8701260827
DETROIT FREE PRESS
870531
Sunday, May 31, 1987
STATE EDITION
1D
MITCH ALBOM
Copyright (c) 1987, Detroit Free Press
GARDEN REMAINS GHOSTLY
AFTER BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS -- THAT'S IT?
It was everything they had, every ounce of desire, strength, guts. The
Pistons kept the Celtics at bay with three minutes left, Danny Ainge missed a
long jumper, but the Celtics got the rebound, Larry Bird missed a long jumper
but the Celtics got the rebound, Robert Parish missed, the Celtics again. It
was as if destiny was toying with Detroit, ignoring its blood. Two more times
the Celtics would miss and get their own crazy rebound. And then Ainge,
standing outside the three-point mark, sending an airborne bullet that
swished. Through the heart.
Life goes on. The Pistons do not. There is no way they deserved to lose
this game, this heartbreaker of a series, no way except from a scoreboard
point of view. And that is all that counts. So when the buzzer sounded it was
the Celtics in each others' arms, laughing, cheering, celebrating a 4-3
series title and a 117-114 victory. It is hard for anyone to believe this
morning, at least anyone who has followed this remarkable series, watched the
sweat, seen the Detroit team play until there was no heart left to pump, play
well enough to win four games, maybe five, and only end up with three.
Detroit had its foot in the door of history. It slammed closed with a
finality that was at once painful and indisputable. When the game ended the
Pistons simply stared at the court that had been their burial ground.
"That's it?" they seemed to say.
Here was brilliant theater, you couldn't ask for more in that department,
and right from the start, the Pistons had the intensity of a surgeon holding a
human heart. No smiles. No celebrating here. Stares and tight jaws and
constant screaming from the coaches, every move, every play, analyzed,
dissected, the lessons passed on to the players on the bench. The first
quarter was Detroit's finest start -- offensively and defensively -- of this
series. The crowd noise dropped from ungodly to uncomfortable. The job was
getting done.
But Celtics basketball is a choke-lock, you can wiggle but you rarely get
free. And so at halftime, with Isiah Thomas sitting much of the second period
with three fouls, the Pistons led by just one point.
And then, when the third period began, when somebody's season was down to
its last 24 minutes, the Celtics came to life, and ugly misfortune decided to
sit in the Pistons' lap. Bird threw a ridiculous high-banker up over Adrian
Dantley and it found net. 75-72 Celtics. Parish dished off to a wide-open
Ainge. 79-72. Darren Daye played volleyball with his own shots, miss, rebound,
miss rebound, miss, put it in. And then the Celtics went for the emotional
kill. Bill Walton entered the game. The Garden responded with a hero's
welcome, even though he hadn't done a thing all series.
And then Vinnie Johnson and Dantley dived for a loose ball and banged
heads and Dantley never got up. He was wheeled out on a stretcher, only
semiconscious.
"It's all over, Detroit!" taunted a throaty fan near the Pistons' bench.
"It's over! It's over!"
If history had a heart, the Pistons would have won it right there. But the
facts are the facts. Bird took over in the fourth quarter, he was everywhere,
scoring, passing, and finally, when time ran out in this sweat box,
celebrating.
The summer goes on. The Pistons do not. This hurts terribly in Detroit,
because the city desperately fell in love with basketball during these last
two weeks, or rather, fell in love again, a rekindled affair. Isiah's pops,
Dantley's spins, Laimbeer's flicked-wrist jumpers -- they had all become part
of the household recently, like knick-knacks collected and put on the shelf.
And suddenly you wake up this morning, and they are behind glass.
That's it.
Hadn't the Pistons became the sentimental favorites of basketball fans
across the country? With each passing game, each slice of clamped-jaw
determination, the Detroit band wagon was more and more full. In Portland and
Milwaukee and Boise and Squaw Valley and Charlotte and New Orleans and
Brooklyn? Weren't they rooting for Detroit? Didn't most everybody want to see
a fresh Eastern champion, want to see someone beat the Celtics and the legends
they cart around like a medicine man with a sack full of magic?
But desire only reaches to the out-of-bounds line. On the floor, it's the
players and on this day, the Celtics were just too much the Celtics.
"That's it?" the team seemed to ask.
No fair, it seems, that now and forever the picture of Bird stealing that
pass in Game 5 will haunt the memory of this series, it will always be there,
like a dull ache, like a scar. And however bad the fan feels, the players
involved -- Thomas, Laimbeer, Dumars -- feel worse. They may say nothing. They
may shrug it off. You never shrug it off. The series at that time was on the
brink, delicate, like high heels on an oil slick. One fall, and the stain was
all over them, indelible.
What hurts is not just that play. But if you flipped this series around, if
the Pistons had won Saturday, the Celtics would have little to complain
about. They had already been soundly beaten three times, virtually beaten in
Game 5, and took them to the limit -- without Dantley -- in Game 7.
The Celtics? Salute their pride, their obstinance, even their arrogance,
for if you admire victory, if that's really what you wanted Saturday, then you
will understand these are all qualities that ensure it. They just belong, in
the Pistons fans' case, to the wrong people.
But it seems wrong to say the Pistons lost this series. It sounds better to
say they finished second, in a photo at the tape, and depending on the angle,
you could maybe, possibly, say that . . .
Never mind. In ends here, in a steamy Boston garden on a muggy Saturday
afternoon. You look around the Boston Garden court, where everything came
crashing down, now empty and quiet, and the finality of it comes to you like
the end of summer, like the last guest leaving a party.
That's it? That's it.
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