DJ RIP

There are many teams I have admired and cheered for. Before I turned 35, there were three teams I had loved: Joe Torre's Yankees, Larry Bird's Celtics, and--right at the end--Jake Plummer's 1996 Arizona State Sun Devils. (Since then there have been Tom Brady's Patriots and Pete Carroll's Trojans, who between the Patriots' last defeat in 2002 and the Vince Bowl in 2006, played a total of one hundred and eleven consecutive games without a loss of lasting significance. Another story, though.)

I read today of the death of Dennis Johnson, Celtic guard, point guard for (no quibbling, please) The Greatest Basketball Team Of All Time, the 1986 Boston Celtics; co-author of The Greatest Play of All Time, the lay-up that followed Larry Bird's steal of Isiah Thomas's in-bound in the waning seconds of Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals. Bill Simmons, who was there (of course) has an account that distills better than any other the sheer miraculous nature of the play. About seven things had to go right, and did. I've probably seen that play 50 times--more than Bucky Dent scraping one over the Monster, more than The Band is On the Field, more than Leyritz v. Wohlers ("to the track, to the wall, we are tied!"), more than Leinart's audible on Fourth and Nine (more memorable than the Bush Push a minute later)--and, like few things in sports, it always surprises me when it happens.

For many Celtic fans, 1987 consolation season was more memorable that the 1986 season, for many reasons. 1986 was a coronation, a run-away-and-hide year where the Celtics lost one game all year at home and so demoralized the Rockets in Game 6 to win the championship that my two brothers, mother and father and I were toasting their victory with three minutes to go in the game. (You would have to know my family, and its bone-deep superstitions, to know how unthinkable this usually is.) In contrast, 1987 was a year-long street fight, in which the team tried to overcome the loss, one after the other, of Len Bias to death, Bill Walton to a broken shin, Scott Wedman to a ripped-up ankle, and Jerry Sichting to a shooting slump that lasted, basically, until the end of his career.

Never has a defending champion gone through a season with a weaker bench. And never has a team boasted a better starting five, that marvelous band: Bird, Kevin, Chief, DJ, Ainge. And even then the pain did not stop. McHale was on his way to MVP runner-up (no way Magic wasn't going to win it that year) when he broke his foot, decided to play through it, and was never the same again. Parish hurt his foot and played on a limp, Ainge had knee and elbow injuires. Only DJ and Bird survived essentially intact.

The Celtics survived a seven-game scare from Milwaukee, and then a seven-game war with Detroit that ranks better than all but a few finals (New York-LA 1970, Boston-LA 1984, and . . . uh, that's about it). After both teams held serve after two games, providing the way for a best of three, Game 5 was decided by Bird Steals the Ball, an moment so dramatic it overshadowed what happened earlier in the game--namely, Robert Parish decking Bill Laimbeer and getting a no-call in the balance. Game 6 (for which Parish was suspended--coincidentally in a game he probably would have missed anyway with his ankle, and didn't the Pistons scream about that) was a case of the Celtics breaking out to the lead, then giving it up when their starters ran out of gas. (There was a lot of that after 1986.) All of this set the stage for Game 7, which I saw on a black-and-white TV at a friend's house in Long Island City, having come East to visit my presumptive graduate school. I remember the tension before Game 7 as unbearable--the closest any other sport has come close to a really big college football game--and the entire contest seemed to turn on every posession, every shot, every rebound, every (as the Celtics had no bench that year) foul.

I'm exhausted right now thinking about that game. I'm convinced to this day that Larry Bird had decided beforehand to play all 48 minutes, which he did. In any case, he was the author of Boston's walk-it-up play that allowed the Boston starters to grab a few seconds of rest before running the play.

What else? With a tie at the end of the third quarter, starting Detroit forward Adrian Dantley and supersub Vinnie Johnson dove for a loose ball and clattered skulls. Dantley was wheeled off the court on a stretcher and Vinnie Johnson mostly spent the fourth quarter with an ice bag on his head, and went scoreless thereafter. The dagger was near the end, Danny Ainge's fall-away three-pointer that game at the tail end of four consecutive Celtic offensive rebounds. Love those fifth chances. And it was over.

This was the game that gave rise to Zeke's post-game "overrated Bird" comment (Bird's line that game: 48 minutes, 38 points, 20 rebounds--overrated, sure), to the Detroit-Boston hatred that persisted until Boston became so bad (thank you, M.L. Carr) it no longer mattered. And the series overshadowed the the fact that the Celtics--without Bias, without Wedman, without Walton, with McHale on a broken foot and Robert Parish limping on a bad ankle--still pushed the Magic-Kareem-Worthy-Scott-Green Lakers to six games, and lost a series they would have won had it not been for Magic's junior sky hook (which would have been obliterated by Bird's subsequent shot, which missed winning the game by two millionths of an inch. But all credit to the Lakers. They were killers).

Anyway, DJ, who Simmons writes, will someday be in the Hall of Fame, is gone. And--again, as Simmons says--if I was never a part of of his life, I am happy to say that he was a part of mine.