by Larry Bird
I went to see Dan, and he started feeling around, and he said, “There’s nothing more I can do for you.” I left his office thinking, “Boy, this really is it.” I got in the car and started driving, but the pain was so intense that I had to stop after about a mile and get out and walk around.
Somehow I managed to play Game 5 at the Garden. A lot of times I would feel lousy heading into the game, but after Dan worked on me a bit, and all my adrenaline got pumping, I could block it out. I knew I’d pay for it later, but that was later. We beat the Pacers in Game 5 and won the series, but not before I banged my head on the parquet floor chasing after a loose ball. I don’t remember much of it, to be honest, because when they took me into the locker room I was in a daze. But I do remember one thing: after all I had been through with my back, no lump on the head was going to keep me out of the playoffs. I remember sitting in the locker room with our team doctor, Arnie Scheller, and after my head started clearing a little bit, I said to him, “Do I have a shot? Can I get back in there?” He said, “Hey, you’ve done enough. That’s it for you.” So we sit in that training room some more, and I keep hearing the crowd. They’re chanting, “Lar-ry! Larry!” I look at Arnie, and I said, “Aw, hell!” and I get up, I run through that tunnel, back onto the court, and the place goes absolutely nuts. Later, when I got hired by the Pacers, Donnie Walsh said he knew I would play. He said he knew I’d come back, and the place would go crazy, and we’d win the game, which is exactly what happened. Even so, we couldn’t sustain the momentum. We ended up losing to Detroit in six games in the next round, and a couple months after that I had my first back surgery.
The procedure involved shaving the disc, as well as widening the canal where the nerves that led to my spinal cord sat. I knew the surgery was not going to solve all my problems. In fact, the pain was back within a couple months. Fusion surgery had been an option, but the surgeons warned me that very few professional athletes had ever played again following fusion surgery, and I wasn’t interested in being a guinea pig. The truth? I was just trying to buy myself some time.
The same day I had my first surgery, I went out and walked ten miles. My surgeon was very optimistic. He said, “You should come back in January and I’ll take another look, but I think you are going to do just fine.” Well, Arnie brought the surgeon to one of our first games of the season. This doc knows nothing about basketball—he’s an old hockey player. He came in after the game and he said to me, “Larry, the way you play this game, you’re not going to last another month. I had no idea you did all this stuff. Hell, you don’t spend any time on your feet.” He looked kind of worried, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was feeling great!
At the time, we were 28–5, and on our way to the best record in the East at the All-Star break. Not very long after that, I was shooting around before the game, and I turned a little funny, and boom! There goes my back. I couldn’t believe it. I knew right then that was the end of it. I was in and out the rest of the season.
Once I realized my back was still going to mess me up no matter what, I seriously considered retiring right then and there. Dave Gavitt, who had come to the Celtics in 1990 to run the team, kept talking me out of it. Not too many people can change my thinking when my mind is made up about something, but Dave was different. We hit it off from the first day we met. Dave had a lot of innovative ideas about how to help the team, and I loved talking about basketball with him. You can tell he was a former coach—he had some really good Providence teams back in the seventies—because of how he approached people. He understood how a player saw the game, and understood that a team needed to have an identity, and that whatever went on in the locker room, or on the floor, was something that should be shared among each other, like a family.
I was really excited when Gavitt took over as the team’s CEO. We needed someone with his basketball expertise making personnel decisions. I was sure he’d be the one that would win us our next championship—until my back interfered.
I went into Dave’s office about four months after my first back surgery and told him, “Dave, I don’t think I can go on like this. I’m not the same player I was. I can’t play the way I want to anymore, and I’m thinking I should retire.” He put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Larry, I didn’t come here to throw you a retirement party. I came here to help you win a championship.” He gave me a little pep talk about how special our team was, and how the NBA would probably never see another front line like me, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish again, and then he got into the whole thing about the Celtics tradition and what it meant to the city of Boston, which was why he had given up his job as commissioner of the Big East to take over the Celtics. I’m telling you, Dave was a pretty persuasive guy. He could get you all fired up. I knew he would back me up, whatever I decided, and I guess I didn’t want to let him down. Besides, I agreed with him on one thing: we still had a chance to win a championship. As long as we still had a crack at that, it was going to be hard—impossible, really—for me to give up playing.
The last championship we won was in 1986. It was a dream season. Everybody played at the top of their games—me, Robert, Kevin, Dennis Johnson, Danny Ainge—and we had a great bench. We also had the two best centers in the league. That was the year Bill Walton played with us, and he was just phenomenal. He is the best passing big man I’ve ever seen, and I marveled at the things he could do, even though his feet were a mess and he wasn’t anywhere near the player he had once been. That didn’t matter on our team. Bill did what he could do, and that was more than enough. But what people tend to forget is that one of the big reasons Walton was able to have that kind of success was because of Robert Parish. Robert was an All-Star center, and he started every game, but there were many times when it was Walton, not Parish, who was on the floor in the fourth quarter. On a different team, with a different guy, that could have caused all sorts of problems. Some players get really protective about minutes, or when they are on the court and how much credit they’re given, but not Robert. He was a true pro. He really didn’t care how much he played, or when, as long as it worked for the team. That’s why that year was so great, because it was all about winning. I’m sure there were some days that Robert wished he was out there, but he would never have said so. I’m sure, also, there were times Robert got tired of all the media attention Bill got—and believe me, it was a lot, which I appreciated, because it took some of the spotlight away from me—but in the end, Robert knew his team respected him, and that’s all that really mattered.
Those are the kind of things I told my Indiana team when I took the Pacers job. Never mind what the outside world thinks—what do the guys who are on the court with you, day after day, think? Because they are the ones who know whether or not you’ve given them everything you have. I used to laugh when I read things in the paper about how important this guy was to our team, or how that guy wasn’t helping us. Because many times they had it all wrong. Take Greg Kite. He was a center from Brigham Young who got drafted by the Celtics in 1983, and Bob Ryan, a sportswriter for the Boston Globe, was constantly killing him. He’d say things like, “He’s a twelfth man that doesn’t belong in the league, this and that,” but what people don’t understand is that most fans only see the games. They don’t see practice. I always thought the practices were so important—I still believe that—to prepare other guys to play. That’s why our 1986 team was so successful. We had Walton going against Parish every day. We had Scottie Wedman going against me for a number of years, pushing me every day. To the second unit, those practices were their games, especially to a guy like Kite who didn’t play much. He wanted to beat us every day in practice. He never took a day off. He couldn’t afford to. He was excellent for our team. He was a smart player, he knew everything we were doing, and he understood exactly what his role was. I wish I could find me a Greg Kite right now for the Pacers.
After that 1986 championship, everything fell apart. Walton stuck around another season, but he was hurt almost all of i
t, and he retired after playing only ten games in 1987. The Celtics drafted Len Bias that spring, and he died of a cocaine overdose. That was a real shock. I was taking a shower, and my mom came in and told me. I thought it was somebody’s idea of a cruel joke. Then Kevin hurt his foot the next season, and by the time we got to the Finals against the Lakers, he was playing on a broken foot. It just seemed like we couldn’t catch a break.
Just before the 1988–89 season, both of my heels started really bothering me. This wasn’t a new injury. I had always had some pain down there. Dan said it didn’t help matters that I never stretched those Achilles tendons. He also said there had been some inflammation in that area for some time. But what took this pain to an unbearable level was that, over time, with repeated trauma to that area, I developed bone mass in both heels. There shouldn’t be any bone anywhere near there, and it was embedded in the tendon. I tried to play through it, but it wasn’t going to happen, so they decided to do surgery on both heels and take all that bone out. Dan was against the surgery. He thought he could treat me without it, but I wanted the pain to stop. I told him, “Let’s just get the stuff out of there and worry about the rest of it later.” Originally the doctors said I would miss about three months, but I ended up missing the whole season. I was miserable. It’s no fun watching your team struggle while you’re sitting there on the bench in street clothes.
When I started my rehab that summer I knew I would never be the same. My legs felt different. The surgery took all the life out of them. I did all the exercises and all the workouts they gave me, but I couldn’t move the way I used to. I could still score and rebound and all that, but defensively it really affected me. I didn’t have the same lift, or side-to-side movement. It was very, very frustrating, but there wasn’t much use in talking about it. I could either play on or give it up, and I figured I had a lot more playing to do.
Of course, that was before I had any real idea of how bad my back would get. I guess I should have known. The doctors had told me I had congenital problems. I was born with a narrower canal than normal where the nerves lead to the spinal cord. Then there are the joints in my back, called the facet joints. They are supposed to be aligned a certain way. The left and right joints should be parallel to each other, but the ones on my right side were at all sorts of different angles. What all of this meant was my disc was going to slowly break down over the course of my life. Dan says I would have had back problems whether I was a professional athlete or not. Just through the wear and tear of every day, my spinal area was deteriorating, and the disc was degenerating. And the worse that disc got, the more excessive motion it caused in my back. That created a wobbly area that had very little stability.
All of that may have been true, but when you are a kid running around playing basketball and baseball and everything else, you don’t want to know that stuff. I didn’t have any major injuries as a kid growing up, unless you count a broken ankle that I got playing basketball. I had no way of knowing my back was going to give out on me.
My first real back problems cropped up in 1983, when I went home to my house in French Lick for the summer to do some work on my property. One of the first things I wanted to get done was to install some tile around my basketball court, to help with the drainage. I was never much on hiring people to do work I was perfectly capable of doing myself, and this job shouldn’t have been a problem. I needed some gravel to seal it, so I got my brother and his friend Eddie to help me spread it. They weren’t doing it the way I wanted, so I said the heck with it, and I took that truck full of gravel and did it all myself. It wasn’t the best idea I ever had. I woke up the next morning and I said, “Something is wrong.” My back was killing me. I couldn’t walk around, much less work out, and I was worried. I had only been with the Celtics for four seasons at that point, and we had already won our first championship, but I knew that if we were ever going to win another one I was going to have to be even better than I was the year before.
I didn’t want to have to tell the team I was hurt, so I didn’t do anything for about two or three weeks, hoping the rest would make it all better. But by then it was July, and I knew I had to get moving with my conditioning and everything for the season, so I called the Celtics team doctor, Tom Silva, and told him what had happened. He told me to put lots of ice on it. I did that for the rest of the summer, but it wasn’t helping much.
I remember really suffering through training camp. Doc Silva would alternate with heat and ice, heat and ice, but it wasn’t working. I remember after we played Philadelphia in an exhibition game at home, the pain was so bad I went to Silva again and said, “We’ve got to try something else.” He said, “Larry, I don’t know what else to tell you.” He called in Dr. Robert Leach, who examined me, then recommended I be seen by this physical therapist, Dan Dyrek, who he thought could help me. I agreed to see Dyrek at my house the next day.
He examined me in my living room, with Doc Leach and our trainer, Ray Melchiorre, watching. He was twisting me this way and that way, and digging into certain areas of my back, and everything he did hurt a whole lot. He explained what he was doing as he went along, and I was listening to everything he said, but I kept looking at Ray and Leach, because I knew them, and I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. I was only twenty-six years old, and I didn’t like the looks on their faces.
My first impression of Dan was pretty good. At least he wasn’t telling me I needed heat and ice, heat and ice, because it was pretty obvious that wasn’t going to work. I remember about an hour after they all left, I got up to turn on a light, and they were all standing in my driveway, still talking. I went back and told Dinah, “They’re still out there. You know what that means. My back must be pretty screwed up.”
Dyrek called me the next morning and explained that there was what he called a real “hot spot” in my back around the disc that he wanted to treat by mobilizing the tissues and tendons around that area. The idea was to manually manipulate that area to restore normal motion and take pressure off the disc. I said, “Let’s start today.”
That’s how my relationship with Dan Dyrek came about. It started out as professional, but he’s become one of my close friends. When you spend that much time with somebody, you find out what kind of person they are, and Dan was always a professional. I never worried that he would be talking to anyone about my treatments. And I could tell early on he knew what he was doing. When I first started seeing him, I was getting these major pains in my side that would last for more than ten seconds when I sat down. It was brutal. But after two or three weeks of seeing Dan, that pain gradually started going away. I ended up receiving treatment every other day for two years.
A couple of months after he started helping me, I offered Dan a couple of my tickets to a Celtics game. I knew he’d never ask for anything. I didn’t even know if he was a sports fan until I saw his face when I gave him the tickets. He looked so excited, and surprised. I’m not the type to just go out and give my tickets to anyone, but I really appreciated how much Dan was helping me. So I gave him two tickets to each game for the rest of the season. We spent so much time together that our pregame treatments turned into little challenges. Just before it was time to take the court, Dan would ask, “How are you doing?” and I’d say, “I’m feeling like I can score forty-three points tonight.” If I actually got to 43 points, we’d have some kind of prearranged signal, like a salute, and I’d turn and give it to him.
It was really important that I could trust Dan not to discuss my injuries. I didn’t want the fans and the media to know every little thing that was wrong with me, but even more important, I didn’t want the teams we were playing against to know! That’s why nobody knew about the neck problems I was having about this same time. But that was nothing compared to my back.
My next serious back episode was in the summer before the 1989–90 season, when I went to a fund-raiser that the singer Kenny Rogers put on each year. I love Kenny Rogers’s music, and I had been doing his charity even
t for three years or so and it was a lot of fun. He got four pro basketball players, four fishermen, four tennis players, and four golfers, and we all tried to play one another’s sports.
I was still having some trouble with my back, but Dan had gotten me to the point where I had long stretches of being pain-free. I was feeling pretty good about the upcoming season.
We were in the final minutes of this charity basketball game when I went up for a rebound and came down a little sideways. Michael Jordan was going for the ball too, and he landed on my back. Right away I knew I was in trouble. My back started tightening up, and I could feel the pain coming on. The game was almost over, which was a good thing, because I was done. I just kind of stood there until it ended, and then I walked off the court without telling anybody what had just happened. Dinah was there with me, and she got on the phone to Dan and told him we needed to come up to Boston to see him. It was awkward, because the fund-raising people kept asking me to play tennis, but I couldn’t, and I really didn’t feel like explaining why.
Within a couple of days we were in Dan’s office, and I could tell right away the news wasn’t good. I had torn additional portions of the disc wall, and my back was really traumatized. I didn’t know it then, all the way back in 1989, but that was the beginning of the end. Dan was able to treat me so I got better and was able to play, but I never came all the way back. For the rest of my career I had to rely on Dan to continually treat me and put things back in their proper place. We told the Celtics what had happened. They took it pretty well. The truth was, my back was so unstable, it was going to give way sometime. It wasn’t like it was this violent collision; Michael didn’t even land on me that hard. I was just at the point where I was an accident waiting to happen.
