by Larry Bird
The one scene that will always stand out in my mind was the first day we had practice. It was the same day Cedric Maxwell, Sidney Wicks, and Curtis Rowe were giving me all that grief about being the Great White Hope. You could tell those guys had their own little thing going. They were smart-mouthing everybody, and calling me the savior—here comes the savior—being really smart-ass about it. I bet we weren’t in practice twenty minutes, and Fitch started killing us. He just ran us into the ground. I didn’t know any better; I thought it was normal. All of a sudden Fitch blows the whistle and says, “Okay, Curtis. Why don’t you go on and get dressed. They’ll send you your checks. You’re done here.” I was thinking to myself, “What is he talking about?” But there goes Curtis Rowe, out the door. We practice another hour and Fitch blows the whistle again, and he sends Sidney Wicks packing.
Now all of a sudden the whole atmosphere has changed. I think Max was a little ticked off, but he got in line pretty quick. I didn’t know what was going on, really, so I just put my head down and kept working.
So that’s how I knew that Bill Fitch was going to be demanding. A Bill Fitch practice is all movement. That’s what I want our Pacers practices to be. With Bill, you always ran a lot more than you think you did, and that’s what I loved about it. He just kept it coming, one drill after another. The one thing he always did was make me play one-on-one against guys after practice. In the beginning it was M. L. Carr, but as soon as he got fatigued he’d send somebody else out there. One day it might be Max, another day it would be Dave Cowens. It was just so exhausting.
In my first year, after we had played about 30 games I went to see Doc Silva, because I was losing a lot of weight. I was down to about 208 pounds, which was about 25 pounds under what I usually was, and Doc Silva said, “He’s working you too hard, kid. You probably should take a week off.” I was having trouble visualizing that, telling Bill Fitch I needed a week off, but Doc Silva was insistent. He said, “You can’t continue to lose weight like this. Go to Florida. Put your feet up for a bit.” I told him, “I don’t need to go to Florida, but could you tell Coach not to run us so hard? Then I wouldn’t be losing so much.”
Bill Fitch was the best coach for me at that time, because I had no clue what I was getting myself into. He would put me through these grueling drills just to get a reaction out of me, but he never did get one. The truth was, I loved it when he worked us like that. He kept me hungry. He never let you know where you stood, so you kept on working so you could impress him.
The funny thing about it is that as a coach, I’m the opposite of Bill Fitch. I don’t yell like he did, and I give my guys a lot more freedom, but I find myself using so much of Bill’s stuff, especially when it comes to conditioning drills.
We won a championship with Bill in 1981, but you could see his ways were wearing on the team. When Robert Parish says something, then you know there’s a problem. Guys like Max and M. L., they always had something to say, but Robert never said anything bad about Coach Fitch, even though there were times you could tell he’d had enough. When even he finally spoke up, then I knew Fitch was gone. All those guys respected Bill Fitch as a coach, but they had trouble not taking his comments to heart. The things he said to them when he got them in a corner, that’s all part of coaching, but they couldn’t separate that. Fitch would say things to Kevin McHale, and he’d get all flustered.
I was really disappointed when they let Bill Fitch go, because I learned so much from him, but I knew it was time. I truly believe three years is the max for any coach with one team. That’s why when I signed my contract with the Indiana Pacers, it was for three years. I guarantee I will not be coaching for them any longer than that. Things get stale to players real fast, even more so today, and they need a fresh look at things. I’m not even sure I’ll make it to three years. I told Donnie Walsh I would reevaluate things after every season.
When Fitch left the Celtics we knew it would be different with K. C. Jones, who was promoted from our assistant coach to our head coach, but we picked up Dennis Johnson that summer, and I felt we’d be fine as a group. K. C. couldn’t have been any more opposite than Fitch. It took a lot to get K. C. really riled about something; it didn’t take much at all for Bill. K. C. doesn’t get a lot of credit for the job he did with our 1984 and 1986 Celtics championship teams, because everyone thinks we were so talented that we could just do it ourselves. That’s not true. K. C. was the perfect coach for that team, because he gave us the freedom we wanted and needed, but also because he knew when it was time to step in and make his presence felt.
K. C. didn’t waste a lot of words. He’d just walk over to you and say, “Hey, you can make a better effort than that.” I remember right from the beginning, K. C. said, “I don’t care what you guys do off the court. When we throw the ball out there, it’s time to play, and you better be ready.” That’s one thing that stuck in my mind. We only needed to give him two hours a day, so get to work. I’ve tried to treat my Indiana players the same way. I promised them I would never yell at them, and, for the most part in my first season, I kept my word. If one of my guys is doing something I don’t like, I pull him aside and say, “I need a better screen from you. Don’t set a lazy pick. Set a good one.” And, if they don’t do what I ask, I call them over a second time and say, “This is the last time I’ll tell you. If you can’t set a good pick, I’ll go out and find myself someone who can.”
One of the things that K. C. really helped me with was controlling my emotions on the court. When I was young, I could be really hotheaded at times. If something set me off, especially early in my career, I would end up with a technical, or sometimes even be thrown out of a game. I remember after one of my outbursts, when I got tossed, K. C. called me aside. He said, “Larry, you aren’t thinking. You are forgetting how valuable you are to us. You don’t do us any good when you’re sitting in the locker room all ticked off about something. You’ve got to understand that when you’re out on the court, we’ve got a chance to win every game. But when you’re sitting in the locker room, and we’re out there playing, we have very little chance of winning.” What I remember most about that was how calmly K. C. said all of it to me. He wasn’t shouting. He explained it very simply, like it was so obvious, and by the time he was done it was obvious to me he was right.
So now whenever I see my star player, Reggie Miller, getting all worked up about something, I tell him the same thing. He’s a very emotional player, which is fine, but not when he gets caught up in those emotions and lets them affect his play. I sat him down early in the season and gave him that whole talk about how when he’s sitting out, he’s not helping us. So now Reggie knows where I got it.
K. C. was an easy guy to play for. He loved to win, but win or lose, he’d call us together after the game and say, “Okay, go in there and wash your asses, and let’s get out of here.” I always got a kick out of that. In fact, after one of our Indiana games, it just came to me that’s what K. C. used to say, so I called my team together and told them, “Okay, go in there and wash your asses, let’s get out of here.” You should have seen them looking at me. They thought I’d lost it.
One other thing I stole from K. C.: not being afraid to sit back and go with the flow of the game. I remember one time we were playing the Clippers, and we were running a play called “32,” for Kevin McHale (his number was 32). It’s basically a play where a guy spins off from the weak side and sets a pick for Kevin. We ran the play two times in a row, and Kevin scored both times. So K. C. yells out, “Thirty-two.” Again and again. He wouldn’t get off it. Finally, the Clippers called time, and K. C. got us in the huddle and said, “We’ll run it fifty times if they don’t stop us.” I love that. I don’t understand why more coaches don’t do that. They all want to save their big plays. But if you save it and the other team gets on a run and scores 15 points, they might have built up enough confidence to stop “32” at that point. I find myself calling out the same play over and over if it’s working. Maybe not to
the extent that K. C. did, but I’m with him. Why not keep coming at ’em until they stop you?
When K. C. decided he had coached enough, after the 1987–88 season, everybody knew the next guy in line was Jimmy Rodgers, who was K. C.’s top assistant and had been part of probably the best coaching staff ever in 1986—Bill Fitch, K. C., and Jimmy. I was really excited that Jimmy got the head job, because he had already been so valuable to our team, and he had very patiently waited for his turn. Jimmy had head coaching offers at other places, including New York, but the Celtics wouldn’t let him out of his contract because they wanted him to be the successor to K. C. I was hopeful that things would go well for Jimmy, but his first season was the year I had surgery on my heels and only played in six games. I came back for the 1989–90 season, and it was a tough year.
People still think I didn’t like Jimmy Rodgers, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. It was just a frustrating season for all of us. We were running a new offense, and nothing seemed to be going smoothly. In the past what had made us so good was how quickly we could get the ball out of the hoop and move it up the floor. But as we got into the season we started playing a different way. Dennis Johnson, who was our point guard, would get the ball and control it for most of the shot clock. He’d come out, get the ball, hold it, and wait for almost 20 seconds. If I could have come off the ball and set a backdoor screen, or something like that, it would have opened up things for everyone, but to just stand there and hold the ball, that was a game I had never played.
I always thought Jimmy Rodgers was a great basketball man, and I’ll always feel that way about him. But like any player or coach, we didn’t always think alike. I felt at the time that our strength was ball movement, but our new offense didn’t emphasize that. There was a game in Detroit, and I was told to stand out on the wing and hold the ball, to wait for things to develop. So I did exactly what they told me. I just held the ball, and I didn’t shoot, even when I was open. I passed up some 12-foot jumpers with nobody around me. I was frustrated, and after the game when the media asked me why I wasn’t looking for my offense, I told them I was doing what the coaches wanted. When they asked me if I liked it, I told them I wasn’t a scorer anymore, I was a “point forward.”
Even though I was just expressing my opinion, the media made a big deal out of it the next day, and Jimmy got all upset about it. I didn’t mean to embarrass Jimmy. I wasn’t trying to create problems for him, it’s just that I was disappointed in the play of our team. I thought I was pretty close to Jimmy Rodgers. When he was an assistant we talked a lot. Once he got the head job, maybe he thought he had to change. His personality was definitely different as a head coach. We used to worry about him a little bit, because the stress seemed to really get to him.
About that same time, our team was starting to fall apart. One thing about the Celtics was we always had a good locker room, with guys always busting on each other, but that year it wasn’t like that. There was tension in the locker room. The whole thing blew up one day after this article ran in the New York Post talking about our team and how divided it was.
I just remember coming in and getting ready for the game, and then all of a sudden all these reporters are at my locker asking me questions about this article. I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t known anything about it, but the paper said there were guys on my team who said I couldn’t accept the fact I was no longer the focal point of the offense, and that my ego was causing all sorts of problems, and I was the reason we were losing. Basically, these two teammates, who didn’t have the guts to put their names in there, were calling me selfish.
I had my suspicions right away on who I thought the two guys were: Jim Paxson and Kevin McHale. Paxson had come to our team a couple seasons before, and he was injured almost the whole time he was there. He was on the downside of his career, and he couldn’t play the way he wanted to, but right away he was a guy I stayed away from, because he was your classic clubhouse lawyer, always talking behind people’s backs. I’ve never trusted people like that. I’ve always felt that if you have something to say, then say it out loud, like a man. But Paxson wasn’t like that. He and McHale became friendly almost right away, and I knew it was going to be bad news for our team. Kevin is a good guy, but he’s always been a follower. The one great thing about all the years Robert Parish, Kevin, and I played together was we always had a great team—no backstabbers. But that was about to change.
The story caused a big stink. The Boston papers wrote the same kind of piece a few days later, and all hell broke loose. I didn’t say too much about it, except that I felt I knew who the two guys were and one of them had a yellow streak running down his back. Everyone knew who I meant, and suddenly Paxson’s name was in the paper. Right away, Paxson denied he was one of the guys. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t really care. What was a lot more disappointing to me was that Kevin had said those things. I just felt that after playing so many years with one guy and going through all the battles we went through together, whether he liked me or not was one thing, but to go to a paper like that and then not even own up to it …I just thought it was a cheap shot. I never said anything to Kevin, but he knew.
I’ve always thought the world of Kevin McHale—I still do—but I was so hurt he would do something so cheap like that. But I always knew Kevin could be one of those guys. He’d come to me and say, “D. J. won’t pass the ball and you’ve got to tell D. J. not to do that,” and then he’d go to D. J. and say, “Larry is hogging the ball, you’ve got to talk to him,” but we all knew that was just Kevin, so we sort of put up with it. The reason we did was because Kevin played hard, and he played hurt, and he won us championships, no question about it.
After playing with a guy that many years and hanging around with him some, playing golf, going out for a beer, I just couldn’t get over that he did that to me. I know Paxson got inside his head and Kevin just followed along, but it doesn’t make it right. It was probably one of the lowest moments of my career.
Whenever I see Kevin we say hello and all that, but it has never really quite been the same. I haven’t forgotten what happened, but I’m not going to hold a grudge. We spent too much time together for that. I was with that guy every day for twelve years. I know Kevin like the back of my hand. So the best thing to do is to wish each other luck and move on.
I wouldn’t say the same about Paxson. Kevin eventually admitted he was one of the unnamed players in the story. Paxson still denies it. I made up my mind that he was a guy I just wouldn’t deal with anymore. He was traded at the end of that 1989–90 season, and I thought to myself, “Good. Hopefully I’ll never see him again.” I didn’t for a long time. I retired from the game, and I started doing some work for a trading card company, and I get a call from one of the guys from the company one day, telling me they had some stuff they wanted me to sign. The guy said, “We’re flying one of our new reps over. It’s an old friend of yours.” I said to the guy, “Tell me who it is.” He answered, “It’s one of your old teammates. It’s a surprise.” I told him, “I don’t like surprises. Who is it?” He said, “Jim Paxson. He’s flying in from the West Coast to Florida as we speak.” I told the guy, “You better find someone else to bring me those cards. I won’t see that guy.” At first he thought I was joking, but he realized pretty quickly I wasn’t. So when Jim Paxson landed, they told him to turn around and fly back home.
All the turmoil we had during that 1989–90 season took its toll. It made me realize how lucky I was before that to be on clubs that had good team chemistry. And now as a coach I am really aware of it. You can notice it from the sidelines, when guys make little remarks to each other on the court, or what they say to their coach when they come out of the game. I can say our Pacers team didn’t run into problems like that at all. We had a really great group of guys that were interested in only one thing: winning.
I’m sure there were little things along the way, but I made a point of staying away from the locker room. That’s a place that belon
gs to the players, and I wanted to keep it that way. Besides, I would have known if we had one of those guys who goes around trying to get in everyone else’s head. They’re the type of guys you really don’t want on your team if you are serious about winning.
Looking back, I guess it’s not that surprising we lost to the Knicks in five games in the first round of the 1990 playoffs that spring. But at the time, I was in shock. I knew we weren’t playing well, but it never occurred to me we’d lose that series. Not very long after that, Jimmy Rodgers was fired. We had won 52 games that year, but the owners didn’t care. They had seen enough of Jimmy. I can still remember the day he got fired. As soon as I heard the news I got myself a plane ticket, and I was out of that town. I didn’t want to hear about it. I didn’t want to talk about it. I felt so sorry for Jimmy. I know a lot of people think I got Jimmy Rodgers fired, but that is not true. I would never do that. I had too much respect for him.
Shortly after they fired Jimmy, the Celtics hired Dave Gavitt to be the team’s CEO. We were all hoping Dave would give our assistant Chris Ford the head job. Chris was worried that because Jimmy didn’t work out, the Celtics wouldn’t want to go that route again. But after going after Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, who didn’t want to make the jump to the pros, Gavitt gave Chris Ford the job.
Chris and I were not only good friends, we were teammates. I always admired Chris because he got the absolute most out of his talent. But we got off to a bad start right away. On the first day, which was media day, all the questions were about how Chris wanted to get us back to a running style. I said, “Hey, I’d love to get out and run, but we hear the same story every year. Every coach tells us how he wants to run, but once the season starts, the coaches call every play, and it slows everything down.” I didn’t say it to be nasty. I was kind of laughing when I said it, but that’s just the way it was.
