Celtics Fought People's War to Defeat Lakers Razzmatazz

1984 NBA Finals

Aesthetes prattle about the game as if it were a ballet performed in sneakers - all those lean, sinewy forms flexing on the parquet floor and leaping to the frontiers of gravity.

There were certainly moments in the championship series when the L.A. Lakers choreographed fast-break passages that transformed basketball into an ethereal competition in grace. But the yeomen in green, the troupe that impresario Red Auerbach gathered together and the unflappable K.C. Jones directed, played the game a different way. They made it the dramatic equivalent of war.

From an album of unforgettable images, none was more telling than the picture of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar slumping on the losers' bench for the ultimate time-out of the seventh game, when the Lakers' doom was already inscribed in the record books and the denizens of Birdland were dancing in the aisles. At that moment, the expressive giant looked as grim as an Iraqi prisoner of war in Iran.

The victorious warriors were hugging each other in exultation; Kevin McHale wrapping his endless arms around Dennis Johnson and lifting him off the floor; the irrepressible M.L. Carr whooping with joy and communing with all the true believers from courtside to the northern reaches of Maine. They acted, these winners, as if they were ready to hitch a few West Coast bodies to their chariots and drag them around the walls of Boston Garden.

The local heroes had fought from the opening tap to the giddy finale as if they were defending kith, kin and the ancestral gods. Connoisseurs of the hoop sport knew these Celtics could not match the laid-back Lakers for flash and filigree. The turnaround jump shots of James Worthy gave the enemy superiority in the air. The precision passing of Magic Johnson would guide the Laker planes like high-tech radar. And Kareem's unstoppable sky hook would do the damage of an Exocet missile.

The Celtics overcame all those weapons with the athletic equivalent of a people's war. When they lost Game 3 by 33 points, Larry Bird said they played like sissies. The hick from French Lick had learned to think like Arnold Auerbach - like a street fighter. He and his buddies won two overtime games and a steambath brawl by jumping over fences and defending themselves with garbage-can covers.

They also had a coach they loved and respected, and at the very end everybody could see that K.C. Jones, that quiet man who first came here in the Russell dynasty, had taught them to love and respect each other.

This was the only kind of war men should fight or follow.