WHEN THE GAME WAS OURS - Larry Bird & Magic Johnson {FerraBit}

WHEN THE GAME WAS OURS

by Larry Bird and Earvin Magic Johnson with Jackie MacMullan (2009)



Read by . . : Dick Hill

Publisher . : Brilliance Audio (2009)

ISBN . . . .: ISBN-10 1441836403 ISBN-13: 9781441836403

Format . . .: MP3. 108 tracks, 518 MB

Bitrate . . : ~95 kbps (iTunes 9, VBR, Mono, 44.1 kHz)

Source . . .: 11 CDs (12.7 hours)

Genre . . . : Non-fiction, Sports

Unabridged .: Unabridged



Nicely tagged and labeled, combined CD tracks, cover scan included.

Some pictures from the book included.



/ Personal rant: This audiobook is an example of (another) production

/ FAILURE by Brilliance Audio (and director Susie Breck). Each CD

/ has 99 tracks - the maximum allowed. Even with half the tracks

/ under a minute long, chapter breaks are in the middle of the tracks.

/ Somebody find Susie, and whoever OK'd this, and dope-slap them for me.



Thanks for sharing & caring.

Cheers, FerraBit

January 2010



Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Bird

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Johnson



Originally posted:

https://thepiratebay.org/user/FerraBit (TPB) & Demonoid

Please present your library card, and comment me some loving.

______________________________________



From the back cover:

From the moment these two players took the court on opposing sides, they engaged in a fierce physical and psychological battle. Their uncommonly competitive relationship came to symbolize the most compelling rivalry in the NBA. These were the basketball epics of the 1980s -- Celtics vs Lakers, East vs West, physical vs finesse, Old School vs Showtime, even white vs black. Each pushed the other to greatness -- together Bird and Johnson collected 8 NBA Championships, and 6 MVP awards and helped save the floundering NBA at its most critical time. When it started they were bitter rivals, but along the way they became lifelong friends. With intimate, fly-on- the- wall detail, WHEN THE GAME WAS OURS transports readers to this electric era of basketball and reveals for the first time the inner workings of two players dead set on besting one another. From the heady days of trading championships to the darker days of injury and illness, we come to understand Larry's obsessive devotion to winning and how his demons drove him on the court. We hear him talk with candor about playing through chronic pain and its truly exacting toll. In Magic we see a young, invincible star struggle with the sting of defeat, not just as a player but as a team leader. We are there the moment he learns he's contracted HIV and hear in his own words how that devastating news impacted his relationships in basketball and beyond. But always, in both cases, we see them prevail. A compelling, up-close-and-personal portrait of asketball's most inimitable duo, WHEN THE GAME WAS OURS is a reevaluation of three decades in counterpoint. It is also a rollicking ride through professional basketball's best times.



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Amazon Exclusive: Bill Walton Reviews When the Game Was Ours



(Bill Walton played in the NBA for 13 years, and in 1996, was named one of the top 50 players in NBA history.)



Larry Bird and Magic Johnson are transcendent, iconic and timeless standard bearers of excellence who changed "The Game" forever, always bringing out the best in each other and never failing to put a smile on all our faces.



I was one of the lucky ones. I had the incredible good fortune to have witnessed firsthand the Bird/Magic rivalry. It was an intense and constant thing for us all. But even I didn't realize how powerful their connection was until I read When the Game Was Ours, a riveting and page-turning masterpiece that could only be written with the help of someone like Jackie MacMullan, who was there every step of the way and who sensed there was a whole lot more to their story than what happened on the court or got played over and over again on the highlight reels. In this book, Larry and Magic tell stories like they never have before. I was enthralled, page after page. Theirs was a unique relationship. They were polar opposites, but in ways few of us realized they were very much the same. They both wanted the same thing, day in and day out--to win. And did they know how to win.



When the Game Was Ours perfectly captures the defining moments of their lives from the very beginning of their fiercest of rivalries through their constantly evolving historical relationship and friendship right up to the present. This epic tome is the capstone of their landmark careers. It is also so much more than anyone could ever dream for. When the Game Was Ours brilliantly explains why "The Game" will always belong to Larry and Magic.--Bill Walton



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From The Washington Post



For sports fans who came of age in the 1980s, nothing in the known universe was as important as Bird vs. Magic. In a debate -- "Who's better, Bird or Magic?" -- you would have staked your life on your answer. When you played hoops alone and fantasized about the final seconds ticking down, you were either one or the other. And when Larry Bird's Boston Celtics and Magic Johnson's Los Angeles Lakers played each other, you would sooner have given away your entire baseball-, basketball- and football-card collections than miss a minute of it. The passage of time has only enhanced the legends of Bird and Magic. We can look back now and understand how their simultaneous arrival in the league, their immense talents rivaled only by their shared competitiveness, saved the NBA from its twin epidemics of drug abuse and uninspired play. Bird and Magic mattered. It was East vs. West, the Lakers' "Showtime" vs. Celtic pride and, yes, black vs. white. By the end of their run as the gods of the hardwood -- Magic's time cut short when he contracted HIV in 1991, Bird's retirement the following year, largely the result of back injuries -- Michael Jordan was well on his way to establishing himself as arguably the greatest player in history. But make no mistake: The '80s, when Bird and Magic ruled, were the NBA's golden era. Perhaps more than any other sports rivals (with the possible exception of boxers Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier), Bird and Magic are intertwined in history, and that rivalry and that history (as well as the friendship, both unlikely and unavoidable, that developed between them) are at the heart of a fascinating new book, "When the Game Was Ours." Though Bird and Johnson (with Jackie MacMullan) are credited as the authors, it is clearly MacMullan's book, as all but the introduction (by Bird and Johnson) is written in the third person, with the former Boston Globe reporter and columnist masterfully weaving the recollections of the two protagonists with those of dozens of observers, including teammates and family members. The book is at its most powerful when it hews close to its premise: the evolution of perhaps sports' greatest rivalry, from its origins in 1979, when Bird's Indiana State Sycamores met Magic's Michigan State Spartans in the NCAA championship game (a game that is frequently credited with giving rise to the phenomenon known as "March Madness") to the deep bonds of friendship and mutual respect that developed between the NBA's top stars. Each player's extreme competitiveness is revealed early on, and it was precisely that competitiveness that forced us to wait more than two decades after their last NBA Finals duel (in 1987) to hear what they thought of each other. "I never let on how much [Johnson] dominated my thoughts during my playing days," Bird says on the book's first page. "I couldn't. But once we agreed to do this book, I knew it was finally time to let people in on my relationship with the person who motivated me like no other. . . . What I had with Magic went beyond brothers." For much of the book, Bird and Magic merely observe each other from afar, with borderline obsessiveness, their occasional encounters on and off the court marked by few words. (An anthropologist could have a field day studying the early interactions of these alpha males, who do everything short of marking their territory to assert their dominance.) The obsession was such that, when Bird's Celtics beat the Lakers to win his first NBA title in 1984, all Bird could say was: "I finally got him. I finally got Magic." Amazingly, their first real conversation (which took place in Bird's basement following a commercial shoot in 1985) doesn't come until Page 176, nearly two-thirds of the way into the book, and it becomes the critical plot development, as the rivalry took on the added dimension of friendship once the men realized the similarities in their backgrounds. Their bond eventually grew so deep that Bird compared learning of Johnson's HIV-positive diagnosis in 1991 to learning of his own father's suicide when Bird was 19. The Bird-Magic dynamic is so powerful that the book drags whenever MacMullan strays from it, as during a distillation of the Celtics-Lakers rivalry or the inevitable biographical examinations of each player. But MacMullan keeps those detours mercifully brief and soon returns to the action, which is not so much what occurred on the court (Magic's Lakers and Bird's Celtics played each other only twice a year, plus three times -- for a total of 19 games -- in the NBA Finals) as about what went on in the minds of these two titans. The game of basketball has never been better than when it was theirs.