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The NBA playoffs start this weekend and between games watch a must-see documentary.
The Boston Celtics are slight favorites to repeat this season for their 18th NBA championship. Also well worth seeing is an incredible docuseries called Celtics City on HBO/Max for sports fans and history buffs.
It depicts all the good and all the bad about Boston and a franchise that has been through its highest moments and absolutely lowest. Produced by veteran multimedia journalist Bill Simmons, he and his dad riff on going to Celtics games for five decades around tremendous archival footage.
Those decades include 11 NBA championships under legendary coach Red Auerbach, backcourt whiz Bob Cousy and brilliant Bill Russell, the center Auerbach drafted from the University of San Francisco and who endured brutal racism during his hall of fame career. “I represent the Celtics, not Boston,” Russell once said famously.
Russell went on to be the NBA’s first player-coach and somehow did not have his jersey hoisted into the rafters until years after his last two NBA crowns in 1968 and ‘69. Rusell went on to thank Boston fans after the ceremony, something he did not have to do and some did not deserve.
Celtics City covers the 13 years of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parrish in a vicious rivalry with the Lakers and Magic Johnson, teams that elevated the NBA from a league that sometimes had tape-delayed TV games in the fight-filled days of professional basketball that could not be controlled. “Losing seven times to the Celtics, that’s no rivalry,” said Lakers emotional star Jerry West, whose silhouette is still on the NBA logo.
And it grips you with two unthinkable losses that derailed the Celtics dynasty. The sudden death of Maryland’s Len Bias right after he was the first pick in the 1986 draft. And the almost sudden death of burgeoning star and hometown hero Reggie Lewis in 1993. And they barely avoided a third tragedy when all-pro Paul Pierce was stabbed 11 times in a Boston bar and miraculously recovered to be part of the 2008 championship team, their last title until Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown led them to last year’s championship.
See the undercurrent of racial turmoil that both plagued the league until the Michael Jordan era and Commissioner David Stern turned the NBA into an international phenomenon and the most popular sport in the world.
Celtics City interviewed numerous local sportswriters and fans who talked about the constant racial crisis that the Celtics, the first team to start five black players, lived with on and off the court and through the celebrations attended by hundreds of thousands of fans.
It is not a docuseries for the faint of heart who lived through it and the younger set that might watch each of the seven episodes in stunned silence of a country that, in some ways, is repeating history today. Watch Celtics City, a story both brilliant and thrilling and as dark as dark can be.
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Featured image via Associated Press/Charles Krupa
Art Chansky is a veteran journalist who has written ten books, including best-sellers “Game Changers,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Dean’s List.” He has contributed to WCHL for decades, having made his first appearance as a student in 1971. His “Sports Notebook” commentary airs daily on the 97.9 The Hill WCHL and his “Art’s Angle” opinion column runs weekly on Chapelboro.Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
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