Bird Watching

by Larry Bird

  I’m getting ticked! He’s a sweetheart of a guy, but here he is—the first person I’ve ever cut—and he’s still telling me, “I’m going to hang around another day, okay, Coach? I know you’ll change your mind.” I walk out of the room, and I’m shell-shocked, and I still got another guy to cut. I see Dick and Rick and I say to them, “Is this some kind of setup? Are you guys in on this?” Rick said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” So I tell them what just happened, and Dick starts going berserk! He was yelling, “Bring that kid in here! I’ll straighten him out! Who does he think he is?” At that point I said, “Rick, I’ve had it. You cut the next guy.” Rick was all set to do it, but then I changed my mind. It’s my job. So I brought in the next guy and I told him, as straight as I could, that he was gone. Well the next thing I know, the guy’s lip is quivering and his eyes are filling up, and that really bothered me. I felt bad, because I knew it was probably his last shot at an NBA job.

  That was it for the day. I couldn’t handle any more than that.

  Exhibition season is kind of a feeling-out process, especially when you have a new coach. In our case, it was a time for the guys to understand that I was dead serious about being on time. I laid out the rules for them: the first time you’re late, it’s a $1,000 fine. Strike two, it’s another $1,000, and strike three in the same month and you’re suspended for a game. No exceptions. That’s how it was going to be.

  So we have one more practice before we head out to this exhibition game against Charlotte. This is cruel, but here’s how it happened. The guys are on the court stretching, and I walk onto the floor and I notice one of our point guards, Travis Best, isn’t out there. I ask Reggie Miller, “Where’s Travis?” He says, “He had to go to the bathroom.” I blew the whistle and said, “That’s a thousand dollars Travis owes us.”

  That wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except the next day we’re on the plane heading to Nashville, Tennessee, for this game against the Hornets, and Travis and Dale Davis aren’t on the plane. They’re late. I wait until it’s exactly four o’clock, and I tell my guys, “Okay, let’s lock it and go.” Three minutes later, Dale and Travis pull into the parking lot, but the doors to the plane were already closed. The pilot shut down the engine, but I told him to fire it back up again. “We’re not waiting,” I said. As Dale and Travis began running toward the plane, lugging their bags, we took off and left them standing there on the runway. Nashville isn’t the easiest place in the world to get to, and those guys had to scramble to find a commercial flight. They wound up getting a connection through Atlanta, but when they got to Atlanta they got stuck there because of bad weather. They were fogged in. That meant having to stay overnight and take an early-morning flight. They didn’t get into Nashville until late the next morning, and they got there about halfway through shootaround. For Dale it was two strikes, but for Travis it was three. Three strikes, suspension. So he had to sit out the game.

  I would have liked Travis to play that night, but there was no way I was changing the rules. I wanted everyone thinking about being on time, and I was prepared to do whatever it took to prove to them I was serious about it. I remember later in the season, Dale Davis had two strikes on him for the month, and we were getting ready for a game, and he was in the locker room for some reason. Dick Harter was so concerned about not having him that night that he ran in there and said, “Now Dale, remember, you’ve got two strikes. Hurry up and get out there. You know Larry, he’ll make you sit.”

  It didn’t matter to me who it was. The rules were the same for everyone. Reggie Miller used to get to places forty-five minutes early. I told the team, “If Reggie can do it, why can’t you?” Early in the season, we were getting ready to go on a bus trip somewhere, and we were leaving at three o’clock. At three I gave the signal to lock and go, and just then, Haywoode Workman, one of our guards who was hurt at the start of the season and was really struggling, because his career might have been over, comes chugging up to the bus limping, hauling his bags, trying to get on the bus. I told him, “Woody, if you’re going to the game, then you’re driving there yourself. You’re late.” The bus driver closed the door and we left him standing there. If I say three o’clock, I mean three o’clock, not 3:01. One minute late, and it’s a $1,000 fine. One second late, it’s a $1,000 fine.

  We had a big game at home against Chicago in March, when Reggie Miller and Antonio Davis ran into a problem and they were late. I was really upset. It’s one of the few times I really chewed them out. I told them, “You just blew any chance we had of winning this game tonight. You are playing one of your biggest competitors, you’re going to be battling these guys in the Eastern Conference Finals, and you’re gonna show up late today? Come on! You just don’t do that.” That night my team went out and got their butts kicked. I knew it was going to happen. I told them it was going to happen. The only good thing about it was it stayed in their minds after that.

  When I played for the Celtics, I was never late for anything. I was usually one of the first guys on the bus. Kevin McHale was always the last guy, every time. It drove me crazy. He was hardly ever late, but he’d walk on the bus at the exact time we were leaving, with maybe a second or two to spare. I always said he was hiding around the corner, waiting until there was only fifteen seconds to go. That’s Kevin. It never affected the way he played, though.

  Once we finally had our roster set, the next challenge was to find enough minutes for everyone on the team. Ideally, most coaches seem to favor a rotation of eight players, but our team was a lot deeper than that. Early in the season, we really didn’t have a set substitution pattern. My feeling was, “We’ll go with who is getting the job done out there.” Sometimes that meant in the fourth quarter of a really close game, we might have reserves like Fred Hoiberg and Mark Pope out there instead of Reggie Miller and Chris Mullin, our starters. Early on, I was playing ten guys, and I was thinking to myself, “How are you going to find time for ten guys?” It was hard to do. But I thought it would help us down the road. I thought I showed enough confidence in those ten guys so that if I went to them in a crucial situation later in the season, they’d be ready. You like to play guys who have worked all year. They’ve earned a chance at some time. That’s not to say I didn’t sweat out some of those early substitutions I made. Of course I did. I know Donnie Walsh was having a heart attack about it. I’m sure there were days he was thinking, “What is Larry doing?” But give him credit. He never said anything to me. He told me from the beginning that when it came to the coaching he would leave me alone.

  If there was one thing that surprised me, it was how bad a rebounding team we were. That was frustrating to me, because rebounding was such a big part of my game. I want these guys to be aggressive on the offensive glass, even if it hurts us sometimes. I always felt I was a great offensive rebounder. As soon as the ball left my hand, I was after it. I was running to it like there was no tomorrow. But then, my rookie season with Boston we had our training camp in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and we were playing outside, and I took a shot and took off after the ball like I always do, even though I was pretty sure it was going in. Well, Bill Fitch was there, and so was Red Auerbach, and he blows the whistle and stopped everything, and then Red turned to me and said, “Hey, while you’re going toward the basket like that, your man is going the other way for a layup. You’ve got to stay with your man.” From that day on, I was never a good offensive rebounder. Here was one of my best attributes, chasing that ball, and now they were telling me I shouldn’t do it.

  In college, when I went to the boards like that, the guard picked up my guy. I thought it should be the same in the pros. But once Red said that to me, I got out of the habit of chasing the ball down. I just didn’t go at it like I used to. Red said the reason the guard could pick up my man so easily in college was because we played a lot of zone defense, which isn’t allowed in the NBA. But I would never get on one of my guys if he went hard after an offensive rebound. To me, it’s one of those
plays that is devastating to the opponent. If you get caught once in a while, well, that’s the price you pay.

  I’m not sure why my Pacers players aren’t better rebounders. Part of it, unfortunately, is because they don’t pursue the basketball. Part of it is because they don’t box out. They’re usually jumping, trying to go up over people. I could never outjump anybody, so I learned very early on in my career to follow the flight of the ball on the offensive end, and to put a body on somebody and box them out on the other end. You take a guy like Antonio Davis. He jumps so well, but if you put your body into him he might still get up, but he won’t explode like he usually does. I don’t care who it is; anytime you stick your body on them, you take away their lift. That’s what other teams did to us all year long in my first season. They took away our lift.

  I used to practice watching the flight of the ball all the time. It started when I was a little kid, and I used to rebound for my brother Mark. He’d do all the shooting, and I’d try to anticipate whether it was going to be short, or long, or off to the left, whatever. I always thought it was the easiest thing to do. It was really instinctive for me, I guess. I could go out and watch a guy shoot for two seconds and be able to tell—not every time, but most of the time—whether he was going to be short or long, and then get right to the ball. The problem with guys nowadays is they just stand there and look at it. They know it’s going to be short, but they don’t react.

  It goes back to stressing the fundamentals. Like the bounce pass. I used to throw ’em all the time, because Coach Jones, my high school coach, showed me how to do it right. With these Indiana guys, I don’t want them throwing a bounce pass, because they don’t do it properly. It should be done hard, with one hand. Sometimes Reggie Miller throws these soft, two-handed bounce passes, and it frustrates me, because I think every one of them is going to get picked off.

  The biggest difference between being a coach and a player is that as a player you only had to worry about getting yourself ready to play. A coach has to prepare twelve guys. The one thing I learned real quickly was to keep these guys moving. No long speeches, no long explanations. That’s when they lose their concentration. Just work them hard and don’t let them stop and lose focus. Some days I might have planned a two-hour practice, but if they are really going at it and they’ve paid attention and got things done, then I’ll consider quitting while I’m ahead. It might have only been an hour and fifteen minutes, but I’ll blow the whistle and tell the guys, “Hey, we’re outta here!”

  The other side of it is when the practice is flat no matter how long you go, and the guys aren’t moving well, and the coaches are getting frustrated. You can go either way. You can keep them there and let it get worse, or you can close her down. If I choose to do that, I say to them, “Look guys, you’ve got to give me something today. So far, this has been crap. We’ve got fifteen more minutes. I want to see bodies flying.” That usually works.

  There’s one thing I was good at right away. I can usually sense when guys are tired or frustrated, or if something is bugging them. Dick and Rick like to push the guys, but some days I have to tell them, “Listen, back off this kid today, his body won’t let him get it done today.” Don’t get me wrong: I get disappointed when I don’t get the effort, but I’m not going to go in there and curse somebody out. It’s not in my makeup. I wouldn’t want somebody doing that to me. But I do spell it out for them. I say, “Reggie, I’m asking you to play thirty-five minutes. Mark, you’re going to play around twenty, twenty-five minutes,” and right on down the line. I say, “I’m not asking you to go out and play hard for eight hours. If you can’t go for some reason, then don’t insult me. Come in and tell me you can’t play. Tell me before the game. Don’t wait until fifteen or twenty minutes after you’re in there. Don’t make me pull you off the floor when you know already you don’t have it that night. Be honest.”

  That happened a couple of times in my first season. I’d pull the guy into my office after the game and say, “Hey, you let your teammates down. Why?” Most of the time, it turns out they are having some kind of personal problem. Maybe their wife gave them hell, or the baby-sitter didn’t show up, or something. You never know with these guys. But I want to know about that stuff beforehand, not when we get down by 15 points. I think these guys know by now that it’s not something I’m going to hold against them.

  There’s something else you’ve got to remember in dealing with these guys. Each of them has physical limitations. You take a guy like Mark Jackson. He’s a real warrior, and he’ll give you everything he’s got, so when Dick Harter gets frustrated with him because Allen Iverson is beating him off the dribble, you’ve got to step back and say, “Of course Iverson is doing that. He’s a lot quicker than Mark.” So then you have to realize that it’s not lack of effort, it’s simply lack of speed, and then you think of a way to help Mark adjust. This is something I did my entire career. I was hardly ever quicker than anyone I guarded, so I had to compensate in other ways and make up for it with smart team defense.

  One thing I never had a problem with as a player was preparation. I was a self-motivated person, and I didn’t need anyone kicking me in the rear to get me jump-started. The difference is, now that I’m a coach, I have to get twelve guys on the same page. That’s completely different. When you call out a play, everyone has to be in a certain area at a certain time or it doesn’t work. It’s the coach’s job to make sure everybody understands exactly what is expected of them, and to make sure they are ready to play.

  So now, all of a sudden, instead of walking onto that floor making sure I’m in the right frame of mind, I’ve got to check with this guy or that guy, who might have had a so-so practice the day before, to make sure he’s with us. You can’t believe all the things that are going through my head, trying to get these guys prepared. They worry you sick.

  There’s another difference I’ve noticed since I got into coaching: I’ve started dreaming about winning championships. When I was a player I never had any dreams. But now that I’m coaching, I have this dream we’re in the NBA Finals, and we’re playing Seattle, for some reason. We usually win, and then I wake up and realize that hasn’t happened yet.

  Bill Fitch used to tell us, “You guys should all have to coach for a day. Then you’d understand what we go through.” He’s right. The one thing about being a player is if you win a game by one point, you walk out of there as happy as can be. But if you win a game by one point and you are the coach, you walk out of there and just remember all the mistakes you made.

  I can’t believe it, but that’s what happened to me. That’s why I’m on borrowed time in this coaching business. When I was playing, I always wanted to take the last shot, instead of putting the ball in someone else’s hands and letting them decide my fate.

  I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it.

  CHAPTER 9

  On Endorsements and Lifestyle

  Here’s something else I’ll never get used to: the demand for celebrity athletes to endorse products.

  When I first started doing commercials, even coming from a small town, I didn’t want to do anything for a shaky company. It had to be a big-time company, like McDonald’s or 7UP. I never did an ad for something I didn’t respect.

  Some of the commercials look like a blast when they’re done, but what you see in thirty seconds can take a whole day. It’s unbelievable what can foul up what you thought was a perfect take. Maybe it’s because this guy doesn’t like the lighting, or that guy didn’t like the way one of the actors said their lines. That’s my only complaint about commercials. They just take up too much time. Everything is union, so everybody has got to do their own little thing. During a taping someone might call out that they need a ladder, but if you ever touched the thing some guy would start shouting, because that’s his job—to move ladders. That kind of stuff drove me crazy. Also, they make you wear makeup. I really hate that.

  My first big commercial was for 7UP in 1979, the year I was a rooki
e with the Celtics. I guess I was a little nervous at the start, but it took so long to film the thing that by the time it was over I was just tired. I always liked 7UP just fine, but when my agent, Jill Leone, picked me up after filming that ad, I ordered a glass of milk at dinner. I drank close to two cases of 7UP during that taping, and I couldn’t even look at another 7UP for a long time after that.

  The other thing you have to get used to with all these commercials is the special effects they use. I did a commercial for Canon cameras in 1980, and they shot it in Boston. They wanted to create the feeling of a musty old gym, so they filled the room with all this smoke. Rick Carlisle, who was my teammate at the time, was in that commercial with me, which turned out to be a mistake, because the people at Canon wanted a shot of me dunking the basketball, and they made me stand on a crate to do it. As you can imagine, Rick had something to say about that. Back then I was dunking on guys all the time. Sometimes I see old footage and I can’t believe I could do all those things, because after my heel surgery and two back surgeries I never moved the same again. Anyhow, I told the people at Canon I didn’t need any crate, but after doing it about fifty times I understood why we had it there. If I had to dunk that many times for real, I would have been exhausted!

  The first commercial I ever did for McDonald’s took fourteen hours. I couldn’t believe it. I remember thinking to myself, “You won’t catch me wasting time like this anymore.” My job was to say a few lines and bite into a cheeseburger. The producer didn’t seem to have too much of a problem with me and how I was eating my burger, but on almost every take he found something wrong with one of the other actors. I must have bit into about two hundred burgers before we got it right. They had to keep running back and heating up fresh trays of burgers every time somebody messed up. It would have been funny if I wasn’t so irritated at blowing an entire day. Jill went to the shoot with me, and that’s the day I turned to her and said, “Four hours. That’s it. From now on, if they take any longer than that, we’re not doing it.”