The late and legendary American sportscaster Haywood Hale Broun is perhaps best remembered for his psychological insights into our games. His most familiar aphorism: "Sports don't build character. They reveal it," is certainly what coaches call "bulletin board material," meaning it's the kind of thing a coach can write up on the team bulletin board for motivation purposes. But after watching the Celtics trounce the Lakers in the six sorry (sorry, that is, from the Laker's perspective) games that passed for this year's NBA finals, a different quote comes to mind.
This one comes from thirty-eight years ago, from a time when the language of psychology was still something of a novelty, and the game of basketball looked much different than it does today.
The quote is as follows: "There is an odd sounding word. It is gestalt. It means a whole greater than the sum of its parts and it applies, for example, to psychological phenomena in groups and to the New York Knickerbockers."
The quote is used in reference to describe way the Knicks beat the Lakers in the 1970 finals. The Lakers, that year, were an all-star team that looked unstoppable. They not only had Elgin Baylor (rated #11 in Slam Magazine's list of the 75 greatest b-ballers to ever lace up their high-tops) and Mr. Clutch himself, Jerry West (who still holds the record for the fourth highest point average in NBA career history), but the greatest single force in the history of basketball, the nearly unstoppable Wilt Chamberlain.
This is not to say the 70 Knicks lacked talent, but their talent was not found in the individual, rather in the team. Their game was one of passing first and shooting second. They played group ball and they did it better than anyone had ever done before. The results, as Broun pointed out, was a whole much better than the sum of their parts, a whole that gleefully stole the finals from the Lakers some three decades ago.
This year's Celtics were also a whole greater than the sum of their parts. There were more than a few differences from those aged Knicks, of course, primarily in the glue that held them together. It seemed like their center wasn't a desire to win as much as it was an unwillingness to lose.
It was as if the collective heartbreak of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen-three perennial all-stars who had never done much in the playoffs, forget the finals-had added together into what Frederick Nietzsche would have described as "a will to power."
These Celtics weren't very pretty to watch, but they were gutsy. They had that same never say die attitude that both helped the 1994 and 1995 Hakeem Olajuwon-led Rockets to victory and gave the sport another of its most famous psychological tidbits. After a surprising game seven win in their repeat season, Coach Rudy Tomjanovich reminded all those who doubted his Rockets along the way to "never underestimate the heart of a champion."
The same must be said about this years Celtics, a team that barely made it to the finals (compared to the Lakers road of easy sweeps), a team that once again helps explain why basketball, so much more than any other of our major sports, is first and foremost a psychological game.
