How Al Horford’s golf outing helped to spark a Celtics comeback for the ages

BOSTON — Al Horford can barely swing a golf club. So why was he holding one on his lone day off after going down  0-3 in their series with the Heat in Miami? With the season on the verge of collapse one week ago, Horford was tired of reliving Boston’s failures. His coach, Joe Mazzula, tends to be stoic and steady when talking to the team in most settings, yet nothing gets him to light into his players like an ugly film session. But after all his years in the league and even a few more on earth than his coach, Horford knew this wasn’t the time to berate the locker room. They all could see they were blowing it. Every player understood that while there were schematic changes that needed to be ironed out, this was an emotional problem. They were no longer connected, something their coach admitted to after their Game 3 dismantling. Mazzulla said he needed to do a better job preparing his team to repair the disconnect, but Horford had seen this before. The Celtics had to find their togetherness and it was his job as the OG to make that happen. Horford told Mazzulla to ditch the film session, organizing a team trip to Topgolf instead. They needed to have fun with each other and feel the joy again. “We completely skipped film,” Grant Williams told The Athletic. “We kept basketball away and we just focused on each other and getting that camaraderie and team back. We disconnected from the actual pressures and we were able to just enjoy one another. We’ve done movies before, we’ve done dinners. But that was our first time doing something active like that. Then we hit the film the next day.” The irony was that Horford shanked just about every shot he took. Jaylen Brown called this a crucial moment but told The Athletic he couldn’t hit anything straight either. It didn’t matter. After all of these struggles on the basketball court, messing around in another sport together was all they needed to get their minds right. “For me at the end of the day, I guess what I can tell you is that our connection with this group goes beyond the court. It’s more on a human level, right?” Horford told The Athletic. “Like friendships, bonds that we’ve built here. Over basketball, I want to make sure that everybody is good and I think sometimes we get so caught up in everything that goes on in our business, you know, it’s expected, it’s our jobs, right? But at the same time, you have to have that perspective.” They were trailing the Miami Heat 0-3 in the Eastern Conference finals when they teed off that day. On Saturday, they came back to Miami and forced a Game 7 as Derrick White made history. That off day together planted the seed for what could be the greatest comeback in NBA history. “That moment, that small instance, that small moment really signifies everything that we’re seeing right now,” Brown said after Boston’s 104-103 Game 6 victory. “In that moment, we could have chose to be like, throw in the towel, and I think like that’s what everybody was expecting or seeing or feeling, that that was coming. But no, that’s not how we wanted to go out. We appreciate all the fans who supported us to get to this point.” As they gathered for their team activity, rumors of fractures in the locker room were blowing up their phones. After Game 3, Mazzulla admitted there was a disconnect he needed to fix. But this team has repeatedly insisted it’s on them to decide their fate, not their coach. So they had to throw the film session out the window. “Those guys had a choice to make,” Mazzulla said. “And they chose to believe in each other.” Before Game 5, everyone was laughing about how Payton Pritchard was disgusted by Grant Williams’ impression of Blake Griffin doing an impression of Payton Pritchard. Forget about levity, they were having fun. By the time the win wrapped up, Horford was walking around the locker room with his son challenging everyone to games of rock, paper and scissors. “I mean, if you’ve been around us the whole season, you know how close this locker room is,” White said. “You see how we’re always joking around. Everybody is getting along. When times are tough, it’s easy to kind of point the fingers, per se, but we just stuck together, cared for each other, and we’ve got one more game to go.” And through that calm and fun came a ferocity that had abandoned them to start the series. Even though they weren’t dominating in the first half of Game 4, Horford said he could see how locked in the team was and knew they were going to turn around after halftime. Then suddenly, they were the ultimate version of themselves, flying all over the place on defense and running all over the Heat on offense. They spent the season saying they knew they had gone from hunters to hunted. But with everything on the line, they were on the attack again and leaving everything out on the floor. “I guess for us it was really our backs was against the wall. Just like an animal in the wild, you back them up, and his back is against the wall,” Marcus Smart said. “He’s doing his thing. He would even tear his own arm off to get out of that hole that he was in. For us, we had to tear our own arm off.” The Celtics were throwing away a prolific season and perhaps their best shot at raising a banner together. Who knows what change was coming if the final nail was hammered into their coffin? But they didn’t want an epic embarrassment to define them. “Don’t measure a man when everything is going well; measure a team or a group or an individual when adversity hits,” Brown said. “It hit us like a storm. Like, can’t get no worse in the playoffs, and how we’ve kind of been playing, and look at how we responded. … That just tells you that the group that we have is unique. The group that we have is special.” It all started at Topgolf, swinging clubs, playing Uno, and just vibing with each other like it’s any other day to leave the mountain of pressure behind. That was the calm before the storm. “I think it was pivotal,” Horford said. “To Joe’s point, we had a choice to make. Our group is a resilient group. We believe in what we have and what we can do as a team. We’re sticking together through thick and thin.” As the adrenaline wore off from the improbable ending to Game 6, the perspective of their fortune sank in. If Smart’s shot had bounced the other direction, away from White, their season would be over in the most disappointing fashion. They would have let it all slip through their grasp, once again, for the final time. But that combination of faith, hope and all those other things brought them to Game 7. “Right now, I’m just excited that we just gave ourselves another chance,” Tatum said. “We didn’t play well the first three games. We didn’t deserve to win, whatever you want to say. We really took it one game at a time. The series is not over. We’ve still got a big game Monday. But just the grit that we showed to get to this moment, I’m proud of that. I’m proud to be on this team.” Now the Celtics are on the verge of moving on to the NBA Finals and pulling off the greatest comeback in NBA history. They watched the Heat exhibit what makes a team special for the first three games of the series, then have spent the rest of the conference finals learning the ultimate lesson to extend a season full of them. Last year’s run taught them the fine line between a group with ambitious talent and a true team with an unwavering identity. The Heat reminded them of that truth after the Celtics spent this season taking it for granted. “It just shows how much heart and fight we have as a team, as brothers,” Williams said. “Our run isn’t over yet.” As Smart and Horford sat at their lockers trying to process one of the most shocking plays they’ll ever see, Smart tried to distill every feeling bouncing around his head as he turned to Horford. Smart warned the world not to let the Celtics get one. They got three. Now they have a chance to get one more and keep their resurrected title hopes alive. After doing just about everything they can to give the season away in crunch time, an OG like Horford would probably want to start parsing film to find every little mistake they can fix. But if there’s anything his trip to Topgolf affirmed, it’s that basketball film can wait. Instead, he told Smart, let’s go back to the hotel and watch a movie. The game is over. Basketball will be there tomorrow. Now it’s time to just be together. Subscribe to The Athletic for in-depth coverage of your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Try a week on us. Jared Weiss is a staff writer covering the Boston Celtics and host of the Grant and Tacko Show & Daily Ding podcast for The Athletic. He has covered the Celtics since 2011, co-founding CLNS Media Network while in college before covering the team for SB Nation’s CelticsBlog and USA Today. Before coming to The Athletic, Weiss spent a decade working for the government, primarily as a compliance bank regulator. Follow Jared on Twitter @JaredWeissNBA