippen, Malone and Rodman every night? Not a chance. 65

  You know what the Smith Experience was like, actually? Watching the newspaper industry battle the Internet these past ten years. Sorry, fellas, the old days are over. You’re gonna lose. I wish I had better news for you. So let’s say Bird bridged the gap between newspapers and the Internet for the forward position. If he’d come along ten or fifteen years later, he would have been the New York Times or Wall Street Journal: still successful, still a must-read, but not quite as iconic. On the other hand, he would have adopted the three-point line much more quickly, and he would have developed all the modern conditioning/training/dieting habits, and shit, maybe something as simple as Pilates would have saved his back … (Now I’m talking myself out of this. Let’s just move on)

  4. MAGIC JOHNSON

  Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 12 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’80, ’82, ’87 … MVP: ’87, 89, ’90

  … runner-up: ’85, ’91 … Top 5 (’83, ’84, ’85, ’86, ’87, ’88, ’89, ’90, ’91), Top 10 (’82) …

  leader: assists (4x), steals (2x), FT% (1x) … 3-year peak: 22–7–12 … 2-year Playoff peaks: 19–7–15 (40 G) … ’80 Finals: 22–11–9 … ’87 Finals: 26–8–13, 2.1 TO’s, 54% FG … career: 19.5–7–11.2 (1st), 85% FT, 52% FG … Playoffs: 20–8, 12.5 APG (1st all-time) … best or second-best player on 5 champs (’80, ’82, ’85, ’87, ’88 Lakers) and 4 runner-ups … holds 12

  different playoff records (including most assists) … member of ’92 Dream Team … 10K

  Assist Club

  My vote for the most fascinating basketball career of all time. He’s one of the most famous college players and professional players ever. He had an iconic game (Game 6, 1980) and iconic moment (the baby sky hook). He played in ten championship finals over a thirteen-year span, taking home six titles in all. He cocaptained the single greatest basketball team ever assembled (the ’92 Dream Team). He starred in the greatest Finals ever (1984). He had one of the best porn names ever but became so famous so fast that we never realized it. 66 He battled Erving, Bird, Moses, Isiah and Jordan in the Finals over the span of twelve years as the league evolved from tape delay to mainstream. He meshed with his city on and off the court like nobody in league history. He was called a savior, a winner, a coach-killer, a choke artist and a loser, and then a winner again … and his prime hadn’t even happened yet. He became the first man to kiss another man in prime time. His game will never be re-created in your lifetime or mine. His first retirement announcement doubled as one of the ten biggest sports moments of all time, one of three JFK-assassination-level moments for Generation X (along with the Challenger exploding and the O.J. car chase) where everyone my age remembers where they heard the news. He became the focal point of the world’s single biggest health crisis in seventy-five years. And all of these things somehow happened between March ’79 and August ’92.

  You know how Microsoft keeps releasing Windows with 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so on? There have been seven incarnations of Earvin “Magic” Johnson in all. In order:

  Magic 1.0. The skinny kid with the big smile and bad facial hair from Michigan State. We hear too much about his NCAA title win and not enough about Magic becoming the first underclassman to get picked first in the NBA draft, 67 or what he specifically meant as the second basketball star other than Doc to transcend color; nobody thought of him as black, just charming and genuine. Throw in his infectious smile, unselfish passing, built-in rivalry with Bird and once-in-a-lifetime game (six foot nine, all arms and legs, capable of playing five positions), and Magic’s color never mattered. For a league battling dueling “too black” and “our guys don’t care” syndromes, this was absolutely crucial.

  (Postscript: How terrific was Magic in high school and college that he actually got away with the nickname “Magic”? That’s like giving yourself the porn name Long Dong Silver—you better be able to back that up. I always respected Magic for this one.)68

  Magic 2.0. He quickly added to his legend by rejuvenating the Lakers and winning the ’80 Finals MVP with a surreal 42–15–8 in Kareem’s place—and then all hell broke loose. He missed 45

  games of his second season with a knee injury, returned one month before the playoffs, then complained that his teammates (specifically, Norm Nixon) were jealous during an eventual upset loss to the Rockets in the first round, saying, “I try to give everybody the ball, keep everyone happy, but I guess it’s never enough. I never heard of this kind of situation on a winning team. Everybody can’t get the pub.” 69 Hardened by fallout from his record $25 million contract and a nasty (but not undeserved) reputation as a coach-killer, Magic 2.0 peaked in year three when the Lakers rolled through the ’82 Playoffs. Now a devastating all-around player who played four positions and filled any void—a little like Phil Hartman or Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live in that he could carry the show and serve as a valuable utility guy—Magic thrived defensively on L.A.’s deadly half-court trap and topped 200 steals. We’ve never seen anyone quite like ’82 Magic and the stats back it up: no modern player came closer to averaging a triple double (18.6 PPG, 9.6

  RPG, 9.5 APG). But the Lakers still didn’t belong to him because he was splitting point guard duties with Nixon (something that seems incongruous in retrospect) 70 and his teammates still bristled about his salary and public image. Even Kareem’s 1983 autobiography dismissed the long-believed assumption that Magic’s enthusiasm rejuvenated his career, griped about the 1980

  Finals MVP vote and proclaimed, “We didn’t repeat as champs in 1981 because Earvin got injured, and when he came back he had forgotten what made us and him so successful.” Ouch.

  (Postscript: Magic didn’t take those barbs personally because, again, Kareem was a ninny. But you’d think Kareem would have appreciated Magic more after not playing with a single All-Star from 1976 through 1979.)

  Magic 3.0. Didn’t emerge until the Lakers got swept in the ’83 Finals, settled their alpha-dog/point-guard issue by sw
apping Nixon for the rights to Byron Scott (giving Magic the keys to Showtime), then got roughed up by a hungry Boston team that hijacked the ’84 Finals. It was a double whammy for Magic—not only did Bird’s team win, but Magic choked badly in crunch time of Game 2, Game 4 and Game 7. (I mean, badly. Like, everyone rehashed it all summer.) Magic rebounded by leading the Lakers to the ’85 title, winning the climactic Game 6 in Boston and exorcising a kajillion Laker demons. That’s when Magic 3.0 peaked as a point guard extraordinare and the King of Showtime, but someone who still needed an alpha dog (in this case, Kareem) to carry the scoring load for him.

  (Postscript: It’s hard to overstate how badly Magic’s reputation suffered after the ’84 Finals, when he mistakenly dribbled out the clock at the end of regulation in Game 2, threw the ball away on another potential game-winning possession in Game 4, bricked two free throws with the score tied and 35 seconds remaining in Game 4, then made consecutive turnovers in the last 80 seconds to squander a winnable Game 7. That August, SI’s Alexander Wolff even wrote an essay titled

  “Johnson in the Clutch: Don’t Call Him Magic, Just Call Him Unreliable.” 71 Even after his ludicrously good performance in the ’85 Finals, the consensus was, “Yeah, but he could never win without Kareem.”)

  Magic 4.0. Didn’t emerge until a young Rockets team trounced the ’86 Lakers and Kareem suddenly looked 200 years old. Hardened for a third time, Magic reinvented himself as a crunch-time scorer, pulling the Lakers past Boston with a Pantheonic Finals performance: A 26–8–13 with 54 percent shooting, one remarkably clutch shot (the do-or-die baby sky hook over McHale and Parish in Game 4) and just 13 turnovers. Amazing. Incredible. He captured MVP and Finals MVP, finally grabbing the conch from Bird as the league’s alpha dog. From 1987 to 1991, Magic 4.0 tallied three MVPs and two rings, made the Finals four times, won 60-plus games per year and single-handedly kept the declining Lakers among the NBA’s elite. Off the court, he emulated Jordan’s marketing savvy and reinvented himself as a commercial pitchman and celebrity, even launching a Rat Pack of sorts with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall. 72 Suddenly he was the face of Hollywood, the guy who bridged every genre, a legendary performer and partier who knew everyone. You always hear the phrase “larger than life,” but in Magic’s case, he really was. 73

  Magic 5.0: And just like that, he became the face of HIV: November 7, 1991. I remember feeling like a family member had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. When my college girlfriend called me at our school’s newspaper office to tell me the news, my knees actually went weak. Magic is gonna die? Even when he kept hanging around over the next twelve months—first the ’92 All-Star Game, then the Dream Team, then a brief comeback that fell apart—an unspoken expiration date lingered over everything. Nobody expected him to survive long. Then again, nobody understood the difference between HIV and full-blown AIDS. We needed someone famous like Magic to teach us about it. Which he did.

  Magic 6.0. My least favorite version. After riding high for fifteen years and getting the “magic”

  carpet pulled from under him, poor Earvin spent the next decade hanging around like Wooderson from Dazed and Confused. 74And you know what? That stretch did more damage to the perception of his basketball career than anyone realizes. He wasted a curious amount of time squashing rumors about his sexuality, even releasing a 1993 autobiography colored with tales about his (very hetero!) escapades and shamelessly plowing through the talk show circuit as “the (very hetero!) stud who banged so many chicks that he ended up with HIV, which means this could happen to you as well!” (Important note: This relentless campaign inadvertently hampered the sex lives of all red-blooded American males between the ages of eighteen and forty for the next eight years. For the first four years, everyone was terrified to have unprotected sex unless they were shitfaced drunk. For the next four, the guys weren’t terrified but the girls still were, although it’s possible they were just out of shape and didn’t want us to see them naked. Then the Paris Hilton/Britney Spears era happened, women got in shape and started dressing more provocatively, we figured out that you had a better chance of winning the lottery than getting HIV from conventional sex and it became a sexual free-for-all. Of course, I was married by then. Awesome. Thanks for ruining my twenties, Magic.) Did we really need to know about his elevator trysts, threesomes and foursomes, or bizarre philosophy about cheating on longtime girlfriend Cookie? 75 Was Magic educating America’s youth about HIV or affirming and reaffirming his heterosexuality? The lowest point: Magic appeared on Arsenio’s show right after the HIV announcement and was asked about his sexuality. Magic said that he wanted to make it clear, “I am not gay.” The crowd applauded liked this was fantastic news, and even worse, Magic reacted to their homophobia like there was nothing wrong with it. It wasn’t his best hour.

  When his post-Dream Team comeback imploded because of HIV in-sensitivities, Magic bombed miserably on NBC, left television to coach the ’94 Lakers, and resigned after sixteen frustrating games because he couldn’t reach younger players. He toured with an exhibition hoops team across Europe—like a washed-up Bono wasting a winter singing karaoke at Irish bars—before becoming a talk show staple, one of those “I was very, very, very available to come on” guests along the lines of Richard Lewis, Teri Garr, and Carrot Top. On the heels of Jordan’s much-ballyhooed return to the Bulls, Magic announced his intentions for another NBA comeback and volunteered his services for the ’96 Olympic team. Nobody cared. Undaunted, he returned after the ’96 All-Star Break and reinvented himself as L.A.’s new power forward for 32 games. This was fun for a week before we realized an older, bulkier Magic couldn’t possibly shed five solid years of basketball rust. Even if his opponents accepted him—an underrated milestone for the acceptance of HIV in this country, by the way—Earvin had turned into Chris Rock’s joke about how “you never want to be the guy who’s just a little too old to be in the club” (think Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) before retiring again that summer. 76 He quickly created a syndicated late night show for himself, hoping to revive Arsenio’s successful tactic of “friendly celebrity brings on other celebrities, makes them feel comfortable, kisses butt, and everyone has fun.” The show would have worked if Magic had been remotely capable of hosting it. (Personally, I was devastated when they canceled it—to this day, it’s the only late night show to shatter the Unintentional Comedy Scale. You know how Magic always does his “There will nev-ah, ev-ah, ev-ah be another Larry Bird” routine? Trust me … there will nev-ah, ev-ah, ev-ah be another TV event like The Magic Hour.)77 Even after that latest public failure, you still couldn’t watch a Lakers home game without NBC’s obligatory Magic interview. He inserted himself into every Shaq-Kobe title celebration like Don King after a big fight. He boasted about beating HIV and claimed the virus had been wiped from his body. When the NBA launched a coed three-on-three celebrity game during 2002 All-Star Weekend, a heavier Magic unbelievably showed up as a teammate of Justin Timberlake and Lisa Leslie. As you watched him, you couldn’t help thinking, “Larry never would have lowered himself to this game.” I didn’t like anything about Magic 6.0 other than his durability.

  Magic 7.0. This version had a happier ending. At least so far. Magic stepped back from the spotlight, became a visionary businessman, made hundreds of millions and opened a chain of successful movie theaters across the West Coast. His on-air skills improved so dramatically that ABC lured him away from TNT last year. He still spends much of his spare time educating people around the world about AIDS and HIV. And the fact that he’s still alive and healthy, far exceeding everyone’s expectations, might be his greatest accomplishment of all.

  From a historical sense, Magic 6.0 cluttered our minds and overshadowed his actual NBA resume. He clearly enjoyed a better playing career than Bird until the Wooderson era destroyed that relatively small gap; now we “remember” them as equals even though Magic’s prime lasted three extra years. Just know that I spent both Reagan terms rooting against Magic, calling him
a choker and arguing Bird’s merits until my face was blue … and then Magic captured my eternal respect after the baby sky hook and his December buzzer-beater in the Garden that same year. It wasn’t that Magic made those shots as much as my reaction as he was taking them; my heart sank even as the ball was drifting toward the basket. Not even the biggest Celtics fan on the planet could deny it any longer. Magic Johnson was just as exceptional as Larry Bird. Beyond that, he remains the most breathtaking player who ever ran a fast break—better than Cousy, better than Nash, better than anyone—because his height, huge hands, Gretzky-like vision and sneaky-long arms allowed him to reach the rim faster than opponents anticipated. (I grew up in a sports world that had seven certainties: you weren’t stopping Kareem’s sky hook, you weren’t covering Rice with one guy, you weren’t blocking LT with one guy, you couldn’t let Gretzky hang behind the net on a power play, you weren’t sacking Marino, you weren’t getting Boggs to chase a bad pitch and you weren’t stopping Magic on a three-on-one.) And he’s the single best leader in the history of the sport. Nobody extracted more from teammates, whether it was an All-Star Game, a mundane affair in December or any playoff game.