From award-winning Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, an
"entertaining" (The Wall Street Journal) and nostalgia-filled
retelling of the 1980s Boston Celtics' glory years, which featured the
sublime play of NBA legend Larry Bird.
Today the NBA is a vast global franchise--a billion-dollar industry seen
by millions of fans in the United States and abroad. But it wasn't
always this successful. Before primetime ESPN coverage, lucrative
branding deals like Air Jordans, and $40 million annual player salaries,
there was the NBA of the 1970s and 1980s--when basketball was still an
up-and-coming sport featuring old school beat reporters and players who
wore Converse All-Stars.
Enter Dan Shaughnessy, then the beat reporter for The Boston Globe
who covered the Boston Celtics every day from 1982 to 1986. It was a
time when reporters travelled with professional teams--flying the same
commercial airlines, riding the same buses, and staying in the same
hotels. Shaughnessy knew the athletes as real people, losing free throw
bets to Larry Bird, being gifted cheap cigars by the iconic coach Red
Auerbach, and having his one-year-old daughter Sarah passed from player
to player on a flight from Logan to Detroit Metro.
Drawing on unprecedented access and personal experiences that would not
be possible for any reporter today, Shaughnessy takes us inside the
legendary Larry Bird-led Celtics teams, capturing the camaraderie as
they dominated the NBA. Fans can witness the cockiness of Larry Bird
(who once walked into an All-Star Weekend locker room, announced that he
was going to win the three-point contest, and did); the ageless
athleticism of Robert Parish; the shooting skills of Kevin McHale; the
fierce, self-sacrificing play of Bill Walton; and the playful humor of
players like Danny Ainge, Cedric "Cornbread" Maxwell, and M.L. Carr.
For any fan who longs to return--for just a few hours--to those magical
years when the Boston Garden rocked and the winner's circle was mostly
colored Boston Green, Wish It Lasted Forever is a masterful tribute to
"the Celtics from 1982-1986 [that] is so good even fervent Celtics
haters will have trouble putting it down" (New York Post).
