I rarely watch the Celtics these days. There’s just too much individual showboating.  I really loved the game of basketball back in the Bird-Parish-McHale days. It was just amazing to watch that team pass the ball. I also loved the Boston Garden with all its warts. The atmosphere was really electric every night because of all the history there. I really dislike the Fleet Center. The eighties Celtics decade really represented one of best times of my life. My Celtics cohort (and niece’s husband), Sergei, and I had our priorities. First and foremost, our goal was t0 get to as many games as possible. We did that by buying packs of obstructed view seats for $10, particularly during playoff time, then we’d figure out a good place to see the game from once we got in. I also had an alternative source of tickets.

At the time, I was in charge of a $7 million marketing communications budget and handled a lot of outgoing contract work. I had become really good friends with the sales manager at Multiprint in Boston, a guy named Peter, and his wife. Not only did he and I go to lunch together, but I’d go to his house for dinner once in a while. Peter was a really fun guy to go to lunch with, to say the least. It was like open bar at a freakin’ wedding. There were a couple of days I didn’t make it back to the office. But the best thing was that Multiprint had unbelievable first balcony Celtics seats at dead center and I got them all the time. Peter used to tell me that the owner at Multiprint used to say, “Give them to Deb. She really appreciates them. The other people don’t even know what’s going on during the game.”

Needless to say, it wasn’t uncommon for Sergei to call my niece, Maria, and say, “Hey, I’ll have to come over after the game. Deb got us tickets.” Yeah, I could feel the pain in my back as she stabbed that voodoo doll I brought her back from New Orleans. The absolute worst thing Sergei and I ever did to Maria happened in 1986, the year the Celts won their final championship of the Bird era.

Will you marry me? (But not right now.)

One day, Sergei and I went to a game and he pulled this ring box out of his jacket pocket. “Hey, I’m going to ask Ria to marry me.” I just looked at him. “You can’t do that now. We’re heading in to the playoffs this week. It’ll be an incredible distraction and I have a ton of seats coming from Multiprint.” He looked at me. “You’re right. I’ll wait until after the playoffs. It’s not like she knows.” We thought that was a brilliant master plan.

Anyway, that was a great Celtics year and a great Celtics team with Bill Walton as the back-up center. If he hadn’t been there, no championship. (How can you go wrong? The guy’s also a Dead Head.)  And Larry Bird is just my all-time favorite athlete, hands down. The guy has class. He was an incredible leader with an amazing talent, and he played the game with passion and to win…whatever it took, even if it meant sacrificing his own stats. That doesn’t happen today. Best of all, when he retired, he really retired. He was done. He didn’t torture the planet with a bunch of absurd “come backs.” Bird was just plain finished.

Anyway, Sergei and I embarked on our excellent championship adventure. When we couldn’t get tickets, we’d go to the Town Line (affectionately called The Town Slime by us) in Malden to watch the games on the big screen TVs (and to get trashed on vodka). My mother would be mortified because it would be me, Sergei and then all of Sergei’s brothers. And she knew we’d be yelling rude stuff at the refs when they called fouls against the Celtics. Hey, at least the stuff we yelled wasn’t as bad as what the guy next to us in the Multiprint seats always yelled. Whenever Jake O’Donnell (our least favorite ref; we were convinced he hated the Celts) blew a foul on a Celtic, the guy next to us would yell, “Hey, Jake, the whistle blows. Does your wife?” I think it was really nasty, but I also admit that the first time I heard it I turned to Sergei and said, “What a great line. How come I can’t think up that stuff?” His response? “Because you’re a lesbian.” (That was always his explanation.)

Anyone remember a guy named Mark Aguirre who played for the Dallas Mavericks? He was a pain in the ass. There were times when he could just turn it on and kill us during a game. One night, he was whistled for a technical foul. It was really quiet in the building, when Sergei yelled, “What did Yoda say?” Know what, the guy really did look like Yoda. I just hadn’t realized it until Sergei yelled it out. The whole section started laughing.

Sergei finally did propose to Maria and, in a fit of passion no doubt, confessed that he had been holding off because of the playoffs. Not only did he confess, but he told Ria that I instigated the whole thing. Benedict Arnold. She called me up one day and left me a message, “You are such a jerk.” Hey, at least she was laughing. She’s never let me live that one down more than twenty years later, and I never let him forget that he threw me under the freakin’ bus.

The plot thickens

The following year, the Celts were in the playoffs again and, unfortunately, Maria would yet again be a victim. My sister decided to have her shower at a restaurant down the street from the house. They scheduled it the day the Celts were supposed to play the Atlanta Hawks, and it was a final and deciding game. Sergei owned this one. He brought a television to the shower. Hey, I was eternally grateful, but this seemed to me to be a big risk after the engagement delay.

Worst of all, it was the day when Larry Bird and Dominique Wilkins went on that amazing scoring bender, matching each other point for point.Everybody at the shower was mesmerized by the shoot out, which meant that nobody was really paying attention to what was going on in that room. Wilkins finally scored 56 and Bird 53. The win, however, went to the Celts. Ah, but now not only was Maria pissed, so was her mother (also known as my oldest sister). And they were pissed at both of us because they were convinced, somehow, that I had instigated this whole television thing. Me?

Seriously, though, we were so bad. I look back now and I’m surprised Maria even speaks to either of us.