Sports movies tend to be corny. Even the good ones. Magic and Bird is anything but corny. In fact, it’s probably the second-best basketball documentary (Hoop Dreams will always be #1) I’ve ever seen. It’s raw and real and a little jarring and extremely nostalgic
Raz and I plan to discuss the film on this week’s podcast, but I just wanted to offer a couple of quick observations without giving the movie away.
“Larry Bird is a dark dude.” I can’t take credit for this quote but it belongs to Raz (he sent it as he watching the film unfold), but it’s probably the most compelling aspect of the film as a whole. He’s not bad or evil dark. He’s “I’ve got demons I haven’t yet resolved and probably never will” dark.
Bryant Gumbel has either had a lot of plastic surgery or was born with the tightest forehead known to man. It simply does not move.
Similarly, someone needs to tell Arsenio Hall to stop pulling his skin back. At this point he looks like a skinny middle-aged man trying with all his might to look 25. Funniest/weirdest part: When he found out that Magic had HIV he said his first thought was, ‘Earvin is going to get skinny and die.’ Well, Magic got fat and lived. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people out there who’d say that since ’91 Arsenio is the one got skinny and died, at least career wise. He is still funny, though.
The footage of Dennis Johnson after the Celtics ’86 title was plain eerie. D.J. was my personal favorite point guard growing up. He was on the Mark Jackson diet before Action even got to the league: D.J. had a gut and flabby arms and butt on his back, but he got buckets and always at the right time. The fact that he’s dead just doesn’t make any sense. The fact that he’s not in the Hall of Fame is an absolute travesty.
Don’t be completely suckered into the movie’s sales pitch, which is basically that Larry and Magic saved the NBA. C’mon, what about Doc? I’m tired of people dissing Doc just cuz he didn’t have a jumper and a handle. More to the point, the film tries to pass off the idea that race was the dominant theme in the Laker-Celtics rivalry and that everyone was obsessed with it. Well, I remember my favorite team being the Celtics and it having absolutely nothing to do with race. They were just the best team in the world in my 10 year-old mind. (As an aside, I can remember walking out my house rocking my white Celtics Starter jacket en route to a Pistons-Bullets game in the mid-eighties and being told by my buddy G’s old man that I had to change. He was best friends with Rick Mahorn. I had no clue of the tension back then. But that doesn’t mean my experience wasn’t valid. I was a black kid who loved the Celtics. What! Say something.)
I’ve been looking for the Chris Wallace interview with Magic right after he announced he’d contracted HIV for years. I remember watching it as a kid. I remember Magic talking about being with 9 women at a time. I remember being in utter disbelief: how could one man sleep with so many women at once. I’ve never been able to find the footage in part because I forgot Wallace interviewed him (I thought it was Gumbel); imagining any superstar confessing to such excessive sexual activity in 2010 seems unfathomable. In ’91, it felt raw and revelatory. I miss those times.
Pat Riley essentially calls Magic and Bird sellouts for shooting a Converse commercial together: Riles is a beast!
If you have a pulse, you will cry; this is the ultimate love story
