When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [108]
The Lakers went on to beat the Celtics in six games, and this time there were no bitter words, no angry barbs. Bird saluted Magic as "the best I've seen." A gracious Johnson maintained, "There's only one Larry Bird."
After eight years of envy, bitterness, anger, and despair, the two stars were finally able to step back and evaluate their rivalry with a hint of appreciation.
"I just knew no one else pushed me like he did," Bird said. "And I knew, the way my body was feeling, it wasn't going to last forever."
The 1987 playoffs represented the end of an era for the Boston Celtics. Walton's career was all but over. He spent the following summer in mourning, locking himself in his Cambridge home and listening to his Grateful Dead records over and over again. Bird went to visit a couple of times, but after a while he stopped. It was too depressing.
"The fun-loving guy I knew was gone," Larry said. "Bill was in such a deep funk, nobody could help him."
McHale underwent surgery to repair the gaping space in his foot and was told by the surgeon that he might suffer long-term effects from his decision to postpone the operation. He played six more seasons, but was never the same player.
Over the next four years, Bird underwent operations on both heels to remove bone spurs, then had major back surgery and played in constant pain for the remainder of his career. He approached each upcoming season as a new day, a new opportunity to coax his team back to the Finals against Magic and the Lakers, yet their West Coast foils appeared to be inching farther and farther away from their grasp.
Riley was still dripping with champagne in the Lakers locker room when he guaranteed a repeat of the 1987 championship. It was no off-the-cuff remark. He had been rehearsing what he'd say for days. The result was just as he desired: a locker room full of shocked players. No one else had to put the pressure on the Lakers. Their coach had taken care of that for them.
A few days later, after the parade and the rally where Riley repeated his guarantee in front of thousands of frothing Lakers fans, he sat down with Magic to explain his reasoning.
"Earv, this group will go down as one of the great teams in NBA history," Riley said. "But you want to go down as one of the greatest teams that ever played? The one way to do that is repeat."
One year later, the Lakers stood poised to do exactly that, but their opponent in the 1988 Finals would not be the Boston Celtics. The Pistons finally expunged their own Garden demons by clinching their first trip to the Finals on Boston's own floor. As the clock ticked down, the Celtics crowd implored Detroit, "Beat LA! Beat LA!"
So now it was Magic and the Lakers and Isiah and the Pistons, and it was an emotionally wrenching proposition. Isiah had been Magic's closest friend in the league. He had survived a childhood beset with poverty, violence, and tragedy in Chicago, and Johnson admired the odds he had overcome. He appreciated Thomas's fighting spirit and identified with his competitive nature, even though he often winced at some of the rash decisions Isiah made in the heat of competition, such as his comments regarding Bird in the 1987 playoffs. Magic had spoken to him about considering the ramifications of his actions instead of impulsively reacting to the situation at hand.
"It was one of the major differences between us," Magic said.
The summer after Thomas, who had just finished his sophomore year at Indiana, declared he would turn professional, Magic invited him to Lansing. Magic helped Isiah prepare for the pro game, just as Norm Nixon and Julius Erving had done for him.
Their off-season workouts became a tradition, along with annual visits with Aguirre to an amusement park in suburban Detroit. They flew to Hawaii together twice a summer: the first time to vacation with their girlfriends (later wives) and the second time to train. In between, they met in Chicago,