Celtics a shadow of their former hoops

Keith Duggan Sideline CutIt has been a strange few days, being back in Boston for the first time in 10 years and finding that the city still moves along at its own refined and sleepy, 19th-century pace and that the Celtics basketball team remain a frustration.

After making it to a seventh deciding game of a play-off series for the first time since 1988, the Celtics had an opportunity to regain some of the local glory heaped on the championship-winning Red Sox and Patriots in the past few years.

But with the pubs around North Station buzzing with a sense of energy and expectation reminiscent of the Larry Bird era, the team fell apart against the Indiana Pacers last Saturday night. All this week, they were branded a disgrace in all the city newspapers and the chief culprit was deemed to be Paul Pierce, a vastly talented but volatile 28-year-old who is paid $15 million a year to restore something of the Celtics' lost grandeur.

Back in the days when they were throwing out green cards like raffle tickets, we landed in Logan airport and drifted toward the areas of Brighton and Allston, where the streets were choked with Irish. With immaculate timing, we missed out by a single season on seeing Bird play and instead had to make do with the Dale Roberts era. Like Bird, Roberts was a slow, 6ft 11in (211cm) white guy but he did not shoot three pointers to win games season in, season out. He did not shoot 40 points a night in the company of legendary players. And he did not do things on a basketball court that are still spoken of to this day.

When the great Julius "The Doctor" Irving visited the Boston Garden in the last days of his career, he was given an ovation by the crowd, who were informed it also happened to be his birthday. Bird then proceeded to torture the helpless Irving, scoring on him from positions all over the floor and shouting "Happy f****** birthday" to the older man after every basket.

The sight was cruel and compelling and is said to have made a lasting impression on a very young Michael Jordan, who watched on television and vowed never to stay in the game long enough to experience humiliation.

Bird had a killer's temperament and was stubborn and somewhat aloof but he was a genius for the game. Boston and then America adored him. And along with Magic Johnson and Jordan, he was a founding father in the transformation of the NBA into a slick and global merchandising product.

A friend named Skip Barry talked about the NBA and what it means now over a late Wednesday night. He recalled taking a train down from his home in Nashua, New Hampshire, and paying $6 for courtside seats in the old Boston Garden in 1980 - for a play-off game. The place was not quite full but it rocked nonetheless, and afterwards patrons could wander onto the famous parquet floor and approach classic players like John Havilcek for autographs.

The great Bill Russell, who led the Celtics when they dominated the sport in the 1960s, was in attendance that evening and he told a friend of Barry's, "Son, I don't sign anymore but I would be pleased to shake your hand."

But what Barry also remembered from that period is that the play-offs, even the NBA finals, were not televised live around the United States. Basketball was popular and well-known but it retained an element of the underground about it because of the fact the league was run in a happy-go-lucky, haphazard way. Fans had to seek the game out and the reward was a sport that was vaguely glamorous while retaining a kind of cult appeal.

At 15, Barry was a beanpole teenager, on his way to becoming 6ft 6in (197cm) and one of the best high-school players in New England. He went on to Boston College and in 1984, his first season, spent September sparring with members of the Celtics, who had just won the NBA championship that summer but were still happy to hammer the local college outfit in pick-up games. Bird never came to those sessions.

Barry was normally assigned to take Danny Ainge, an angel-faced 6ft 5in (195cm)guard who was as tough as nails. Kevin McHale, Bird's lanky sidekick on that great Celtics team, was about as pleasant as anyone Barry had met but on the court he was ferocious and unforgiving and mean. In an empty gym, against youngsters, the best team in America played with the ferocity of animals. They hated losing.

After leaving Boston College, Barry went travelling and played some seasons in Ireland and when he returned home consigned basketball to the basement of his mind in the way serious athletes often do. He had his fill of it. And over the next 10 years, the iconic 1980s team became stiff and old and, through a series of mishaps, the Celtics were diminished in importance.

The organisation struggled to adapt to the flashy hoopla created by the ascendance of Michael Jordan and the commercial imperatives driven by the NBA commissioner, David Stern. By the time the old Boston Garden was knocked, the Celtics were just another NBA team. They kept the parquet floor as their distinctive emblem and 17 white championship banners are suspended from the rafters of the new arena, hanging like accusations high above the young millionaires who play today.

Skip Barry is not alone in his indifference toward the contemporary NBA. He catches a game every now and then but it feels less and less like the sport of his adolescence. In recent years he has started returning to Boston College games, where the spirit of competition and the atmosphere in the gym have an authenticity that has not changed.

He has become active among the alumni, worrying that even in a college as fundamentally sound as BC scholarship hoop players are falling through the cracks, missing out on the leap to NBA riches and leaving without a requisite education.

He gets to meet old faces, pressmen who covered his games back when and former players still living around the city. Kevin McHale came in one night during the season past and was pleasant as ever.

Over the next few weeks, teams other than the Boston Celtics will meet in the NBA finals and the series will be broadcast live around the world to a voracious audience. The association and the game is a monster now, a brand that has attained universal recognition. The NBA will continue to hype its millionaire gazelles while at the same time peddling the fallacy that it has stayed loyal and faithful to its roots. It strategically uses the aura of players like Bill Russell and Bird and esteems the notion of returning to the atmosphere and ethos they produced while all the time moving light years away.

And it can't go back, of course. As Manchester United fans are discovering this weekend, once a professional team sets it heart on commercial advancement, it has already crossed the point of no return.

But when you see a club like the once haughty Boston Celtics caught in limbo in a sport they helped define, you have to question the long-term damage the sport has done to itself in the great worldwide sale.