HBO’s current series Winning Time is a heavily stylised look at the Los Angeles Lakers franchise throughout the 1980s, in particular its decades-long rivalry with the Boston Celtics. The pilot directed by Adam McKay (Moneyball, Don’t Look Up) harnesses a style heavily indebted to Tarantino, with crashing graphics, regular breaches of the fourth wall, and quite a lot of extraneous information dumping. It’s also hugely entertaining, well-cast and beautifully shot – but largely sidesteps the actual tensions and dramas of the era in favour of nailing period wardrobe and hairstyles.
Which is not to say you shouldn’t watch Winning Time; it’s just a little lacking in historical context and meaty basketball content. Luckily, ESPN’s brilliant 30 for 30 documentary series covered the same story in Celtics/Lakers: Best Of Enemies, an exhaustive three-part, five-hour documentary released in 2017.
In the 1980s, basketball went from a marginal interest to an absolute phenomenon. The reasons for the game’s ascent are varied and complicated – including increased television interest, endorsement deals with McDonald’s and Nike and the expansion of the league to more markets – but one major draw was the rivalry between the LA Lakers and Boston Celtics, and in particular, between Lakers point guard Magic Johnson and Celtics forward Larry Bird.
Like all great rivalries, it’s the differences between enemies that allow for the closest matchups. Magic was Hollywood personified; with his thousand-watt smile and razzle-dazzle style of play, he brought showmanship to the NBA. Lakers games were a form of theatre, and sold-out arenas filled with the likes of Farrah Fawcett, Rob Lowe and Jack Nicholson sitting courtside.
Celebrities started attending Lakers games at the LA Forum just to be seen; the narrator (and a Celtics fan), Donnie Wahlberg, dismissively calls the Forum “the arena that doubles as a nightclub.” Lakers games quickly became the centre of Hollywood glamour and Magic was the ringleader, standing 6ft 9in high, and appearing much larger.
Boston, on the other hand, was pumping with Irish blood and its team took a workingman’s approach to basketball. Their players were violent and tough. They had no time for theatrics. Bird, born and raised in the tiny farming town of French Lick, Indiana, was fiercely adverse to the growing celebrity he was receiving; you’ll feel his visceral discomfort as you see him shoot a splashy Converse ad. He was an ungraceful athlete with superhuman basketball abilities and a sharp tongue.
The only concession to his own physical health was cutting down on beer during one off season late into his career, and buying an exercise bike for his farm – a new leaf that Boston commentators marvelled at. His career was cut short due to a back injury caused by dry paving his mother’s driveway: he was a famous multimillionaire at the time, but it needed to be done, and Larry got things done.
A more perfect set of rivals couldn’t have been carved out in a television writers’ room. The pair became the two faces of the NBA and an easy shorthand for the racial tensions that inflamed the US in the 1980s.
The first part of Celtics/Lakers: Best Of Enemies casts back through the 1960s and 70s to cover not only the Boston and LA rivalry, but the overriding perception among white Americans that the NBA was a “black league”, replete with the loaded references to “playground hoops” verses “fundamental basketball”, which coloured most coverage at the time.
While Winning Time has a lot of fun with the muttonchop, cocaine, pool-side excess of 1980s LA, all played for voyeuristic joy, Best of Enemies shows a country in freefall. Crack cocaine is ravaging the inner cities, Boston’s big draft hope Len Bias dies of an overdose, racial disharmony spills into racist violence and the sexually promiscuous Magic Johnson contracts HIV – at the time considered a quick, painful death sentence.
If you want a real look at the era, with its complicated societal issues, this is a wonderful documentary series. The facial hair is still fantastic, and the razzle-dazzle is all real.
Celtic/Lakers: Best of Enemies is streaming on Kayo and Foxtel Go in Australia
