Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. Now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Anyone who follows the New York Stock Exchange knows there's a lot of different kinds of companies among the 2,400 or so that list here. Just recently, Sweetgreen, that's NYSE ticker symbol SG, the maker of delivered salads went public. We've had our fill barbecue out an experienced square on Broad Street when Weber grills and Traeger grills, that's ticker symbols, WEBR and COOK, or cook, respectively went public. But let me take you back in time to one of the more unusual listings we've ever had here. From 1986 to 2003, you could actually buy shares of Boston Celtics L.P. that's NYSE ticker symbol, or was NYSE ticker symbol BOS. I'm talking about the professional basketball team, that at the time of its listing had just hoisted its 16th world championship banner to the rafters of Boston Garden. That created a lot of problems for what was essentially a small company with 57 employees at one point in its public tenure, and total annual gross revenues in 2001 of just $82 million.
Josh King:
A sum so small that it didn't even rank in the top 125 largest publicly traded companies headquartered in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Suddenly, you had fans tripping into restaurants in Brookline and Newton, where I grew up, declaring themselves the owner of the team and demanding special service. Just like Red Auerbach's corner booth at Legal Sea Foods, where the legendary coach and general manager was given special dispensation to smoke his Hoyo de Monterrey cigars amid the scores of patrons and flick the ashes into his just finished bowl of Boston clam chowder. Such were the days of reigning Celtics royalty of the Larry Bird era. You had to be pretty patient for that investment to pay off. You'd get a dividend check with a team logo on it. Instead of cashing it for 35 cents, you'd wave it around the hallways of Newton South High School. The principal owners at the time, Don Gaston, Paul Dupee and Alan Cohen had all the power. All you had was a share that went public at around $18, spiked to 20 when Bird retired because the team's payroll declined.
Josh King:
Hit a trough in 1998 when the National Basketball League locked out its players in a union dispute, and then finally rose to nearly $30 in April, 2003 when Wooster kid and current owner Wyc Grousbeck bought out all the shares and the team for the princely sum $360 million. For reference, in 2019, Joe Tsai bought the Brooklyn Nets, a team that's never won a single NBA championship, but has two ABA banners to its New Jersey name from the Dr. J era, forget this, $2.3 billion. The seller was Mikhail Prokhorov who bought the franchise in 2010 for 200 million. Such is the inflation in value in today's NBA. Experiencing unparalleled worldwide popularity off the play of superstars like Giannis of the Bucks, KD in Brooklyn, LeBron in LA, and Steph Curry at Golden State. But you can argue that none of that value creation would be possible but for a six foot nine inch kid from French Lick Indiana and Indiana State University named Larry Bird.
Josh King:
Who entered the league in the 1979-'80 season, along with Earvin Magic Johnson out of Michigan State, and Michael Jordan who came along in the '84-'85 season. The crowds and the ratings and the money were a lot smaller back then. The planes were all commercial and the hotels generally sucked, but it might have been the golden age of basketball. Bill Walton, the towering center who played under John Wooden and ended his career on the championship Celtics team of 1987 said of the era, "I wish it lasted forever." That is the title of the new book about the Bird Celtics by The Boston Globe's sports columnist, Dan Shaughnessy. Who I've read since he first sat behind a typewriter at 135 Morrissey Boulevard or at the Press Box of the Garden. Our conversation with Dan on the business of basketball, the role of sports in society, and the team led by a guy named Larry Legend is coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Our guests today, Dan Shaughnessy is a sports columnist and associate editor of The Boston Globe, as well as The New York Times best selling co-author of Francona. An author of a long list of other books that fill a fan's shelf, like The Curse of the Bambino, At Fenway, Senior Year, Seeing Red and One Strike Away. Dan had a habit when covering the Larry Bird Celtics of revealing where the rival LA Lakers were staying when they were playing at the Garden. Something that drove coach Pat Riley nuts. But I'll turn on the tables because it's in the book and note that Dan lives in Newton, where I spent the first 18 years of my life and where I'm recording this episode today from my folks house in the village of Waban. Where I'd take the green line tea to north station with my brother, Rick and buddy Marklivovich for our rafters level season tickets at the Garden to watch Larry lead the Celtics to glory during my high school years. Dan, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Dan Shaughnessy:
That was good stuff there, Josh. Good writing. They taught you well at Newton South.
Josh King:
Hey, didn't they? Mr. [inaudible 00:07:15] was a great teacher to all of us. Hey, Dan, what's your memory of those days that the Celtics were publicly traded on the NYSE and the doctors and lawyers in the Western suburbs were all flashing their stock certificates and dividend checks at the barbershop?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Yeah. It seemed like kind of a frivolous thing. It was a stocking stopper. We weren't crazy about the owners there, Paul, Don Gaston. Alan Cohen was actually a pretty good sports guy. Didn't get to know that ownership group real well. When they did that, it felt like a little cheesy, but for the locals, everybody was just crazy about it. It was almost like that whole Green Bay Packer thing where, "Yeah, I'm part owner of the team now." It gave everybody a nice lift.
Josh King:
I mean, the owners of that era and of subsequent eras, it's not like George Steinbrenner who flexes muscle all over the place. Has the Celtics success over the years from Walter Brown to the present been better for owners taking a sort of step back while people like Red ran the team and built the teams?
Dan Shaughnessy:
That's a really good point. Walter Brown, who invented the team, he also owned the Boston Garden and the Bruins. He was a very hands off guy. He hired people and trusted. It was a very small operation, and of course hired the right guy, Red Auerbach who steered them from 1950 until his death in 2002 or '3, whatever it was. Red became a lesser figure as he aged, but he was a force. I mean, he won eight championships on the bench. Then as a GM, he won eight more and never went away. Just around there coming to practice with the cigar going. He didn't like a lot of the frills of today's NBA, the noise in the gym, the cheerleaders. There were no Celtic dancers. The Celtic dancers didn't debut until like the week after Red died. It was the same year.
Dan Shaughnessy:
I think that was not a coincidence, but had good leadership from him. The owners pretty much stayed out of the way, with the exception of John Y. Brown. That was kind of a dark era. He went on to become governor of Kentucky and he was Kentucky Fried Chicken and had a lot of holdings down there. But he was a little bit of a busy-body at the time, but it did lead to some good things including Robert Parish and Kevin McHale with very involved tradings that were going on at the time. But ownership's pretty much been stepped back. We've not had the Steinbrenner iron fist hard hand out front guys there. They're more in the background and always have been.
Josh King:
Before we get into the book in earnest, Dan, your colleague, Ben Volin who's down in Atlanta last night might have been having one of those games where you might expect the Patriots veteran version of Rick Carlisle to come up and say, "You want us to lose after that 25 nothing beat down at the Falcons." Are the Pats as skeptical about their beat reporters as some of those Celtics players were of you?
Dan Shaughnessy:
More so. I mean, again, with the Patriot thing and especially their fans, if you're not on board, you're the devil. I pushed back on that quite a bit over the 20 year dynasty and the nine Super Bowls they went to, and you just got a little tired. Sometimes angry and victory angry and defeat just angry all the time, but it's an amazing successful run. What you've seen from young Benny Volin here today is just, he's right, they weren't that impressive. They won 25 nothing, but the offense didn't do what it should do. Hard to estimate how bad the Falcons are. But I, for one, who've been very critical of that organization because of their secrecy and their paranoia and their cheating and all the things that they do with their success, I'm loving what they're doing this year because it's unexpected. It's a rookie quarterback, came out of nowhere. They were seven and nine last year. They were one and three this year. I'm loving this ride. You won't see that kind of negativity from me anymore, Josh.
Josh King:
Before we get into the Celtics of the '80s and beyond the Patriots, give our listeners a quick rundown of hub teams of the 2020s. It's been three years since the Sox won a world series and the Pats won a Super Bowl 10 years since the Bruins won a Stanley Cup and 13 since the Celtics hoisted a banner.
Dan Shaughnessy:
Well, again, we're spoiled. I mean, we actually had a drought from 1986, the greatest Celtic team ever until 2002, when Brady wins the first one. There were no championships in our region for those 16 years. Then in this century, 12 duck boat parades. The last one being when Brady and those guys won that dreadful 13 to three game in Atlanta two or three years ago before the world stops. I mean, in this century nine Super Bowl appearances for the Patriots, six wins World Series championships for the Red Sox after they went 86 years without any. The Bruins in Southeast picked off one. There are kids who grew up here that have no idea what it's like to wait, because they have been really spoiled in this century.
Josh King:
I was one of those waiters for a long time as a Red Sox fan. Anyway, Dan, I've read you since your first bylines for those high school games in '75 when I was 10 and fetched The Globe from the stoop of my parents' house. Now you're still there in March, 2020 when COVID cancels the rest of the Celtics and Bruins seasons and it was going to take months for the Red Sox to get going. What's a sports writer to do when there's no sports to cover?
Dan Shaughnessy:
You had to be creative. I had gone to Holy Cross and the football season was canceled because of a hepatitis outbreak the year before I got there in 1969 or '70. I rounded up some of those guys, one played for the NFL for the Dolphins undefeated team and they were having their 50th reunion that year. Then that got canceled because of the pandemic. But to find football players who had been quarantined in a hotel, it was the biggest hepatitis outbreak in America in a long, long time where medical journals came from around world to study what had happened here. You try to be creative with stories like that. I called Hank Finkel who had replaced Bill Russell because I'm like, "Who's going to replace Tom Brady? What's that going to be like? Henry, tell me about this." Because the Celtics after Russell left, they were in last place and everybody blames poor Hank Finkel. What was he supposed to do? You just tried to find things about modern times that would somehow find things from way back that would relate to what was going on at the time. We were challenged with that.
Dan Shaughnessy:
I had called Bill Rodgers the day the marathon was canceled and said, "Billy, imagine the marathons canceled, what's this like?" He told me how he was going to try and run on his own that day and different things. But it was consuming. It helped trigger this book because locally The Last Dance was sort of must see TV. They were showing the Jordan thing on Sunday nights. We had that, but all the sports programming was deadly. Then locally, they started showing the Southeast classics of the '80s. I kept seeing my 30 year old self with the giant glasses and hair sitting at the press table. The days when they actually let writers sit next to the bench instead of selling those seats for $5,000. Thank you very much. I'm thinking, "Boy, we really had great access. Wasn't that great?" It kind of fired me up to get going on a project like this to put in the pages what that era was like. That's how the book came out of that.
Josh King:
I think you wrote that there were 11 family members and three dogs at the home while you churned out the book. I think I'm talking to you now in your second floor office where a lot of the work was done. But as you are putting the pages together and your recall of every name of hotel in every city, was that in books that are somewhere in those shelves behind you or is that off the top of your head?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I turned to my little computer here. There's a box over there with ... I kept journals each year, so I knew where we were and little things that Larry Bird would say to me or Robert Parish, whatever. I jotted down things there from going back to the late '70s. I have those. Of course, the Globe archives are great for the game by game. I have a good memory, which amplifies that a little bit. It was a strange time for all of us and especially here in Newton corner where we live.
Josh King:
You are watching The Last Dance and you get in touch with Scribner and they're interested. Did you find yourself happy to revisit the world of the '80s in your little cocoon there?
Dan Shaughnessy:
I did. I really got into it. It was the way back machine. I was enjoying it. We have a little hoop out in the driveway. I'd go out and do the asphalt meditation, go out there and shoot hoops and think about it and tracking nice guys down. I mean, one thing, Josh, at this time, people were home. It was easier to get people than it usually is because no one was going anywhere. You could track down Rick Carlisle, Kevin McHale, Cedric Maxwell, M.L. Carr with less difficulty than it would be in other times. Guys really like talking about their old days because for a lot of them, life was never more exciting or fun. I mean Scott Wedman's building apartments in Kansas City and he's never been back to the new Garden. For him to talk about going 11 for 11 against the Lakers in 1984 or '85, these things that just people probably don't even know that he was an NBA player if you were walking around Scott Wedman now.
Dan Shaughnessy:
It's been all those years and he doesn't make a big thing out of it. I think generally, even if they didn't like me that much, they sort of liked going back in time and talking about their youth and when they were part of something that was so special. Of course, Bill Walton, who gave me the title for the book and I mean, his passages, I mean, Bill's kind of missed a hyperbole anyway. It's like, this is the greatest diet Coke I've ever had. Everything's like that, so he really gets to this. "The Celtics saved my life. Empty this resource when you write this. Whatever you want to say, you cannot overstate how great this was." Just really passionate. I mean, no one talks like that and it just lit me up as well.
Josh King:
Did you expect Larry to pick up the phone when you called?
Dan Shaughnessy:
No. I had told Scribner to buy the book. I said, "Well just telling you, we're probably not going to get him because he's turned off the faucets. There was a period for a few years there, he actually would pick up. I had his cell and the first thing you'd hear would be, "What do you want, scoot?" That's how you knew you had Larry. I remember when those Patriots played the Giants in Indianapolis in the Super Bowl in February of 2012, Larry was still GM over there then. I went over to the Lucas Oil Stadium, whatever, and tracked him down and talked about football. How if he rooted for the Colts, if he rooted for the Patriots growing up how much he cared about football. It was just a way to do that. He was still okay and I think we're on okay terms.
Dan Shaughnessy:
But I could tell early on, Maxwell wasn't able to get him to help with his book and that's a teammate. I'd have trouble with that if I was a teammate. Then Jackie MacMullan and Bob Ryan, who'd both done wonderful biographies with Larry, lived in his house while they were doing them and they were insiders. They weren't getting return calls for stuff they were working on, so I said, "Well, I know Larry, and if he's made up his mind, it's going to be unilateral. It's not going to pick and choose and do one and not do the others." I was okay with that.
Josh King:
Based on reporting though, I mean, if he's not talking to Jackie or Bob or Cedric or you, what does the reporter think is going on there and is he spending his days in a happy place?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Yeah, it's a good question. I was a little worried about him, but I keep seeing him show up in these commercials, so it tells me that he's healthy. That's good. He's so security eligible now. He became a granddad last Christmas. I think he's kind of done with it. He gave us his game and then he did GM and coach and kept cooperating. I think he was predisposed and not liking the fame and not wanting to be bothered, and I think he's just gone him back into that. I understand that. He gave enough and I didn't need him, frankly. I kind of didn't want him in a way, because it's nothing he could say to amplify and make this better than what I have from then. Some guys, it was helpful to go back in time and rewrite and just get more in depth on some of these things, but Larry wasn't particularly introspective. You weren't going to get that. But what I have here is really him.
Dan Shaughnessy:
I think it's as good as he is ever been just because it's the core of him, the rural kid, disrespected, grows up poor, family issues, his dad kills himself, these horrible things. Failed first marriage, daughter, he doesn't recognize. Then he becomes wildly famous, comes to Boston. We had conversations where I grew up not poor, but without much in farm town in Central Massachusetts. I loved basketball and I was on the varsity and we had the Converse All Stars that he had. You'd get a pair before the season, another pair before the tournament, and those things were kind of universal truths. Our house was a half mile from the gym and we were talking about that once and he said, "Yeah, we were like that."
Dan Shaughnessy:
Then he goes a story that I don't have, he says, "One night I had 30 at halftime and my dad, he wouldn't come to the games. My uncle called from the payphone and said, you better get down to the gym here, because your boy's going to set the Orange County record tonight. I ended up with 58 points and 35 rebounds, and my dad walked down for the second half." I'm thinking, "Imagine being a father of a player like that and you don't even go to the game and you just ..." He was a tortured, poor guy that had a tragic thirst and a tortured soul. But he would tell you stories like that, I think once he felt comfortable enough to let you in a little bit. It was never going to be forever, "Hey, how's it going? Let's go fishing." Or, "I'll come visit." Or anything like that. I mean, he was great in the time he was here, he gave us his game and that was good enough.
Josh King:
We're all locked down, May June 2020. ESPN is struggling for content. They rushed to put up The Last Dance. We learn again the story of that team with their six trophies in the '90s. 10 years earlier, the Celtics did it three times, '81, '84, '86. Before we get into Bird and some of the other individuals, for those who aren't from this town, introduce us to the legacy of this team and give us a 30,000 foot view of the significance of what those teams did.
Dan Shaughnessy:
Well, again, I mean the NBA it's pretty small time. It starts in the mid '40s. There's teams in Tri-Cities, in Iowa, in Fort Wayne, Syracuse. There was just places no one really knows as mainstream professional sports town. There's only nine teams in the '60, and Bill Russell comes to Boston and Red Auerbach had the foresight to get the greatest rebounder and shot blocker. He wasn't going to be the biggest scorer, and they just have this run of success. Red was smart than everybody else. Red, he's first draft of Black player, first to have Black five starting Black players, first to hire a Black man to coach his team. Very forward thinking that way and just also sharp. Making deals all the time ahead of people. They're all playing chess when they're all playing checkers. That was Red. Builds this dynasty and they all stay around. Then Red hires guys to coach his team. Russell coaches them, Tommy Heinsohn coaches them, Dave Cowens coaches them, Tom Sanders. He kept in the family. It bottomed out twice.
Dan Shaughnessy:
It bottomed out the Hank Finkel days in the early '70s. It came back with Havlicek, Jo Jo White, Dave Cowens. It bottomed out again and then Larry Bird brings it back in the '80s. Then Red, he steals all these players. He gets Parish for McHale, for Joe Barry Carroll. He gets Dennis Johnson for Rick Robey. He gets Danny Ainge to quit Major League Baseball. Red drafts him in the second round. He gets him to come play because of Larry Bird. He gets Bill Walton for Cedric Maxwell. One thing I noticed with these guys, a lot of them had the chips on their shoulder that Larry had. The starting five against the Lakers in '84, they were all from second tier conferences. Gerald Henderson, Virginia Commonwealth, Cedric Maxwell, North Carolina Charlotte, Larry Bird, Indiana State. You have Robert Parish, Centenary. Dennis Johnson, Pepperdine. These aren't the blue chippers. It's not Kentucky, North Carolina, UCLA, which is what the Lakers had. UCLA, Kentucky, North Carolina. It's the blue chippers against the guys with chips in their shoulders kind of thing.
Dan Shaughnessy:
I think Red would say was it was easy to assemble a team with all guys from Kentucky and UCLA and North Carolina, but he could do it with second tier guys because he was smart and he figured it out. He creates another dynasty, and the Bird Magic finals of the '80s are like the Ali Frazier fights. There's three of them and it brings the sport back. It gets all the eyeballs on that. Then of course Jordan comes into the league and by '92, you got the dream team, David Stern, your global international and they're megastars. The thing never looked back and you referenced that with the price of franchises and how that went. Celtics are very integral to this. There was a time I think when the Celtics played the Lakers, those two had won half of all NBA championships at that time. They're tied at 17 right now. They each have 17. The league's only been around since '46, so the numbers are still pretty good for them.
Josh King:
That's amazing. Talking about blue chippers, Dan, talk about the company that you worked for then, worked for now. There really was nothing like The Globe sports staff in the '70s and '80s. The newsroom that Vince Doria like Red assembled with writers like Ray Fitzgerald, McDonough, Gammons, Ryan and Manfield.
Dan Shaughnessy:
Yeah. We like to brag on ourselves on this. I think Sports Illustrated said it was the greatest sports staff ever assembled. I believe that. We certainly were part of it. I think there was 10 guys in there, halls of fame, Peter Gammons, Bob Ryan, Jackie MacMullan, Bud Collins. I mean, we had Will McDonough. They were the voice on their sport. Will's the first guy to trade off into TV and bring that expertise to TV and get paid for doing that. Which they should all thank Willie for creating that because many did it after him. Bob Ryan, the final word on the NBA. Peter Gammons, the Commissioner of Baseball. These guys were gods. Kevin Dupont, hockey hall of fame. We just had them everywhere. Lee Manfield, the columnist, and Ray Fitzgerald. We were stacked and they plowed money into it.
Dan Shaughnessy:
A lot of people hated the Globe because of its liberal politics, whatnot, but they loved reading that sports page. We continue this on. I mean, it's harder to do now with budgets and travel and all these things, but the Globe still, I think has the best sports page in the country. You get arguments, The Washington Post, LA Times, whatnot, and The New York Post is really good, but I think we're still holding up our end. But in the '80s, we had it going. It was a deep roster of amazing talents.
Josh King:
You were on that roster, Dan. You're a kid from Groton, a small town of 4,000 or so on the route two quarter, a little south of the New Hampshire border. How did you discover that you had a facility with words and what was it like to apply your trade in an unknown area like Baltimore and Washington to start your career?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Yeah. I'm the youngest of five kids. A lot of ballplayer. My sister was a better player than me. That's always embarrassing when you're in high school. I mean, I had some studs in my family and so I was always reporting the games to my parents. I had to go to the library and read whatever they had about sports. I played and then I get to Holy Cross and I was just writing for the school paper and the Globe would let you do occasional stories because we were still playing Syracuse and Army and BC back then. Then they let me, like, you talked about, do high schools. I'd go to Newton North High School and give them the Dalton trophy. But the first real job as a full-timer was in Baltimore covering the Orioles for The Baltimore Evening Sun. Great. I was on Major League ball when I was 23 years old. That team, hall of famers everywhere, Brooks Robinson, Eddie Murray, Jim Palmer-
Josh King:
Jim Palmer.
Dan Shaughnessy:
... Earl Weaver, Frank Robinson. They were good to me and it was a great way to break in. I wasn't quite the wise ass or tough guy then. I was pretty wide-eyed and just liked being around it. Again, having read all these people in Boston growing up, I was bringing that style to Baltimore and that worked down there. It would work anywhere. The team got more popular and started drawing better. They had always been good and win 90 every year just showing up. Then The Washington Star hired me to do the Orioles. I was up against Tom Boswell, The Washington Post, the best baseball writer of all time. I got to meet Roger Angell and these real writers who were just the gods of the industry. It was great training. Five years of Major League Baseball. All my papers went out of business, The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Washington Star.
Dan Shaughnessy:
I was at The Star with Witcover and [inaudible 00:26:30] Juman and Maureen Dowd was a young reporter there, and Mary McGrory was there. It was sweet times. But evening papers were going south and we couldn't keep up with the post. When The Star folded, I had a lot of opportunities. I was 28 and had done big league ball for five years. I came back to the Globe and then Bob Ryan at dope took a job in TV and that opened up the Celtic beat for me. I stepped in there for four years, and I'm so glad that I did.
Josh King:
When Ryan gets the call to go to TV and Doria brings you in from the bullpen, did you know that it was going to be a dream assignment or was just, do whatever Vince says?
Dan Shaughnessy:
I was nervous because replacing Ryan he was the word in the NBA and it was just a lot to follow. They all liked him. The players liked him and trusted him and here's this goofy guy, who is this guy? That was daunting. They had already won a championship in '81 and they were already starting the sellout streak. They were the hot team in town. We've had cycles in Boston, the Bruins in the old days the '70s, they were it. The Celtics in the '80s with Bird, and of course the Patriots in this century with all the success and the fame and the demand for them to be the hot team.
Dan Shaughnessy:
The Sox never go out of style, but they've had ups and downs. But the Bird Celtic '80s was the place to be. I knew it was a good beat, but it was intimidating and I was intent on being good and being tough and honoring the legacy of Bob Ryan. It was a lot of responsibility, young, married, starting a family, moving houses every few years and Newton trying to trade up. It was just a lot going on. Thank God my wife was tougher than me and able to keep things going.
Josh King:
He gave us a flavor, Dan, of Bird when he was in French Lick. He gets to Boston. He's living on Newton Street in Brookline, across the street, it turns out from my grandmother and neighboring his agent, Bob Wolff, who also repped Jim Plunkett when he came out of Stanford to quarterback the terrible Patriots during those years. Sort of how the city fathers of Louisville staked Muhammad Ali, you write that a group of Terre Haute businessmen formed a committee to find an agent for Larry. What's that transition from Indiana to Beantown like for him?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Well, I think the big city, he just couldn't believe it, people didn't dress like him or talk like him. He was careful and guarded and didn't want to do a lot. He didn't know anything. He'd never been to an NBA game. He went to some ABA games in, I think Louisville, where he could go to see the Kentucky Colonels or whatnot. Having money for the first time was just ... He was careful with his money and it meant a lot to him. He never lost his hunger for money to elevate to that status and to be famous. He hated going to the airport and trying to find a quiet spot and read his paper and somebody would say, "Hey, there's Larry Bird." Then he didn't want to sign it because he would start signing and you got to keep signing.
Dan Shaughnessy:
He had ways out of it and people would say, "If you don't sign me, when I get home, my wife would kill me." He would say, "Well, I guess she's married to a dead man." He'd put you off with that. He stopped going to baseball games because he had to sign and he didn't want to be a jackass. The fame was hard for him. He wanted to live his life quietly and nothing fancy, but he loved free stuff. If you gave him a T-shirt, he'd wear it. He'd wear anything if was free. He never lost that.
Josh King:
Beside Bird, Dan, a key figure in that first '81 championship was Cedric Maxwell. You wrote that he was, I'm going to quote you here, a third year player who demonstrated he belonged in the league, but was periodically unmotivated. That's the sort of running narrative of his time at the Celtics. He also feels aggrieved by what he perceives as low pay. But it turned out that of all the players in the championships teams beside Ainge, he kind of remained closest in later years to Boston as a broadcaster. Talk to a lot for this book. How do you rationalize the irony of what Cedric represents?
Dan Shaughnessy:
I love him. It was so weird because the first year on the beat, he stopped talking because there had been a paternity suit back home in North Carolina that got publicized. I don't know who it was. I don't think he even knows, but he just shut down for the year. He didn't talk for the year. He honored that. I didn't know what I was missing because he's the best quote on the team. It was kind of a sour year. They got swept by the Bucks in the playoffs and had to change coaches. The first year wasn't a lot of gangbusters fun for anybody. Then he came back to talking and I'm, "This guy's the best." He was clutch and he subjugated his ego a lot for that team because his shot totals went down every year. Because he's a man when he gets here on a bad team and then Bird comes in and then McHale comes in, then Ainge comes in, so the touches are just going away from him. He's got to guard the hardest guy at the other end.
Dan Shaughnessy:
He felt a grieved every now and then, like Larry get named all defensive team, second team and he'd laugh his butt off and say, "Are you kidding me? I'm guarding the tough guy down the other end." Then when he was MVP of the finals in '81, he got a Seiko watch instead of a car. He still talks about that. He brings the Seiko watch around and shows it to Jayson Tatum and these guys like, "Look how small this league used to be." He says, "I came out of the New York stadium looking for my car with a bow on it. There was a cab waiting to take me back to the airport and my Seiko watch in my hand. That's all I got." He was from North Carolina. He felt the race issue in Boston being here and being a 6'8" Black man made you stand out. He used to tell me, this is in the book, that when the Celtics won, they would put Larry Bird or Ainge or McHale's picture in the cover. When they lost, he says, "They'll have me or chief making a goofy face like this."
Dan Shaughnessy:
I found a picture where that's exactly what happens. They lose a playoff game in Philly and there's a goofy picture of Max the next day. He was so happy when I produced that for him. He says, "There you go. That was what was going on." I said, "Well, that's a random occurrence." But I understood his grievances and how hard that must have been. He told us we'd never see him again. I remember in the '84 finals in LA, he got into a good stride. He was talking trash and going on, he says, "Nope. When this is over, you're not going to have me there anymore." He says, "I'm just going to drive around to construction sites of North Carolina in a big Cadillac, put the windows down, look out the window and say, sorry, boys. I got nothing to do today." That was the life he was looking forward to. I don't know if it was economics or what, but the years went by, we did not hear from him, and all of a sudden we did.
Dan Shaughnessy:
Now he's a local broadcast color guy. We can't shake him. We can't get rid of him. He's everywhere, and I love him. I call him for everything. He's got a book out. It's hilarious. His quotes in this book. just jump off the page.
Josh King:
One person who's not quoted in the book for new stuff is Robert Parish, who's a through line of all those championship seasons and stayed with the team through '93, '94, 2 years past Bird's retirement. Also grabbed another trophy with the Bulls. But he never liked you very much, and the disdain was shared by his wife, Nancy. It turned out in the end that they didn't really like each other much either. Why couldn't you ever break through to the chief?
Dan Shaughnessy:
It was the weirdest thing. I mean, we were in San Antonio my first year in the beat for pre-season game and I was sitting with Johnny Miller who lives over in Newton. But anyway, Johnny kind of says, "Hey Dan, sit down." He was having a plate of late night food with Robert. And Johnny got up and left and it's me and Robert Parish. We're the same age and I tried stuff that we might have in common. I remember I knew he was friends with the big guy out in the Warriors. I had seen him in a movie. I was just trying to make small talk and I thought it went okay. Then he did have a hold out that year. McHale got more money than him and then he walked off. I came down hard on him in the paper on that, but it was illogical. He just didn't want to talk to me and he wouldn't have it. One day we were in Detroit and I plopped down, cause everybody in the team kind of knew [crosstalk 00:34:14]-
Josh King:
Did he do other report duty? Did he do his press conferences and talk to other [crosstalk 00:34:18]-
Dan Shaughnessy:
Yeah, he was okay. He was okay. He wasn't outgoing, but it was a thing with me. I sat next to him in Detroit one day in the airport, we were waiting and Quinn Buckner was there and I said, "Robert, let's let's have this out. What is it? What did I do? We can do this." He just wasn't having it. I remember he said, "You remind me of a woman. You remind me of my wife." I'm thinking, "Well, I don't think that's good." Of course we later found out that wasn't good. Then Nancy Parish hated me equally. There's a scene when they win the championship in '84, and she runs me down. I hear the high heels clicking. They've just won the championship against the Lakers, greatest series ever, and Nancy Parish wanted a piece of me.
Dan Shaughnessy:
They all love that. Next time I talk to Larry, he goes, "Yeah, I heard Mrs. Chief hit you with her purse. Yeah, way to go." It did end up they weren't happy together and they split up and he didn't do right by her evidently. But, well, I asked Maxwell about it 37 years later, I'm like, "Max, what ..." Max was still friends with chief, couple of them are. I said, "What was it?" Max said, "Chief just had a disdain for your ass." That's the title of one chapters.
Josh King:
Talking about another one of the big three of era. Kevin McHale comes off the bench seven times in that historic seven game win in the '84 finals against the Lakers. Scoring an average to 13.4 points a game compared to what Bird was doing 27.4. But Kevin provides that crucial sparking game with the flagrant close line of Kurt Rambis. Pat Riley said, "It was as blatant a cheap shot as I've ever seen." Talk about the significance of that play to winning the 15th title and McHale's overall impact on the Celtics during his career.
Dan Shaughnessy:
Yeah. I mean, he was such a skilled player, but Kevin had the mentality to come off the bench all those years. When it was clear he was one of the ... I mean, other coaches would say, "This guy's one of the top 10 players in the league." He just had the extraordinary low post moves and drop step and get his shot against anybody. But that's the role and Red always would say, "It doesn't matter who starts, it's who finishes." McHale was generally in there at the finish and they had good depth in the front court, so there it was. But in '84, the Lakers, it was a dunk fest. Game three, the Lakers beat them by 35 in LA, up and down the floor dunk after dunk. Larry called them sissies, he called everybody out and said, "We played like girls." Stuff you wouldn't really want to say today, especially.
Dan Shaughnessy:
I know Danny Ainge said, "Everybody hates me. I'm always getting accused of being a cheap shot. Somebody needs to take somebody down. No more lay ups. Somebody hits somebody. Kev, what about you? Why can't you do it" whatever was going on, it was the second half of game four, so the Lakers were up two games to one. It should have been 3-0. They just dominated them. Then there was a breakaway and Rambis took a pass streaming down the right sideline past mid court, and McHale came across the court and just put one of those long, gumby arms out.
Josh King:
It looked like a missile. I watched the video of it last night, McHale coming across.
Dan Shaughnessy:
Rambis's foot almost hits the rim. He's so upended his foot almost hits the rim. Lands hard on the hardwood and gets up and it's go time for everybody. There was no objections, no suspensions, no flagrant foul, no path to the basket. There were two free throws, and it went down the other end. I asked McHale in the book, I'm like, "Come on, Kev." He says, "I would be suspended for a year today if that happened." It changed rules. It changed a lot of things. In that moment, it was two free throws and the Lakers never recovered. They were out of their minds. The rest of the way they were the better team. They knew it, and they could not execute. Got into Kareem's head. Max talks about this. He says, "He was the thinker. You got into thinker's head, you knew you had them."
Dan Shaughnessy:
James Worthy, Maxwell said, "James Worthy's a hall of famer. He's better than me nine times out of 10. But in those days, I had him and he knew it." Max has given him a choke sign and Worthy is missing a free throw and Worthy grew up in North Carolina worshiping young Cedric Maxwell. It was just a head game. M.L. Carr's banging on their locker room door saying, "Get out you LA fakers. Tragic Johnson, we own you. We got you." Celtics somehow end up winning the series, going away in game seven with a team that wasn't as good, frankly. They stole that one. It was amazing.
Josh King:
It seems that the most fun, Dan, that you and the team had was in the '85, '86 championship season. A lot of that's due to the arrival of a veteran to give Parish a breather, and that's Bill Walton. "Get him if you can." Bird told Auerbach. This is a grateful, dead loving, pot smoking, Nixon hating meditating guru who earned a Sports Illustrated cover by playing for John Wooden at UCLA. Got a NBA title in Portland, but then suffered through playing for the Donald Sterling owned Clippers before getting to Boston, team up with Bird Parrish, McHale, and Ainge .what was the significance of the move to him, but also the team?
Dan Shaughnessy:
They couldn't believe it. I mean, they were thin on the bench in '85, they won a ton of games. They lost the Lakers in six. Now Red replenishes the team, he gets Jerry Sichting, a shooting guard. He trades Maxwell for Walton. Bill, it was like a faustian bargain where he got one year left and he was let out Clipper jail and gave up a lot of money to do that. But he wanted his freedom. He wanted play with Larry Bird. Bill grew up La Mesa, California, UCLA, the whole thing. But he had this reverence for the Celtics, the park Cape floor, Red Auerbach, Bill Russell and Larry Bird. To play with Larry Bird was a life changer for Bill. To the point where the middle of that chapter Bill Walton begs coach K. C. Jones for a hall pass to go out to French Lick while they're playing the Indianapolis Pacers. "I just want to see where Larry grew up." Larry and Quinn Buckner and some state cop out there, a friend of Larry's, drives him through the night to French Lick.
Dan Shaughnessy:
Larry's got a house there. The next morning, they go to Georgia Bird's house in the poor whatever neighborhood. Larry's dirt driveway and this old rusty rim. Bill asked for a canning jar and Georgia Bird gave him that. He went out and scooped up dirt from the jar and the rest of the season, he would sprinkle on himself for inspiration. End of the year, he takes the jar out to La Mesa and puts it in the driveway where young Bill Walton grew up. He says, "That is now sacred ground." I mean, this guy was all about this stuff. I mean, he loved, he talked like that. It was sincere. It was legit. He's still like that. He told me things for this book, it was just unbelievable. He told me, "Empty that resource, whatever you want to say, you can't overstate how great this was." I've tried not to, but the fun that he brought to it, it's unmistakable how much fun it was.
Josh King:
I listened to the audio version of the book which you recorded yourself over those five or six hours [crosstalk 00:41:00]-
Dan Shaughnessy:
No one's heard that. How does it sound? I was doing his voice [crosstalk 00:41:02]-
Josh King:
Your Walton voice, your baritone is getting there, but it must have been a real flex of the old vocal chords to get as low as Walton was.
Dan Shaughnessy:
It was because everything's the hyperbole, the greatest Coca-Cola, everything. He means it. My kids love making fun. McHale does a great Walton because Bill's got the little stutter and they all made fun of that, and McHale would say, "You, you, you, you guys don't even call players. You just ..." And just carry on like this. The whole thing about Bill standing up after the season opener and saying he was an embarrassment to the game of basketball. Larry's like, "Have a beer. We've got 81 more of these."
Josh King:
81 more of these, and we got a little more of the show after this. We're going to take a break and then we'll journey from that 16th Boston banner and the Garden rafters to what the NBA has become, a global financial empire. That's all coming right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Dan Shaughnessy, The Boston Globe columnist and author of Wish It Lasted Forever: Life with the Larry Bird Celtics. We're talking about Dan's career, Larry Legend's arrival in Boston and how it transformed the sport of basketball. Now we're going to turn our attention for a couple minutes to what it all brought. Dan, it takes 13 players along with the coaches and trainers to make up an NBA roster. You spent a lot of Wish It Lasted Forever talking about Larry's supporting cast from Rick Roby to M.L. Carr, to Dennis Johnson, to water guzzling Scott Wedman, and the perpetual fear of asbestos that he had. Beyond the starting five to the bench coaches Fitch, Jones and even trainer [Ramel Huri 00:43:52], how did these groups gel in the commercial jets and the shitty hotels that made up the life that Larry seemed to so enjoy traveling from city to city, especially the west coast trips?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Yeah, it was a small group, a small traveling group. Johnny Most was part of that, the broadcaster. They all would make fun of Johnny because he had the hearing aids, he couldn't stop smoking. They would call his room and say it was security. "We know you're smoking in there Mr. Most. We're coming up for you." Johnny would fall for it every time. It was small and everybody had a nickname, usually assigned by Cedric Maxwell. Again, you're together so much and you play a night game and the next morning, first bus to the airport for first flight out. All this downtime, I mean people that go to college together or in the military together, anybody who travels together, you have a lot of time with each other.
Dan Shaughnessy:
I mean, we had our first two of our three children while I was doing this and I saw more Larry Bird than my two daughters in those years. Which I'm not proud of, but we were just always together because that's the nature of commercial travel and the NBA. Again, a West Coast trip, you'd be in seven cities in 11 days. There was one we went in and out of California three times. You'd go into Oakland and then you'd go to Phoenix, and then you'd go into LA and then you go to Denver and you'd go back up to Sacramento. I look at it now and I have the logs of those calendars from those days and I just can't believe I did that.
Josh King:
I mean, today we see LeBron James doing ads for Tonal gym keeping his body in top form and his career at least sputtering along at nearly 37 years of age with 19 years in the league. LeBron won the championship as recently as the 200 bubble year. You document pretty extensively Larry's crappy diet, his beer intake, his bar brawls, his snow shoveling induced injuries. If he had taken better care of himself, how might his own stats and the number of self expanders in the rafters been different?
Dan Shaughnessy:
It's a tough one to say, because the back injuries and whatnot, I don't know how much that was congenital or just wear and tear or the running up the floor. I think having Len Bias survive and not die two days after the draft, all those guys extend their careers a little bit because they're not playing as many minutes and McHale maybe doesn't play with a broken foot in '87. Birds died, He didn't like staying in shape. He'd say, "When I'm done playing, I'll be the fattest bleep you ever saw because this is the hardest part of the job." I remember he gained all this weight when his back was hurting because he was eating wedding cakes. He told that to Jack McCallum.
Dan Shaughnessy:
He says he'll screw up a wedding cake. "That's what I'm going to eat while I'm gone." He gained seven pounds in a week. He actually didn't blow up in his late career, so he didn't honor that. But I don't think he would've ... He played from '79 to '92. I'm sure there was that many more seasons. He came to the league older, don't forget. A five year college guy because he took a year off, a gap year, and then four years at Indiana State. He's 22 or three when he's a rookie. Not like these guys coming in at 18. But quite a few players today, halfway through their careers, they've already played more games than Larry Bird because they start off at 19.
Josh King:
You write a lot in the book about the journalistic standards that you worked hard to maintain, even as you needed to craft relationship with these players. As you're writing a book now about events that happened 35 years ago, do you go back into those notebooks and find stuff that you jotted down as off the record at the time, but felt okay recounting now, or was off the record then off the record now?
Dan Shaughnessy:
There would be things that were either too reflecting poorly or just stuff that you wouldn't want to repeat that were privileged. You want your college roommate talking about all the stuff you talked about for four years looking at the ceiling before going to sleep and stuff. I wouldn't reveal things that were personal or shouldn't be in there, but general stuff like Larry talking about his brothers or talking about where his house was or being poor, to me, that was okay. Most of it was just kind of breaking chops with each other. Like, "Scoop, do you ever notice how quiet it gets when you walk in here?" Just back and forth stuff.
Dan Shaughnessy:
"I got hit in the head by a pass in Portland during warmups and my glasses broke." He noticed everything. He saw me, he said, "Scoop, I saw that. You was pissed at Kenny Carr." I wouldn't write that for The Globe in the moment. It doesn't really relevant to anything, but 35 years later, just these little vignettes, these little interaction, as long as they're harmless and not hurtful, I think that that stuff's fair game.
Josh King:
Beyond the Celtics competitors, you write a lot about your own competitors. Guys like Mike Fine of the Quincy Patriot Ledger, Mike Carey of The Herald, even the Hartford Courant gets a nod. You talk about that vignette when Sports Illustrated and Times, Tom Callahan was greeted by Georgia Bird in French Lick. As the years went on, Dan, Frank Deford starts up The National in 1990. Bill Simmons creates a new basketball niche for ESPN, and Grantland and The ringer. Now there's Barstool and The Athletic and a lot of writers want to even create their own brand on Substack, like you just mentioned about Michael Holley. But there's Shaughnessy still at The Globe writing most recently on Parcells's impressions on Mac Jones. What's the state of the trade do you think?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Well, and again, it's changed so much and I'm not a fan of how it's changed, but I don't bay at the moon about its evolution. You're not going to have the relationships that we had back then. Because the mode has gotten so wide. No one gets near anyone. The pandemic now, I mean we don't even know what's going on with the Celtics these days. Whether Brown and Tatum hate each other or like the new coach or whatever. Nobody's near that, there's that. I think more fans are getting into it and writing from a fan perspective and not getting information from the people they're covering as much and kind of maybe rooting for the teams. I didn't root for the teams, I root for the sport. If I knew something and it was relevant to the consumers, the fans, then I was going to write it. I didn't get a lot of scoops that way. But I think over the years, you develop relationships and if someone's professional, that's good enough. They don't have to be my confidant because I'm not going to protect them.
Dan Shaughnessy:
That exists still, but it's changed a lot. Again, you always sound like the old guy, get off my lawn. I don't like some of the changes the way it's evolved, but we just don't know as much. We can't get in as much. The readers are poorer for that. You have too many ... When college kids write to me and they want to get in the business and they want to be Barstool and they tell me, "Here's what I think of the Knicks." I don't give a shit what you think about the Knicks when you're 19 years old. It doesn't mean anything. What Bob Ryan thinks of the Knicks or Hubie Brown thinks of Knicks, that means something because they're there. Go tell me what's happening at University of Connecticut Storrs, Connecticut. Tell me about your team, your campus. Do some boots on the ground reporting and tell me what's around you and learn something. I can learn something from you with that.
Dan Shaughnessy:
I don't learn anything reading your opinion about the Knicks. It means nothing to me. Unfortunately, that's sort of the way it's headed, I think. That is the old guy, get off my lawn. Sorry.
Josh King:
Yeah's stay on the lawn, Dan. I mean, well you're covering the Red Sox and other Boston sports in the early 2000s. Your colleagues in the other part of the newsroom on the Spotlight team in 2002 published their first story on the Boston Archdiocese. Church allowed abuse by priest for years, the headline read. Bring us inside the newsroom in those years. What was it like to see your paper and your colleagues turn the city upside down?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Yeah. I mean we're so unfortunately kind of oblivious that's happening. I know some of those guys and we were really happy for them when they get The Pulitzer. I mean, my father had he lived, would've been just tortured by those stories about the Catholic church and what went down. The seriousness of it does not allude you. But we're immersed in Milwaukee Bucks coming up and Pistons next week and not giving it the gravitas or the eyeballs that I should have at the time. It wasn't until the movie came out that I'm like, "Whoa, this was really a lot going on there." So much respect for Walter Robinson and Marty Baron and Eileen McNamara, the people who really forged that. I was honored to know them and happy with their work, but truthfully not as appreciative in the moment, because you're so immersed in what you're doing yourself.
Josh King:
As we wrap up, Dan, we started the conversation talking about how the Boston Celtics were a business that was one time listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The New York Times is publicly listed today under the ticker symbol NYT. It bought The Globe from the Taylor family in 1993 for a billion dollars, then sold it to another private owner, John Henry for only 70 million 20 years later. In some ways, this is a golden age of journalism where I can read you from Manhattan without fetching it from my parents stoop. But what's the feeling like about the future of the newsroom today and what's your sense of the potential conflict of interest given that Henry also owns the team that you cover?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Well, I mean on the first portion, I mean the future, I think obviously digital subscriptions that's the future and that's what the goal is. That's why The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, they have those digital subscriptions. You can hire a lot of journalism and pay for journalism when you've got that number, because the distribution of the product is pushing a button right here you've sent the product out and you've got eyeballs all over the globe. More people read The Globe now than we had a circulation of 800,000. They're just getting it in China or Spain or Detroit or wherever they are because of the internet and the ability to do that. Monetizing that, having Macy's and Gimbals or whoever paying for that, that's another story. It's beyond my purview, but I think we've turned the corner. Where digital subscriptions are going to start to pay off. What I worry about is the printed product is so much more costly. That's the one I like. Old people's purview. It's overpriced. They kind of want it to go away, and I understand that.
Dan Shaughnessy:
It's a push-pull conflict that I have there. To your point about the conflict of interest, it absolutely exists. The notion that the man who owns the Boston Red Sox owns The Boston Globe, it's the only time in a history that I'm aware of this. You've had the reverse with a news entity own the team, and that would be the Chicago Tribune owning the Cubs and Atlanta situation with TV stations and whatnot. But here, the team owns the paper, as far as I'm concerned and not a good situation. I've done my best. I think I've established my independence in this area. I've certainly poked the bear enough. I give John Henry credit for not firing me because who wants to read the stuff where you're getting jabed in the ribs every weekend by the wise ass covering the Red Sox? But it's an awkward situation, to say the least. I don't like it, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. It is definitely a conflict of interest, which by definition is what we have here.
Josh King:
One more question for the wise ass who also knows his way around Newton sports. How do we get to the point where as we come to the end of another suburban Boston high school football season, that my beloved Newton South actually is ranked higher than Newton North in The Globe's Division 1 high school power rankings, 23 over 25?
Dan Shaughnessy:
Well, football has not been our strength at North and we do our best and we're on the rise here. But I'll tell you, this weekend, tomorrow, the Newton North girls' volleyball team is playing in the state championship against Needham and the Newton North boys' soccer team is playing against Brookline state championship. You've never had ... It's like the Indiana State basketball tournament when it's all merged now, it's not east against west, they put them all together into a pool, and the Bay State League has the top four in both of those sports playing each other tomorrow. There, take that.
Josh King:
We will take that and we'll be out to watch the games this weekend as they wrap up their seasons. Dan, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Dan Shaughnessy:
Really enjoyed it, Josh. Take care.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe columnist and author of Wish It Lasted Forever: Life with the Larry Bird Celtics out now from Scribner. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Stephan Capriles with production assistants from Pete Asch and Stephen [inaudible 00:55:35]. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
The information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor is affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitution offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some potions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of mental clarity.
