When the Game Was War: A Journey Back to the NBA's Greatest Season | Rich Cohen

[00:00:00] This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. So many interests. Well actually when I got to know you was when I wrote the Rolling Stones book

[00:00:23] and I'd taken guitar lessons when I was a kid and I got back into it because I wanted to try to play those songs that I was writing about. And how did it work out? Did you learn the songs?

[00:00:32] I realized it was so good that I hadn't played guitar when I was in college because all I would have done is get high and play guitar. That's it.

[00:00:42] It took a more adult less addictive personality, so it's so fun. And it's such a good way to sort of see how simple most of these songs actually are. And it's the same song kind of over and over again.

[00:00:59] In what sense? Because they have similar chords and different words. I remember it being from the Rolling Stones. I think it was, I'm probably going to get the songs wrong, but I think Bill Wyman came in with the riff for like,

[00:01:14] maybe it was Brown Sugar, it was one of those songs. It's just unusual for Bill Wyman. And they were all excited and they played it. And Keith Hridge said, you recognize it don't you? It's just honky tonk woman backwards.

[00:01:25] Well, you know, it's like three or four chords. Most of those songs. And I want, you know, as you of course know and you've written about, like, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were basically taught about songwriting from John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

[00:01:44] They couldn't write that first song. They ran into John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the street. And then John and Paul basically wrote their first hit song for them.

[00:01:53] Yeah. They probably were showing them, you know, like sometimes I remember when I was skiing once I was like seeing a really difficult hill and I didn't know how I was going to get down.

[00:02:03] It had huge moguls and a friend that I was with came up behind me and just went right down. I was like, oh, that's how you do it. You just have to go right down and figure it out as you go along.

[00:02:11] You know? So I think that that's what they showed him, which was, you know, they don't have to write. I think a big liberating thing is for writing too is you don't have to write a great song. You don't have to worry about that.

[00:02:25] You know, just write a song and every now and then you'll write a great song. I think that's a story with the wrong shots. I never thought of it that way. Do you think that's true for the Beatles as well?

[00:02:36] Because they have so many great songs. Do they have, is it a quantity thing? Well, I don't mean yesterday is such a classic song. It doesn't it feels like or let it be or whatever. Like it seems like the average band at that time wasn't writing those songs.

[00:02:52] Well, you know the story of yesterday, right? No. Paul McCartney dreamed it and was stuck in his head and he was trying to figure out, you know, who wrote this song,

[00:03:03] who wrote the song and he kept asking everybody and they all said we don't know, we don't know. And then finally John Lennon said maybe you wrote it.

[00:03:10] So it kind of came to him in a dream. I don't think, I don't mean that its quantity and some percentage is going to be good. I mean that it's sort of the tyranny of trying to be good.

[00:03:20] You know, like it's like a problem when you try to do something good because you're not ultimately in control of that. Like you just got to do the activity and then hope it works. You know what I mean?

[00:03:31] It's like otherwise, so there's a great writer that I love that inspired me to be a nonfiction writer, Joseph Mitchell who was at the New Yorker. Yeah.

[00:03:39] And the famous story about him was that he returned to his last story in 1963 and was in the New Yorker until the mid-90s typing, writing and never turned anything in.

[00:03:49] And finally when he died they found some of the stuff and published the stuff you've been working on. I kind of knew him. And to me he's an example of somebody whose taste got past his ability.

[00:04:00] Every time he reread something he wrote it didn't look right to him. So it's never finished. You know, I've had this discussion with other writers. Like I feel that's true for all writers.

[00:04:09] Like when I look at things I even wrote a year ago I could see the problems, the flaws. Like as you continue learning and there's so much to learn in writing you're always going to not like your older stuff.

[00:04:23] Like if you look back at some of your first books I'm sure you'd be able to say the same way. I just had, I read my first book on audio and I thought, and it was a very successful book, maybe established my whole career.

[00:04:35] I mean without it I wouldn't have been able to do what I do. I don't think it was tough. What was it? Tough Jews about Jews. And I just didn't think it was good. Well, that's a great book too.

[00:04:46] I know it just because you just evolve little by little and you don't even, it's like growing, like you don't even realize. And then there's a scary thought that I used to have to kind of believe you're always getting better or kind of what's the point.

[00:04:58] That's what you're talking about, about the guitar, which is when I was a kid I'd try something new. My first thought was I'm going to be the best person in the world that ever did this, you know?

[00:05:06] And it would make me not enjoy things because I realized I wasn't that good. And like when you get older and like play guitar, you realize you're never going to be good so you don't have, you can just enjoy it.

[00:05:15] The flip side though is with writing you can get better and better as you get older. It's one of those things that works better with age in many cases. Well, that's my point which is at some point maybe you will have done your best thing.

[00:05:29] Maybe, because when you look back at other writers you think that was their best book, maybe they're 40 or something. And you'll never, it's depressing to think about. It's like thinking about your, like maybe, I just like turn in my mind

[00:05:41] like maybe the best is already in back of me, which is a scary, scary thought. But you look at writers or artists who do the really, really, really great stuff and they're really, really old. And that's very, very inspiring.

[00:05:55] Well, and look you're the exact same age as me. We were both born in 1968. And I do think writers hit their peak ages probably more in their 60s than in their 40s. Now of course there are many examples of writers who have written their best work

[00:06:08] in their 40s, but I mean how old was Ernest Hemingway when he wrote A Moveable Beast or Old Man in the Sea? Yeah, but he, the stories that he's really famous for that made his reputation that were revolutionary were the first ones.

[00:06:22] Which is, I'm a huge Hemingway fan. Hemingway grew up in suburban Chicago where I grew up. So it's like, you know, a suburban kid, like really. And his first book, you know, In Our Time, which is just,

[00:06:36] it was like some of the Nick Adams stories, World War I stories. And if you go back there are masterpieces, almost every single one of them. And he wrote them when he was in the mid-20s. And I think that he wrote Farewell to Arms

[00:06:48] and he wrote Sun Alls Orises, which I mean, I love A Moveable Beast. Absolutely. But The Sun Alls Orises is probably his best novel. But you know, I would challenge you on that. Like I would reread The Sun Alls Orises.

[00:07:00] I feel like he has, if you compare that to Old Man in the Sea, which I know is almost just more of like a big short story or a novella. But The Sun Alls Orises I feel has a little bit of ego in it. Too much ego.

[00:07:12] He's getting out some personal revenges in The Sun Alls Orises. And he loses that later on, although he says an element to that. But Old Man in the Sea is like a pure book without his ego. But what's amazing about Farewell to Arms, let's say,

[00:07:28] is take the first paragraph of Farewell to Arms. If you were to go back and read it or read it out loud, it's like a magic, it's like a song. And you cannot figure out how it works. It's so beautiful. It's like a painting.

[00:07:40] And I feel like you can almost take it and type the exact words down on the page yourself and it won't sound the same. Something happened that never really happens to anybody. And it was just that he got it.

[00:07:53] He had this very intense experience in the first World War where he was blown up. I don't know if you know that he was an ambulance driver. But basically blown up. And I think he was... And those are stories that are very, very, very intense.

[00:08:08] But that's just it too. The intensity is there to mask any inability. Not that he was incapable of writing a book. Obviously he was a great writer even then. But I think the intensity of the experience, it was so in his head that that was able to masquerade

[00:08:26] any faults he might have as a writer then. Again, not that he had any faults or was a great writer. I just think somehow or other for me, Old Man of the Sea is more sublime than those earlier books. All those earlier books were more grand.

[00:08:42] Well, it's kind of an old man book and a young man book. And it's also you kind of feel like it's a little tiny bit. Hemingway who won the Nobel Prize was the best-selling writer, super celebrity. Like no writer has felt a little sorry for himself.

[00:08:55] And so this idea that every writer has that he did this incredible thing, which is he caught this giant fish and he gets devoured by sharks. That's just like when you feel like when you write a book and it starts getting attacked.

[00:09:12] It's like, jerk him to God damn sharks. So I really think he was exercising his anger towards... I never thought of it that way. Yeah, that's how I see it. That's so interesting. Well, it's interesting because I'll segue into your current book, which is a fascinating read

[00:09:31] and I highly recommend it. Sports and basketball compared to writing are very interesting things because again, writing sort of improves with age and experience to a large extent, but there's always feeling like you say that maybe the best is behind you.

[00:09:49] But sports, and you refer to this in the book, you say every athlete dies twice. There's the actual death that everybody experiences, but there's that earlier death when the thing you've done since you were a child and you've done it every day, you love it,

[00:10:05] and you're the best in the world at it, a sport. At some point, whether it's age 25, age 30, age 40, at some point you're not going to physically be able to do it anymore at that level. Yeah, experience does not help. What you lose with age,

[00:10:22] you can never gain back with experience. Karim Abdul-Jabbar was a young man when he retired. He was over a decade younger than you and I are now. And yet he was an old man, he was the oldest man in the league, right? Yeah. And he had to retire.

[00:10:36] And like what was it, 1989, the year after the season you write about? Yeah, yeah. And he was, I think it was 41 or something. I mean, I think that first of all, the Hemingway thing, it's interesting the connection because Hemingway writes about sports all the time.

[00:10:49] He writes about Joe DiMaggio in The Old Man in the Sea, right? He's comparing himself to the great DiMaggio. I think Hemingway really saw it. He grew up in Chicago and during the White Sox through the World Series, there's a thing, an anonymous piece by him

[00:11:03] where he interviewed one of the great players, maybe Joe Jackson, heading West for spring training when he was working in Kansas City. And also he has a description in one of those early stories just about a guy hitting a home run and as far as physical action

[00:11:21] because Hemingway was so interested in writing about physical action. I mean, you can write about what somebody looks like, what a park looks like at night, what it looks like under the lights, what the player's uniform looks like. That's writing.

[00:11:31] And when I always liked about writing so much about sports is I feel like there's this real bifurcation between like literary writing, which I try to think of myself as, and sports writing. And once you start writing a lot about sports, you get thrown in the sports bucket.

[00:11:45] But I always thought sports, some of the greatest American literature, whether or not you realize it, is sports writing. So, and I think that, I think that the thing about sports is all the stuff that people keep hidden, that they do in their house that you never see

[00:12:03] are out exposed in the public to think about and write about. So what you're talking about, the fact that these guys in the middle of their crime for anybody else, they lose their ability, they lose their magic. And they have this,

[00:12:17] and they move from basically being in the center participant to being observer, a civilian like the rest of us. But we never experienced it, so we never lost it. I mean, more than anything, most of the people I know would rather have been a professional athlete.

[00:12:32] You can't think of anything cooler than that. And you send, that's why the guys who are old who find a way still to contribute, even when they're old, sometimes by changing their game are so inspiring. Like Michael Jordan is a great example. No one was more physically gifted

[00:12:48] than Michael Jordan in 1984, 1985, 1986. But he retired and he came back and he wasn't quite physically the same. He couldn't jump as high, he couldn't hang like he'd hung. And so he reinvented his game where he suddenly became an outside player.

[00:13:05] He started where he would play from the outside, which would have to give him room and then he'd go inside. Whereas early in his career he just went inside every time. So it's really interesting to watch when people change like that.

[00:13:20] And a lot of players can't do it and some can. Amazing thing about Karim was he still played the same way but he would pick, he was old for basketball and he would pick his spots. So like if it was a game

[00:13:33] that was over, he would take it easy. That's why the really funny thing in airplane where they say Karim isn't running back on defense. He didn't run back on defense. He had to conserve his energy for basically offense or big moments. But in those playoff series

[00:13:45] and season I wrote about it, 87-88, the Lakers played every round except the first round was seven games. So they almost played like an additional season by the time they got to the last two or three games in the final. And Karim would disappear when not needed

[00:14:01] and when needed for a big moment he'd suddenly get the keep lock or do the key thing. So he very much learned to conserve his energy and pick his spots which is inspiring and a lesson to take for the rest of us getting older. Yeah.

[00:14:15] And it's a little, it's interesting too also because as you get older in a sport like basketball is a great example it's not just that you have to play less. At some point you really can't play at all or you're going to get hurt like an old man.

[00:14:30] Right. And so yes, Karim, Michael Jordan they all had to kind of reinvent. They had to slow down their game but again in a fairly young age, middle age, they have to just stop. They can't just sort of like play with their kids or grandkids or whatever

[00:14:45] because they might get hurt when they jump. Yeah, well I remember when Wayne Grutzky retired and he still seemed like a really great player. I mean he's leading the league in a cyst or had a lot of cysts and they asked Mark Messier why he was retiring.

[00:14:59] He said because this is the NHL and if you slow down a little you can really get hurt. It's like dangerous. So now it gets to the point where you're actually putting yourself in a not even sports danger like actual, actual danger.

[00:15:13] That's why sometimes you get these outliers and you think about it who play like Messier played almost till he was 50. Gordy Howe played until he was in his 50s and even Karim played till he was 41. Those guys are freaks in nature because think about all the people

[00:15:29] who played sports at a high level that you knew like a lot of them were quit in third grade, some of them quit in seventh grade. Some of them quit in the middle of high school. Some quit after two years of college.

[00:15:40] Some of them quit after two games in the NBA. These guys, some of them quit at age 33, 34. So when you get a guy that played stuff 40 there's like, you know, like two or three out of like millions who can actually end up doing that.

[00:15:54] So first off, I really love the book When The Game Was War the NBA's greatest season, the 87-88 season you make a claim that this is the greatest season and after reading your book I have to agree like it was such an intense season

[00:16:24] but you know, I've never watched the basketball game on TV ever. I've been to one basketball game in my life that's probably the only game I've watched and yet for some reason I've been fascinated like you earlier you said sports writing is often the greatest literature.

[00:16:39] Lately I've been fascinated by all the content out there about basketball. Like there's the HBO show Winning Time about the beginning of Magic Johnson's career The Lakers in the early 80s. Of course there was the documentary Last Dance there's the TV show that's on right now

[00:16:56] Swagger which is fictional show but produced by Kevin Durant There's probably two or three documentaries on Netflix or Amazon right now that are in the charts for basketball and what is it that makes such great drama what is it that I like about it?

[00:17:12] Like I really love these shows and I'm not a basketball fan at all. Well one thing about basketball that's different than the other sports is there's only five players on the court at a time so it's not like football where you got eleven on its side

[00:17:25] you know you got twenty two because you got eleven on offense and you got eleven on defense and then you got special teams so maybe it's more like thirty people or more so and they're wearing masks and helmets and you can't see them basketball players are very visible

[00:17:39] and they're talking trash and they're saying crap to each other and you can hear it and you could watch it and the personalities of these guys are so evident in their playing style so like Larry Bird from French lick Indiana Southern Indiana

[00:17:51] his father committed suicide when he was a kid he sort of didn't really make it at Indiana University with Bobby Knight you sort of see all that you know you see it in their game Michael Jordan getting humiliated on the driveway in front of his house

[00:18:07] by his older brother game after game after game and burning first just to beat his brother which then translated into beating everyone in the world and this incredible chip on its shoulder so I think with basketball starting with the fact that you can really see their faces

[00:18:21] unlike just about any other I guess baseball you can baseball is kind of I love baseball but baseball is the national game of an America that doesn't exist anymore you know basketball is like the national game with the the speed and the intensity and it's the baseball

[00:18:37] basketball I'd say it's really the game of the individual you know where it posts up into a one-on-one game and the era I'm writing about a lot of the shows you're talking about like The Last Dance and Winning Time are about the same era

[00:18:51] I think it's because it was the last it was a real golden age of basketball partly because it was before everything went on line and there became so many highlights and replay of every single moment to me that's like inflation like the more dollars you print

[00:19:10] the less each dollar is worth and the more highlights you see the less each highlight means we had a wait all day watch those games live and you saw them once or you missed them forever and there would be a recap on the news three minutes of sports

[00:19:25] just before the weather guy so basically because we only saw it once and then a replay or two those moments were so intense and they burned so brightly and the cities were really different than each other I think in a way they're not anymore

[00:19:41] everything's become a little bit homogenous so the Detroit team the Pistons the bad boys really seemed to personify the working class tough auto industry mentality of Detroit and the Lakers were showtime that was LA that was Hollywood Celtics were really Boston and the Bulls were what was

[00:20:01] the new Chicago that sort of boom after the 70s when you know the city kind of fell apart a little bit so I think that all that was on display and the fans were really involved with the players and it's just an era that's gone because everything's gone

[00:20:17] onto our phones in some way you know I think also with basketball you have these almost magical feats of physical showmanship like just the concept of a dunk or Michael Jordan flying through the air it's like a magic trick whereas with baseball yes you could see a ball

[00:20:44] go over a fence that's the magical feat there so you're not even seeing a human and like you say with the NFL it's amazing the passes the catches, the amazing runs for the touchdown but still you don't see their faces so I guess you're right

[00:20:57] there is something that little you see the people you see the drama and then you see the magic actually happen in front of you and also think about the highlights which I talked about like baseball the reason why it's so satisfying

[00:21:10] is because a lot for a long time nothing happens and if you care the tension builds and it's very very very frustrating if you need your team to score and your team can't score and then finally after two hours there's a hit and it's just a hit

[00:21:30] it scores a run and it's like when you experience it it's so cathartic that it's like the most it's exciting play you've ever seen if you go back and watch it on a highlight you're like what is this a hit just I've seen a million hits like that

[00:21:43] and with basketball though that's true sometimes those plays, those individual Michael Jordan plays are in isolation unbelievable but what he could do physically was unbelievable and one of the really cool things was when he came into the league the best player in the league at that time was

[00:22:01] either Magic Johnson or Larry Bird and Larry Bird said he's incredible I've never seen anyone like him he's doing stuff that no one has ever done and I think physically still no one really does did what he did it's not just that he scored

[00:22:15] and did all that stuff he did it made it look so cool he did it with such beauty and grace he was like a rock star you couldn't take your eyes off to him and it was kind of hard for a while for me to watch him

[00:22:27] after he retired because it was like the stars out of the movie some of that's because up from Chicago and the Bulls were finally really good but also just because I mean think about it everybody before him were these short shorts he just changed the way

[00:22:41] everybody in America dresses I mean you go into a banana republic two years after he changed his into long shorts or only selling long shorts that's when guys started guys balding started shaving their heads when I was a kid people didn't shave their heads

[00:22:57] they did a comb over they hung on to everything they had they were like a man they worshiped a little bit of hair they had they prayed to it Jordan shaved his head looked like the coolest guy in the world and now everywhere there's bald guys

[00:23:10] I give that credit to Jordan too you know it's interesting the drum and personality like you know and you see this in the show Winning Time also the rival between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and then you have you know all these charismatic or wild personalities

[00:23:31] like Dennis Rodman Isaiah Thomas until I read your book I didn't know the story that Dennis Rodman didn't start playing professional basketball until he was 25 years old everyone gets recruited when they're in college or drafted when they're in college but he grew 10 inches around at some point

[00:23:51] he was like a small guy and then he grew 10 inches kind of late he grew 10 inches like in a year which means if you put your ear next to his door now you can probably hear him growing I mean that and it was after high school

[00:24:04] so but that's an interesting recurrent thing that I noticed in basketball and probably in a lot of sports which is the guys who grew late if they persisted because they would be pushed out of the game whatever the game is if you're real small you get pushed out

[00:24:19] if you want to be like Isaiah Thomas who's under six feet tall the only player in the top 50 under six feet tall you got to be better than everybody else there's no mediocre 5 foot 10 players in the NBA they're all great

[00:24:31] so a lot of the guys who are shorter in basketball they get pushed out but if you persist you actually can become a great player if you grow so like Jordan grew late too relatively late he grew in high school and he had to develop all these skills

[00:24:46] to beat much bigger people and then he grew and he had these incredible skills ball handling, jumping faking people out except now he was six foot six not 5 foot 10 or 5 foot 11 and also Magic Johnson he didn't really grow that late but when he was a kid

[00:25:05] he played guard and he really was an excellent ball handler and developed his ball handling dribbling skills people forget dribbling like the basic alphabet of basketball and then he grew and now you had a guy who insisted on staying at guard you had a guard

[00:25:22] who was like six foot eight which never existed which meant everybody covering him was like six inches shorter than him which gave him this incredible vision which resulted in all these incredible passes because back then especially you didn't have guys that go that fast with the ball

[00:25:39] handling the ball and make passes on the fly like he did why is that this is a naive question but why is a guard shorter usually than other positions and Isaiah Thomas was also a guard right? yeah well traditionally you want the guy outside

[00:25:53] who's sort of carrying the ball up setting up the play making the passes initiating the play and can shoot from the outside but inside you want big guys because you know you're fighting for rebound so when you're fighting for rebounds height is a big deal

[00:26:05] so if you have a guy that's very tall you put him in the forward position so he can get rebounds now I mean obviously think about how it's silly to say but think about how important rebounds are if you get twice as many rebounds

[00:26:18] you only have to make half as many shots especially offensive rebounds and basketball you get a do over as you get the rebound so it's changed a little bit now because of the three-point shot but Red Arrowback who built the Celtics team

[00:26:33] and built three different dynasties in Boston he always looked he said you can't teach height I can't teach anything but I can't teach height so the thing now that the Bulls that was really new back then that you see now is like

[00:26:47] Bill Lambeer with just about a seven foot center for the Pistons and he can get a three-point shot now you see that that was unique Scotty Pippen who was another guy who grew very late in college came up playing guard and then grew like a foot

[00:27:02] and they put him at forward but because he'd grown up playing guard because he had been short he could sort of be a swing player where he could swing between forward almost playing a center at times back to guard which is incredibly versatile

[00:27:17] if you have a guy that can sort of play all over the floor so the other interesting thing is you have these great individual athletes like Matt Johnson, Michael Jordan Scotty Pippen, Larry Bird but ultimately it's a team and you go through this in the book

[00:27:34] like the dynamics and the bonding of the team are just as important for winning that championship as is whoever your greatest player is there's plenty of examples of teams that have the greatest player in history where they can't win because there's no team around them

[00:27:52] I mean the Lakers if they didn't have Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson and Byron Skye and all these or Brian's I forget all these names if they didn't have the team it wouldn't have worked for them Yeah well a good example that is Jordan himself who took many

[00:28:08] I think I can't remember six or seven years before he finally won he was the best player in the league he won the MVP but the Bulls would get eliminated in the usually as soon as they ran into the Pistons and the playoffs

[00:28:19] and the criticism of Jordan was he's not a team player and they asked Larry Bird that his response was yeah well he doesn't have a team and when I was a kid they called the Bulls Jordan and the Jordanaires you know the Jordanaires were Elvis's backup band

[00:28:36] and basically they had to build a team what interested me was I was a history major in college and when I studied the United States and how the United States became so heavily armed in my childhood you couldn't really understand it if you didn't understand the Soviet Union

[00:28:54] and Russia you know it wasn't in a vacuum they were responding to something and when I try to figure out why the Pistons played the way they did which was the bad boy very violent, very physical and I didn't really get it you go back and you look

[00:29:05] they were built specifically to beat the Celtics because before they could get to the finals they had to beat the Celtics and the Celtics had the biggest front line maybe an NBA history size-wise Larry Bird with the smallest one Robert Parrish and Kevin McHale three Hall of Famers

[00:29:21] so they had to get me to beat the Celtics and the Celtics had to get big in me to beat the 76ers so that's sort of how basketball evolves and for the one of the great things about the Pistons was Isaiah Thomas who was a great great player

[00:29:36] who's kind of undervalued now because of his shoot with Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson but he was such a great player he realized that he was the best player on the Pistons and he could probably score it 30 points a night

[00:29:49] but he realized that if he scored 30 points a night his team would not win he had to sublimate his own talent score less and spread out the scoring and the great thing about those Pistons was they were so balanced they became impossible to stop

[00:30:03] not only their first team they had a second team that was arguably better than their first team on their second team they had Dennis Rodman and John Sally and Vinny Johnson all all-stars almost all Hall of Famers coming off the bench

[00:30:19] so when they play a team like Larry Bird the Celtics might beat the first team but as soon as the Celtics sat down to rest the second team came in and ran up the score so then the coach had to send the first team back out

[00:30:31] and those guys were old and they just couldn't play that many minutes that the Celtics made him play and that's physical minutes and when I was a kid one of the sadder things I remember watching was Larry Bird at the end of his career would come out

[00:30:46] it was still great but he'd come out of the games and have to lie on the sideline because his back hurt so much his back was spasming and it was like if you're at a back spasm that's just like excruciatingly painful

[00:30:58] and you'd see him lying on the sidelines waiting till his spasm died down and then coming back and scoring five or six points and going back and getting back down on the sideline it's like watching a combination between Dr. J. and my Uncle Ross

[00:31:09] that's what it seemed like you know I wonder if like you mentioned Michael Jordan was the best player in the league but he was having trouble or the team was having the Bulls were having trouble winning titles this seems particularly true in the season you write about 1987-88

[00:31:23] you mentioned how the coach had all these plays or Phil Jackson had somebody working had all these plays for all the other guys and eventually they would run out of steam and then it was Michael Jordan for the rest of the game is this why they weren't

[00:31:36] they weren't really that much in contention in years like 87? Yeah and also again true in all sports which is the game in the regular season and the game in the playoffs is completely different which is in the regular season they're playing you know a team here

[00:31:50] a team there and they play their game you know but when they get to the playoffs it's these long series and they work out a strategy for just this team and now you have to face a team that's figured out how to beat you

[00:32:03] and in that case Jordan and the Pistons did it and the Pistons it was Joe Dumars who did it he would and they were very smart about it so Jordan they said we're not going to stop Jordan from scoring what they would do is let him score

[00:32:16] in the first three and a half quarters then in the fourth quarter they put the screws on him and they'd also they would play make them play a lot of defense to try to tie them out right and then they put the screws on him

[00:32:31] in the third in the fourth quarter in the crunch time which meant they would foul him a lot and each guy had five fouls so they'd each take fouls they'd spread around the fouls they'd be draped all over them they had the Jordan rules

[00:32:42] were basically once he gets into the paint which is the area you know right under the basket they'd knock him foul him hard knock him down and by the time they got to the end Jordan was exhausted he was beat up and now he'd start looking for help

[00:32:54] and he passed the guys like Will Perdue who was on that team or Sam Vincent guys you haven't heard of maybe were on that team and those guys hadn't really shot all games so they were all cold so basically it was kind of a really brilliant strategy

[00:33:09] and Jordan still scored a lot of points but his average was like down ten points against the distance and that's what was so frustrating and the coach then was Doug Collins he'd been a superstar player had a superstar player's mentality and he was kind of with Jordan

[00:33:26] and Phil Jackson came in and he had the Isaiah Thomasman thought he would say you've got to sublimate your own talent develop these other guys that's the only way you're going to win and he got Jordan to buy into it and they got the players

[00:33:39] a lot of them are already there and the year I wrote about but they were on the bench like John Paxton who became the famous you know guards for the team and Pippin and Ross and Horace Grant were both great players and they were rookies that year

[00:33:54] so the team was just about there but they hadn't quite figured out how to win but it was ultimately so satisfying as a Bulls fan because the season would end with this basically beat down where the Pistons would just beat the crap out of the Bulls

[00:34:08] you go outside and you cry it was so upsetting but every year the Bulls got closer and closer and closer and when they finally beat the Pistons the Pistons collapsed they swept the Pistons and then they went on I think they beat the Lakers in 5

[00:34:23] and it was just so satisfying that was the first year they won so 80, 99, 91 the spring of 91 so it was kind of like a dragon quest it was like we've been with the Bulls as they slowly built this team and struggled

[00:34:44] you know it was like Lord of the Rings or something I mean it wasn't just basketball it was like epic it was an epic epic thing and that's another thing you don't get as much anymore because of free agency and because all these guys know

[00:34:56] the guy across from me in the court is a guy who might be playing with this in the next year so the idea is like Bird didn't want to be friends with anybody and there's a famous story where magic who considered Bird his friend

[00:35:08] they played together in high school went to shake Bird's hand and Bird cut him just walked by and Bird some players have to hate the other team they think to perform they have to decide the other team is evil unjust and must be stopped

[00:35:24] and play with kind of a righteous anger magic wasn't like that but Bird was and Rodman was and Isaiah was but it's interesting though how when Magic Johnson in 1991 had announced that he had AIDS Larry Bird was one of the first people to call him

[00:35:41] and Larry Bird was just like you know really sad about it well Bird had softened because the famous story is that they did a commercial together a converse commercial where Magic came out to Bird's house in French-Lake, Indiana where he lived with his mom

[00:35:57] and they kind of became friends and then the thing is I wouldn't say Bird didn't like Magic but he saw him he felt that if baby came friendly then when it was time to stick the knife in he wouldn't do it he just didn't want to be friendly

[00:36:10] because he thought he took away an edge that he needed to perform you know and but he realized that Magic was a crucial part of his time in his career and they needed each other so to me it's like one of the reasons

[00:36:26] why this was the greatest season is because there were four great dynasties each in different stages of rise and collapse and they pushed each other and they tested each other over a series of seasons really so to me it's like you don't really have Muhammad Ali

[00:36:41] if you don't have Joe Frazier if you don't have Larry Holm you know I grew up when I was just out of college Mike Tyson was his devastating boxer but you felt like you never faced a great great boxer so you never really saw how great he was

[00:36:54] you know and I feel like Bird understood that Magic was his great rival and it was together that rivalry that made them both great players starting you know when they played against each other in the NCAA final the year before they went into the NBA

[00:37:12] and then continued to play against each other for their entire careers How much of a basketball player's ultimate skill is talent versus work so let's say Michael Jordan you know he grew and then he had this unbelievable talent Larry Bird says I've never seen anything like it

[00:37:45] but we know he worked really hard is it true like Michael Jordan was the first person at the court you know working out practicing in the last person to leave you know or guys like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and so on

[00:37:56] Here's what I realized as I've gotten older The work is the talent You know what I mean? Like obviously you need some physical talent but sort of the ability to work and to play and to perform at that level intensity night after night is a talent

[00:38:15] you know and Jordan and all these guys they had that talent that turned it on and to push themselves further than anybody ever pushed themselves I spoke to this guy who was like maybe the number one draft pick in the NHL or in the top 10

[00:38:31] and he by Tampa Bay and his career nothing happened he played like 30 games and then he wanted the minor league hockey and now he's like giving skating lessons okay and I asked him what the hell I mean obviously you played against these guys in college

[00:38:43] or juniors or whatever what happened he said at the NHL you have to basically play your best game every single night he said I couldn't do it every night I could do it like once or twice a week you know but the ability to go that hard

[00:39:01] that's why it's so hard to play so long and one of the things I found really interesting was I always think that there's like two considerations when somebody is playing a sport like this one is like the long term the career

[00:39:13] like what are you doing right now going to jeopardize my career and the other is right now like I don't care about what happens in my career all that exists is right now and I'm going to do whatever I got to do right now

[00:39:24] and in that era a lot of those guys chose the right now over the longevity Bird is an example maybe the great example is Kevin McCail who's a forward for the Celtics who played an entire playoffs and most of a season on a broken foot

[00:39:41] sure meaning he was an excruciating pain every night he played and surely shortening his career so did Isaiah Isaiah in the playoffs I write about was knocked out cold twice and both times came back and delivered the decisive blow

[00:39:56] it was almost like not that he could still play well after he got heard it's like he played better after he was heard because she would piss you know and I think that that is that is a talent and it's because all the time you hear about guys

[00:40:14] oh he would be great if he worked harder or if he tried you know but like that is just a part of the makeup that is part of the talent that allows you to go at the top of the level which is true about Jordan

[00:40:27] I wrote a story for Rolling Stone a lot of years ago about Keith Van Horn who had been a top draft pick by the New Jersey Nets and it was when Jordan was older like 30 in his late 30s or whatever on the Washington Wizards

[00:40:39] and I went by to meet Van Horn like 10 in the morning the day before a game that night like at 7 and I walked him to the arena and Jordan was all alone in the arena just shooting free throw 10 in the morning and Barry Bird that was the thing

[00:40:54] like Barry Bird did so he just shoot like 300 shots a day and the other really cool thing about Bird is he's a good less ancient writer too after every season he played he would go back evaluate his season evaluate his postseason see what he was lacking

[00:41:10] and develop a new shot and every fall, summer when they come back to camp he'd come in with a new shot that nobody knew about that nobody could defend so the idea of keep adding new tricks as you get older is just sort of a brilliant thing

[00:41:27] That is really interesting I didn't and it is similar to writers I would say writers challenge themselves constantly with experimenting with different forms different points of view and so on what was it about 1987-88 that really stood out for you I mean obviously it's like

[00:41:47] a hall of fame extravaganza in terms of all the players and names and personalities like everybody you write about in the book and you kind of give their stories you give the team stories you give the game stories but all these people

[00:42:01] again to me they're people I've heard about even though I've never followed basketball at all I think that we mentioned the fact that there were more hall of famers playing than ever before and age-wise they span the entire history of the league because you had Karim who was 40

[00:42:18] and he played with players that played before there was an NBA and he also played with and against players that played almost up until now so he's kind of at the focal point of the whole history of the NBA played for so long

[00:42:33] but he played with everybody past and future and then you have the young players like Reggie Miller Scotty Pippin so there's that but also I think that was the moment when I fell in love with Pro Basketball and it was a specific game which I write about

[00:42:50] it was game six of the 1988 NBA finals where the Pistons were trying to close out the Lakers would be the first team to win back-to-back titles in a long time in the LA Forum and they were cruising along and Isaiah rolled his ankle

[00:43:08] and it looked like he broke his ankle if you watch it and it looked like he was out for the game and it was like as if he knew that I have a little bit of time before I can't walk anymore

[00:43:19] if you ever had an injury like that you're going to start to swell up and soon you're not going to fit a shoe on and I'm going to carry this team and he scored 25 points I think in the third quarter which is still a playoff record

[00:43:33] but he was out in the locker room I mean he was all over the place and it was so exciting to see a guy playing hurt like that I mean it was just inspiring and then they ended up losing the game on a very questionable call

[00:43:47] sort of a phantom foul that Bill Ambeer probably did not commit against Kareem and Kareem went to the streets or a line at the end so I wanted to go back and think about what it was about that era that involved me emotionally to such a degree

[00:44:02] and I remember it as like you mentioned there were these four different dynasties and normally you know like I've written a book about the Cubs Chicago Cubs and I wrote a book about the Chicago Bears and I wrote a book about my son's Pee Wee Youth hockey team

[00:44:17] but it's like every one of those you try to build this thing that existed and in this case sort of get to build four teams and then it's like having four different toys and then they go to war with each other and I had this idea that

[00:44:31] I only write about four games plus the post-season plus the finals that in each one of those four sections I'll describe all the players on each one of these four teams and by the time you get to the fourth game you know everybody on the floor

[00:44:46] so it's sort of like Pulp Fiction it's how I imagined it where in one scene Bruce Willis is the center of the action and the next scene he's in the background normally a player guy in the background you don't know in a movie

[00:44:59] you already know all about him because he's now a bit player instead of the star player and it gives you a sense of a whole complete world so that was what I was trying to do organizationally Yeah, no it's a book that almost

[00:45:11] I don't want to say it writes itself obviously it requires a great writer but you had so much material so many great dramatic stories to kind of weave together to get to that final you know very dramatic playoffs it's the Lakers consecutive

[00:45:26] you know Pat Riley had made the statement the year earlier that we're going to definitely win the consecutive titles which no one had done in something like 30 years and then you again you start with the players and their stories that builds the story of each team

[00:45:42] until finally we have the story of the season so it was really you know well done You know I'll tell you one thing they used to have this show in Chicago Public Access TV or maybe called the sport and then it was picked up I think

[00:45:55] called the sports writers you ever seen that? No Go look it up on YouTube it's hilarious man it's these great old Chicago sports writers probably Rick Tellender who was young I wrote a story about it for Sports Illustrated and it's sort of the you know the super

[00:46:09] super fans on Serenite Live that are getting bearish fans yeah yeah they're based on those guys those guys are like that for real and they had this whole discussion about Pat Riley at that era because after they won that second title Pat Riley trademarked the term three Pete

[00:46:25] right which they never did so they were talking about how they're gonna need with all that mean Pat Riley trademarked three Pete is that we're gonna have to pay him a royalty when the bulls three Pete and the bulls did the bulls repeated twice that's funny

[00:46:40] did they pay a royalty? I'm sure they had to to term seems like a weird term to trademark yeah well he always said you know he's writing those business books and the how-to books and the guru books everything so I mean he built great scene

[00:46:54] what do you think of Adrian Brody as playing Pat Riley in winning time? I like it I mean the weird thing about playing anybody like this is what I always feel about all kind of biopics a lot of these guys were playing roles

[00:47:06] so Pat Riley was on display he was playing Pat Riley you know I mean if you look at Pat Riley two years before he became the Lakers he had blow-dried hair he wore glasses he was a sideline announcer who'd been sort of a middling player

[00:47:21] I mean and then he sort of realized where he was and he reinvented himself so he was already playing a role so to me it's always hard I never think an actor does the role as well as the actual guy doing the role another one famous examples are

[00:47:35] Will Smith playing Muhammad Ali or Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman Andy Kaufman was playing Andy Kaufman you know so now you have Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman playing Andy Kaufman so I think Adrian Brody is great I'm a huge Adrian Brody fan

[00:47:49] I think all that cast is great but my mind always goes back to the real people it's like when you read a novel and then they make a movie out of it and the people, the actors never seem right you already got them in your head right

[00:48:02] yeah I think that's why books always seem better than the movies because you've already cast and played the movie in your head many times while reading the book not only that I mean what's so great about books like I always say movies are go from the outside in

[00:48:15] and books go from the inside out and when you read a book you're actively engaged in creating the book so you're part of the creation when you read it you're imagining everything you're putting it all together you're connecting the dots

[00:48:29] that's why a lot of times I'll have a memory and I'm trying to remember where that happened and I realize it's from a book and it's so vivid it's like the actual experience and it's very hard for movies to do that

[00:48:40] because they do all the work for you in a way and your brain isn't engaged in the same way that's how I feel how do you think basketball and this is kind of equivalent to all other sports and competitions how do you think it's evolved in the past

[00:48:55] 30 or so years since those playoffs like it seems like the players and again this goes for every sport it seems there are a lot more physically trained like you see a lot more weight lifters among athletes now like LeBron James compared with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

[00:49:13] it's like a completely different set of training made those athletes how do you think the training and the sport itself has evolved? well I think all sports, all the pro sports they become much more precise in how they train players and the fitness and everything

[00:49:31] and as a result of that the bad players now are bad is the wrong word the players at the bottom of the roster on these proteins are better than the players at the bottom of the roster back then maybe the middle roster but the great players then

[00:49:47] would be the greatest players now I have no doubt about it and even with the weight lifting so like you hear this a lot about hockey as a hockey parent somebody just posted a picture of Gordy Howe and Bobby Hull with their shirts off, tying on their states

[00:50:03] those guys were as strong as anybody who's ever played in the NHL I don't know how they did it maybe they lifted weights but they were just as strong as anybody playing in the NHL now there wouldn't be a lesser player and they would have better states

[00:50:19] and they would have maybe worked more on certain parts of their skating but they would still be the best players in the league and with basketball I still think Michael Jordan would be the best player in the league and Scotty Pippin would still be an all-star

[00:50:35] and a great player the best guard and the best passer and all this stuff so or you know, best handler of the ball but I think that here's how the game really changed which is the Pistons with a brilliant strategy

[00:50:51] the Jordan rules and the way they played physically figured out how to beat more physically talented teams by keeping the score down and really tightening the screws and the league didn't like it because one it inhibited scoring people wanted to see highlights

[00:51:09] and they were worried that their Marquis players like Michael Jordan were going to get hurt so they changed the rules and they disallowed a lot of the defensive tactics that kept those games close and now the games become so focused on offense the others thing that they did

[00:51:27] is the three-point shot was in existence of course in the whole era I'm writing about the first game as a Celtic was during that game the first three-point shot ever was made so his career is basically the first whatever 12 years or whatever it is

[00:51:44] 14 years of the three-point shot the three-point shot was meant as sort of something to keep games close late so if you're down by nine points with the minute left instead of fans streaming out and the game being over still away you can hit three quick baskets

[00:52:03] and get back in it keeps games close at the end would be like now if they sort of said a whole court shot's worth ten points the idea wouldn't be that the team would just only take those shots but somebody I think the algorithm guys came along

[00:52:18] and they figured out that what happened after this era were better off statistically shooting almost only threes threes or givemies under the basket shooting only threes and making 30% then shooting a lot of twos and making 60% we will win with the threes and as a result of that

[00:52:40] so now all the players certain players that would dominate in the league there's no place for them if they can't shoot an outside shot and now everybody's pulled to the outside so when this era everybody was underneath the basket fighting for the rebound

[00:52:54] that was a game within the game it was like a mosh pit it was going on inside there but it was a battle and now partly because everyone's pulled to the outside and partly because when you miss a three you get a completely different kind of rebound

[00:53:08] you get a long rebound that doesn't go right down underneath you don't get the same kind of putbacks you would get the whole inside of the interior of the court which for a lot of us was basketball is now sort of hollowed out and it seems like

[00:53:23] there's no way the league intended this it's just an unintended consequence like when you make one little change somebody's figured out the way to game the system and everybody else followed and now we have a completely different kind of basketball and what do you think of guys like

[00:53:38] you ever watch this guy on YouTube the professor, it's like this amazing dribbler and does all these tricks and plays streetball basically I mean the truth is the history of the NBA is early on the game was kind of a gym game played by very precise rules

[00:53:57] was very boring with a lot of set shots and stuff and then there was streetball played by mostly black players and it's the kind of stuff you're talking about and it was only when you kind of let the streetball become pro basketball that pro basketball got great

[00:54:13] so anytime anyone's out there doing crazy stuff it's like basically when I was a kid we had kind of the boring bowls little kid and then you had the Harlem Globetrotters would do incredible things and you'd go watch them and they'd go on Scooby-Doo

[00:54:28] and they'd go on Scooby-Doo and they'd throw a bucket of water and a guy turned out to only be confetti you know and they had a Saturday morning cartoon I used to watch and now and then the bowls became like

[00:54:40] what the pro players could do by the time I was 15 they could do everything the Globetrotters could do while in the process of winning a basketball game and they didn't have to play the Washington Senators every night they played actual good teams that were trying to beat them

[00:54:53] yeah it's so interesting to me that I'm interested in it having really never watched a basketball game so well go up and look up Pete Marovitch YouTube highlights he was a guy unbelievable played before his time averaged I think over 40 points a game in college

[00:55:11] maybe more than that but there's a thing where Red Arrowback is showing how Marovitch passes one direction and the ball goes the other direction you know that's part of the problem with the way these guys played Magic 2 which is when he first showed up

[00:55:25] Magic sort of the master to this day of the don't look pass if you're open I'm getting it to you even if you don't know you're open and when he went to those first Lakers practices other guys didn't know how to play that way

[00:55:37] and he would pass the ball and hit guys in the back of the head inside of the head they had no idea the ball was coming they were completely fooled by it so they had to have an education period where you know how to play with these guys

[00:55:47] you couldn't have one guy who could play that way you needed a team of guys who played in this really clever way that's all about you know getting you going one way and then you go the other way which is the whole key to basketball

[00:56:03] just playing with my father the first thing you would always do is figure out your weak hand and make you go that way every single time you know and that's just a small level that's basketball and play the way that they want

[00:56:15] letting them play the way that's to your advantage how would you apply that to writing I think in writing a good way is just the opposite which is play the way you want and write the way that's your strength

[00:56:29] so one of the things you have to do is when you get caught up writing a whole bunch of crap that you don't like and isn't good you should cut all that stuff just do the good stuff yeah I always tell people

[00:56:41] after you let's say if you write an article story the first thing you should do even if you know this rule the first thing you should do after writing a small piece a relatively small piece is remove the first paragraph and the last paragraph and it'll read better

[00:56:57] because the first paragraph you're sort of struggling to figure out how to start and last paragraph you're sort of struggling to figure out how to conclude but that's not your natural style the natural style is everything in the middle in between those

[00:57:07] so if you just do the whole article even knowing this rule the first paragraph knowing you're going to cut the first paragraph later it still works I find it works like 95% of the time yeah I always thought writing a book is kind of like being a sculptor

[00:57:23] but before you do the sculpting you got to first create the marble so like the first draft is the marble like my first drafts this book is 75,000 words the first draft was probably 150,000 words I cut usually more than I write and but while you're writing it you can't

[00:57:45] you have to sort of forget that it's like women forget childbirth because if you don't forget it then you realize I'm spending a whole day doing something that I'm later going to throw out that'll drive you insane so while you're doing it I feel good about it

[00:57:57] you have to learn how to feel really good that good feeling you get when you cut something and you realize ah it's better now you can't have any attachment to something you wrote it feels like losing weight and there's nothing like the feeling where

[00:58:15] you have something about a book isn't working and you cut like 10,000 words and suddenly it flies that's just a great feeling so and you know that other stuff that you write I always think like it's not a waste because like you said

[00:58:29] the throat clearing at the beginning of a story that you cut the first paragraph that was necessary to get you going yeah it wasn't no reason you couldn't have gotten to the second paragraph without going through the first paragraph

[00:58:41] you know you have to go through the bad paragraph to get to the good paragraph so what's next what are you working on next I've been just you know writing this monthly column for the Wall Street Journal which is called Back When and it's sort of about

[00:58:55] stuff I was obsessed with when I was a kid and my idea is that at the end of this you put pieces together you get kind of a portrait of my whole generation as a young man so like I wrote one about model rockets we're really

[00:59:11] into blowing off model rockets when I was a kid I wrote one about Risky Business the 40th anniversary of Risky Business I wrote one about the fireworks we use when we were kids that are now illegal like the M80 and about shopping malls and about Wiffle Ball

[00:59:27] and about stick them in the NFL and about the song You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone this is kind of what I've been doing it's cool I'll have to check that out it would be good to see a collection of those because that's like it is

[00:59:41] like a summary of Gen X all those things you mentioned I just think about like what was I into what was I into and then I sort of that's the only way things just pop up you know I still feel like I'm living a version of my life

[00:59:55] when I was a kid now oh I think that's the great thing about growing older is that you can still you can go back to the things you were nostalgic about and really explore them from a whole different angle and I think the idea of looking at everything

[01:00:09] like looking at the generation like I look back at Gen X you think about like 1994 where you have or 1992 to 1994 you have things like Douglas Kooplin's book Generation X you have the reality bites and the slacker's this sort of showed this picture of Generation

[01:00:29] X as being like these slacker generation that's never going to do as well as their parents and yet we kind of destroyed it like Gen X did a lot better than people predicted for so where did you grow up I grew up in New Jersey okay with town

[01:00:45] right near New Brunswick a town called North Brunswick okay so basically we're the same age when's your birthday January 22nd you're like one of those kids that Malcolm Gladwell said it's going to go pro in everything so basically yeah so basically I think that

[01:01:03] I never believed in the idea of a generation because somebody's born every minute of every day so it's just continuous streaming new people so how can there be a generation but yet as they get older I realize there really are generations because you are

[01:01:17] influenced by the culture of your time which you then help create also at the same time you necessarily react to the world that's around you when you're a kid now I'm the youngest and I have much older siblings and the whole kind of

[01:01:36] I was like at the burnt end edge of the hippies like I saw that hippie thing at the end of it when it was bell bottoms and what seemed to me like bad music and people getting losing their shit over stuff that was really unimportant

[01:01:48] and all these causes and all my reaction to it was I don't want any causes man I just want a story don't tell me just give me the fucking story and don't give me any causes and I just see as I get older I see

[01:02:04] a work of art and I'm like that person's my age that person feels exactly like I do and I see it over and over and over again and it's part of it I think because we came after the baby boomers there were so many of them

[01:02:18] the whole marketing culture was geared towards them and now here come the millennials there's even more of them when there were the boomers and now everything's geared towards them we're like this small group between the big groups and when I look back

[01:02:30] I can see it echoed again and again so my father's generation he's in the Korean War they called the silent generation because they made no noise but they made no noise because there weren't that many of them and they had no president right, Yo-hee says that

[01:02:46] he had no president and then if you look back going back to where we started I think Hemingway's lost generation was like that too and I think one of the things he said after World War One in Terrell the Arms I forget the exact quote but he says

[01:03:02] we don't want to hear the words glory, sacrifice honor, justice they all became bullshit basically and by the end the only thing that seemed true were the names and numbers of the roads and I just recognize that sensibility where you've seen this adherence to this kind of ideology

[01:03:24] that came before you without any sense of humor about it you know so I always said Gen X is the hope of America we're gonna have to step forward and save them well you know it's also interesting because we grew up like you mentioned how

[01:03:38] we're at the tail end of the causes of the hippie movement we were also trained to look at the heavy movement in a different way because we had shows that basically normalized in this weird way the whole 60's counterculture movement like we had the Mod Squad

[01:03:54] where these hippies were basically FBI agents we had the Partridge family where they sort of were counterculture but they were also just like the first teen idols and you know we had all these TV shows that basically normalized and simplified and they

[01:04:12] merchandised it and they sold it back to them so we grew up with the sort of the, that's how all counterculture movements are destroyed they become absorbed in the mainstream and turned into kitsch you know and basically and that whole reaction like the whole punk rock reaction

[01:04:28] against that music you know which by the way now that music I like listening to which I hated like I just didn't like the over-rotness of the music at the tail end of the 60's and 70's where everyone was clearly trying to take the place that had been

[01:04:44] vacated by the Beatles so these orchestral rock songs now I kind of enjoy just because for the nostalgia purposes just because they were on the radio when I was a little kid but basically by the time it got to us it had curdled and it just seemed bad

[01:05:04] and you just wanted something stripped down, sleek and cool and that's the clash you know and that's everything that came out of that era well like hip hop was born into that era definitely hip hop in the early hip hop we also didn't have the worries

[01:05:24] like kind of Reagan pushed aside a lot of the worries and the focus was on money and junk bonds and this and that but I was worried about getting blown up in a nuclear war man knowing what I would do like the day that it happened

[01:05:38] I knew what I was going to do if I found out the missiles were on the way there was a girl down the street I was going to tell her I loved her which I've been waiting to do but definitely going to do that

[01:05:48] and this whole list of things I was going to do and we used to have discussions like would you rather be at the epicenter and just leave your shadow on a wall or would you rather be in the outskirts and that was like genuine worry

[01:06:00] yeah and yet though the year you became a drinking adult the iron curtain came down so that whole worry was just gone and we had this peace dividend of the 90s that we became adults in yeah and we had well because it seemed like

[01:06:16] well that was the moment of history has ended and all that Francis Fouknyam all that stuff but in fact what happened is that the world went back to its normal condition which are a series of nations competing with each other

[01:06:28] whereas after World War I it was a World War II and just the United States alone for a really long time because Europe had basically destroyed itself you know so you know but it's there's a quote, a great quote where

[01:06:40] I think it might be like a Walter Benjamin quote where what you see of history in your life is basically a car sliding into and hitting another car but it's actually like a 10 million car pile up and you're just seeing one little instance

[01:06:54] of it and then you're gone so basically we had a really good luck that we were so scared and then we did see unbelievable if you asked me when I was a kid how long the Soviet Union would be around I'd say another thousand years

[01:07:08] it seemed this indestructible thing and then it just dissolved you know and then you had MTV and the Berlin Wall and people ripping off chunks of the Berlin Wall it was just an unbelievable thing and not many years before

[01:07:22] there was a TV show on, I know what you remember it was an Ed's WIC TV movie called The Morning After yeah of course right and their ad campaign is like don't watch this movie alone you'll be deeply, deeply traumatized

[01:07:34] which is like a brilliant ad campaign to scare the crap out of everybody into watching it my whole family gathered to watch it me my mother, my father, my brother my sister was in law school and I looked around about an hour into it

[01:07:46] and everybody else was sound asleep I was like oh my god technically I'm alone I'm gonna be watching this thing alone do I wake these people up or am I gonna be traumatized what? and then just a few minutes later we were you know

[01:07:58] MTV and the end of the Berlin Wall and the East and the East and West Germany united and Russia not caring, seemingly not caring about it, letting us do it yeah it's interesting and then of course I think that does lead up to your book which is sort

[01:08:14] of right at that same exact year basically, the year before and now there's a great Larry King who grew up with my father and I knew him when I was a kid used to say sports are the most important unimportant thing in the world

[01:08:28] and that's really about this it's like there really it was such a good American moment in that we weren't scared existentially in a way for a few years we would be now we are again because of climate change and everything else but for a few years

[01:08:44] that perpetual fear that we're all about to die was sort of lifted and you could just think something like the bull's journey to unseat the pistons was the most important thing in the world that's really interesting because I always wonder on the one hand

[01:09:00] you can say it's a game it's a bunch of guys running around with a ball trying to throw it into a hoop or you could say this is a thing about hockey or soccer or baseball or whatever so on the one hand it can easily be

[01:09:12] described as something frivolous and yet and yet these to pursue it like these professional players do and to be a fan of it and to be an industry around it it really is worthwhile like we're always taught you know you either do something frivolous or you work hard

[01:09:30] you know be an account and work hard or be a lawyer but there really is something important about the frivolous and excellence and the pursuit of excellence in something that can also be described as frivolous it's like great art in a way you know

[01:09:46] it's like the world that it removes it's not your life but it feels like your life and it's you know these moments of incredible identification with these players and these teams and it's incredibly cathartic and it's good for the players that they get

[01:10:02] to be free agents and make a ton of money but a huge part of the thing of being a fan was that these players spent their whole careers with these teams and you watched them when they were young and you watched them reach their prime

[01:10:14] and you watched them grow old and then you watched them retire and you felt like you saw the entire life cycle you know played out in these one careers that's why it's so upsetting when you see somebody like Michael Jordan come back in a Washington wizards uniform

[01:10:28] it makes you want to you know bomb it like the Yankees were lucky Yankees fans and Derek Jeter plays his whole entire career for the Yankees but it almost never happens anymore and it's something that we really miss I always joke that

[01:10:40] when I go by a jersey like a jersey now I ask them to put the name of the general manager on the back because that's the only person that's still going to be around in a couple years. Yeah it's interesting like I think of the Pittsburgh Steelers

[01:10:52] in the 70s those guys all just spent their whole careers out on that team you're like yeah I love that I love that yeah Jack Lamber Jack Ham and Mike Webster who was the first sort of CTE guy, Lin Swan, Derek Stalwart, John Stalwart

[01:11:10] Rocky Blyre, you ever see the Rocky Blyre do you ever see the Rocky Blyre story on TV? No. You talk about a TV movie the week Rocky Blyre was in Vietnam and it's like the movie ends with him like

[01:11:22] with a three yard touchdown carry in the Super Bowl and they intercut it with him like running across a minefield under fire That's great. Well Rich Cohen, author of When The Game Was War the NBA's greatest season such a great book riveting stories

[01:11:40] and again this is coming from someone who has never watched a basketball game ever. I went to one I don't even know if I watched the one I went to but I love this stuff and thanks so much for writing this book

[01:11:52] and for coming on the show to talk about it it was really great book and it has a lot of life lessons in it so thank you Yeah thank you and when the the Knicks finally make it I'll get us tickets because you can play in the finals

[01:12:04] Alright great.