A generation ago, it was practically sacrilegious for a black man to root for any Boston sports franchise. Rooting for them was like rooting for an outbreak of locusts or for roach infestation. You might as well cheer for termites in your home or for open sores to break out all over your lips and face. Even while growing up in Ohio, I learned very early in life that Boston — the team and the city — was something to detest, and to wish for rather un-Godly things to befall them.
I went to all black schools and nobody, I mean not one person, rooted for the Celtics in the 80s. Even those of us who engaged in a playful war of words about Dr. J’s 76ers and Magic Johnson’s Lakers, would unite in our naked and unbridled hatred of that Boston team, that city and that mop-headed blonde boy who they assigned supernatural characteristics to: Larry Bird. Oh, did we hate Bird with every fiber of our being. We hated him not because he was great, which he unquestionably was, but because of what he symbolized and how much greater white people made him out to be than he actually was.
Boston the city was the personification of evil and redneck-ism to most African Americans until recent times. It was as if a Southern city was somehow surgically removed and placed in the Northeast corner of the country. It was the place that screamed white power and virulent anti-blackism.
From a sociopolitical, cultural and sports standpoint, Boston reeked of two-day-old wet hate and undying devotion to Larry Bird, Bob Cousey, Dave Cowens and John Havlichek. Although blacks placed the Celtics along the upper echelon of the NBA powers, the city’s residents made it clear they did not want any black sightings in their arenas nor their city, much less their sides of town.
It was the city where white people broke into Bill Russell’s home and defecated in his bed — even while he was leading the Celtics to a record-breaking 11 NBA championships in 13 years. He made them arguably sports greatest and proudest franchise, yet they s*** on Russell, literally and figuratively. When white sports pundits would work themselves into a lather while talking about the Celtics’ greatest players, Russell was frequently omitted from that list.
The city’s baseball franchise, the Red Sox, was the team in the Major Leagues to accept a black player onto its roster.
It was the one Northern city that threw rocks and stones at Sen. Edward Kennedy when he tried to help integrate the city’s schools in the early 1970s. It was the city of mainly Irish immigrants who treated blacks the way they were treated by the English in Ireland. I never was able to reconcile how Irish Americans viewed us, yet former IRA affiliate Garry Adams would come to America and practically kiss Rosa Parks feet for helping to inspire an uprising against injustice.
Boston was the place that proved Malcolm X’s statement: “There is no such thing as a North and South in America,” Malcolm often roared in his attempts to swat away false beliefs that the North was more sympathetic to the plight of rights-deprived blacks than their Southern counterparts. “If it’s south of the Canadian border, it is South,” he added.
Boston was the last place in the increasingly black NBA of the 1970s and 80s where the concept of the “White Hope” could live and breathe.
Those days are gone. When I think about Boston, I no longer harbor hot hatred for the Celtics. There was a major injection of cool and hipness when the triumvirate of future Hall of Famers — Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and long-range assassin Ray “Jesus Shuttlesworth” Allen — rolled into the city. If the demographically-challenged Fleetwood Center didn’t like the darkening of their beloved Celtics, they were forced to accept it if they had any hope of returning to NBA glory.
Actually, my hatred began to recede when this generation’s most tragic sports occurrence — the death of the Jordan-like Len Bias who was their first pick in 1986 — set the franchise back a decade. I was actually surprised that the Celtics had even drafted a great black player to begin with. But then they did it again when they nurtured another superstar, Reggie Lewis, who also exemplified some Jordan-like characteristics, before he collapsed and died on the court in the 1990s.
After that, the Celtics suffered through two decades of horrid, putrid basketball, which was almost as if the basketball god’s were punishing the city for its uncouth, dastardly treatment and under-appreciation of the black stars who made them what they were.
When I think of the Celtics now, especially when you juxtapose them against the sports’ most polarizing star, Kobe Bryant, you cannot help but root for the Celtics. Go Green! –terry shropshire
