Armchair view will be better than press box

AMERICA AT LARGE:AS MUCH as I've been looking forward to the NBA Finals that will (finally) get under way this evening, it has occurred to me more than once over the past week that this is one occasion when I'm delighted to be retired from the daily newspaper dodge and watching as a mere civilian.

The Boston Celtics earned their place in the best-of-seven championship series with a win in Detroit last Friday night. A night earlier, the Los Angeles Lakers had claimed the West by routing the defending champions San Antonio Spurs.

Since both teams were prepared to play that weekend had either series been extended, logic would have suggested the Finals could easily have begun five days ago, but in 2008 it doesn't work that way. The television schedule had been drawn nearly a year in advance to maximise a prime-time audience; so, the championship of a sport Dr Naismith devised to be played indoors during cold New England winters may yet be decided on June 15th.

While the participants themselves have been cooling their heels for the better part of a week, newspapermen have still been obligated to keep the balloons in the air by exhausting every angle to produce daily reports and columns of dubious value to anyone save addle-brained sports editors. It represents an exercise in pure drudgery.

By yesterday I might have already been reduced to interviewing the ball boys.

The NBA's crack PR staff, in apparent recognition of this enforced ennui, on Tuesday provided a fresh angle by trotting out a pair of legends, Larry Bird and Earvin (Magic) Johnson, for a conference-call. Between them, Bird's Celtics and Magic's Lakers won eight NBA titles in the 1980s, three of them in memorable series against one another.

The rivalry between the future Hall of Famers had been foreshadowed in the 1979 NCAA championship game, in which Johnson's Michigan State team beat Bird's Indiana State 75-64, and while Magic would wind up with more NBA titles, it was Bird who initially made the more significant impact.

The Celtics team joined by Bird had won just 29 of 82 games the previous season. With him, they won 61 the next year, although they were ousted in the Eastern Finals by Julius Erving's Philadelphia 76ers.

In the balloting for Rookie of the Year, the final tally was Bird 63 votes, Johnson 3.

Boston had won 11 championships in 13 seasons between 1956 and '69, but hadn't been near the Finals since the retirement of the great Bill Russell. In Bird's second season they defeated the Houston Rockets in six games, setting the stage for what will for me endure as Larry Bird's defining moment.

Going into that series Houston's Moses Malone had boasted that he could pick four guys from a playground back in his Virginia hometown and still beat the Celtics. When Bird and his triumphant team-mates returned to Boston they were feted by a massive crowd at Boston's City Hall Plaza, one of whom bore a hand-lettered placard that read "Moses Eats Shit".

Bird was a small-town Indiana farm boy unused to public speaking. Handed the microphone by the beaming mayor of Boston, he looked out upon hundreds of thousands of fans, spotted the sign, and, with the television cameras rolling, said, "You know, you're right. Moses does eat shit!"

The series starting tonight will be the 11th time the Lakers and Celtics have faced off in the Finals - including one encounter, in the 1950s, when the former were still the Minneapolis Lakers. (Why they kept the name when they moved to Tinseltown remains a mystery, sort of like the Jazz retaining their name when they shifted from New Orleans, the veritable birthplace of the genre, to Salt Lake City, a staid Mormon bastion in which music is generally regarded as sinful.)

Those encounters included three classic LA-Boston match-ups in the 1980s. The last of these, in 1987, was won by the Lakers, and Magic's team went on to win several more. The Celtics haven't been in the Finals since.

Bird was the Most Valuable Player of the 1983-84 finals, won by Boston in six games, but the most memorable moment was provided by Kevin McHale.

McHale, who played Robin to Bird's Batman on those teams, is almost single-handedly responsible for his old team's presence in this year's championships as well. As the vice-president for basketball operations of the Minnesota Timberwolves, he is the man who agreed to trade Kevin Garnett to the Celtics for five useless bodies, thereby transforming a Boston team that won 24 games last season into one that won 66 this year.

And it was McHale's takedown of Kurt Rambis that may have inspired Boston's win in 1984. A muscular oaf who incongruously affected horn-rimmed glasses, Rambis' role in the midst of more athletically gifted team-mates involved (a) rebounding, and (b) inflicting as much physical punishment on the opposition as he could get away with.

Boston had lost two of the first three games and were trailing in the fourth when Rambis, not known for his scoring, attempted what appeared destined to be an uncontested lay-up on a breakaway. Suddenly there was McHale, running him down from behind to seize him by the neck with a clothesline tackle and flinging him to the floor, precipitating a bench-clearing rumble on the court and sending Jack Nicholson into near-apoplexy.

Today the incident would probably be punished as a flagrant foul. That night in LA, it lifted the Celtics from the brink of elimination to a 129-125 victory to even the series, and Boston won in seven games.

The Lakers, with Johnson providing the dramatics, rebounded to win the next year, and Boston defeated the Rockets to win the 1986 title, setting the stage for the 1987 showdown that represents the last between the teams until tonight.

Although Bird, McHale, and Robert Parish were the cornerstones of that Boston franchise in much the same manner Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen are of this year's edition, a key component of those teams was Bill Walton. It was late in his injury-plagued career, and he was primarily used to back up Parrish, but Walton was a fun-loving, countercultural free spirit who spent his off-seasons travelling with the Grateful Dead, and brought an intangible chemistry to the Celtics locker-room.

He also brought his children along to the NBA finals. Walton's undisciplined young boys turned the team hotel into their private playroom, boisterously racing through the halls of the Los Angeles Airport Marriott in combat fatigues while terrified adults tried to get out of the way.

"God," sighed McHale. "It's like living with Rambo's kids."

I found myself recalling that this morning only because one of Rambo's kids, 28-year-old Luke Walton, is a reserve forward on the Lakers team that will throw down against his father's old franchise tonight.

Let the games begin.