Episode 199: Celtics v. Lakers In the 1980s, First Ever Video Rental Store, Weird Bubblegum Flavors, Sleeping In the Outfield(6-11-2025)

Relive a historic basketball rivalry. Learn the story of the first video rental store. Recoil at some weird bubble gum flavors.

Episode 199 is the final stop before the big Listener's Choice show but there's plenty of nostalgia to be had.

It all begins with the beginning of the video rental store. It was at one point a gigantic industry before falling to streaming, but it had to start somewhere. We will look at how the first video store came to be and some of the original players in the world of rentals.

There have been many amazing rivalries between teams in all sports. Few had the impact of the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers battles in the 1980s. Bird and Magic, Boston and L.A., it was a wonderful time to be a fan. We will look at what made it special.

Peppermint, spearmint, cinnamon, fruit, these are all classic favorite bubblegum flavors. This week's Top 5 will not be featuring beloved classics. Instead we will look at some of the weirdest and in some cases grossest bubblegum flavors there have been.

There will be a new This Week In History and Time Capsule featuring the crazy but true story of a player who fell asleep on the field during a baseball game.

Don't forget to become a free member and to go vote in the polls for Listener's Choice Episode 200 over on Patreon! Voting ends June 12th!

Helpful Links from this Episode

• Purchase My New Book Cape Cod Beyond the Beach!
• In My Footsteps: A Cape Cod Travel Guide(2nd Edition)
• Hooked By Kiwi - Etsy.com
• DJ Williams Music
• KeeKee's Cape Cod Kitchen
• Christopher Setterlund.com
• Cape Cod Living - Zazzle Store
• Subscribe on YouTube!
• Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog
• Webcam Weekly Wrapup Podcast
• CJSetterlundPhotos on Etsy
• Serenading Romero
• Candy Hero.com

Listen to Episode 198 here

Transcript

Speaker: 0:02

Hello world! And welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 199. Oh, that's right, we're one step away from Listener's Choice Episode 200. Make sure you go and vote on the free tier on Patreon. This week though, I did not phone it in. We've got loads of fun Gen X nostalgia to get into. We're gonna kick it off with a look back at the dawning of the video rental store, including a bit about the first ever video rental store. With the NBA finals upon us, we're gonna go way back in the day and look at what it was like witnessing the historic Boston Celtics vs. LA Lakers rivalry in the NBA in the 1980s. We're gonna have a brand new top five that's gonna be the weirdest bubblegum flavors I could find. I don't know if you want to eat any of these. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time capsule looking back at a real story of a player falling asleep on the field during a baseball game. All of that fun stuff is coming up right now on episode 199 of the In My Footsteps podcast. So, what are we gonna talk about this week? I've already mentioned next week is episode 200. I've gotta get that out of the way in the beginning. Go and vote for what you want to hear on listener's choice. Every topic is up for vote. When this podcast goes live, voting will end the next day on the Thursday, June 12th. So if you're listening to this on the Wednesday, get out there, go vote on Patreon, just on the free tier. As much as I would love everybody to go become a paying subscriber, I wanted to open up the voting for episode 200 to as many people as possible. Speaking of Patreon, I could not start the show off without thanking my Patreon backers. Laurie, Mary Lou, Ashley, Kevin, Leo, Marguerite, Neglectoid, Crystal, Matt. Thank you all so much for being my biggest supporters, my biggest backers. Five dollars a month on Patreon gets you access to bonus podcast episodes. It gets you access to the remastered without a map live streams that I did a few years ago. And of course, as a paying member, you can also vote for listener's choice. But wherever you are, wherever you're listening from, I hope the weather is as good as it can be. I hope you're enjoying the kind of unofficial start of summer, even though it really starts next week. This past week on Cape Cod, we finally had our first hot day. It was eighty-seven degrees. And me as someone who runs hot, I don't really love that type of weather. But it's sort of like the first few hot days, you're like, ah, yeah, it's summer. And then in about two months, when you get the same days, it's like please let it be fall soon. Before we dive into the podcast, I had a little anecdote. The further adventures of my basketball blues. As listeners know, I ended up la every time I play basketball, I end up with some kind of ache, pain, something that needs to be adjusted by my boss, Dr. Michael Singleton, chiropractor slash lots of other things. So this week I went to play and everything was good. I was feeling good, the weather was warm. But just for one brief moment, I lost track of where I was on the court. I was running, I ended up off the court on the dirt and sprained my ankle because of course I did. Luckily, I thought I broke it at first. I honestly thought I might have broken my ankle. It's like, oh man. But no, it's quote unquote just a sprain. As I've said before, though, as soon as I feel 100%, I'll be back out on the court looking for the next thing that I can injure. Spraining or rolling my ankle from basketball was a common occurrence back in the day when I had a basketball hoop in front of my house during middle school into high school. I believe it was right after my eighth grade graduation. I was playing out in front at the hoop with friends. I rolled my ankle really bad to the point where I needed a few days on the couch with ice on it. During that time it was a lot of looking outside and wishing I was there. But also watching TV and just not having to care about anything in the world. One of the benefits of that time would have been getting movies I wanted from the video store so I could watch whatever I felt like watching. And I was working hard to get to that segue here for the podcast, because we're gonna now look back at the origin of the video rental store, including the first one ever. So let's kick off Listener's Choice Eve, episode 199, with a look at the very first video rental stores. It's kind of funny actually now looking back at the dawn of the video rental store in the mid-2020s when the video rental store they don't exist anymore. It's like I'm a little bit late to the party, I guess, for a historical look back. I guess if you go scouring the United States, you might be able to find a video rental store per se, but it's nothing like it was 15 years ago. Yeah, it was only fifteen or so years ago that every town seemed to have at least one, maybe two or three, video rental stores. There were the big chains like Blockbuster, Hollywood video, family video. I can remember on Cape Cod we had the little mom and pop video stores. There was one at this little strip mall that I used to walk to when I was a kid that had a convenience store, but the video store used to let us rent R-rated movies. This was back in the late 80s. Where I grew up in Yarmouth on Cape Cod. We had places like Entertainment Stop, we had Video Galaxy, which smelled like popcorn every time I walked in. There were notorious video stores like Gotcha Video on the Hyenis line that had a lot of adult videos. Cape Codders will remember those ads that used to be on the radio. Luckily, I don't think I ever asked my parents, what does that mean with the adult videos? What are they? We gotta go way back though to get to the origin of the video rental store. You know, way before streaming and DVDs or even laser discs in the 80s. There was a quiet revolution beginning in the 1970s. This was a movement sparked by the rise of Betamax, which I talked about last week, and VHS technology. Betamax came out in 1975. It was a home video cassette recording format, marketed as high quality, as a good option for recording television shows. But Betamax cassettes only held enough room for one hour of video, so you couldn't record a full movie or sporting event. And then a year later in 1976, JVC released the video home system, VHS. The big difference was VHS tapes could hold two hours or eventually up to six hours of content on each tape. Additionally, JVC licensed the VHS format more openly, which allowed more manufacturers to create compatible devices, which led to cheaper VCRs and a wider distribution. VHS quickly gained the market share thanks to the longer recording time, lower cost, and a more aggressive licensing strategy. By 1981, VHS had about 60% of the market, and by 1988, Betamax was already obsolete. So at this point, enter a man named George Atkinson. He saw potential where few others did. In late 1977, Atkinson made a bold move purchasing a copy of each of the 50 films available from a company called Magnetic Video, a new distributor that had struck deals with studios like 20th Century Fox to release movies on video cassette for home use. Atkinson ended up paying roughly $3,000 for these titles at about $59.95 each. Do you guys remember that who grew up in the eighties when they would advertise movies on home video and they would be priced somewhere like that, like sixty dollars for a video cassette? Anyway, back to Atkinson. In December 1977, Atkinson opened the video station in Los Angeles, California. His idea was simple but radical. Instead of buying movies for hundreds of dollars, customers could rent them for a few dollars a night. But memberships were required, with Atkinson charging fifty dollars for annual access, plus rental fees of about ten dollars per tape. Which I mean I guess it's still really steep, but when you're the very first video rental store, I guess it's up to you to set what you think the price should be. His model of video rental was instantly successful. The gamble had tapped into a previously unmet demand. People who wanted to watch movies at home, but they didn't want to buy every title. They didn't want to wait, hopefully, for a TV station to play an edited version of the movie. Within months, Atkinson's video station store became a destination. And he started franchising his idea. Within a few years, there were dozens of video station locations that popped up across California and beyond. It's amazing to think of what a novel concept renting video cassettes was in the late 1970s, and how Atkinson was the one that took the chance on it. At its peak, the video station chain of rental stores had 550 locations. By 2005, there were over 24,000 video rental stores in the United States, with a lot of them being the chains Blockbuster, Hollywood, Family Video, those. For people who got in on the ground floor of home video rentals, the timing couldn't have been better. As the VCRs dropped in price in the early 80s, more households could get them. For example, in 1980, only about 1% of United States homes had a VCR. By 1985, that number skyrocketed to 23%. And by 1990, more than 75% of households had a VCR in the United States. In 1985 alone, Americans rented nearly 400 million videotapes, and that number surged to 6.5 billion video rentals per year by 2000. Those huge numbers, it was part of the reason why I came up with this segment for the podcast, because you think of video rental stores and how massive they were, you know, 20 years ago, and then you start to think there had to be an OG, there had to be an original idea for a video rental store. In 1987, for the first time ever, home video revenue outpaced box office revenue. So more people were watching the movies at home than in theaters. This caused the movie studios to realize that it was a gold mine, video rentals, because at the beginning they were reluctant to embrace home video for fear of piracy and lost ticket sales. You might remember last week when I talked about Betamax, I briefly touched on the 1984 Supreme Court case about the legality of recording TV shows on home video for private use and how it was thought to be possibly illegal. And a big part of that was due to the movie theaters and these big companies thinking they were gonna lose millions and billions of dollars. So George Atkinson and his video station, they were the first store, the first chain. Then in the eighties, several other rental chains came around. Some of the first ones included Errols Video Club, founded in the early eighties in Virginia.

Speaker 2: 13:11

West Coast Video presents Hollywood Search, a new scratch up game with 100 million dollars in instant prices.

Speaker: 13:33

They launched in 1988, expanding rapidly during the 90s, becoming the second largest video rental chain in the US, with more than 2,000 locations at its peak.

Speaker 4: 13:45

The new releases have arrived at Hollywood Video, and only Hollywood Video gives you five-day rentals on even the newest releases, like You've Got Mail, Holy Man, and Saving Private Ryan.

Speaker: 14:02

They were founded in 1985 in Dallas, Texas. By 1987, they had more than 300 stores, and at its peak, they were opening a new location every 17 hours. The peak of Blockbuster was 2004, where they had more than 9,000 stores worldwide. Obviously, those of you my age know the video rental store was not meant to last forever. Changing technologies, streaming, cable, and other changes. They made it where driving to the video rental store, picking out tapes, it was no longer feasible. I used to love the nights at the video store. Go back and check out episode 136, where I get more in depth about what it was like just going to the video store and what that experience was like. In the mid-2000s, that was when the tide started turning. That's when companies like Netflix or Redbox, or being able to get the DVDs from these little look like vending machines outside of supermarkets, or having them sent to your house, made the video stores, the video rental stores, kind of obsolete. By the time 2010 rolled around, Hollywood video, blockbuster video, they were all but gone. And those weekend evenings going to the video store just became a cherished memory for Gen Xers like me, maybe some older millennials. George Atkinson, the man who started the video rental store with his video station, he died in 2005 when video rental stores were still at their peak. So he never got to see the fall of his idea. Interestingly, though, to put kind of a bow on this, Atkinson did not have a smooth ride, despite creating the video rental store. After the company went public, Atkinson was forced to resign in 1983 due to fiscal reports of him overstating the value of the company. His brother Edward, who had been the Secretary Treasurer, was sentenced to five years in prison in 1988 for perjury and securities fraud involving video station. George Atkinson had pleaded guilty to filing false financial reports, and he got three months in a community treatment center, 2,000 hours of community service, and five years probation. Although he was inducted into the Video Hall of Fame in 1991. Which, if you're curious, I looked it up, I can't find this video hall of fame. I found video game hall of fame, I found Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but nothing for this video Hall of Fame that George Atkinson was inducted into. While streaming eventually made video stores obsolete, the legacy of the video rental store, it's deeply woven into the cultural fabric of the late 20th century. People my age, little older, a little younger, we remember what a nightly ritual it was for us families, couples, film fans, walking the aisles of a rental store, reading the back of the VHS boxes, and discovering new favorites. It all started with one man, George Atkinson, 50 tapes, and a revolutionary idea. Why buy when you can rent? I simply had to have this as this week in history, because it seems like something that can't be real. So a little about Ed Roush. He was born in 1893 in Oakland City, Indiana, and he was one of the finest hitters of his generation. He had a distinctive batting style, using a forty ounce bat and rarely taking full swings. He was said to have been able to place the ball on the field with surgical precision. He broke into the major leagues in 1913 with the Chicago White Sox. After a brief stint with the New York Giants, he found his stride with the Cincinnati Reds. Roush played the bulk of his career with Cincinnati, becoming a consistent offensive threat. He won the National League batting title in 1917 and 1919, and was one of the players that helped lead Cincinnati to victory in the infamous 1919 World Series against the Chicago Black Sox. Over his 18-year career, Roush batted 323 with 2,376 hits, 182 triples, and over 980 runs batted in. He was known as a fierce defender and a shrewd base runner, and in 1962, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. So I gave you all of his credentials to lead to this one story. On June 8th, 1920, during a game between the Cincinnati Reds and the New York Giants at the Polo grounds in New York City, it was unusually long, it was heated, and during a dispute in the fifth inning between the umpire and the players over a contested call, things reached the tipping point. The argument lasted for nearly twenty minutes with both teams' managers and several players joining in the fray. During this delay, Ed Roush, who was playing center field for the Reds, did something unexpected. Rather than pacing around or stewing about the arguments, he simply laid down in the outfield and took a nap. Yep, that's right. During the game. So eventually the game is resumed, but no one thought to go wake Roush up in the field. When the next batter stepped up and the ball was put into play, it became quickly apparent that Cincinnati was short one fielder. There was massive confusion with eventually the Reds infielders waving their arms and shouting, trying to draw the attention of the sleeping teammate out in center field. There have been arguments through history as far as how Rousch was sleeping. Some saying he was using his glove as a pillow, or he was face down in the grass. He was eventually awakened and was pretty embarrassed and resumed his position in center field as if nothing happened. However, Roush was not allowed to stay in the game. He was ejected for delaying the game. Can you imagine playing in a professional sports game and falling asleep while the game was going on on the field? For Ed Roush, it didn't ruin his career. It became more of a charming anecdote. As I said, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Teammates had described him as intense and no nonsense, so it was funny that a hard-nosed player could be caught sleeping in the outfield in the middle of a game. Ed Roush continued playing until 1931 and lived a long, full life, passing away at the age of 94 in 1988. At the time of his death, he was the oldest living Hall of Famer. When asked about his infamous sleeping incident, Ed Roush once said, quote, it was a long game, a hot day, and a stupid argument. What else was I supposed to do? End quote. And Ed Roush's sleeping in the outfield took place 105 years ago, this week in history. This is from the super popular movie Grease, the Grease soundtrack. This song is one of the best-selling singles ever with estimates of more than 15 million copies sold worldwide. The soundtrack for the movie Grease is also one of the highest-selling movie soundtracks ever with estimates of more than 30 million copies sold. Fun fact, actor John Travolta has had three top ten singles on the Billboard charts. This one, Summer Nights, also with Olivia Newton John, and Letter In, which is his only solo single, to get in the top ten. The number one movie was Damien, Omen 2. And you could get into the theater with a ticket costing $2.34. This is the sequel to the 1976 film, The Omen. It's a supernatural horror series. Damien is the future Antichrist, and he's a child, and it's what he does as he starts to learn his powers in the Omen 2. The film was a modest hit, making about $27 million on a budget of just under 7 million. It's 50% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, a far cry from the 85% fresh rating that the original Omen has on Rotten Tomatoes. The number one TV show was One Day at a Time. This sitcom is about a divorced mother raising her two daughters in Indianapolis. It starred Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli as the two daughters. The show was on for nine seasons and two hundred and nine total episodes between nineteen seventy-five and nineteen eighty-four. And if you were around back then, June 9th, 1978, perhaps you are new parents that literally just had a child that day, and you need a little break from a screaming child. Well, I've got something for you that'll give you a little bit of relief. That is a brand new hammock. You can get yourself a brand new hammock at Pier 1 Imports. 60 inches by 84 inches for $49.88. That's about $245 when adjusted for inflation to 2025. If you miss Pier 1, they're still around as an online only shop, so you can go to their website. I didn't check if they still have hammocks. June 9th, 1978 is also the birth date of one of my oldest friends, more like a brother, John. Ironically, we grew up together on Cape Cod, but he's lived out in California longer than he lived on Cape Cod now, which just blows my mind. He's easily one of the funniest people I've ever met, very dry and understated but biting sense of humor that would have me in tears laughing so much. He's also one of the smartest friends I have. His skill with video games, with computer animation, he had these skills in the early 90s when I didn't even know that you could do stuff like that. He is someone that I can not see for a couple of years and then see him, and it's like we're back in high school again. Which I don't know if that's good or bad for both of us. So happy birthday to John. I can promise you that I will not be getting you any of these weird and disgusting bubblegum flavors, but we're gonna talk about all of them coming up right now in a brand new top five. Peppermint, spearmint, some kind of fruit flavor, maybe cinnamon, or maybe some of you like just bubblegum, whatever that flavor really is. I highly doubt that any of you were gonna come up with any of the flavors that I have managed to find for this week's top five. As I look at some of the weirdest bubblegum flavors that you could possibly think of. I'll be honest, doing the research for weird bubblegum flavors, it did not take me very long to find a whole bunch that I was like, I can't believe these are real. I'm not really a betting man anymore, as those of you that have listened to the podcast for a long time know my gambling issues are why I moved back to Cape Cod from Las Vegas. But anyway, I'd be willing to bet that the majority of you have never tried any of these flavors of bubblegum. But who knows? I've got a lot of international listeners, so maybe you that don't live in the United States have these bubblegums in your kitchen right now. As with most of these top fives, there are some honorable mentions, and the top five itself is in no particular order. And none of these gums I'm gonna name do I endorse you trying, so don't blame me if you go find one of these and eat them and say he recommended they were good. I'm like, No, I don't. Okay, so honorable mentions for weird bubblegum flavors include cloves. This type of gum was popular, I guess, in the 1920s and 30s. It's now around a bit as a novelty. But any of you that have a spice rack, go grab your cloves out of there and smell it, and then ask yourself if you'd want to eat that as a gum. Another honorable mention is dill pickle. Pickle-flavored chips are pretty good. Pickle-flavored bubblegum, I don't know. I don't know if I'd want to just chew on something and have that flavor in my mouth for maybe an hour. You can find dill pickle gumballs online, although the place I just looked at, they're out of stock, so I don't know if that means forever. Another honorable mention is Ghost Pepper. Bubblegum reminds me of childhood, a nice sunny summer afternoon, fruit or some kind of mint flavor. I do not think of the hottest possible peppers. There's a website called Sonoran Spice, S-O-N-O-R-A-N, and they sell right now ghost pepper flavored gumballs, so have at it if you really want that. And the final honorable mention for weird bubblegum flavors is pepper fruits. This is basically pepper flavored bubblegum. I feel like these people were just running out of ideas, so they went to the spice rack and said, all these things, let's make each one into a bubblegum. Cloves, pepper fruits. I'm sure there's a lot of other ones, but I only had so much time to research. So those are the honorable mentions. Have you tried any of those gums? Did you like them? Or were they immediately brought back to the store? But if you thought those ones were weird, oh, just wait till the top five. Let's start off the top five with number one, wasabi. Speaking of spice, like ghost pepper, if you've never had wasabi, it's served a lot with sushi. It's kinda similar to hot mustard. It's one of those things I joke about. If you're congested, grab some wasabi and take a big deep breath. It'll probably clear your nasal passages. There's a website called candyhero.com. They have got some hot wasabi flavored gumballs. They do offer 14 day returns, so if you get 'em and chew one of them and hate them. You can send them back. I don't think I want anything that's associated with sushi in my bubble gum, but that's just me. Number two is TV dinner. TV dinner flavored gum. I found a website named Marinamarket.com. These are the ones that have TV dinner flavored gumballs. I'm thinking, and I'm not sure, but I think that it's a mix of different flavors in one container. So each gumball, there's buttered corn, roast beef, and apple cobbler. So I'm thinking that it's each of those flavors is part of the bag overall. I do not think each gumball has all those flavors in them. But it is marketed as T V dinner gumballs. Hey, it's only $4.50 to get yourself a bag of TV dinner gumballs, so if you're super curious, the place is in Washington State. So it shouldn't take long for it to get sent to you. So it'll be quicker for you to be disappointed by it. So I always tell you the top fives are in no particular order. If I had to have put these in an order for weirdest bubblegum flavors, this next one probably would be number one just based on its name. But in this countdown, it's number three. That is man smell. Yes, I am serious. There is a flavor of gum just called man smell. I don't know about you, but the first thing I thought of was just dirt and BO and cigarettes and beer. That's what I think of when I think of man smell. This is a real gum that was around in the mid-2000s in Japan. The Japanese name of it is Otoku Kauru, which translates to man smell. Interestingly, the gum's actual scent and flavor is rose, because it is supposed to help combat body odor on men. I found this one funniest because I thought originally it was gonna be some kind of novelty, like those Jones sodas that are weird flavors. But it's actually was meant to be helping men with their smell. I would say though, if you're chewing bubblegum to try to smell better for women, you're gonna be wasting a lot of money. You're gonna have to chew gum nonstop. You might as well just invest in old spice or maybe even axe body spray. Or you can go in the complete opposite direction with number four, meatball. Why smell like roses for women when you can smell like a meatball sub? I went to a website called geekalerts.com, which is where I found the meatball gumballs. They had a link to Amazon where you could buy a package of those for $2.50, but the link is broken, so I don't think it's made anymore. There is a bit of a caveat to this gum where it is marketed as meatball gum, but it doesn't taste like meatballs. They are shaped, they look like little Italian meatballs. The problem is the flavor is actually bubblegum. So it's blatant false advertising. Although I couldn't find any reviews from people, so I don't know if the bubblegum flavor is actually what you think, or if it does have a hint of beef or pork in it. So I don't know. If you want to call that a cheat, that's fine. But let's end this top five off with another weirdo one with number five, foie gras. We go back to candyhero.com to find foie gras flavored bubblegum. What is it exactly? Foie gras is a fatty duck or goose liver, usually stuffed with butter. It's considered a delicacy, so why not turn it into a bubblegum? It's gonna be right up there with things like caviar, escargo. Would you want that in your bubblegum? Unfortunately, according to Candy Hero, the Foie Gro bubblegum has been discontinued. Gee, you're telling me it wasn't popular? In case you were wondering, and I was, so I had to share, if you wanted to go and buy foie gras to have at home with your lunch or dinner, I'm seeing it for $24.99 for six ounces of it. I don't know if that's high quality, low quality. I am not an expert in goose and duck liver. So don't take your foie gras shopping advice from me. But there you have it. Top five weird bubblegum flavors, at least the ones that I could find during my research. Which of these was weirdest for you? I know that man smell doesn't really smell like men, it's roses, and I know meatball is more the shape, although I couldn't find any proof it doesn't taste like meatballs. But wasabi, TV dinner, foie gras, it's all there. But let's segue from the weird world of bubblegum flavors to one of the greatest rivalries in the history of sports. So let's go back and relive the glory days of the Celtics Lakers rivalry in the 1980s. If I had a dollar for every time that I say on this podcast how lucky I was to grow up when I did in the 80s and 90s, I'd be pretty rich. Now, granted, I could skew that and just say it 50 times per episode, but that's not the point. I have so many incredible memories of childhood, just everything about it, and it seems like such a bygone era of the world. I grew up huge into sports. I started watching sports in 1986. My big favorites were baseball and basketball, that's what I played as well. Growing up in the 1980s in New England, I was lucky enough to be witness to one of the greatest rivalries ever in sports, and that was the basketball clash between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers. The NBA finals are going on right now as we speak. In fact, yesterday from when I'm recording the podcast was Game One between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers, with the Pacers pulling off an incredible comeback in the last seconds to win game one. So I made sure I scheduled this segment deep into the NBA finals, the NBA playoffs. You never know, the Thunder Pacers Final Series might end up being one of the best ever. But for my money, and maybe I'm biased because I grew up then, nothing tops the intensity and the drama and the cultural impact of the Boston Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers feud. It is said by many people way smarter than me in sports that the Celtics Lakers rivalry, and specifically Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, saved the NBA. It ended up being more than a basketball rivalry. It was East Coast versus West Coast, grit vs. glamour, tradition versus flash, and it set the stage for the rise in popularity of the NBA in the 80s, 90s, and up to today. Even though we're going to talk a lot about the 1980s rivalry between the Celtics and Lakers, their meetings, they go way back. They go back to the 1960s, where the two franchises met seven times in the NBA Finals. Back then the Celtics were the dominant team in sports. They won all seven series between them and the Lakers in the 60s. The Celtics back then were led by legends like Bill Russell and John Havlichek, Coach Red Auerbach. The Lakers were led by Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. In the 70s, they didn't meet as much. The Celtics won a pair of NBA titles in 1974 and 76, behind Hall of Famers like Dave Cowens and Jojo White. The Lakers won in 1972, and they built around young star Kareem Abdul Jabbar. The 70s in the NBA was a weird time where you had a lot of one-off champions like the Milwaukee Bucks, Seattle Supersonics, Portland Trailblazers. It was more of the parody that I'm sure the NBA wanted for its league. But the Celtics and Lakers, they didn't fade from the spotlight for long. It all began with the 1979 NCAA championship game between Magic Johnson's Michigan State and Larry Bird's Indiana State. This was the most watched college basketball game in history at the time. Magic's Michigan State Spartans defeated Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores, and a personal rivalry was born. In the summer of 1979, Larry Bird joined the Celtics as a rookie. He was actually drafted the year before in 78, but it was different back then. He actually had the option to go play one more year of college ball. Which that had to be pretty scary for the Celtics to spend your first round pick on your potential next franchise player and having to go watch him play another year in college and just hoping he doesn't get hurt. Magic Johnson was drafted first overall by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1979. So Bird and Magic, Celtics Lakers, they immediately revitalized the franchises and then the rivalry. Before they even played against each other, the hype was there. Larry Bird with his sharp shooting, unselfish play, and relentless competitiveness transformed Boston from a 29-win team the year before to a 61-win team. And they would remain among the NBA's elite all through Byrd's 13-year career. Magic Johnson, with his six foot nine inch frame and dazzling passes, he brought Showtime basketball to LA. Although the jump wasn't as big, the year before he got there, the Lakers won 47 games and they won 60 in his rookie year. Even though each team won an NBA title before they got to play each other in the finals, it wasn't until 1984 that the Celtics and Lakers met in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1969. Sure, the Lakers and Celtics would play two times each year, and the hype for those games was off the charts, but it was nothing like the 1984 NBA Finals, some legendary moments included in Game 2 where the Lakers had a chance to go up 2-0 in the Boston Garden, but Magic Johnson made a critical late game error, dribbling out the clock, with the Celtics tying the series. After a Game 3 blowout in LA in the forum, Larry Bird famously called out his teammates for playing like sissies. Game four is perhaps the most well known with Kevin McHale's infamous clothesline of Kurt Rambis and the fight that ensued after. And then there was the iconic Game 7 in the Boston Garden where the Celtics won. Larry Bird got his second NBA title and bragging rights over magic. One of the highlights of my childhood was staying home sick from school and getting to watch this game on a VHS tape that my Uncle Steve had recorded. I may have been sick, but I was hyped up enough at the end of that game that I wanted to go out front and shoot some hoops. That 1984 NBA Finals was the highest-rated playoff series for the NBA up to that time. 1985 it was all about the rematch. It was like the NBA season was just a formality to get back to the Celtics Lakers in the finals. It didn't start well for the Lakers with the Celtics dominating game won 148-114, famously called the Memorial Day Massacre. But the Lakers responded with a vengeance with magic and 38-year-old Kareem Abdul Jabbar playing brilliantly. The Lakers won the series in six games, beating the Celtics in the finals for the first time ever. In 1986, it was all lined up again for the Celtics and Lakers to meet in the finals. The 1986 Celtics are considered one of the greatest teams in the history of the NBA. I was just a kid, a newbie to sports, and I think I got kind of spoiled by how good the Celtics were. All the talk was about they were going to get their revenge on the Lakers, beat them again in the finals, and then something crazy happened. The Lakers took the Houston Rockets lightly in the 1986 Western Conference Finals. They got beat in five games. So instead of getting Celtics-Lakers part three, we got Celtics and Rockets, and the Celtics basically slapped the hell out of them. But oh, that loss in 86 for the Lakers, it motivated them. The 1987 finals, it was really a even though it went six, the Lakers really dominated.

Speaker 1: 43:30

It was a well-directed Lakers attack that captured the first two games of the NBA Finals. Los Angeles was impressive with their passing and relentless with their running. As they overwhelmed a hobbled Celtics team. It was obvious the defending champions were vulnerable.

Speaker: 43:46

This was Showtime Lakers at their peak. Magic Johnson, league MVP, orchestrating the offense like a maestro, a 6'9 point guard. In Game 4, the Celtics were threatening to tie the series, but Magic hit the famous junior sky hook over Kevin McHale and Robert Parish. One of his signature moments in the NBA. The Lakers again won in six games. This would be the last time the Celtics and Lakers would play in the NBA finals until 2008 when the Celtics won that series in six games. Besides just the stats and who won the championships, this rivalry between the Celtics and Lakers, it was cultural, it was competitive. You had Boston, blue collar, team-oriented, defensive-minded. You had Los Angeles, glitz and celebrity, fast-paced, showtime. They were literally opposite coasts and opposite philosophies. Even the cities, Boston and LA, are very different. It was like Bird and Magic were the perfect avatars for their cities. Bird was stoic, tough, fundamentally sound. Magic was smiling, improvisational, and electric. I was always watching the Celtics once I got into the NBA, but I would only reserve my staying up late for West Coast games when the Celtics played the Lakers. Because you had to be up at 10 30 for tip-off on the East Coast. I wasn't going to be doing that to watch them play the Clippers or the Kings or the Trailblazers or the Supersonics. It was Lakers. That was it. They created must-see TV. Besides nine, ten-year-old kids like me. Everybody that liked basketball, and even people that weren't into it, they got into watching the NBA because of Bird and Magic, Celtics and Lakers. A crazy thing happened at the peak of the Lakers Celtics rivalry in the 80s is that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson became friends, and to this day they're very close friends. There was a Converse shoe commercial where Magic Johnson shows up at Larry Bird's house, steps out of his limo, and they're arguing about each other's shoes they have.

Speaker 5: 46:04

I heard Converse made a pair of Bird shoes, but last year's MVP. Yep. Okay, Magic, show me what you got.

Speaker: 46:16

They said on the set of that commercial is where they developed their respect and friendship. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson played head-to-head in the NBA 37 times. Magic had the overall lead, winning 22 and losing 15. In the 1980s alone, the Celtics and Lakers combined for eight of the ten NBA titles, with the Lakers winning five and the Celtics winning three. And if you were wondering to finish out the trivia, the other two NBA champions were the Philadelphia 76ers and Detroit Pistons. The Magic and Bird Celtics Lakers rivalry, it seems very eighties contained because Magic Johnson had to retire before the 1991 season when he was diagnosed with HIV. And Larry Bird retired after the 92 season because of all the cumulative injuries he had, especially his back. So when you look at it, it's really the 1980s, which is why this rivalry was so special. It's interesting when I think about it growing up here in New England. I almost think that the Celtics-Lakers rivalry of the 80s was better than the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry up until 2004 when the Sox finally won. Because how much of a rivalry could it be when the Yankees always beat the Red Sox? At least Celtics and Lakers, it was almost 50-50. It was like people in the 2000s and 2010 saying the Patriots and Jets had a rivalry, but how much of a rivalry is it when the Patriots win all the matchups? The Celtics-Lakers rivalry laid the foundation for the NBA's global popularity in the 90s and 2000s. Yes, you had legendary teams like Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls, and the San Antonio Spurs with Duncan and David Robinson, the Lakers with Shaq and Kobe. It all goes back to those original super teams of the Celtics-Lakers in the eighties. As I said a minute ago, the rivalry was renewed when the Celtics and Lakers met in the finals two out of three years in 2008 and 2010, with each team winning one. I am sure at some point I'll be doing more deep dives into the NBA in the 80s, specifically the Celtics. But summing this up, that 80s Celtics-Lakers rivalry was the perfect storm of talent, timing, and television. My mother and stepfather bought the sports channel cable package in New England so we could watch the Celtics. And we were middle class, so it wasn't just like we could throw away money for that. That's how important the Celtics were to us living in New England. We had our Celtic pride. Without Bird vs. Magic, Boston vs. LA, the NBA might never have become the global phenomenon it is today. It is not hyperbole to state how important Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and the Celtics and Lakers were. If you don't believe me, go on YouTube and just type in 1980s Celtics Lakers and just watch the highlights. Their battles didn't just decide the championships, they defined an era, they defined the eighties, captivated a generation, and changed the course of basketball history. But until next week, that's gonna wrap up episode 199 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Next week is episode 200. Have you voted in the polls on Patreon? It's free. Go become a free member, vote on what you want on the show. This is the point in the podcast where I usually would say coming up next week and give you kind of a rundown of what I've got, but I don't know. Voting is ongoing. I can see what's winning, but I don't want to jinx it or influence anyone's voting. So yeah, I just know that next week on episode 200, it's gonna be everything voted on by you, the listener. So thank you to all of you who go and vote. Thank you for those of you that share the podcast, that tell others to come and check out my wacky Gen X nostalgia. I'm constantly adding new ideas and new topics to my podcast rundown. I got something coming up that I'm very excited about, but I don't want to spoil, so I'll just leave that little teaser out there. If you enjoy my work, my content, you can always support me. $5 a month on Patreon.com. The link is in the podcast notes. You can always buy me a coffee. That's less. You can go as low as a dollar, which won't buy me a coffee, but that's fine. Of course, the best way to support me, to support any content creator, is by sharing what we do. Sharing the podcast, sharing my blogs, subscribing on YouTube, sharing the videos. I've got hundreds and hundreds of videos, sharing my books. I've got nine books that I've written. I'm hoping this week as I'm recording this podcast to actually really get into the meat and potatoes of voiceover acting. At least in terms of applying for a few gigs. I figure 200 episodes of the podcast, tons of videos that I made on YouTube, I think I can do pretty well with voiceover stuff, but who knows? Maybe in a few weeks you'll be listening to the radio and there'll be some annoying insurance commercial coming on, and you'll be like, wait, I know that guy's voice. He does that Gen X nostalgia podcast. Happy birthday again to one of my oldest friends, John. I gave you the time capsule this week. Coming up in a few weeks, episode 202 is the fortieth anniversary of one of our favorite movies, Back to the Future. You may be seeing cover art that might remind you of yourself. I don't want to spoil anything. I will do my best this week not to get injured worse playing basketball. Maybe I'll actually take some time away from the court. I think I made the joke last week that I could still record the show if both my hips exploded. That was kind of whistling past the graveyard. Because I can still record the show with my ankle kind of wrapped up as it is now. And wherever you are, stay warm if it's cool, stay cool if it's hot. But take the podcast with you. It's perfect length for a good walk outside. That's a little unexpected benefit. When I initially recorded the podcast, I didn't have a time frame in mind. I kind of just went as long as my content dictated, and now it's kind of settled into that 50 to 60 minute range. Perfect time to go outside and walk two or three miles, get your exercise in while you remember your childhood. I'll be back next week for the big episode 200, and from there it's the race to 300 and beyond. Thank you all so much. All of you that tune in weekly, those of you that might be hearing me for the first time, I've got a huge back catalog of episodes, and when I get the info, I'll be sharing where you can watch my first movie, see how my performance went playing a podcaster. But until then, remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life because you never know what tomorrow brings. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, but you already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.