Shortly after All-Star Weekend, SI sent me to write a story about whether Bird was, in fact, the greatest player ever. Magazines love these greatest-ever stories—men, in particular, are inveterate list makers, adept at wasting hour after hour in fervent arguments about whether Keith Moon or John Bonham was the greater drummer or whether Taxi Driver or Raging Bull was the greater De Niro vehicle—and, predictably, I got into the spirit and pretty much decided that Bird was the greatest ever, backed up by several quotes from unbiased observers, one being John Wooden. “I’ve always considered Oscar Robertson to be the best player in the game,” the Wizard of Westwood told me. “Now I’m not so sure that Larry Bird isn’t.”
(Never mind that the following season I would find a different all-time best, Magic, and a couple of years after that another, Jordan. That’s how it goes in the list-making business; you have to have a short memory.)
I recall several things from that Bird story, beyond him telling me that Bonanza was his favorite TV show. Chuck Daly, later his Dream Team coach, told me that Bird deliberately “once knocked me ass over tin cups” after he drilled a jumper in front of the Detroit Pistons bench. Celtics teammate Danny Ainge told me that Bird was so good that from time to time he deliberately dribbled into trouble just to increase the degree of difficulty on the play, something that Bird confirmed. (Years later Kobe Bryant would be crucified when Phil Jackson claimed that Kobe did the same thing.) Bill Walton related a night when Bird dribbled into the corner, drew a triple-team, then zipped him a pass that traveled through Joe Barry Carroll’s legs.
Bird was also not shy about professing his proficiency at other sports, something that always fascinates me about pro athletes. (Jordan always mused about how well he could’ve done not only in baseball, a question to which we later got an answer, but also at sports such as track and football.) Bird told me, in all seriousness, that he was as adept at backyard badminton as he was at basketball. He also said that he wasn’t “weight-room strong but cock-strong,” a farmer’s expression that has nothing to do with the penis. And he loved to brag about his softball skills (a sport he enjoyed playing with his brothers for Terre Haute’s Platolene 500–Carpet Center team) as a power hitter and first baseman/outfielder. Bird had shattered a knuckle in a softball injury he had suffered years later and always claimed he couldn’t feel the basketball as well after that. I never knew whether to believe that.
I was particularly intrigued by Bird’s ambidexterity, which went well beyond his ability to dribble with his left hand. Bird looked utterly comfortable shooting left-handed, as he did from time to time, and he both ate and signed autographs with his left. He just grew up that way. He says that he always picked up a pencil and wrote with his left, yet when a teacher sent him to the blackboard to write he used his right hand.
There was about Bird the mystique of a street hustler, always with something up his sleeve, always some kind of trump-card chicanery at the ready. Quinn Buckner, a former Bird teammate who would later be on the committee that would select the Dream Team, tells of Bird’s wizardry during a practice shooting game called Knockout. “You’d be ready to win, and all of a sudden—I’m not making this up—Larry would throw up a shot that would not only knock your ball away from the basket but would also go in itself,” says Buckner. “The man could play pool and basketball at the same time.”
Buckner conjures up a moment during a game when he was streaking downcourt and Bird wound up to throw him a long pass despite the fact that a defender was directly in the line between them. “So Larry throws this thing that starts way out to the left, veers around the defender, and curves right into my hands,” Buckner says. “Nobody in history—nobody—threw those kinds of passes.”
That Bird had even agreed to compete in this 1986 three-point contest was a triumph for the NBA because no one was quite sure how that particular sideshow was going to turn out. But Bird had signed on for a few reasons. It appealed to the gunslinger aspect of his game—he loved the pre- and post-practice shooting games in which he engaged with teammates Ainge and Jerry Sichting. He loved the idea that, as talk about the three-point contest heated up, he was not necessarily considered the favorite since players such as Craig Hodges, Dale Ellis, and Wood were long-distance specialists. With a game on the line, Bird was everybody’s choice, of course, but that was not necessarily the case in an exhibition, where his relatively slow delivery would be a liability. Bird wanted to show that such an analysis was flawed.
And so, a few minutes before the competition in Dallas was to begin and seven of the eight players who would be participating in the three-point contest were gathered in a locker room, suddenly the door burst open and in strode Bird, asking, “Who’s comin’ in second?” Then he reiterated his feelings about the slippery red-white-and-blue balls.
It was pretty much over at that point. Bird didn’t even remove his warm-up jacket for the first two rounds—he always insisted that it was not a fuck-you move but just how he felt comfortable—and went up against sharpshooter Hodges in the final. It was no contest. Now in his absurdly bright red East All-Star uniform, Bird drained nine shots in a row at one point and even deliberately banked in the red-white-and-blue ball near the end.
Bird was ecstatic. His first comments were directed to his Boston teammates who had kidded him that he wouldn’t win, and specifically to veteran M. L. Carr, who used to claim that he was the “three-point king.” So Bird stole his line. “I’m the three-point king,” Bird yelped, over and over. “I’m the three-point king.” Even later in his career, it would bring a smile to his face when someone called him the three-point king. He was, too, in a way that Bird didn’t even intend at the time. He probably wasn’t the first great three-point shooter, a title that might belong to Dale Ellis. But he was the first true superstar to incorporate the three-point shot into his game, and he remains the greatest combination of player and three-point shooter in NBA history.
Bird would win the contest the next two years, too, but there was something about that first one. It came in the middle of a championship season, and it seemed to say everything about Bird—the deadly concentration, the balls-out confidence, the pure joy he got from playing the game better than anyone else. There was just something about Larry, something that earned him the sobriquet of “Legend” even if we allow for the fact that Jordan was a better all-around player and Magic (five championships to Bird’s three) was a greater winner.
We cannot, ever, divorce Bird from his ethnicity. The fact that millions of white youngsters all over the world gravitated to Bird, found him almost godlike, is not racist, but it is certainly racial. Ditto for the millions who detested him purely because he was white, theorizing that his fame, trumpeted by a mostly white press, was chimerical.
But those who knew him knew that his grittiness was hard-earned, legit, that his darkness-on-the-edge-of-town upbringing (his alcoholic father committed suicide when Bird was eighteen) was the foundation of his character.
Years later Patrick Ewing told me everything I needed to know about what other players thought about Bird. Though Ewing grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and idolized Celtics legend Bill Russell, he was not a fan of Bird or the contemporary Celtics. He didn’t explain why. He didn’t have to. The Celtics were the white team and Bird the white leader. “All through high school,” says Ewing, “my friends and I hated him and hated his team.”
But something changed when Ewing entered the league and faced those flinty eyes of the Hick from French Lick. So he picked up the phone and dialed his friends.
“You know all that shit we were talking back then?” Ewing told them. “Well, forget about it. This motherfucker right here is the truth.”
CHAPTER 5
THE OUTCAST
Isiah Throws It Away … Then Throws It All Away
He had it in his hands, right there, the whole game, the whole season, his long battle to make the NBA’s Terrific Triumvirate a Fantastic Foursome … all of it. Right there! His Detroit Pi
stons were leading the Boston Celtics by one point in Boston Garden in Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference finals. There were only five seconds left, and all Isiah Thomas had to do was successfully inbound the ball to a teammate and victory was his. Easy. Isiah was then, by his reckoning, the smartest guy in the room, all the time, every time. And he wasn’t far wrong.
But then the situation started to devolve. Coach Chuck Daly motioned for a time-out, which the Pistons had, but nobody saw him. None of the veterans on the court, including Joe Dumars, Bill Laimbeer, Adrian Dantley, or Thomas himself, thought to do it, either.
Isiah’s best option was Laimbeer, a good foul shooter, and Larry Bird knew this, too. So Bird faked as if he was covering Dantley and darted toward Laimbeer just as Thomas, now pressed by the five-second clock, threw it in that direction.
This was classic Bird, who always had trouble staying in front of his own man but, like a classroom busybody, was a master at horning in on everyone else’s affairs. Bird thought for a moment about fouling Laimbeer, but, as he said later, Thomas’s pass “seemed to stay in the air forever.” Bird made the steal, then immediately whirled, found teammate Dennis Johnson streaking down the lane, fed him a perfect pass, and watched as Johnson banked in a layup that gave the Celtics a 108–107 victory and a 3–2 series lead.
It was not then that Thomas severely hurt his chances of being on a Dream Team that wasn’t even born yet. It was a few minutes later.
Thomas was caught in what was then the worst place for an NBA player who had just lost a tough one—the visitors’ locker room in ancient Boston Garden, one step up from a junior high lavatory, complete with tepid water, open stalls, and the aroma of a prison mess hall. It was crowded, the air thick with tension, the season all but gone, and much hostility toward the Celtics already roiling in Isiah’s system. Indeed, a fight between Bird and Laimbeer, Isiah’s good buddy, had erupted during Game 3, a 122–104 Pistons victory. Laimbeer had been fined $5,000 for taking Bird down, and Bird $2,000 for throwing the ball at Laimbeer.
Dennis Rodman, a rookie, then (as far as we know) dressing only like a man, decided to offer an opinion on Bird. I wasn’t there for the beginning of the conversation, but Rodman said that Bird was “overrated” and had won three straight MVP awards “just because he was white.” The attention then turned to Thomas, which was when I arrived. Thomas was asked about Rodman’s comments and said he “had to agree with Rodman.” Then, his brain, evidently in full lockdown mode, added: “Larry Bird is a very, very good basketball player. But if he was black he’d be just another guy.”
Then Isiah did the Isiah laugh, familiar to anyone who had been around him, a little chuckle, accompanied by the part-angel, part-devil Isiah smile.
Days later, when he went on an ask-for-absolution tour that culminated at the NBA Finals in Los Angeles, Isiah, standing next to an obviously uncomfortable Bird, would offer up the laugh as proof that he was joshing. But the laugh, then as now, never comes across that way. It is inscrutable, one that could mean he was joking or could mean he was as serious as a priest at high mass. It was impossible to tell. Isiah was, and remains today, a solipsist, his reality the only reality.
At the press conference Isiah made some legitimate points about how black athletes are sometimes adjudged differently than white athletes. Whites are frequently called “heady” and “hardworking,” while blacks are presented as just naturally talented. There is something to that, but it was a subject for a different time and, in any case, should not have included Bird. Better that Isiah’s defense would’ve been: I blew it. I was mad. You ever stand half naked in Boston Garden in front of an audience and been asked about a hated rival?
But he didn’t. Though there were other reasons that Isiah never ultimately made the Dream Team—many point to the alleged All-Star Game freeze-out of Jordan, which had occurred two years earlier, and others pointed to the backroom politicking he had done during the 1988–89 season to force the Pistons to get rid of Adrian Dantley in favor of his buddy Mark Aguirre—I think that this was the major strike.
Detroit still had hope, even after Isiah’s double gaffe. The Pistons beat the Celtics 113–105 at home to tie the series but, predictably, lost back at Boston Garden in Game 7, 117–114.
So what Isiah should’ve said when asked lo those many years ago whether Bird was overrated was what Patrick Ewing said to the boys back home: Rodman was wrong. This motherfucker right here is the truth.
CHAPTER 6
THE MAGIC MAN
With a Junior Skyhook, He Claims His Place on Top
Just a few weeks after Isiah made the ill-advised pass that came to (partly) define his career, Magic Johnson, Isiah’s best buddy (so they both told us), also stood with the ball at Boston Garden, the game in his hands, as it had been in Isiah’s. The stakes were higher for Magic than they had been for Isiah because this was the Finals. Johnson’s Lakers trailed the Celtics 106–105 with about ten seconds left, and this was Game 4. A Boston win tied up the series.
The Lakers called time-out and the ball came in to Magic, which was no surprise. He caught it near the left baseline about twenty feet from the basket as long-armed Kevin McHale jumped out to guard him. Magic stutter-dribbled, then continued into the lane as Bird and Robert Parish converged on him. Magic would frequently dish off at this point, but from my perspective along the baseline, he seemed to be shooting all the way. About eight feet from the basket Magic softly released the shot that was later proclaimed to be, by a jubilant Johnson, “the junior, junior skyhook,” playing off the name given to the hook shot that was the specialty of teammate Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It went in, giving the Lakers a victory and a 3–1 series lead, which proved to be crucial when they won the title in L.A. in Game 6.
It was at that moment—one year after the Celtics and Bird owned the league, and three years after McHale had referred to Magic as “Tragic Johnson” for his poor play in the 1984 Finals—that Magic stood on the top rung of NBA players. Picture Bird and Magic on side-by-side elevators somewhere around midseason. They stopped for a while on the same floor while others below them, including youngsters such as Michael Jordan, could only gaze at them up there on high, saviors of the league, guardians of all that is holy in hoops—skill, unselfishness, imperviousness to pressure. Then Bird slowly, ever so slowly, started on his way down, grimacing with back pain, and Magic ascended. Here’s how good Johnson was in the 1986–87 season, which earned him the first of his three MVP awards: he increased his scoring by an average of 5 points per game while still controlling the offense with his passing.
The reversal of fortunes was sudden but not altogether unexpected. If you listened to Bird closely at the end of the Celtics’ 1986 championship run, he was already looking into a hazy future. He knew his back was getting worse, and he also worried about the health of Bill Walton, whose sixth-man play had energized the team. And how many games did Walton, plagued by an ankle injury, play in 1986–87? Better to measure it in minutes: 112.
If Magic was ever the optimist, Bird was ever the realist.
The popular belief is that Magic was a ton of laughs and the Lakers Showtime caravan was the linchpin of the joie de vivre that took place in the NBA during the 1980s. That was not the case. Abdul-Jabbar brought new meaning to the word dour; I approached his locker in the Forum the same way I would’ve approached an open viper pit. James Worthy kept his own counsel. Byron Scott always seemed a little nervous, as if he were on permanent audition, subject to rebuke from coach Pat Riley’s hook or Abdul-Jabbar’s scowl. A. C. Green was not a stirring conversationalist once you got past the subject of his virginity, on which I never lasted long. (Gordon Edes of the Los Angeles Times memorably quipped that Green’s idea of a one-liner was John 3:16.) Pat Riley was (is) a smart man whose company I enjoyed, but somewhere along the line he was overtaken by paranoia and is the person most responsible for instituting closed practices and a football-coach mentality in the NBA.
The broad strokes used to define the te
ams—the Lakers franchise as Entertainment Central, the stodgy Celtics as the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour—were simply wrong. Celtics practices at Hellenic College in suburban Boston were entertaining affairs, a kind of basketball vaudeville. Coach K. C. Jones was rather like a substitute teacher winging it without a lesson plan. McHale zinged one-liners at Walton, Bird stuck it to anyone and everyone, and Danny Ainge performed daily in the role of a Mormon Beaver Cleaver. Walton, never averse to hyperbole, called the intrasquad scrimmages “spiritual,” filled as they were with what he considered the essence of basketball—the unbridled joy of competition.
Something funny always seemed to happen when you hung around the Celtics. Such was the case one night in L.A. during the ’87 Finals when I opened my hotel room door to find Celtics reserve forward Darren Daye sticking a bare foot into my Portabubble, an unwieldy portable computer terminal with huge couplers on which I wrote and transmitted my stories.
“Darren, what the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Uh, what’s your last name?” he said. “McCallum? Oh, see, I asked for McHale’s room key at the front desk and they gave me this one. I thought this was the foot-stimulator machine Kevin was using.”
Without a McHale, an Ainge, and a Walton, the Lakers were not so outwardly comical. They had their moments—karate-chopping a teammate’s newspaper while he was reading in an airport lounge or in the locker room was a team obsession for a while—but the Lakers, so flashy on the court, were more about outward propriety.
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