The Kitchen Table

Our first client at GS&P was a company named “Amazin’ Software.” It consisted of a young Harvard guy, Tripp Hawkins, a British engineer named Tim Mott, a goofy former Ogilvy & Mather account man, Bing Gordon, and a gaggle of teenaged programmers.

Computer games came on floppy disks in those days, usually packaged in plastic bags with the title on cardboard that sealed the top and hung on a metal rod at retail. Rich Silverstein, Andy Berlin and I had come from a childhood of record album covers, so we decided games should come in downsized record albums too, that could feature arty covers and even interviews with the electronic artists inside.

That’s what we called the programmers, electronic artists. In fact, that’s what we wanted to call the company too: Electronic Artists. It reminded us of Charlie Chaplin’s United Artists, and seemed to suggest a band of renegades and freak geniuses. Tripp, though, thought it sounded too low tech. So we changed it to Electronic Arts.

It’s worth reading the copy. Check it out.

The first ad for EA (as it came to be called) included an Irving Penn sort of black and white portrait of the programming staff, with the headline, “Can A Computer Make You Cry?” The engineering community loved it. For the first time, they weren’t geeks, they were stars. Rock stars. (In fact, at a 25th anniversary of EA’s founding, a good number of them came up to me and said that that ad was why they became game programmers.

EA of course went on to become the most successful game company of all time. Tripp Hawkins was on the cover of TIME. And we designed and wrote packages for games that have now become classics: “Mule,” “Archon,” “Hard Hat Mack,” and “Murder on the Zinderneuf.” These things look like massively primitive Lego creations in light today. They make “World of Warcraft” look like a cure for cancer. Nevertheless, they sold like CRAZY.

Several years into our relationship with EA, still in the pre-Internet era, there was a lot of debate about whether digital games would be sold in big flashy mass market ways, or through direct mail. Amazingly, they chose direct mail, fired us, and that’s why we don’t work for them anymore. But that’s another story.

Anyway, we somehow lasted as their agency until 1988, when they concocted a new game called “Dr. J and Larry Bird: One on One.” It was going to be their biggest title ever.

For the cover of the game package, Silverstein designed a gritty shot with Larry Bird and Julius Erving in street basketball clothes, up against a playground wall. How would we get such a shot? Good question.

Fortuitously, it turned out that there is an NBA Hall of Fame dinner in Springfield, Massachusetts every year, and Bird and J would be attending as the most likely future inductees. They had to be there. And someone had to pick them up at the airport.

That someone was me. The plan was, I would take the two of them to a nearby junior high school where Rich would dress them in playground basketball clothes. Dennis Grey would then photograph them looking inner city tough.

And so it was that, two weeks later, two of the most famous basketball players on the planet strode out of the terminal at Bradley Field, near Springfield, signing an autograph here and there, but totally without any handlers or security. Bird had won three NBA championships and, along with Magic Johnson, brought basketball back from a purgatory of thuggery and drug abuse. Dr. J had revolutionized the athleticism of basketball and won a Finals himself. (He would tell me that the 1985 Sixers championship team was “a jazz quintet. We were trading solos, man.”)

As he walked off the plane, J smiled and shook my hand warmly. His thumb and fingers actually met around my hand. I was enveloped. Bird was shy and a little distracted. “How you doin?” he said, and headed off. He was carrying his own duffel bag.

Julius did all the talking. “What’s up? What are we doing? Who are you?” he asked.

I had the keys to a rental car which, though an act of incredibly inept planning, was a four door Honda Accord. Dr. J got in front with his knees looming as high as the top of the dashboard. Larry sat sideways across the back. Neither one uttered a word of complaint.

Meanwhile, Rich was at the junior high, trying to turn it into Harlem. Graffiti was everywhere (how did they know what to write?), ripped fences, careworn metal chain nets. It felt dangerous when you walked out there, even though the area around it was seriously “Leave It to Beaver.”

Julius was nostalgic as we drove right through the area around the University of Massachusetts, where The Doctor had been such a college sensation. “There was a Valle’s Steak House right there,” he pointed. “We used to think we would’ve made it, if we could afford a steak at Valle’s.” He shook his head. “Check it out! Drive through the campus, can we?”

Bird groaned loudly. “Noooooo. Please, no. Let’s get this over with.”

“That’s just because you went to a farmer school,” Julius said. “Indiana State is a farmer school. Nobody wants to go back and drive around a farmer school. This place is cool.”

We drove through the campus, with Dr. J chuckling about this and that. Bird was rolling his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Stop! Please!”

The junior high school where the shoot would take place was an unassuming brick building. It was a Sunday morning, if I remember right, and the place was deserted. We went around back and encountered Rich’s recreation of Rucker Playground on 155th Street.

J and Bird greeted the crew, but were all business. They got right to the task of dressing for the photos. Both started with their shirts off, Bird in some cut off jeans, and J in shorts. While Larry was in very good shape, his whiteness looked a bit inadequate next to the gleaming black musculature of Dr. J. They put a cutoff sweatshirt on him. Would he be offended by this request? “Thank you!” Larry smiled.

They walked onto the basketball court and, in an action they’d repeated thousands of times, picked up a ball and started lazily arching it toward the hoop. It was an act that connected these enormous grown men with their childhoods, and they did it with a curious blend of ennui and anticipation.

At first, they didn’t engage with each other at all. They just shot the ball from wherever it happened to land, short hooks and lay-ins that telegraphed they weren’t really trying. We told them we’d need them to at least pretend they were playing one-on-one. We’d need such shots for our game cover, but we were also rolling video tape for the game designers. In those days, before the invention of those electronic reference body suits designers now use, computer games were still drawn, like animated cartoons. If you’ve ever seen the finished “One-on-One,” you’d agree that it is hilariously dinky by today’s standards – especially J’s pixelated Afro.

Meanwhile, out on the court, things started to heat up. Bird and J were each trying a bit harder – not going all out, but trying harder. Larry would pump fake, and Julius would make believe he was blocking the shot. Then, J would lope past Bird for an easy lay-up.

There was suddenly a moment, though, when Bird laughed, just a little derisively, when he threw up a hook from 15 feet and it swished through. He was a famous trash-talker, of course, and I thought I noticed J get a little irritated by this gesture. The next time around, The Doctor blew past Bird and elevated from ten feet out like he was about to slam the ball quite emphatically, only to instead roll it gently off his finger tips as if to say that really ain’t nothin.

The bonhomie did not last. Minutes later, it became apparent that neither man could really stop the other from scoring. Dr. J streaked past Bird to the basket, time and again. Left hand, right hand, contact, no contact, it made no difference. He would score. Likewise, Bird sank every shot from the outside. Every single one. And when J came out to block him, he would simply slither under his block and score as Julius came down on top of him. In fact, the only time either guy didn’t score was when he went against his strength. If Bird tried to drive, Julius would easily outjump him to block his layup. Conversely, Dr. J was not nearly as accurate from the outside as Bird was.

Now they were both sweating. It was fun – an honor – to watch. Just our little crew watching two Hall of Famers goof around on a junior high court.

It was at that moment that a little boy rode around the corner on a blue banana bike. He was still 50 feet from the court, but he saw who was playing. Before the production assistants could talk to him, he had pivoted and sped off.

Two minutes later, the whole neighborhood rounded that same corner. The crew had to stretch yellow crime scene tape up to keep back what was soon hundreds of onlookers. J and Bird played on intrepidly, now with a cheering crowd. Between points, they would often stop and talk to kids nearby. All pretext of serious on court battle disappeared from the photography. And finally, we just called it quits.

As the crew packed up, the players waded cooperatively into the crowd, talking and signing anything and everything. Dr. J used a Sharpie to autograph the shoulder of a nice-looking high school girl. Bird took off his sweaty shirt and threw it to an eight-year-old kid. Everyone went wild.

I bet they stayed there for 15 minutes. Back in the car, it was like it had never happened. I think Larry said something nice about the locals. Then Dr. J returned to pointing out pizza joints and hot bars, and Bird got back to howling for him to shut up.

We pulled up at the Springfield Marriott, where I was supposed to interview Bird for the game package. Dr. J headed off without saying goodbye to Larry at all. He came up to me, though. “That was fun,” he said. My hand disappeared inside his again.

On the way to Bird’s room, a couple stopped him and said they were from Indiana, just like he was. People must do this to him all the time, I thought. He’s got to be so sick of it.

Instead, Larry lit up. “What town you from?” he beamed, towering over the tiny couple. I waited for five or ten minutes while they talked about the kind of season Indiana State and Indiana had, what high schools were going to be good, and what the weather’s been like back there.

Bird was smiling and shaking his head as we walked off. “They didn’t even ask for an autograph,” he said. “I like that.”

I never saw either of them again.