TALL MEN, SHORT SHORTS

A firsthand account of the 1969 NBA finals, pitting the Lakers against the Celtics.

The 1969 playoffs should have been lopsided. Montville, a prolific author and former reporter for the Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated who was on the scene for the games, notes that there had been only 12 NBA Finals preceding it, and Boston had won 10 of them. But the 1969 Lakers were a force, thanks in large part to new addition Wilt Chamberlain. Against them were Bill Russell, who was then serving two roles: “As a young coach at thirty-five,” writes the author, “he knew the limits of an old player at thirty-five.” Montville’s deep dive into the storied series is much more than the usual color commentary. Self-deprecatingly, he digs up a word that old-school sportswriters applied to writers of his generation: chipmunks. “Young, mostly under thirty-five, they are irritants to the older generation,” he writes. “Too noisy. Too demanding. Too…everything.” His writing has the verve of the new journalism, but the author also looks hard at the business of basketball. The big stars of the day, he writes, earned just $200,000 to $300,000 per year, “nothing to compare to the status of LeBron James and Kevin Durant” and others. In passing, readers will learn all sorts of fun sports trivia—e.g., why the Celtics wore black sneakers—and Montville is a master of context. He writes about a college campus visit by Russell in which he talked about the Black Panthers, the previous Olympic Games, and his refusal to enter politics “because politicians in 1960s America did not tend to live too long”—every subject under the sun, it seems, except basketball. In this, Montville’s book makes an excellent companion to Ron Brownstein’s Rock Me on the Water as a portrait of a fast-receding time.

A thrillingly good blend of sportswriting, pop culture, and history and a must-read for roundball fans.