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four “We Were about Winning” Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and the Rivalry That Remade the NBA D A N I E L A . N A T H A N On the eve of the 2008 National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs, almost two months before the finals, Sports Illustrated featured Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers and Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics on its cover. “There’s a long way to go, of course,” mused senior writer Jack McCallum, “but the idea of a Celtics-Lakers title showdown, which hasn’t happened since the Reagan Administration, is the most tantalizing postseason prospect to come along in years for the league, its network partners and fans starved for a rivalry that evokes the NBA’s glory days.”1 Depending upon whom one asks, “the NBA’s glory days” might be the 1960s, when coach Red Auerbach and center Bill Russell led the Celtics to nine championships, beatingthe Lakers six times. Or it might be the 1980s, when Larry Bird of the Celtics and Earvin “Magic” Johnson of the Lakers reinvigorated the rivalry between the franchises, and, arguably, the NBA itself. Perhaps responding to Sports Illustrated, or to the widespread hope that the Lakers and the Celtics, the teams with the best records in their respective conferences, would meet in the finals, Harvey Araton of the New York Times reminisced, “Lakers-Celtics, or at least the anticipation of another Bird-Johnson showdown, had been the league’s meal ticket for the better part of a decade, with beloved team-first superstars from opposite coasts: one black, one white, by then fraternal soul brothers, headlining a basketball Cosby Show.”2 Araton was right, for while the Lakers-Celtics rivalry obviously preceded and has outlasted the BirdJohnson competition, the latter was sui generis for many reasons, including that it was a valued commodity. At the same time, the Bird-Johnson rivalry represented deeply entrenched cultural values and tensions, and it continues to resonate. 1WIGGINS_pages:Layout 1 2/11/10 3:25 PM Page 69 Indeed, few American sports rivalries were and remain as celebrated and symbolic as the one between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Tremendously talented, successful basketball players, whose lengthy careers were intertwined with one another dating back to their final college game, Bird and Johnson played with passion, intelligence, and creativity . “They’ll always be linked,” declared Johnson’s former coach, Pat Riley: “They were just smarter than the other players in the league. Spiritually. Mentally. I think of four words to describe them: Respect. Dignity. Integrity. Trust.”3 During the 1980s and early 1990s, Bird and Johnson were NBA superstars of the highest order and their teams were perennial championship contenders. Collectively, they won eight titles in twelve years: Bird’s Celtics, three; Johnson’s Lakers, five. “We weren’t about stats,” Johnson later explained. “We were about winning.”4 Because of their winning ways, different styles, public personas, and racial identities, and because of the tremendous media attention they received and the cultural moment in which they played, Bird and Johnson “enthralled fans (and players), literally, across the globe” and contributed to taking the NBA from its popular and commercial nadir to somewhere close to its zenith.5 This certainly explains much about the duo’s continued importance and iconicity. Yet the Bird-Johnson rivalry was about more than the NBA’s renaissance. It was, in fact, about more than basketball; when understood in its multiple contexts— historical, social, and political—it was a rivalry rife with cultural meaning , one that reflected and helped define an era. A brief word on the nature of sports rivalries and on Bird and Johnson’s, in particular, is in order. Essentially, rivalries work or are meaningful because of contrast and genuine competition. The rivals need to be different in some significant way: say, geographically (proximity usually breeds hostility) or in terms of temperament (cool versus fiery), strategic philosophy (innovation versus tradition), aesthetics (baroque versus minimalist ), or politics (conservative versus progressive)—or some combination of these characteristics. The operative idea here is difference. If the difference takes on obvious symbolic qualities—consider the cultural salience of the National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys–Washington Redskins rivalry—all the better. It is also important for the rivals to be relatively evenly matched; the outcome of the competition cannot be obvious ; there needs to be doubt about who will win, about who is better. If 70 DANIEL A. NATHAN 1WIGGINS_pages:Layout 1 2/11...

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