By Ryan McGowan
A couple of months ago, I was playing cards at home with a few buddies in our usual Thursday night game. For whatever reason, we decided to put on my roommate’s DVD copy of Larry Bird: A Basketball Legend, a video on which at least four questions on the tenth-grade MCAS exam should be based. (Perhaps a compare-and-contrast essay topic in which the student has to dissect the Bird-Magic rivalry in the context of the greater cultural Boston-L.A. rivalry, for some interdisciplinary learning.) Either way, the best part of the new DVD release of LBABL is that it contains full-length game footage of three of Bird’s most memorable games: the fourth quarter shootout with Dominique in the ’88 Eastern Conference playoffs, the miraculous 49-point game in 1992 when his back was on the verge of simply cracking like a twig, and the great 60-point game against the Hawks in `85, just a few days after McHale had set the team record with 56 in a game. These are simply a phenomenal thing for any sports fan to own. Poker, normally an all-consuming Thursday night passion, quickly became an afterthought, as everyone was transfixed by the game films on the screen.
Watching those games was like looking at my high school yearbook ten years after graduation. Everything looked vaguely familiar (the uniforms, the floor, the arena) but somehow it was all so removed, so much a relic of an earlier, bygone era that it seemed like it was part of a different life altogether. I stared at the screen, watching Bird, Parish, McHale, Wilkins, a young Doc Rivers, Ainge, DJ, Lohaus. It looked not only familiar but also comforting, to see what basketball used to be like: a more exciting, more intense, better game that what the NBA has turned into in 2005.
Part of me hates to write about this, because an inherent turn-off of many readers is the writer with the “In My Day” syndrome, droning on and on about the superiority of baseball before the DH and free agent, football before platoon play, and hockey before goalie masks and cups. Most people hate to hear about how great things were way back when. In most cases, they are right. Progress has moved us forward as a society in so many ways. Nowadays I can DVR “The O.C.”, “Family Guy”, and “24”, rather than have to set up a recording with a video tape and a clock that perpetually reads “12:00 AM.” But nowhere was it more evident to me as to how superior the NBA product was back in the 1980’s than when I watched those games.
Granted, the games that were on the DVD were put there for a reason; they exemplified the best of an era. But still, something should be said for how transfixed we all were while watching them, and how blasé and uninterested I am in the real-life Celtics of today. My dad has a 12-game season ticket package to the C’s, so the last few years I’ve been able to go to 5 or 6 games a year. I have to honestly say that I have only been interested in the game a handful of times. More often than not, I find myself trying to have a conversation with the people in my group (that is, in those times when I could hear myself over the insanely loud music that they play DURING THE GAME).
And that is to say nothing of the incessant t-shirt tosses, leprechaun acrobatics, six year olds dressing in adult clothing and trying to make a layup, shopping cart shooting, and the other antics that are shoved down our throats beginning no more than 0.2 seconds after the action on the floor stops. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a good idea to add some ancillary entertainment to the experience, especially with the exorbitant ticket prices for C’s games. I like the occasional half-court shot contest or something like that. But is it really necessary to cram in so many events that it almost causes sensory overload in some people?
I realize that the NBA tries to market the game to kids, and to try to develop a new generation of basketball fans. But if the Association wants to rely on this extraneous entertainment to catch the interest of an increasing population of kids with short attention spans, they won’t be creating new NBA fans. Instead, we will have a generation of kids who want to go to games to get free t-shirts, get on the JumboTron, and make fun of the white guys who get inducted into the Bad Dance Hall of Fame. Kids today know very little of Larry Bird, John Havlicek, Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Dave Cowens. Worse yet, they see very few players like them, save for the occasional Tim Duncan or LeBron James. Even the great Michael Jordan is a blurry memory for many young “fans” at the Celtics games.
We sit up in section 323, near the Family Section. Every game I go to, I see 10-year-old kids passively watching the game, sometimes getting fired up enough to shout an F-bomb at a player. What gets them REALLY excited are the t-shirt cannon shoots and the prize drops from the rafters. These kids aren’t fans of the Celtics; they are fans of the Celtics game experience. But why should they be fans of the Celtics, or the NBA at all for that matter? They play an 82-game regular season that 90% of players sleepwalk through. Then they play excruciatingly long playoff series, extending the season well into June. Very few teams even bother to play defense, but it wouldn’t matter, since most teams can’t play offense either. Watching the Celtics of the 1980’s play was like watching an oasis, a mirage that apparently existed at some point in history but would be incomprehensible to a younger fan today.
Take one of the kids from Section 323 back in time to the old Garden, and they would be annoyed. They’d probably sit there bored, asking their parents when the leprechaun was going to come out and do backflip dunks.
The NBA’s problems seen to be twofold: a problem of marketing, and a problem with the game itself. It is shortsighted to think that young people will only be interested in basketball if there are these endless hooks at the game. Look at the number of kids who go to Red Sox games at Fenway and who wear their Ortiz and Ramirez jerseys around school. These kids are growing up learning to appreciate baseball (a much slower and more “boring” game than basketball) for the game itself, and the game is enjoying unprecedented popularity among young people. The NBA, in contrast, is doomed because someday these young fans will grow up and will have no appreciation for the game of basketball to fall back on.
As Rick Pitino once aptly pointed out, Larry Bird ain’t walking through that door. No, he’s not. But the direction in which the NBA has gone since his retirement is killing the future of pro basketball. Hockey is dead, at least for this season and maybe the foreseeable future. The Sox don’t start for 6-7 weeks. The Celtics have a very small window for our attention, but because the NBA seems to think that the frills of the sport are more important than the sport itself, real sports fans couldn’t care less about what happens over on Causeway Street. It was a sad indicator for me this past weekend when I didn’t watch one second of the NBA All-Star Game, but instead paid attention through at least 75 laps of the Daytona 500.
At least I still have the Larry Legend DVD to help pass the time until Opening Day.
