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.