Wish It Lasted Forever: Life with the Larry Bird Celtics

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 ath