Another Excerpt From Shank's Latest Book

The Boston Globe published a little more from Shank's book on the Larry Bird era Celtics:

Book excerpt: Remembering the first Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals of the Larry Bird era

The Celtics host the Lakers Friday night at TD Garden (wotta coincidence! - ed.) , and any renewal of one of the great NBA rivalries always conjures memories of their historic matchups.

With that in mind, this has been excerpted from “Wish It Lasted Forever — Life With the Larry Bird Celtics” by Dan Shaughnessy. Copyright ©2021 by Dan Shaughnessy. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Bird-Magic Finals of the NBA’s golden 1980s — the Celtics and Lakers met three times in a stretch of four seasons between 1984-87 — were like the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier title fights. The first of the three Bird-Magic bouts came in 1984 after the Celtics beat the Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern Conference finals, while the Lakers advanced in the West against the Phoenix Suns.

CBS was ecstatic. Boston-LA meant that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson would be meeting in a championship event for the first time since NBC set unbreakable ratings records with its broadcast of the Bird-Magic NCAA Final in 1979. At least one of them had been in the NBA Finals in each of their first four NBA seasons, but this was the first championship series featuring both.

The Celtics and Lakers were the Yankees and Dodgers of pro basketball. They’d played in seven NBA Finals from 1959 to 1969 with Boston winning every one. Lakers fans were haunted by the 1962 finale, when Frank Selvy’s potential series winner clanged off the rim at the Boston Garden. LA general manager Jerry West experienced what he called the low point of his life when the Lakers couldn’t beat Boston in 1969. A Celtics-Lakers Final in 1984 meant that the league’s two showcase franchises accounted for 60 percent (23 of 38) of all NBA crowns in the first four decades of the league’s existence. (In the COVID summer of 2020, the LeBron James Lakers won their seventeenth NBA crown, finally tying the Celtics for most championship banners.)