When the Game Was War
The NBA's Greatest Season
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The gritty, no-holds-barred account of the 1987 NBA season, a thrilling year of fierce battles and off-the-court drama between Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, and Michael Jordan—from New York Times bestselling author Rich Cohen.
“Plug in to a world where rivalries really mattered.”—Bob Ryan, sports columnist emeritus, The Boston Globe
AN ESQUIRE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Four historic teams. Four legendary players. One unforgettable season.
The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. Since its founding in 1946, the league had evolved from a bruising, earthbound game of mostly nameless, underpaid players to one in which athletes became household names for their thrilling, physics-defying play. The 1987–88 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of incredible drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime—the most future Hall of Famers competing at one time in any given season—battling for the title, and for their respective legacies.
In When the Game Was War, bestselling author Rich Cohen tells the story of this incredible season through the four teams, and the four players, who dominated it: Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics, Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers, Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons, and a young Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls. From rural Indiana to the South Side of Chicago, suburban North Carolina to rust-belt Michigan, Cohen explores the diverse journeys each of these iconic players took before arriving on the big stage. Drawing from dozens of interviews with NBA insiders, Cohen brings to vivid life some of the most colorful characters of the era—like Bill Laimbeer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Danny Ainge, and Charles Oakley—who fought like hell to help these stars succeed.
For anyone who longs to understand how the NBA came to be the cultural juggernaut it is today—and to relive the magic and turmoil of those pivotal years—When the Game Was War brilliantly recasts one unforgettable season and the four transcendent players who were at the center of it all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The "incredible pool of talent" on display in the NBA's 1987–1988 season makes it the league's best to date, according to this exhilarating account. Focusing on how Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Isiah Thomas revolutionized the NBA, Wall Street Journal columnist Cohen (The Adventures of Herbie Cohen) recaps key games, including the Feb. 21, 1988, matchup between Thomas's Pistons and Johnson's Lakers, during which Thomas embodied his team's "brutal" aggression, which Johnson countered with the Lakers' signature "pass-drunk, run-crazy fast-break" style. Bird and Jordan, according to Cohen, represented the past and future of basketball, with Bird's Celtics slipping out of their dynasty phase as Jordan's Bulls became a contender. Cohen excels at wringing the human drama out of the sport, as when he portrays the ascendant Bulls' rivalry with the powerhouse Pistons as a "schoolyard quest" to "stand up to a bully," or draws pathos from 40-year-old Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stoically facing down the end of his basketball career: "Nothing brings fans closer to an athlete than watching him struggle with mortality." The empathetic portraits humanize the legendary players, and the play-by-play game recreations thrill ("Just as Zeke started to release the ball, Kareem, appearing from nowhere, reached out and swatted it away. Block. Game over"). This love letter to the NBA's golden age is an instant classic.
