It’s a few clicks past 11 o’clock on a Monday night in late May, sports fans, and the Boston Celtics just whipped the Miami Heat by 20 points to even the N.B.A.’s Eastern Conference finals at two games apiece. I just wish I cared.
The game would’ve escaped my notice entirely but for a mention by my father, who’s not only following the series closely but torn about which team to root for — Boston, his onetime city of long residence, or Miami, whose Heat he follows from his semi-new wintertime home down the coast a ways in even more southern Florida.
But, let’s be real, Jimmy Butler, Jayson Tatum — it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for these players today, as talented as they may be, when you were weaned on the likes of Larry Bird, Robert (the Chief) Parish, and Kevin McHale, the greatest frontcourt of all time. Toss in Cedric (Cornbread) Maxwell before them, with some contentious overlap, of course. Crafty veteran guards like Dennis Johnson or Danny Ainge (reputed to be a dirty player, but we’ll let that slide). They were likable in part for the lack of athleticism they seemingly shared with the Celtics big men. Hey, as Al Davis said in a different sport, “Just win, baby.”
Take the 1986 N.B.A. finals, Boston over the Houston Rockets in six. Bird, the M.V.P. of the series, put on a show, alternately a sharpshooter from deep, a soft-touch passer in traffic, and a bruiser crashing the boards. So much so that a stunned and defeated Hakeem Olajuwon, all facets considered maybe the most skilled center in history, sat beside his locker afterward, elbows on knees, and shook his head, calling him “the best player I’ve ever seen.”
Why that’s stuck with me all this time is a bit of a mystery. It’s good to have heroes when you’re young. But it’s also good to move on. There’s always the danger of taking such enthusiasms too far — the man-child at the ballpark, scorecard in hand, who can recite every stat from Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine of 1976, the schlub pawing at the record store cut bins who knows by heart every scrap of minutiae regarding the garage bands of Detroit circa 1968. Guys who never learned how to care about anything else, that is.
Now I see that Dan Shaughnessy, the Boston Globe sportswriter, is out with a counterargument, a book about his time covering Larry Bird and the Celtics in the ’80s. He’s titled it “Wish It Lasted Forever.”
There’s no way I’m not checking it out.