When the Minneapolis professional basketball club moved to Los Angeles in 1960, it kept the name Lakers, a curious choice at first glance, because Southern California is not Minnesota — the state with 10 000 lakes — and that, in our minds, always hungry for logic and connections, the association between the City of Angels and fresh water bodies is far from self-evident.
But why change a winning formula? In the north of the country, the Lakers had already participated in six of the thirteen championship finals of the young National Basketball Association (NBA), and they had won five of them, including three in a row at the dawn of the Eisenhower years, a first “ trepeat ”, as they say there.
Continuing on this momentum, they would find in their path the Celtics of Bill Russell who, during their astonishing and insurmountable sequence of twelve participations and eleven titles in the space of thirteen years, routinely kicked their butts seven times. Between 1959 and 1970, the Lakers went 0-8 in the Finals. They now had their pet peeve and still had a whole story ahead of them.
Today, the two clubs dominate the NBA record with 17 wins each, a tie that the Celtics, after having flown through the regular season, will try to break in the coming weeks. And if the Lakers now hold the record for the number of defeats at the top, with 15, it is by virtue of their 32 appearances in the championship series, a rather incredible number: since 1947, the Lakers have played in a little less than half and a little over a third of all NBA Finals! To find a comparable record, you have to change sports and look towards the Montreal Canadiens and the New York Yankees.
But basketball in LA isn’t just about basketball. It is undoubtedly no coincidence that the biggest stars of this sport have succeeded one another under the spotlights of the capital of showbiz, from Wilt Chamberlain to LeBron James via the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Earvin Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant of this (beautiful) world. Between the 1980s and the third millennium, when the cream of basketball players went beyond the simple ball game to achieve the status of cultural icons, it is there, in a scent of glamour Hollywood, which the very great paraded.
Larry Bird, of the Celtics, and Michael Jordan were the only two major legends to scratch the legendary dynasty inaugurated by Magic Johnson in 1980 and called Showtimeas much for the astonishing brilliance of its playmaker as for the aura of celebrity which emanated from its supporters, including Jack Nicholson at the height of glory and quite a few pretty groupies ready to give of themselves.
I started to take an interest in basketball a few months later than the rest of the planet, at the time of the third coronation of Jordan’s Bulls, in 1993, less than a year after the sweep of the Dream Team at the Barcelona Games. And two years earlier had taken place the transfer of power, when, in the finale that everyone was hoping for, Air Jordan, definitively taking off as a shoe super-seller high-techhad finally ruled out an aging Johnson.
In the 1990s, every kid wanted to wear Nike, but it had already been almost a generation since Earvin Magic Johnson brought basketball into globalized popular culture. I knew only by hearsay of the golden legend of his clashes with Bird’s Celtics, because this atavistic rivalry, like the fights of Muhammad Ali, transcended the sporting scene. From Johnson, endowed with this ordinary lechery which today finds its redemption under the name of sexual addiction and an extraordinary vitality, I had especially retained a few words spoken during a press conference strewn with flashes and which I still hear as if I were there: “ Because of this HIV virus I have…, I will have to retire from the Lakers. »
Read the 800-page bio that Roland Lazenby has just devoted to him (Magic. The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson2023) is like taking a course in Magic Johnson 101. The only drawback being that, to get to the last chapters and this famous press conference which brought AIDS out of the closet of American consciousness, you have to First of all, agree to deal with a French translation whose poor quality reaches the height of ridiculousness.
Apparently, Talent Éditions, in Paris, does not invest much in that of its translators. The pair who laboriously moved this book from an Anglo-American language that they don’t know very well to a French that, obviously, they don’t know much better seem to ignore that the word ” game » can have more than one meaning. But perhaps these translators don’t know much about the sport itself, which would explain why the transition game (” transition game ) called by the context becomes, for them, a “transitional match” which has absolutely no connection.
Elsewhere, they confuse “moving” and “emotional”, translate “ price fight » (boxing fight) by “prize competition” (!), and a completely unmarked player (“ widely open ) becomes, ayoye, a “wide open” player! Similar pearls jump out at us almost on every page, enough to constitute a hilarious blooper, but it is the work as a whole, with its unstructured and seemingly mindless text, that I find distressing. The simple management of verb tenses seems beyond their strength. Sloppy work at all levels: that’s the only explanation.
You may think I’m exaggerating, but the following example is typical of the style in which Lazenby’s “Magic” is translated: “He who wanted to win everything now had the one trophy he didn’t own. » Um.