At first Mikan came to be out of creation’s barnstorming. He wore glasses so as to better see the void’s darkness, not realizing his body was the chasm and the ticking of his heart a shot clock. A bird named Pettit fluttered in his brain and then vanished. Russell, the Earth, and Chamberlain, the Sky, split the darkness like two lips. Nobody knows when or how, but they spoke the first word in the void — it stretched for eleven syllables of an eternity.
Chamberlain, sometimes called Wilt, sparkled with the stardust of countless nuclear reactors, while Russell, sometimes called Bill, cloaked himself in forest green and stark snowfall. They were joined in rivalry, and in their tidal clashing, that effervescent bleeding of the horizon, a new generation arose. And yet, they were clearly lords of time and space.
The burning of the Auerbach marked the gradual passing of the Rivalry. Underneath its constant pulse, the Titans rose from the ash heaps and inhaled the smoke billows. And, as they rose, they borrowed lessons from Russell and Chamberlain. They formed sacred trusts with starlight and earth. Many of them were long-limbed and tall as mountains. They cast shadows like Tolkien Ents. Still others parted ways with gravity and flew with a shy cockiness, like modern marvels, or Wright Brother planes.
But Russell and Wilt could not embrace their children with singular emotions. They knew the rise of the Titans meant the end for their eternity. Russell’s life-giving pride was no longer isolated on Celtic tongues, and Wilt’s striving spread from coast to coast. A time of industry had begun.
Daniel Rowell | Wiki Commons -- Jean-Léon_Gérôme | Wiki Commons
A Garden grew in Manhattan, tended and plowed by Walt Frazier and Willis Reed. They fed on the fruits of knowledge and transcribed the lessons of the agrarian Enlightenment. Counted in number amongst these scribes were the likes of Bill Bradley and Phil Jackson, the future’s Gatekeepers.
Twin giants grew out of the UCLA, where the sea touched the desert. One grew to be as enduring as stone. The other grew to be as fragile as bone. One carried a sickle. The other dragged a wooden plow. Hidden in the big western woods, both were favored by Russell’s vision of many cities upon many hills.
However, many of the challengers to the Rivalry were denied their inheritances and found themselves trapped in the ABA’s rainbow. Julius Erving, David Thompson, and George Gervin hovered like moths in the spectrum’s flames. The arch of the rainbow curved across the slumped shoulders of Moses Malone. And earning his father’s favor, Oscar Robertson guarded against their escape. Hence, he became known as the Big O.
In addition to these names and lands, giants and trolls and dwarves fanned forges across the Earth. The hammers of Unseld and Barry and Sikma rang from coastal cities, shooting sparks across the Sky.
But this world could not have been if not for Russell’s having urged Alcindor of the UCLA to raise his sickle against Chamberlain. When Alcindor raised his blade against his father, he sunk it deep into the tapestry of stars and split the heavens on a seam. Prior to this moment, no one could imagine a power mightier than Wilt, but Alcindor proved that the universe does not confine itself to singularities. From that moment on, they called this once awkward youth Kareem, and he ruled the universe with his blood-crusted skyhook.
Kareem sat on the world’s highest throne, which bore a strange resemblance to Mikan’s gray-goggled skull, and with time, and in most circles, his being would become synonymous with time itself, as if he were a river’s mouth or a tree’s roots or the night’s darkness. He ruled in all kingdoms and courts. His robes morphed from forest green to purple and gold. The orange sun rose from one palm and descended on another. The other big men obeyed his will and everyone believed life would always be as so, anchored to his size and his might, measured and yet unmoving.
And maybe time would have stood still, if fear had not prompted Wilt’s usurper to act.
Always mindful of the worlds that first crumbled in his graceful wake, Kareem feared even the world he built from chaos might one day falter, so he set about damming tomorrow’s dawns. He sharpened his scythe. He paced his journeys through the Sky. He took to wearing an extra pair of eyes. He even swallowed his own children.
Inside his belly, his perceived enemies huddled together like ping pong balls, or a chicken’s eggs inside the gullet of a scaly serpent.
However, upon the birth of Magic Johnson, Buss hid the rookie among the Spartans. Behind their shields he grew tall and fast, and because Buss had Jerry West feed Kareem a rock in Magic’s place, the biggest man of them all never asked about Magic and continued to believe the future began and ended with his purple and gold wingspan, except when bouts of paranoia told him it wouldn’t.
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That said, Magic was tended by NCAA nymphs and was nursed by the goat Jud Heathcoate, which is a good name for a goat, whether scruffy or tamed. From Jud’s horns flowed burgers and champagne; what would become the diet of the young god and all his acquaintances in the years to come. So Magic grew faster and stronger than anyone could believe, and when he left the Spartan cave, he took the world by storm.
He challenged his father to a foot race, and his father agreed as a matter of drunken pride. In leaner years, he would have said no, but the universe whispered rumors of his decline, of his receding hairline and softening belly. He needed to flex his eternal glow. More importantly, he did not know this youthful upstart with the wide grin was his son, having never laid eyes upon him. He also still believed all his offspring resided inside his stomach. Then, too, maybe he forgot the prophecy about how one day his world would end, turning on little more than an ankle bit of bone, and the arrival of the one who got away. After all, sometimes old men stop heeding the dawn and hear only their own snoring.
Any tyrant, even a quiet giant, will eventually sew animosity unawares. Power attracts resentment, even when it plods. With Magic standing at the starting line and grinning from cheek to cheek, Kareem tripped on a role player’s foot. Lionel Hollins, a sibling of the giant Moses, undercut the mighty king, striking a blow for all those who had cowered for so long under his steely, four-eyed glare. Thus, when it came time to race, Kareem could not even run, and when he lost, the punishment was death.
Magic wrestled the sickle from Kareem’s hand and slit his father’s torso just as his father had once done to his father. Emerging from Kareem’s cavity were the gods of a new generation. Bird and Dominique stepped forth, followed by McHale, Dantley, and English. And Dennis Johnson, too. This moment marked the end of the Titans.
The Age of Showtime had begun, and now Magic was the lord of the universe.
But Magic did not want all of the responsibility. So he shared his duties with his brothers, specifically Bird and Dominique. They began to construct a new world out of the old world’s jerseys. And, looking towards the rafters, they were guided by banners. Their swift movements connected the living with the dead.
Of the Titans, only Moses and Erving remained. Aside from Kareem, they were the most powerful of the old generation. Moses was made to bear the weight of the material world, as he had once bore the arch of ABA’s rainbow, and Erving, who could see well into the future, avoided apprehension until the day he was chained to a cliff and pecked by birds. As for Kareem, his blood poured forth from his body and became the tides and rivers of time. When it rains, the world shines with the absence of antiquity’s physical being, gathering in puddles on the hardwood.
Still, some creatures remained loyal to the old Spiritus Mundi. Among them were the Portland Hydra, the Barkley Lion, the New York Ewing, a three-headed dog, a fierce Chimera, and a desert Sphinx. A great wizard named Stern hid these foul beasts away in the caves and forests and deserts of the Continent. He nursed them on vials of the Rivalry’s sweat and tears and other dark enchantments. He knew one day they would be the tests and challenges for those chasing immortality.
In the golden halls of the Forum, specifically in a disco-lit room known as the Forum Club, the Olympian gods sat on leather and velvet lounge chairs and reigned over heaven and earth and NBC. There were several of them, for Magic shared his powers, with friends and family and strangers and friends of strangers and everyone he met and even those he didn’t meet. In other words, there was a lot of sharing and swapping and sharing and swapping. Everyone was there, and everyone felt like a golden god, even the defeated.
Magic sat on the center throne, and it most definitely did not resemble Mikan’s bifocals. In no particular order, but amongst the pantheon sat the following: Laimbeer, god of war; Bowie, god of the forge; Isiah, the trickster god; Dominique, the lord of liquid highlights; Worthy, who sprung from Magic’s own brain; English, the god of wine; the twins, Hakeem and Sampson. There were others, but these names resounded most often in the veins of time and in the banners both visible and invisible.
Aguirre, the Microwave, tended to the hearth, and therefore needed no chair, although it was strange to keep an open flame inside a dance club, but no one was paying attention to fire codes because this was a time of deregulation.
Bird, the chief rival of Magic, was lord of Boston and preferred its gloomy Puritan snowdrifts to the glitz of Hollywood. McHale stayed with him, as did Dennis Johnson and the Parrish chief. They stayed in a palace called the Boston Garden, which really was neither a palace nor a garden, but a great heaping dump that creaked with arthritic heat and smelled like sulphur. Some say its walls and seats were carved from Russell’s skull and that the last embers of the Auerbach glowed deep inside its darkest chambers.
It should be noted the gods themselves could never die. This was the gift of Dominique’s highlight reels. Most of the time they lived happily, but sometimes passion turned to hate. And, while they could not die, they could age and retire and take other forms. When this happened, they would scorch younger generations with the flames of their jealousy. But Magic, with a thunderbolt smile, would always restore order with a reference to himself and a tweetstorm of sports clichés about back in the day.
Ed. Note: Some lines in this story are an intentional homage to D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths