Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever by Jack McCallum

Author:Jack McCallum [McCallum, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation, Biography & Autobiography, Sports, Basketball, Olympics
ISBN: 9780345520500
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2012-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

In the months before the Dream Team got together, the sometimes hobbled Bird probably drew the most attention during the strange and sometimes surreal circumstances surrounding the maybe-I-am-and-maybe-I’m-not retirement of Magic Johnson.

Magic had picked the date of his ceremony as February 16 because the Celtics and Bird would be in Los Angeles. That was one of the times when Bird was sidelined, and he would not have flown cross-country had Magic not been hanging up his sneakers … or whatever the hell he was doing. Gamely and uncomfortably, Bird stood on the podium during the forty-five-minute ceremony. He wore a double-breasted suit and looked for all the world like an Indiana undertaker. (Later, after he had returned to his more comfortable sweats, he uttered the obligatory line: “I rented it out, now I gotta take it back.” It sounded funny coming from him because a lot of stuff sounded funny coming from him.)

Bird’s introduction drew such loud and sustained applause that he was prompted to say, “I’m not the one retiring here, but thank you very much.” Magic, standing a few feet away, asked with a smile: “Soon?” To which Bird replied: “Very soon.” (Nobody but Bird knew how soon.) Bird then presented Magic with a piece of the Boston Garden parquet floor, the same memento the navel-gazing Celtics had given Kareem Abdul-Jabbar during his retirement tour in the 1988–89 season.

My best guess is that Bird honestly thought that Magic was retiring, because he was emotional during his brief remarks, promising, “We’re gonna go to Barcelona and bring back the gold”—quite an enthusiastic turnaround for one who had initially seemed so disinclined to play.

And Bird had by this time, with the reality of his basketball mortality settling in, begun to appreciate his relationship with Magic and understand their dual impact upon the NBA. This is not exactly new ground, having been covered in the outstanding HBO documentary Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals and in When the Game Was Ours. Some players, most notably Michael Jordan, were dismissive of the “shared legacy” story line, believing it to be mostly a Magic creation. (See Jordan interlude.) But it’s worth another brief look.

Never in the history of sport has there been such a clear delineation of an era than the one that began when Magic and Bird came into the league, forever bound by blessed timing. Their rookie season, 1979–80, coincided with the coming of a new decade that would begin a new age in the NBA. They had been the two most-watched athletes in college basketball the previous season. They were dispatched not only to teams with contrasting styles but also to cities with a contrasting ethos—Magic’s Los Angeles, the glitzy and showy entertainment center, and Bird’s Boston, the conservative, traditional pride of the workingman.

The easy thing was to typecast the principals as reflections of their environment, the fast-breaking Magic as metaphor for fast-breaking Hollywood, the fundamentally sound Bird as metaphor for fundamentally sound Beantown. It worked at a certain

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