Bird vs Magic: the rivalry that saved the NBA

It's easy to forget now, but around the end of the 1970s the NBA was struggling — low interest, financial worries, and Finals games shown on tape delay rather than live. What the league needed was a story. It got one in the form of two rookies who arrived in 1979 already bound together, and who would spend the next decade turning professional basketball into must-watch television.

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were a marketer's dream because they were perfect opposites. Bird was a laconic, ice-cold shooter and trash-talker from small-town Indiana, playing for the Boston Celtics. Magic was a dazzling, grinning showman from the Midwest who ran the Los Angeles Lakers' 'Showtime' fast break. Their rivalry had already begun in college, when Magic's Michigan State beat Bird's Indiana State in the 1979 national championship — the most-watched college basketball game ever.

For most of the 1980s, the road to the title ran through one or the other. Between them, Bird's Celtics and Magic's Lakers dominated the decade, meeting three times in the Finals and trading championships and MVP awards year after year. Every Boston–LA clash became an event, a contrast of styles and coasts and personalities. They pushed each other to be better precisely because neither could stand to lose to the other.

The twist is that the fiercest rivals of their era became close friends, a bond that deepened after Magic's public announcement in 1991 that he was HIV-positive. Together they had done something bigger than win: they made the NBA matter again, setting the stage for the global explosion Michael Jordan would later ride. When people talk about the modern billion-dollar NBA, the story starts here — with a shooter, a showman, and a rivalry that saved a sport.