Wish It Lasted Forever: Life with the Larry Bird Celtics

Product Description
For fans of the hit basketball documentary The Last Dance, and from award-winning Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, a nostalgia-filled retelling of the Boston Celtics’ 1980s dominance, which featured the sublime play of NBA legend Larry Bird.
Today the NBA is a vast global franchise—a billion-dollar industry viewed by millions of fans in the United States and abroad. But it wasn’t always this successful. Before primetime ESPN coverage, lucrative branding deals like Air Jordans, and $40 million annual player salaries, there was the NBA of the 1970s and 1980s—when basketball was still an up-and-coming sport featuring old school beat reporters and players wore Converse All-Stars.
Enter Dan Shaughnessy, then the beat reporter for
The
Boston Globe who covered the Boston Celtics every day from 1982 to1986. It was a time when reporters travelled with professional teams—flying the same commercial airlines, riding the same buses, and staying in the same hotels. Shaughnessy knew the athletes as real people, losing free throw bets to Larry Bird, being gifted cheap cigars by the iconic coach Red Auerbach, and having his one-year-old daughter Sarah passed from player to player on a flight from Logan to Detroit Metro.
Drawing on unprecedented access and personal experiences that would not be possible for any reporter today, Shaughnessy takes us inside the legendary Larry Bird-led Celtics teams, capturing the camaraderie as they rose to dominate the NBA. Fans can witness the cockiness of Larry Bird (who once walked into an All Star Weekend locker room, announced that he was going to win the three-point contest, and
did); the ageless athleticism of Robert Parish; the shooting skills of Kevin McHale; the fierce, self-sacrificing play of Bill Walton; and the playful humor of players like Danny Ainge, Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell, and M.L. Carr.
For any fan who longs to return—for just a few hours—to those magical years when the Boston Garden rocked, the LA Lakers were the perennial mountain to be climbed, and the winner’s circle was mostly colored Boston Green,
Wish It Lasted Forever is a VIP courtside seat and masterful tribute to the Larry Bird era and the Celtics’ age of dominance.​
Review
“Colorful, fast-paced . . .
Wish It Lasted Forever packs the stat sheet with entertainment from the Celtics’ glory years: Shaughnessy always leads the league in shots taken, but here he also provides plenty of rebounds, assists, and stolen laughter.
Wish It Lasted Forever is an insider’s look into the outmoded culture of the game.”
—
The Boston Globe
"In
Wish It Lasted Forever, Mr. Shaughnessy seemingly empties out his old notebooks. Fortunately, they’re good notebooks, and the book is an entertaining read."
—
Ben Yagoda, Wall Street Journal
“Ought to be high on your list…Dan Shaughnessy’s memoir of covering the Celtics from 1982-86 is so good even fervent Celtics haters will have trouble putting it down.”
—
New York Post
"Take a seat on the bus, kids, with Larry and Kevin, Chief and Max, DJ and K.C., and Danny and Red and Bill Walton, too.
Wish It Lasted Forever is retro gold. This is a special book about a special time. Terrific.”
—
Leigh Montville, former Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated
"Throughout, the author is amiable and self-effacing, but the best parts of his book are the you-are-there accounts…Often funny, Shaughnessy’s book offers considerable insight into the making of a winning team in the hands of players who some consider to be the greatest in the history of the game. A treat for fans of the old Boston Celtics and for roundball fans generally."
—
Kirkus Reviews
“This is the story of a great team, rendered in an immersive style. It’s also a writer’s coming of age story. Looking back on that team and time, it was Bill Walton who said, ‘I wish it lasted forever.’ He was speaking for the scribe as well.”
—
Bob Costas, 28-time Emmy Award-winning sportscaster
"The best book