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Four Corners: Our favorite NBA All-Star moments

With the basketball world about to descend upon New Orleans for for the 2017 NBA All-Star Game, we thought we’d take a second to look back at some of our most beloved memories from All-Star Weekends past.

The topic for this week’s Four Corners roundtable: What’s your favorite All-Star Weekend moment? Here’s what we on the BDL staff remember most fondly. Let’s hear your favorites in the comments.

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Larry Legend leaves his warmups on for Three-Point three-peat

Before the NBA’s inaugural long-distance shootout in 1986, Larry Bird walked into a crowded locker room and asked the competition, “Which one of you guys is finishing second?” Or so the story goes.

Two years later? “I didn’t have to say anything,” said Bird. “They all knew who was going to win.”

Bird didn’t break much of a sweat winning the contest the previous two seasons and only ever removed his Celtics warmup jacket to dominate Craig Hodges in the final round of the 1986 shootout. The 1988 edition was no different, his green jacket and matching short shorts embodying his bravado.

“It keeps me warm, so why take it off?” the notorious trash-talker told reporters at the time. “The other guys know I’m the favorite, so it gets easier every year.” This is the stuff of Larry Legend.

He skated through the first round with fewer points than rival Los Angeles Lakers guard Byron Scott, so Celtics teammate Kevin McHale came out of the crowd to line up the seams of each ball just so, and Bird dropped 23 in the semifinals, sinking every money ball and four-of-five shots on his last four racks.

Dale Ellis posted a 15-spot to start the final round, and Bird put up just 7 points through the first three racks. Counting along in his head, Bird knew the number he had to get to, so he swept the next rack to push his total to 13. After missing his first two attempts from the corner, Bird made the next two to tie Ellis, then released the last money ball.

Before it even found the net, Bird raised his index finger in the air and started walking away. They all knew who was going to win. For me, the kid who loved chucking up 3-pointers in the driveway, that was the moment. Larry Bird was so freakin’ money.

Larry Bird knew it.
Larry Bird knew it.

“If it had come up short, I would have been surprised,” said Bird. “It looked down all the way.”

The Chicago crowd cheered as if Bird was their own. He walked back to accept congratulations from his competitors on the sideline, where Detlef Schrempf could only shake his head in disbelief. He should’ve seen it coming. A young Craig Sager was there, too, laughing at the sight of it all. Then, Bird saved one last jab for his favorite punching bag, Danny Ainge, who bowed out in the first round.

“I’m just glad Danny Ainge didn’t win this thing,” he told reporters. “If he won, we’d have to hear about it for the next 10 years. I feel sorry for him because he has been practicing for two months. Kevin tried to bother Danny before the competition started, but it wasn’t necessary. He choked on his own.”

Savage, as they say.

His inspiration for it all — delivering on his third straight 3-point shootout victory, and never even removing his jacket in the process?

“Right there,” finished Bird, pointing to the $12,500 winner’s check.

Money. — Ben Rohrbach

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Fathers, sons, daughters and dunks

Without question, my fondest All-Star Weekend memory has to be the 1988 Slam Dunk Contest. The whole weekend was great: CBS’ broadcast of the game (which I had to tape for my dad to watch later, as he was at work) was silly fun, Larry Bird’s legend had already been explained to me by that Three-Point Shootout (I’d turn eight a few months later), and the setting of the thing in the same Chicago chill that we all were feeling that weekend just drove things over the top. It probably wasn’t the coldest Chicago weekend of the 1980s or even that year, but because your sense of recall drives so hard around things that matter, less-noticeable elements tend to take on legendary status. I ate 18 buckwheat pancakes that morning, dammit.

It’s one of my favorite basketball memories and one of the top moments of my life, full stop. This entire ridiculous windfall of talents and showcase and meaning (“Michael Jordan only lost the dunk title last year because he was hurt!”) was broadcast in full color in a warm basement, with the exploits peeling off as a mix of the tangible (“Bird left his warmup jacket on because it’s cold”) and ethereal (the dunks).

Dad didn’t have to work that Saturday, so he sat as I stood, likely annoying the hell out of him, to take in a weekend he’d no doubt watched before, but never with an interested partner. He dutifully explained to me the background, and nudged me to use what few math skills I had to understand how many points Jordan needed to earn on the next dunk. Both he and the contest left me with a thirst I never fully quenched. There was so much more to learn. It’s why I’m writing about basketball on a cold February day, some 29 years later.

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In a way, it almost sounds a lot like what my kids and I did the day after the 2016 Slam Dunk Contest. They were away at friends’ houses on the Saturday night of the show, and I can’t blame them for not wanting to stay home and watch LIVE basic cable television with me pausing the broadcast every few minutes while I wrote and worked. Upon their return, we decided on the fly to take it in together before I deleted it off the TiVo.

It was pretty sweet.

Neither of my girls had any idea who Aaron Gordon or Zach LaVine was or is, but they also had no clue who the Orlando Magic or Minnesota Timberwolves were. It didn’t matter that they were unaware of both prior to the weekend, or that they’ve likely forgotten about all names and parties in the 12 months since. It was just a bit of fun as we marveled at the athleticism after assuming we’d all have to be sated with lesser props and novelties – what a fantastic thing to take in. Burgeoning math skills were used, the living room was loud, and it was fun to be with my unexpected partners.

For them, and us together, this isn’t meant to last. My dad probably didn’t think he’d be greasing the wheels for a sportswriter’s career when he sat patient with me on that Saturday. (He’d probably hoped I would at least make the 3-point competition.) Given my exuberance, though, he couldn’t have helped but notice there was something going on there. After all, he entrusted a 7-year-old to tape the game for him the next day.

The more recent version was just as special, however impermanent. Just some too-smart kids slumming in an area that makes their stepdad so weirdly happy (and busy) at the same time each February, makin’ memories. More to come. — Kelly Dwyer

***

Gerald Green’s Birthday Cake Dunk

Gerald Green makes a wish. (AP)
Gerald Green makes a wish. (AP)

The dunk contest is not a serious event. While plenty of amazing performances and a connection to Michael Jordan have conferred some historical importance upon it, the dunk contest is ultimately about dumb fun.

Participants, some of whom are barely known to the audience, throw out their best displays of athleticism and showmanship, often not getting it right until the fourth or fifth try. Judges assign arbitrary scores. One announcer declares that “the dunk contest is back,” enacting a perpetual cycle of renewal. If we’re lucky, a dunk or two becomes a benchmark for future contests. At no point does any of it resemble real basketball.

No dunk has better captured the spirit of the dunk contest than Gerald Green’s “Birthday Cake” entry in 2008. Nothing has ever been so delightfully nonsensical.

It all seems straightforward enough — Green blows out a candle on a cupcake placed on the back of the rim. But the whole scenario falls apart at the slightest whiff of analysis.

Green’s Timberwolves teammate Rashad McCants gently places the cupcake on the back of the rim with some coy playacting, but it’s in no way clear why Green couldn’t have done it himself. Green appears to blow out the candle, but it’s impossible to prove that it didn’t go out due to a momentary breeze or the atmospheric impact of his leap. The dunk itself isn’t even that impressive and still garnered very high scores.

More importantly, the concept makes no sense. The dunk immediately became known as “The Birthday Cake” — by everyone, with no exceptions — even though it was clearly a cupcake. No one ate the cake afterwards. It wasn’t even anyone’s birthday.

Despite it all, Green’s dunk has remained one of All-Star Weekend’s all-time great cult moments. Green lost to Dwight Howard in the finals of the event, but all anyone remembers from Dwight’s performance was a forced Superman gimmick. Green, for his part, captured the minds of thousands. He expanded the possibilities of the collective dunk imagination and exposed the absurdity at the heart of the dunk contest itself, all in just a few seconds.

There have been very good, even great, dunks since, but none have ever matched “The Birthday Cake” for sheer depth of meaning. Yet none have required such little explanation, as well. — Eric Freeman

***

Magic Johnson returns for the 1992 All-Star Game

Magic Johnson smiles with the 1992 NBA All-Star Game Most Valuable Player trophy. (AP)
Magic Johnson smiles with the 1992 NBA All-Star Game Most Valuable Player trophy. (AP)

I can’t claim Magic Johnson. I grew up on the wrong coast. I was a New York kid, all of nine years old and just starting to get deeply into Patrick Ewing and John Starks, when the Lakers legend announced that he’d contracted HIV and had to retire from professional basketball effective immediately.

I hadn’t gotten much first-hand experience of the control he could exert on a game or the awe he could inspire, hadn’t shared in the peaks of his title triumphs or the valleys of his championship defeats. All I really remember from that November was knowing that one of the most famous people in the world was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Or that he would be any day now, anyway.

And then, three months later, he wasn’t.

Magic Johnson wasn’t dead. He was still there, on the court in Orlando, sharing the floor with the best basketball players in the world. He was still there, basking in the cheers and the chants of the fans who’d voted him to his 12th All-Star Game despite having not suited up for a single game that season. The NBA never took him off the ballot, and fans responded in droves, hoping to give Magic a better note to end on than the one he sounded at that podium on Nov. 7, 1991.

He was still there, pushing the pace and finger-rolling, baby-hooking from the post and throwing no-look darts. He was still there, and looking an awful lot like Magic Johnson.

And if Magic Johnson could look like Magic Johnson, even with HIV, then maybe other people with HIV were more than just on-the-way-out husks, too. Maybe AIDS wasn’t just the punishment that proved your choices or orientations meant you deserved to be a pariah. Maybe the people who had it were still just people who needed love and support, same as everybody else.

“Words mean a lot, but it’s feelings that count most,” Johnson would later say. “Ours is a game of compassion. I’ll never forget those hugs and high-fives.”

Fueled by that compassion, Johnson penned an ending for the ages, with some help from Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan:

“The All-Star Game is about having a good show, not only for the fans, but we wanted it to be a good show for Magic,” Isiah Thomas told Thomas Golianopolous for a 2012 SLAM oral history of the ’92 All-Star Game. “Myself, Jordan, we wanted to make sure it ended right for Magic.”

It ended right, with 25 points, nine assists, five rebounds and the game’s Most Valuable Player award.

“When I hit those three 3-pointers in the fourth quarter, it just showed people, Magic is back, he can play, he’s OK. Yeah, you can play against him, nothing is going to happen,’’ Johnson said in 2012. “I think it did a lot for the world and it did a lot for HIV and AIDS all at the same time. And it did a lot for people who are dealing with anything, not just HIV, but anything else — that they can go on and live a productive life.”

Johnson capped a performance that Sports Illustrated last year ranked as one of the 40 greatest moments in sports history by hitting one last 3 with 14.5 seconds remaining. The game just ended there. Everybody was too busy hugging and celebrating to play out the clock.

“If this is it, this is the way I wanted it to be,” Magic said. “I will cherish this for the rest of my life. This moment, this day, whatever happens, I will cherish this.”

That wasn’t it. He’d go on to suit up for “The Dream Team” in the 1992 Summer Olympics, coach the Lakers in 1994, purchase an ownership stake in the team, and make a short-lived comeback to the court in 1996 that allowed him to walk away from the game on his own terms. But his remarkable second act has stretched far beyond the court, as Johnson has become a talk-show host, TV commentator and the head of a business conglomerate worth hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as a part-owner of multiple professional sports franchises and a philanthropist who has raised millions of dollars for research to develop medications and treatment options.

It’s February of 2017, and Magic Johnson is still here — still leading, still challenging our expectations.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you just can’t orchestrate it better than that,” said NBC play-by-play man Dick Enberg 25 years ago, when Magic ended the 1992 All-Star Game 14.5 seconds early. “But when you’re great, you deliver on cue.” — Dan Devine

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