lowing day. Some 712 games had been canceled dur-
ing the strike. Hoping to generate fan enthusiasm,
owners devised a complicated playoff system for the
1981 season whereby the division leaders in each
half of the season would play in a preliminary elimi-
nation round to determine who would advance to
the league championships. Attendance and televi-
sion ratings, however, fell significantly. Further-
more, the complicated system resulted in the two
National League teams with the best overall records,
the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds, be-
ing excluded from the playoffs. Meanwhile, the Kan-
sas City Royals won the second-half American
League Western Division championship, despite
having a losing record for the abbreviated season.
Impact There were no winners in the strike of
- Fans were disgusted with owners and players
alike. The strike produced a deep-seated distrust be-
tween the players’ union and ownership. Owners
made Kuhn a scapegoat and refused to reelect him
to another term as commissioner. The stage was thus
set for even more costly battles over free agency and
player salaries.
Further Reading
Burk, Robert F.Much More than a Game: Players,
Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Korr, Charles P.The End of Baseball as We Knew It: The
Players Union, 1960-81. Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press, 2002.
Rader, Benjamin G.Baseball: A Histor y of America’s
Game. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2002.
M. Philip Lucas
See also Baseball; Sports; Unions.
Basketball
Definition Team sport
The confluence of events that transpired in the National
Basketball Association in the early 1980’s saved the league,
allowed it to expand, elevated it to equal status with the Na-
tional Football League and Major League Baseball, and
made it an indelible aspect of the American psyche.
The unprecedented success of basketball in the
1980’s can be traced to a singular event in the final
year of the 1970’s. In the ultimate game of the 1979
National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)
tournament, two polar forces of the basketball uni-
verse collided to determine the last college basket-
ball champion of the decade. The game, held on
March 26 in Salt Lake City, Utah, marked the genesis
of the rivalry between Michigan State University’s
sophomore guard Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Indi-
ana State University’s senior forward Larry Bird.
Johnson’s team prevailed 75-64. The two young stars
entered the National Basketball Association (NBA)
the following fall—Johnson with the Los Angeles
Lakers and Bird with the Boston Celtics. They made
immediate impacts on the league and came to sym-
bolize the heightened interest in, and the cultural
significance of, basketball in the United States.The NBA Takes Off The rivalry between Bird and
Johnson and, in a larger context, between the histor-
ically dominant organizations that each player rep-
resented gave the NBA a marketable product and a
sustainable plotline. The styles employed by the two
players contrasted immensely. Johnson’s flashy style
and up-tempo attitude were a natural fit for Holly-
wood, while Bird’s combination of a fundamentally
sound and fluid style and gritty, blue-collar work-
manship melded with his Bostonian surroundings.
The trait that Johnson and Bird shared, however, was
the deep, existential desire to be the best. “The first
thing I would do every morning was look at the box
score to see what Magic did. I didn’t care about any-
thing else,” Bird admitted. The two players met
three times in the NBA finals; the Lakers won two of
the three series. Bird and Johnson both won three
Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards and were se-
lected nine times for the All-NBA first team.
The NBA needed to capitalize on the heightened
interest in the league that the two superstars engen-
dered, and the emergence of cable television cou-
pled with a visionary league commissioner helped
basketball flourish like never before. In 1984, the
NBA’s executive vice president David Stern became
the new NBA commissioner when Larry O’Brien re-
tired. Stern implemented a number of provisions
that ensured the lasting success of the league. He
encouraged corporate sponsorship of NBA fran-
chises—highlighting the marketability of many of
the young players in the league. Stern encouraged
the dissemination of the NBA through cable televi-
sion: In the previous season, the Entertainment and94 Basketball The Eighties in America