When the Game Was Ours (20 page)

His anger was neither contrived nor fleeting. Bird could see yet another chance at a ring faltering and he wasn't going to stand idly by and allow it to happen.

"I wanted to fight every teammate I had after Game 3," Bird said. "I did everything I could in the papers to get them fired up. I knew if something didn't change, we were going to lose. So I called them sissies, told them they played like girls. I didn't know if there would be some backlash, but I didn't care.

"I was not going to watch Magic celebrating in front of me again."

When reporters relayed Bird's rant to his coach, Jones suppressed a smile. Although he did not publicly condone or condemn Bird's remarks, he was privately thrilled that his best player had challenged the team.

"It was needed," Jones said, "and it was done by the only guy who could get away with it."

Although the insults may have been shocking to the public, Bird's outburst was nothing his teammates hadn't heard before. From the moment he slipped on his Celtics jersey, Bird had demanded excellence—of himself and of those around him.

"Larry was always saying stuff like that to us," Ainge shrugged. "We knew we played like garbage. Larry's comments usually reflected how we felt as a team."

When Bird returned to his Los Angeles hotel room, the message light on his phone was blinking. He wasn't in the mood to talk to anyone and didn't bother to check his messages. Later that night, his phone rang. Steve Riley, Bird's friend and the vice president of sales for the Celtics, was on the line.

"You guys are done. It's over," Riley said.

"Bullshit!" Bird retorted. "We're a long way from that."

The morning after Game 3, Magic was picking up some dry cleaning in his Culver City neighborhood when a fan asked him if he thought James Worthy would be the MVP of the series once the Lakers "wrapped things up." The Lakers' floor general winced. He had read Bird's "sissies" comments and understood the psychology behind it. The series, he knew, was far from over.

While Johnson was running errands, K. C. Jones was ushering Bird and his teammates into the visitors' locker room at the Forum. He shut the door, turned down the lights, and plugged in the projector.

"Watch," Jones said, then fell silent. Assistant coach Chris Ford started rolling the game film, with repeated clips of the Celtics getting beaten down the floor by the Lakers. The players said little. The images of Scott stroking pull-up jumpers on the wing untouched, Worthy streaking to the basket unscathed, and Magic, alone in the open floor, hitting his teammates with no-look passes, said it all.

"That was K.C.'s style," Ford said. "Watch the film. See the embarrassment. Do something about it."

Jones turned the lights back up, faced his team, and said calmly, "No more lay-ups."

As the players migrated to the Forum court to begin practice, McHale turned to Ainge, his closest friend on the team, and said, "We've got to foul someone hard."

Ainge rolled his eyes. He had played the role of the irksome antagonist since the day he joined the Celtics. As the last line of defense on transition defense, he was the one who usually grabbed Magic or some other opposing superstar on the way to the basket and endured the wrath of the opposition for it.

"Kevin, when have you ever hit anybody?" Ainge said.

McHale chuckled, but he was not amused.

"We were a bunch of pretty surly guys at that point," Ainge said.

Before Game 4, Jones switched D.J.'s assignment. He would be responsible for shadowing Magic the rest of the series. Only then did D.J. reveal to his coach how disappointed he had been not to assume that role in the first place. "I wish D.J. had said something to me sooner," Jones said. "If he had, I would have let him take Magic."

Although D.J. did have success tempering Magic's success, the Lakers still held a 76–70 advantage in the third quarter when Ram-bis, LA's version of a blue-collar grinder, streaked to the basket in transition. McHale, hustling to get back, remembered the edict from his coach: no easy lay-ups. As Rambis continued to the basket, Carr goaded McHale, "Hit him!!"

Rambis approached the basket at a sharp angle. McHale had already made up his mind to grab the Lakers forward and throw him down, which was a common (and accepted) tactic in the mideighties on a breakaway play. But Rambis was farther from the basket than McHale had estimated, and when the Celtics forward delivered the hit, he wasn't able to cushion Rambis's fall the way he'd planned.

Although Rambis knew a Boston player was coming for him, he couldn't initially identify the culprit. It appeared to him the player was coming for him at considerable speed, so he concentrated on holding on to the ball and bracing himself for contact. The last thing he saw before he absorbed the hit was his own foot, which seemed to be almost as high as the rim.

"Man, this is going to hurt," Rambis thought as McHale clothes-lined him, sending him sprawling.

"Oh, there's going to be a fight now," McHale said to himself once he realized how badly he had flattened Rambis.

The Los Angeles forward was fortunate that instead of landing on his head, as he feared, his rear end absorbed most of the blow. When his body banged onto the floor, his first thought was, "Nothing hurts." His second was, "Where's McHale?" He popped up and charged toward the Celtics forward, but came at McHale from behind Worthy, who felt the presence of a moving body coming at him and wheeled around to defend himself. He shoved Rambis into referee Jess Kersey and a group of court-side reporters, unaware that it was his own teammate he was manhandling. Cooper, weary of Carr's verbal attacks from the bench, lunged at him, and both benches emptied. Although no actual punches landed, the psychological blow delivered by the Celtics was apparent.

McHale watched the proceedings with part awe and part elation. The flagrant foul was so contrary to anything he had ever done in his career that even his own coach would admit later he was flabbergasted by it.

"People say it was planned," McHale said. "It wasn't. If I thought about it ahead of time, I would have done it to Magic or Kareem or Worthy. They were a helluva lot more important than Rambis."

The brawl ignited chaos on the floor and turmoil in the stands. The Lakers, on the verge of putting the series away, lost their composure. They blew a five-point lead with under a minute to play behind a pair of free throws from Bird and a three-point play from Parish.

Predictably, the game came down to the final minute of overtime after D.J. missed a double-clutch shot in the key and Magic rebounded the ball. Johnson galloped down the floor on what would have been a 3-on-1 fast break and an easy Lakers basket, but the officials had already whistled D.J. for reaching in after his miss.

Magic went to the line with 35 seconds on the clock. Normally, his concentration when shooting free throws was flawless, but now he was second-guessing each move he made on the court.

His first free throw hit the back rim. His second did the same. On the Lakers bench, Abdul-Jabbar, who had fouled out, looked away. Bird grabbed the rebound on the second miss, and the Celtics called time-out.

"That's when I knew we had 'em," Bird said.

Magic, his trademark smile long gone, walked to his bench both bewildered and embarrassed. Having overshot the free throws because he was too hyped up, he left his team precariously close to blowing the game.

Boston emerged from their huddle with one plan in mind: locate Bird for the shot. Maxwell and Parish each set a pick on Cooper, who slipped trying to fight through the double screen, forcing Magic to switch over and cover his rival.

Once Bird realized he had Johnson guarding him, he waved madly for the ball. It was what he had been waiting for: the Celtics trailing 2–1 in the series, on Magic's court, and the two of them in the trenches to decide the game. It was Bird's chance for redemption from 1979, when Johnson had shattered his dreams in the NCAA championship. Maybe now he could begin to return the favor.

"At that moment," Bird said, "I knew I had to make that shot."

He did, lofting a soft fallaway jumper over Magic's head that dropped through the strings without a ripple, giving Boston the 125–123 lead with 16 seconds left.

Though the game was far from over, the momentum had clearly shifted. When Worthy stepped to the free throw line with a chance to tie the game, Carr, in a low voice, delivered a message.

"You're gonna miss," Carr said.

Worthy's first free throw clanged short, and Maxwell strolled across the key and flashed him the choke sign. Riley, watching from the Lakers bench, was apoplectic, yet his players did not seem to share in his outrage. The Celtics won, and the Lakers lost more than just a game. They lost control of the series.

In postgame interviews, Riley derided Boston as "a bunch of thugs." Maxwell and Carr mocked the Lakers for being unable to finish the job. McHale's takedown of Rambis was identified as the turning point of the game—and, in retrospect, the Finals.

"Before McHale hit Rambis, the Lakers were just running across the street whenever they wanted," Maxwell chortled. "Now they stop at the corner, push the button, wait for the light, and look both ways."

As the Celtics boarded their team bus and headed to the airport to fly home to Boston, an elated Bird plopped down next to D.J. and said, "Can you believe we're still in this? They're trying to
give
us the championship."

D.J. nodded in agreement. He scored 22 points in Game 4 and would go on to average 21.5 points a game over the final four games of the series. It was no accident that production coincided with his new defensive assignment. Magic inspired him like no other opponent.

"D.J. was the smartest guy who ever guarded me," Magic said. "He knew how to make adjustments. If I was rolling with a certain move, D.J. would say, 'You got away with that in the last quarter. Not this one.' It might take Gerald Henderson a whole game to figure out what I was doing. Sometimes he wouldn't even realize it until the film session the next day."

The venue for Game 5 was the antiquated Boston Garden, the site of so many past colossal Laker disappointments. Boston was in the midst of a heat wave, and there was no air conditioning in the building, so temperatures hovered at close to 100 degrees on the court by game time. A Lakers official brought an oscillating fan into the suffocating visitors' locker room, but it provided little relief.

"It was miserable in there," Magic said. "I had already sweated through my uniform before we had even had our pregame talk."

Although the Celtics locker room was larger, it was equally oppressive. Yet Bird was upbeat in the hours leading up to Game 5. He had slept fitfully the previous night, rehashing the action through the first four games of the Finals, and woke up exhausted. "I was concerned how we were going to stop Magic from controlling the tempo," he said.

By the time he drove down Causeway Street to the Garden, the exhaustion had been replaced by adrenaline. He was unconcerned with the heat and humidity; it was no more stifling than the summer heat of French Lick. When he arrived at the Garden, he was relieved to discover that his teammates were not about to be deterred by the oppressive temperatures either.

"We were the 'dirty' team," Maxwell said. "We weren't used to playing in luxury like the Lakers. We were a no- frills operation. When that game got hotter and hotter and hotter, we were like, 'All right, bring it on.'"

With a sizable portion of America watching on television, Bird delivered one of the finest performances of his young career, scoring 34 points on 15-of-20 shooting and grabbing 17 rebounds. He hit long perimet er shots, drives to the basket with his opposite hand, post-up jump shots, and put-backs in traffic.

"I was hitting everything," Bird said. "I had that rhythm you dream of. It was a tremendous feeling. And our crowd was fantastic. I felt after Game 5 we had it."

As Jones watched Bird take over the game, he expected at least a hint of exuberance from his forward over his remarkable performance. Yet Bird's demeanor was unchanged.

"When you are having a game like that, you figure the guy is going to be jumping up and down," K.C. said. "Not Larry. He did it without flair.

"In that regard, he was the exact opposite of Magic."

The lasting image of that 119–108 victory was Abdul-Jabbar slumped on the Lakers bench, sucking in oxygen through a small mask attached to a tank. The big man shot 7 of 25 from the floor and had wilted in New England's sweltering summer heat. Yet the Celtics knew better than to discount the fiercely competitive Hall of Famer, who still had the most lethal weapon in the series: the unstoppable skyhook.

Magic kept clear of his center in the aftermath of the loss. By the time the Lakers returned home, which required another flight across the country for both clubs, Abdul-Jabbar was suffering from another migraine. He vomited in the locker room before Game 6, then went out and scored 30 points and grabbed 10 rebounds. Worthy, in an attempt to quell some of the growing chatter that the Lakers were soft, shoved Maxwell into the backstop. The Celtics were unimpressed with LA's attempt at Eastern Conference physicality. They were convinced they had rattled Magic's confidence, and Carr spent the majority of Game 6 baiting him with the goal of breaking Johnson's concentration.

"C'mon, Cheese-o," Carr heckled. "Give us one of your cheesy smiles."

"Hey, Magic," Carr said the next time Johnson ran past Boston's bench. "Are you going to call time-out?"

The normally unflappable Johnson grew so agitated by Carr's antics that he approached the Celtics bench in the waning minutes of the third quarter. "Okay, Cheese-o, come get me. I'm ready," Carr coaxed him.

Referee Darrell Garretson walked over and pointed directly at Carr. "If you don't sit down and be quiet, I'm throwing you out of this game," Garretson warned.

"What do I care?" Carr retorted. "I'm not playing anyway."

The Celtics were so comfortable with their 65–59 halftime lead that they began encasing their lockers in plastic in anticipation of the champagne-soaked celebration they were sure would occur following the game. As late as the fourth quarter, Maxwell was still convinced Boston was about to wrap up the title. "We've got this," he said to Carr on the bench.