It was just after the opening of the 1991-92 National Basketball Association season, which would turn out to be the last for Larry Bird, and the legendary Celtics` star-Larry Legend as he came to be known around Boston- hadn`t been shooting the ball all that well or scoring near his 24-point career average.
He sensed he was about to be abused some by the quicker Scottie Pippen and if it came to the last shot, his teammates were probably more likely to look toward rising star Reggie Lewis.
But Larry Bird was, nevertheless, enjoying himself immensely. He was leaning back in his locker stall an hour before the game against the Bulls, shooting a verbal jab at a teammate or pounding home a point about the game.
”Competing, that`s what it`s all about,” Bird explained about his jovial mood. ”I thought that was it last year, with all I went through (with back pain). I had a big contract for this season ($7 million), but I wasn`t going to go through that again. It`s not for the money. It never has been. It`s the game. I loved to play. I`m a regular guy who played basketball for a living.”
But he won`t anymore.
Larry Joe Bird (retirement, obituaries and presidential nominations earn mention of middle names) announced his retirement Tuesday after 13 years with the Boston Celtics. He averaged 24.3 points, 10 rebounds and 6.3 assists, won three straight MVP awards, two more in the NBA Finals and played on three championship teams.
And though impressive, those numbers and accolades, including a life-size statue erected in Boston, hardly tell the 35-year-old Bird`s story.
When he made his long-expected announcement-it was clear during his participation with the Olympic ”Dream Team” his back would no longer allow him to play even though he was to earn $8 million over the next two seasons-the acclaim was even predictable about one of the five best ever to play in the NBA.
There was a mutual respect between the Bulls` Michael Jordan and Bird. After Jordan scored 63 points in a 1986 playoff game against the Celtics, Bird said, ”It was God disguised as Michael Jordan.”
Only last season, Jordan still was suggesting Bird was the league`s Most Valuable Player. Jordan, an occasional golf partner of Bird`s, said then,
”He`s one of the best players in the game, and he does does everything.”
”He was one of a kind,” said Knicks coach Pat Riley, ”a true warrior . . . the only one who ever did what he did.”
NBA Commissioner David Stern said Bird ”helped to define the way a generation of basketball fans has come to view and appreciate the NBA. There will never be another Larry Bird.”
And from Earvin ”Magic” Johnson, who along with Bird helped transform the NBA as rookies in 1979 by no longer making pass a four-letter word:
”Larry was the only player in the league that I feared and he was the smartest I ever played against. I always used his play as a measuring stick against mine.”
Johnson-ironically now contemplating a comeback almost a year after announcing his retirement due to testing positive for the HIV virus-and Bird took their rivalry in the 1979 NCAA title game into the NBA and a series of finals. Once asked about the Celtics and Bird coming to Los Angeles, Johnson said: ”The big thing is you hear not only the boo, but the `oooh.` ”
And it`s what made Bird, the 6-foot-9-inch country kid from Southern Indiana, a big man in the city game.
Don`t ever suggest Larry Bird wasn`t an athlete, for it wasn`t merely a knowledge of the game that made him probably the best ever at his position and perhaps the best all-around player in NBA history-he was one of three players to rank among the top 10 in five major statistical categories in a season.
He was said to be slow and unable to jump, but had a deceptively quick first step to the basket. He was not muscular, but he was strong and knew the value of positioning.
”There`s guys who can jump out of the gym,” he once said. ”They rely totally on their skills, but they never box out, they never play the physical game. You put a body on someone and now they don`t have that 40-inch vertical leap.”
Bird was a master of the fake, head and shoulders jigging, or eyes and head darting. Former Bulls coach Doug Collins remembers seeing Bird bending as if to pick up something, drawing the defender`s attention and then driving by. The old ”your shoelace is untied” trick.
But it wasn`t magic. It was mostly hard work, of which Bird was most proud and most renowned.
”When I played, I played as hard as I could,” he said during the press conference to announce his retirement (he`ll take a position in the Celtics`
front office). ”That`s what I want to be remembered for.”
For years he`d arrive at the arena three hours before the game to shoot, taking hundreds of jumpers to be ready when the time came. Stan Albeck, when he was coaching the Nets, ordered his team to the arena once two hours before the game to show them that Bird, an MVP, would be there practicing.
The team walked onto the floor. No Bird. Then someone spotted him running up and down the steps. He had shot for an hour already and was now doing laps in the stands.
Bird, of course, has the legendary traits associated with the great sports stars of all time-with Jordan, Johnson, Ted Williams, Bobby Orr and the like.
They couldn`t stand losing.
”He`ll kill you over a game of jacks,” former Celtics coach Bill Fitch once said. An old friend and former coach, Jim Jones, said Bird would make him weigh their fish to see who caught the biggest.
And that competitiveness led to many a thrilling moment in the NBA.
Once he got into a fight with the gentlemanly Julius Erving after taunting Erving late in a game ”42-6, Doc, 42-6,” over the point spread between the two.
No big deal, said Bird. ”My brothers and I fought all the time, but I still love them.”
The game was the thing.
”I`ve been on a high for 17 years,” Bird said Tuesday. ”I enjoyed it. I just didn`t like the injuries that I had, but that goes with the territory. I gave my body, my heart and my soul to the Celtics.
”My whole life has been basketball.”
Both as a destination and an escape.
Bird`s life growing up in rural French Lick, Ind., was not pleasant. He was a Hoosier, but it wasn`t the movie.
His dad, an alcoholic, committed suicide. His mother worked two jobs to support the family. He went to Indiana University for 24 days. It was too big and he went home to drive a garbage truck and mow lawns.
Friends said mowing was one of Bird`s favorite forms of relaxation and Bird once said his greatest disappointment upon achieving celebrity status was being unable to mow his lawn at his modest Boston home.
Bird also was married in college and divorced after a year, the failed union producing a daughter he rarely saw.
He said years later he had recurring dreams about that marriage and about being poor. He feared both overtaking him.
”It`s not like I hated rich people when I grew up,” said Bird a few years back, ”but I sort of frowned on them. Don`t get me wrong, it`s the only way to go, but there was just something about the rich that irritated me.”
And so it was when Bird first came to Boston, he stayed a week in the hotel without running up any room-service charges. He brought in food and cans of pop because it was cheaper.
”I`m a hick from French Lick,” Bird said upon arriving in Boston in 1979. ”I lead a simple life. I`m a small-town kid who`s come to the city.”
And, not untypically, Bird went out that way, preferring to forego the now popular farewell tour.
”I don`t need all that fanfare,” he said. ”My style is not to draw attention to myself.”
But he did. He tried to ignore the media for some time, saying in college it was a team game and too many stories were focusing on him. He wore that slack-jawed look and the white-on-white mustache. He was shy when he came to Boston and he had a rough southern Indiana twang.
But it was the cord on the nets that he rippled most smoothly.
”The only thing different between us is the color,” Magic Johnson once said.
They tried to paint Bird with the broad brush of White Hope when he came to Boston, a city of racial disharmony. Bird would have none of it. He could have been a super endorser-white star and all that-but would have none of it. He was there to play basketball. Not to be noticed.
”I pass good, so I`ll pass a lot,” Bird said when he first came to the Celtics, ironically with a draft pick Boston obtained from the Lakers as part of a deal for Charlie Scott. ”Passing the ball is what I like best because when a guy gets the ball and scores, you can see the gleam in his eye when he`s running back downcourt. And that`s the best feeling in the world. I`m not expecting to be a big scorer.”
But he had to be because he was one of the great ones, the one who wanted to take the big shot.
And Bird did it all, passing and scoring and even having back-to-back 21- rebound games in the Finals. Like all the great ones, he did what was necessary.
And he often did it with an impish sense of humor. Though often sullen with the media, Bird was known as a man`s man to his teammates, a practical joker with a mischievous sense of humor.
Once he and teammates watched a streaker in the stands as coach K.C. Jones tried to chart a play. ”Not now, K.C.,” Bird said, ”we`re busy.”
”When I got to rookie camp, I realized I could play in this league,”
Bird deadpanned during his Tuesday press conference. ”The thing about it was I had Rick Robey guarding me, so I thought I was going to be a little bit better than I really was.”
He was known to friends for tying the coach`s shoelaces together or faking a call from a reporter. In recent years, he`s grown more comfortable with his status, but never lost his little-boy shyness.
”You can wear this if you want,” Bird supposedly said in handing his longtime girlfriend, Dinah, a ring a few years ago. Last year they adopted a son, Connor.
So Connor will have to watch it all on tape, the fallaway and lean-in jumpers, Bird being too quick for the big forwards and too big and strong for the small forwards. He`ll have to look for the stamina and peripheral vision, the depth perception and incredible memory and concentration, of the times he threw shots off the backboard and ran to where the rebound would come, of a basketball player who used the glass, who spanned the eras and knew there was no ”i” in team.
”This is not a sad day,” Bird said Tuesday, ”because I knew it was going to come.”
But why did it have to come so soon?
