How a Basketball History Book Rebuilt a Saturday Morning

The snow started Friday night, and by Saturday morning it had buried the mailbox. My son called to ask whether we could still have our visit, and I told him to bundle up the boys and come on over. I had no idea, as I cleared the walk and filled the coffee maker, that a basketball book sitting unread on my shelf was about to give us one of our best afternoons in years.

A little background. I am Gordon Ellis, I turn fifty-eight this spring, and I have been reading sports history for as long as I have been following games, which is longer than I like to admit. I grew up in the eighties, which means I grew up with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. The book on my shelf that morning, a gift I had bought myself and never opened, was When The Game Was Ours.

Fast forward to my grandson, who is nine and plays on the town youth team. He knows every current player and has the stats cold, but the men who came before him, he has no frame for any of them. When the snowed-in morning came, I reached for that gift and started reading a page aloud, mostly to break the silence.

That one page changed the whole afternoon. The book is told in the voices of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson themselves, and it does not read like a history textbook at all. It reads like two old friends finally sitting down and telling the truth about the years they spent trying to beat each other. My grandson stopped fidgeting. My son put his coffee down. By the second chapter we were in the best kind of argument, the one about who was really better, Bird or Magic, which is precisely the argument that has never been settled and never should be.

That single page changed the afternoon. It read like two old friends finally telling the truth about the years they spent trying to beat each other.

I have read a lot of sports history over the years, and I can usually tell the difference between a book that was compiled and a book that was lived. When The Game Was Ours was lived. Jackie MacMullan, the longtime Boston writer, helped Bird and Magic find the memories, and you can feel the honesty in the result. This is not two men polishing their reputations. It is two men remembering how much they resented each other in the years after that 1979 NCAA final and, later, how glad they are that the whole long rivalry happened at all.

What surprised me, reading it out loud, is how much ground it covers beyond the games. It walks you from their two very different small-town upbringings through the draft night that changed the NBA and on to the years when every meeting between them felt like a heavyweight title. It lingers on the quiet parts too, the handshake before a Finals, the way the two of them finally started to talk after years of barely a word. The book gives you the bones of that history, and your own memory supplies the rest, so nobody at the table is just listening. Everybody is arguing, which is exactly what we used to do in front of the television in the eighties.

The passages my grandson loved best were the small ones. Magic showing up unannounced at the Bird family house in French Lick, Indiana, wandering into the kitchen and sitting down with Bird's mother. Bird growing up poor, not owning a pair of basketball shoes until he was a teenager. Those human details are what turn a sports book into something you can hand to a nine year old and watch him actually read instead of scroll.

And it worked in the other direction too. By early afternoon my son was telling the boys about watching the 1984 Finals with his own father, about the back and forth games and the noise in our old living room. Three generations, in a single afternoon, connected by one book. The snow kept falling outside, and none of us wanted it to stop.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are on the fence about a basketball history book, I would tell you this plainly. Do not buy it because you need the numbers, there are reference books for that. Buy When The Game Was Ours because it is a good story told by the two men who lived it, and because stories like that are exactly how a family passes a love of the game down to the next generation. It made one snowy morning matter in my house, and it cost me nothing but a quiet hour to start. I suspect it will do the same in yours, and I have already ordered a second copy for my son's shelf so the argument can keep going there too.