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Magic & Bird, a Courtship of Rivals (2010), HBO Sports

A few months ago I reviewed When the Game Was Ours, by Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Jackie MacMullen, and called it a “perfectly entertaining sports book for the basketball fan.”  However, I didn’t think its appeal would extend beyond that group of readers.

This must be a hot topic.  HBO Sports has just released a 90-minute documentary, Magic & Bird, a Courtship of Rivals, which is a superb piece of work, one that really should interest a broader audience.  Part of what has always linked these two players, of course, is how different they appeared to be.  In Boston, we had Larry Bird, the “hick from French Lick,” shy, inarticulate, a Hoosier all the way, a hardworking, lunch bucket white guy who couldn’t jump but had astounding basketball abilities.  In Los Angeles, they had Earvin “Magic” Johnson, a man with a 1000-watt smile, Hollywood handsome, well spoken, an African American athlete of uncommon skill.  And yet both players could dominate all phases of any basketball game in which they played.

The format of Magic & Bird is basically linear sports biography, interrupted from time to time by separate, single camera interview segments with the present day subjects, each looking older and portlier than you probably recall.  Bird even wears a suit jacket.  Notoriously shy and usually reluctant to share his thoughts, Larry Legend is surprisingly honest in this film, touching on his father’s suicide, his refusal to be drawn into a discussion of racism when Isaiah Thomas and Dennis Rodman denigrated his talent, and his reaction when he learned that Johnson had been diagnosed HIV-positive.  As a player, Bird had a killer instinct, and in interviews, he is blunt about how he not only wanted to win, he wanted to see his opponent (Magic) struggle.  Others who are interviewed for Bird’s story include Mark Bird, Larry’s brother, Jackie MacMullen and Charles Pierce of the Boston Globe, and former Celtics Jerry Sichting, Rick Robey, and Cedric Maxwell, who puts a different spin on NBA racism.  (This documentary’s discussion of color in the NBA is one of its strengths.  For much more, read, or at least rummage around in, Bill Simmons’s lengthy The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy, a smart book by a well informed wise guy that does not shy away from considering the role played by racial issues in professional basketball.)

Johnson is perhaps a little less forthcoming in his interviews, but Magic has always been pretty upfront about his life; compared to Bird, there is simply less about Magic that we do not know.  He draws a useful distinction between Earvin Johnson, the regular guy from the Michigan Rust Belt, and Magic Johnson, his basketball alter ego, star of the Lakers’ “Showtime,” the groupie magnet.  He recounts the day, a few years into their rivalry, when Magic and Bird, bitter opponents who shared a profound mutual respect, agreed to make a sneaker commercial at Bird’s home in Indiana (Bird refused to go to Los Angeles).  It is the first time they really get to know each other off the basketball court.  Near the end of the film, when Magic talks about learning in 1991 that he was HIV-positive, he suddenly tears up recalling that Bird, unlike so many others (remember that in 1991 AIDS was still strongly associated with homosexuality, a taboo topic in the NBA), telephoned him immediately to ask about his health and to offer his support.  It is a touching piece of video.

Jackie MacMullen has said that Magic and Bird belong to a club of which they can be the only two members, and every now and then, these old friends, so different, so alike, hold a reunion.  That seems right to me.  You’ll enjoy this film very much.

[Magic & Bird, a Courtship of Rivals, debuted March 6, 2010 on HBO and is presumably in re-runs and ON DEMAND for a while.]