Skip to main content

When the Game Was Ours by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson (with Jackie MacMullan)

Not one of the first sports books I would recommend, although if you're interested in basketball history it's a diverting and painless read. It's also vaguely inappropriate to say this book is "written" by Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, it's actually written by the co-author, Jackie MacMullan, who was a Boston Globe sports reporter before the collapse of the print media industry. 

In fact, MacMullan probably ghost-wrote the short 150-word essays that Bird and Magic "wrote" to preface the book. 

There are more interesting and more insightful sports books out there, starting with Andre Agassi's Open, Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, either of Wilt Chamberlain's autobiographies or even Charles Barkley's autobiography--which he famously claimed he never read! I'd start with any of those before reading this.

Notes: 
* Bird and Louisville coach Denny Crum is a great story: Crum really wanted Bird to commit to his team, and Bird wasn't having any of it. So Crum challenged him to a game of horse: if Crum won, Bird would have to at least visit Louisville's campus. Bird obviously won, but then realized that Crum was actually crestfallen; Bird patted Crum's shoulder and said "at least I don't have to go see your school." That is some gangster shit right there. 

* Bird as a college junior seeing an escalator for the first time--and riding it twice for fun.

* Bird being the opposite of Magic Johnson: trying to avoid attention, avoid the spotlight, slip out the side door, avoid media, etc.

* Both Bird and Magic get sniping and "crabs in a bucket" behavior from certain teammates; ironically these "passengers" get a much better career journey they ever would have had without them.

* The year of the famous Bird-Magic NCAA championship game (Michigan State vs Indiana State) came during a time when NCAA basketball had not been professionalized, not even close. And the media/economic machine around it hadn't been professionalized yet either. [Note that it can be easily argued that Bird and Magic kick-started a multi-billion dollar enterprise. The NCAA grew to be a tremendously profitable (yet "non-profit" lol) organization built on what the it euphemistically calls "student-athletes" but which are really a form of modern slave labor.] 

* Dr J giving Magic advice before he decided to leave college for the pros: "Are you ready to be in a man's world? This is 82 games now, not 30... You think you know, but trust me, you don't."

* It's amusing to see Bird as a young country boy: he student teaches in his last few weeks at Indiana State (dealing with disabled kids and teaching flag football), he breaks his finger grotesquely playing softball that summer, he gets up early to hunt morel mushrooms in the countryside, etc.

* "Norm Nixon nicknamed him 'Buck' because he was always galloping around like a young deer." Uhhh nope. Clearly some authors know the real story of Magic Johnson's nickname, others know only the sanitized version of the story...

* The book has some structuring/ordering problems: some of the narratives repeat (for example, the book goes over the 76ers/Lakers final and Magic's and Bird's first pro season two separate times), some are out of order. The book jumps around illogically at times.

* David Stern as an extremely competent commissioner making significant adjustments and changes to various aspects of the NBA, for example, implementing the first revenue sharing plan in the league's history.

* Larry Bird's mother's favorite players were Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer!

* Quite striking to learn about the level of poverty Larry Bird grew up in, the family didn't even own a car.

* Magic gets an autograph from Kareem as a kid but Kareem was so dismissive that Magic said to himself, "I'm going to smile at every single person that wants my autograph."

* Magic's reaction to actually meeting Larry Bird outside of competition reminds me of a Democrat meeting a Republican (or vice versa) in real life versus meeting via the cognitive filter of legacy (or social) media:


* Bill Walton revering Bird, grateful to him for reviving his love of the game.

* Kareem, approaching Magic for economic/wealth advice years after both men retired. Quite striking to see Kareem spending his career treating everyone around him (especially fans) like shit, reaping the meager results, and then thinking he can still do things "another way" somehow. 


* Also striking how Magic tries to cheer up Bird when Bird called him after hearing about Magic's HIV diagnosis:


* Just like Kareem, Isiah Thomas also really screwed up, and Magic saw precisely why: "I'm sad for Isiah. He is alienated so many people in his life, and he still doesn't get it. He doesn't understand why he wasn't chosen for that Olympic team [the 1992 Dream Team], and that's really too bad. You should be aware when you have ticked off more than half of the NBA." [Note also that Isiah was later hired as GM for the Knicks... and nearly ruined that organization too with his backbiting and incompetence].

* Inspiring how these two players just love the game: Magic is more nostalgic about a single no-look pass he fired to Larry Bird during a meaningless warm-up tournament before the Olympics then almost anything else in his career.

* What we see of Magic is his actual personality, he's genuinely joyous about life; see also his joyous behavior during the Dream Team/1992 Olympics when he was under a clear death sentence (because of his HIV diagnosis and then-held consensus beliefs about HIV in those days) yet he was still a genuinely exuberant participant with the team.

* Bird also in a hilarious scene with Ewing in Monte Carlo: Ewing "ordered a round of draft beer for Bird and his friends, unfazed by the $8 price tag. Bird was incredulous each time his new friend ordered another round. 'Do you know how much those beers cost?' Bird asked Ewing. 'Nah, I don't drink,' Ewing replied. 'They are $8 each!' Bird exclaimed. 'I would never pay that for a beer!'" I guess you can take the boy out of Indiana, but you can't take the Indiana out of the boy...

* Both Bird and Magic experience difficult and adversarial relationships with their teams after they retire, Bird in particular.

More Posts

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre [fictionalized bio of Jesse Livermore]

"History repeats itself all the time in Wall Street." A fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of history's most famous speculators. This is an enriching book, worth reading every decade or so across your investment career. And it's a genuinely fun read, conveying the free-wheeling investment culture of the days before the Securities and Exchange Act. When you're young and beginning to invest, this book thrills you with all the bravado of speculating. When you're older, after you've seen a few things and learned many of the manipulations and other techniques the investment industry uses to extract money from you, the book becomes more of a cautionary tale of things not to do, traps not to step in, things to avoid. This is the third time I've read this book (I'm now in my fourth decade as an investor, so I guess that makes me one reading behind schedule), and what struck me most this time around was Livermore's self-admitted weaknesses:...
Read more

The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel

A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse.  Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic.  Then why read it? You  don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the worst books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the in...
Read more

Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD

"I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience." The more I come into contact with modern medicine, the more I've watched my elders' lives intersect with it, the more I've observed the field's neomania and accompanying iatrogenic harms, the more I realize that everyone--everyone!--should read the following four books: H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis Dr. John Sarno: The Divided Mind Robert S. Mendelsohn: Confessions of a Medical Heretic While reading these works, it will be worth noting your internal reaction to them. Do you agree? Do you strongly reject? Why? And what might this indicate about your attachment to your existing beliefs about medicine? In Confession of a Medical Heretic , author Dr. Robert Mendelsohn frames up modern medicine as a type of religion, complete with priests (read: doctors), sacraments, rituals, and even...
Read more