It was Game One of the 2008 NBA Finals, and Paul Pierce had just crumpled to the floor like a heap of laundry before being carried, much like a wounded soldier, to a wheelchair awaiting him in the tunnel leading to the Celtics locker room. It was so sudden, so life-sucking. A resounding death knell. Just like that, thanks to a torn meniscus, ACL, MCL, or whatever other kind of “-CL” you’ll find hiding beneath a human kneecap, Boston’s title run had vaporized faster than you can say “Dr. James Andrews.”
We were all ready to write the Celtics off when, lo and behold, Pierce emerged a short minute and thirty-four seconds later with no apparent damage to anything other than his pride and reputation. I was dumbfounded. My 12-year-old self frothed at the jowls with bitterness and confusion, not at Pierce’s health fortune — I have never understood how some sports fans can cheer for the injury of an opposing team’s player — but at the way he had duped us all in order to validate his ridiculous overreactions at the initial tumble. Well, that plan backfired. I already had a rather developed disdain for the cagey Pierce, but this little episode was like flying a squadron of B-52 Bombers over a California wildfire and discharging barrels of kerosene onto the mess. That more or less describes my feelings for Number 34 at that time.
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Fast-forward seven years into the future. I’ve matured (though others who know me would argue the contrary). I actually like Paul Pierce, especially this ‘zero-effs-given’ version, and understand, through personal experience, that sometimes the shock of a fall — and the fear that something is structurally wrong — can be more troubling than genuine pain.
What’s more, my seasoned distaste for New England’s favorite collection of cagers has subsided for a variety of reasons. I go to college in Boston, have read dozens of biographies on iconic NBA figures — Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Red Auerbach, Jerry West, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Steve Nash, Shaquille O’Neal, you name it — and watched roughly twelve hours of professional basketball per week last season (the plan is to bump that number to around fifteen hours this school year), including every Celtics game past the trade deadline.
(Side note: If you want some reading suggestions to help get you through the dog days of the NBA offseason, holler at me in the comments section.)
Larry Bird and Bill Russell are my favorite historic players, Red Auerbach my favorite coach/front office manager, M.L. Carr my favorite bench warmer and towel waver. In pickup ball at the rec center, I model my post game after Kevin McHale’s. When people ask me who the most historically underrated player of all time is, I usually respond with John Havlicek, who is endearingly referred to in Boston sports lore as “Hondo.” The comically homerific Tommy Heinsohn is my favorite color guy, and it’s a goddamn American tragedy that he isn’t able to travel to away games anymore.
Through all of it, I am not a Boston Celtics fan. That is a distinctive quality of mine as a contributor to this site. I love the entire NBA too much to be a fan of any one team. But damn is it a cool franchise! I’m a history major, and no other team in the league has more tradition and pride than the boys in green.
…
When I was a child, every summer my family would roadtrip down to St. Petersburg, Florida, to visit both sides of the family, a tough balancing act for my two parents, whose lone desire was to appease everyone. My dad’s mother had been living in the same house for over four decades, and not much had changed from when he and his sister were the ones skipping down the hallway, hitting a small tennis ball back and forth with those lime-green, plastic paddles. It was a total throwback: soothing jazz records spun on a perpetual loop in the living room, the furniture color palette had a burnt-out orange foundation, and the whole place just smelled like the 1950s, if that makes any sense.
In the bedroom where my brother and I slept, there was an old, old TV set, complete with a wooden frame, the most rudimentary cable box on the market, and that almost effervescent neon hue so characteristic of early 1960s color television. At night, we would stay up for Drew Carey’s Whose Line Is It Anyway on ABC Family, a program I was forbidden to watch at home because of its suggestive content.
In my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, everyone uses Comcast as their cable provider, but in sunny South Florida, Bright House Networks reigns supreme. And at the time, Bright House had one tiny little feature that Comcast didn’t: ESPN Classic.
The NBA Finals had come and gone by the time we’d arrived down in St. Pete, but NBA fever was still in full swing. To capitalize on this, ESPN Classic would air tapes of vintage games from the basketball yesteryear, most memorably Bird-era Celtics contests from the 1980s on the washed-out parquet floor in the Boston Garden, the perimeter of which showed up on that junky old TV set as a delightfully eye-searing bright green outline. Watching those players, in those shorts, on that TV, in that house, on that court, with Dick Stockton and Tommy Heinsohn on the call… there are no words to describe how awesome it was. And for a Y-Generation kid who was already infatuated with 1980s American culture — Marty McFly was, and still very much is, my hero, “Centerfold,” by the J. Geils Band, was my favorite song, and Tab Cola is my Sunday afternoon beverage of choice — I felt like Sandy Cheeks upon discovering a hoard of acorns shaped like Texas.
It was my first introduction to the pure joy that is Larry Bird’s early-80s mullet-fro, but more importantly it was an overture to the long, weird internal struggle between my affinity for Celtics history and lore and my deep-rooted revulsion of the Rondo/Big 3 outfit from 2008-2012.
Those guys are gone now, and the trade Boston made with Brooklyn two years ago has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving. It’s weird; the second they left Boston, an appreciation of what Garnett, Pierce, and Allen had brought to the NBA world as Celtics began to spring up inside me. I have never associated myself with any particular NBA fan base; fandom isn’t really my thing when it comes to basketball. Not my shtick. But the Brooklyn trade marked my departure from Celtics un-fandom, a winding road through a forest of antipathy that dead ended in front of a freshly mowed lawn with clear skies overhead: a new start.
And this team I write about now? They’re fun, well-coached, and easy to root for, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not quite sure I’ll ever reach the point where I’m actively and consistently pulling for the same NBA team, and I don’t really think I want to. But I’ve come this far, haven’t I?
As the drudgery of the August sports drought marches on (baseball, anyone?), I hope you can find solace and comfort knowing that your beloved Beantown Ballers have one less hater to fend off. So with that, I’ll sign off with an ever-so-slightly sincere, yet practically emotionless “Go Celtics.”