When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [60]
Bird was aware in general terms of the Lakers-Celtics wars of the past, but he wasn't particularly interested in learning the nuts and bolts of the rivalry. While he had great respect for the players before him, he wasn't inclined to study their accomplishments. His developing rivalry with Magic was already being compared to the epic battles of Russell and Chamberlain, yet those debates were of little consequence to Bird.
"Obviously I had heard of Bill Russell and the championships he won," Bird said. "But if anyone had pressed me on which years, I wouldn't have known. When I was 23 years old, I thought Bill Russell was 100 years old. That's the way it is when you are 23.
"You don't care what happened before. You want to make your own history."
Since both Magic and Larry had already won an NBA championship, dethroning one another became the salacious subplot. Magic was tired of hearing about the "gritty" Bird, and Larry was sick of the "dynamic" Johnson. By playoff time, both stars were aggravated by comparisons and questions regarding the other. The competition between them had ratcheted up yet another notch.
"It was annoying," Magic said. "We were both trying to carve out our own niche, on an individual and a team level, and everyone kept linking us together. I didn't like it. I kept telling people, 'I'm nothing like him.' We didn't even play the same position."
That did not prevent basketball pundits from engaging in a reoccurring debate: who is better, Larry or Magic? Both Johnson and Bird feigned indifference, yet each knew their first head-to-head clash in the pros would give whoever won the edge.
"Magic didn't sit around and talk about Larry," said Rambis. "But clearly he was on Earvin's mind. He was on all of our minds."
He should have been. An ornery Bird spent the better part of 1983–84 ruminating over the collapse of his team the previous spring. After losing to Milwaukee in the 1983 playoffs, Bird punished himself with rigorous off-season conditioning drills in the searing southern Indiana sun. During his long, arduous runs through the hills of Orange County, Bird cursed his team's inability to focus and their preoccupation with upstaging their coach, Bill Fitch.
The nucleus of the freewheeling group that won an NBA championship with such flourish two years earlier in 1981 had disintegrated into a collection of dispirited, divided, and, in some cases, openly defiant players. Although Bird resolutely stood by Fitch publicly and privately, even he could see the coach had lost the team.
"It was the petty stuff that turned us on him," explained Carr, one of Fitch's chief antagonists.
During a road trip to New York in 1979, his first season with Boston, Carr made plans to meet some family after the game at Charley O's, a restaurant directly across the street from Madison Square Garden. As he was about to leave, Boston trainer Ray Melchiorre informed him that Fitch's rule was that every member of the team was required to go back to the hotel on the team bus.
The hotel was nearly 15 blocks uptown. Carr stared at Melchiorre in disbelief.
"You mean to tell me you are going to make me drive on this bus 20 minutes, then take a cab back to the exact spot where the bus is parked?" he said.
"That's right," Melchiorre said.
Carr threw down his towel in disgust, grabbed his bag, and stomped off. As he made his way to the back of the bus, he complained, "I signed a five-year deal to be treated like this?"
Despite their dissatisfaction with their coach, the Celtics initially appeared to be poised for another title run in 1982–83. They broke out of the gates winning 16 of their first 20 games. Bird was averaging 22.9 points a night and tended to describe to some hapless defensive opponent in painstaking detail how he was going to score on him before carrying out the deed in exactly the fashion he outlined.
He developed a friendly but competitive