Larry Bird loves being the Indiana Pacers’ general manager, just loves it. He loves the scouting, even the drives like the one he took last week up snowbound Interstate Highway 65 to Valparaiso to see a 6-foot-6-inch guard.
“A guy said I had to see this kid,” Bird says. “I love scouting. I’ve been overseas twice already, [including] the European championships. There are some nice players over there. I love their game. But they’re so young.”
It’s the scouting that keeps Bird young, the chase for just the right player.
Bird knows he needs another one or two, probably a point guard, maybe a shooter. His Indiana Pacers, who play the Bulls on Tuesday night at the United Center, aren’t quite perfect despite leading the NBA’s Eastern Conference.
“We don’t want to make any crazy trade and shuffle the deck,” Bird says. “I like our team. But these guys don’t believe in themselves like I think they should. They’ve never been there. They haven’t been on teams that are tight-knit, [where players] believe in one another. I believe that’s what cost them last season. Their vision is to get through the season and have a good year, and then go after it in the playoffs.
“Really, you don’t do that. You make yourself better through the season, stay tough and together. I don’t know if they can do that. We’re going to find out.”
Keeping on the move
So Larry Bird, the Hall of Famer with three championship rings from the Boston Celtics, hits the gyms.
“We’ll see the Pac-10 and Big 12 tournaments,” Bird says. “See six games in two days, then go someplace else, see if someone catches your eye. Make sure to pick out the right kind of player, someone who can fit in and help. We know we’ll pick somewhere near 25, 30 [in the NBA draft]. You don’t need a superstar but someone who can play the game the way the system is set up.”
All this is new to Bird.
“Every day’s exciting to me,” he says. “Whether it will stay exciting 10 years down the road, I don’t know. But I’m one of those guys, say someone calls me about a trade, I want to know yes or no. But they try to put things in your head, to keep it there and then they’re doing something else. That’s bull. I have a player. If you’re interested, let me know. If not, let me know that too. But they don’t want to do that.”
With that, Bird smiles and shrugs. His blue eyes are bright and penetrating. His hair, like cornstalks in late summer, seems to attract the light. He can be the focus of the room without saying much. His presence is commanding, yet his voice remains as flat as the Indiana prairie. He is the Harry Truman of sport, plain-spoken and intelligent, confident and self-assured, but humble.
He remains most comfortable with modest friends. He points the spotlight elsewhere, as he did when he refused virtually every public appearance request when he was hired to coach the Pacers in 1997. He wanted the attention on the players. Yet the camera always sought Bird.
It was how he picked up that prickly reputation at Indiana State and early on with the Celtics. He wanted everyone to recognize the team, not the individuals. He was the star who mowed his own lawn in Boston, who first hurt his back installing drainage tile for his basketball court in French Lick, Ind. Bird never would have someone do manual labor he could do himself.
While Magic Johnson thrived in crowds and Michael Jordan expected them, Bird found back rooms and side-door escapes to have a beer with friends. During the Dream Team Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain, he would steal away to baseball games with fans he had met there, taking turns going to the concession stands.
He spends most of his time around the Pacers with broadcaster and old American Basketball Association coach Bobby “Slick” Leonard. He is a Hall of Fame storyteller, enjoying a good laugh as much as a good pass.
Larry Bird knows who he is and what he wants to do, and what he wants to do now is run the Pacers.
Not that it was any sort of life’s goal, and not that Bird, 47, looks very far ahead. But when you have heart problems, you always pause some. Bird’s heart condition is not considered serious, though as the old joke goes, major surgery is on you; minor is on someone else.
Bird has atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat. He controls it with medication and diet, though he admits it was causing him problems when he decided to leave the Pacers after they lost to the Lakers in the 2000 Finals.
“It was out of rhythm. I just wasn’t feeling good,” Bird says.
He knew he was done with coaching, and he rejected Pacers President Donnie Walsh’s offer of the basketball operations job he now holds. “I wanted to get away, and when I left I didn’t think I’d ever get back into it.”
He hardly pauses for effect at this point, though the admission is startling, an unemotional Bird inexorably rolling through the details.
“When I was feeling bad, I just wanted to stay home and see my kids growing up,” he says. “I just live and enjoy what I’m doing. I’m going to have a short life span. I’m not in this to live to 70, 75. Hey, how many 7-foot 70-year-old guys you see walking around? Not many.
“But once I started feeling better,” Bird goes on without pause, a lighter moment surely coming as usual, “I realized I love my kids, but, man, they can be a pain in the butt. And I’m sure they feel the same way about daddy. Like, `Why don’t you get a job?'”
So Bird did, and the Pacers, and the NBA, are much better for it.
Fundamentally, a winner
There may never have been a greater talent and student of the game, as confident and knowledgeable as he was genuine. Bird was both burdened and enriched by his Hoosier legacy. He became the epitome of American basketball, the kid with the great shot who saw the court and involved all the players. He wasn’t the greatest athlete, but he was fundamentally sound, unshakably confident and a winner.
Back problems slowed and shortened his career, and his own natural reticence and humility limited his fame. He never had bodyguards or an entourage. Bird always was closest with fringe players like Rick Robey and Rick Carlisle, whom he hired as the Pacers’ coach. He was never comfortable with crowds, except when they were looking for him to make the big shot. He wasn’t nervous in games, only before them. He would rather stare at a hostile crowd than friendly reporters.
Bird went home after he retired in 1992 as a player, but came back to surprise everyone but himself and his friends when he successfully coached the Pacers for three seasons.
“Larry is different than people think,” Walsh says. “He really loves the game and is really smart. He has the innate ability to focus on what’s important and has a great feel for players. He knows how to deal with people. He’s direct and definite. I think the players appreciate that.”
He’s not afraid to admit what he doesn’t know. Pride never was the issue for the man who made so many proud.
Bird didn’t consider himself the detail expert, so he hired Carlisle to run his offense and Dick Harter to run his defense when he coached the Pacers. Though Bird was known for scrutinizing film like a coach when he was a player, to the point of coming to players the next day to say when and where he missed them when they were open, Bird isn’t afraid to ask for help. He does so with Walsh regularly, though Walsh says he now defers to Bird.
Just as he did in the firing of coach Isiah Thomas last summer.
“We agreed to keep Isiah, but he said if he didn’t think it would work, he’d come and tell me,” Walsh says. “The end of the summer he said it wouldn’t, and what we were picking up he was absolutely right. (They believed there was a lack of communication with management, splintering relationships among players.)
“He said if we didn’t do it then we might have to do it in the middle of the season, and then we wouldn’t have access to who we might want to hire. And Rick was available, so we got him.”
Executive instincts
The ability to seek out the best advice and then make bold decisions without hesitation is perhaps the ultimate trait of a great executive.
Bird doesn’t hang around much, doesn’t demand players be Larry Bird. He’s not thrilled about the NBA today. “Too loosey-goosey,” he says. Bird was the ultimate basketball fundamentalist. He hates that so few players can use both hands, that all those shirttails are out, that everyone raves about the great defense now.
“You think if me at small forward at 6-9 and [Kevin] McHale at 6-11 and [Robert] Parish at 7-1 with DJ [Dennis Johnson] and Danny [Ainge] at 6-5–if we played half court all the time we wouldn’t be stopping people with our length and height?” Bird asks. “We liked to get out and run and play more full court. Defense is better now? I don’t buy that.”
Not everything’s perfect with the Pacers. Ron Artest has been much better, but hardly perfect. Al Harrington wants to start. Jamaal Tinsley gets upset when he doesn’t start. They had to let Brad Miller go for economics.
“Hey, if your owner tells you he doesn’t want to go over the luxury tax, I understand that,” Bird says. “You’re going to have problems once a week. I tell Donnie our problems are not as bad as the guys up the road, the team over there. In Boston the coach just quit. C’mon. We actually have good guys. They’re not going to run up and hug you, but you can talk to them.”
Bird does, though not often. And he has some rules: Late three times in a month and you’re suspended; no sneakers on the plane. Hear the rules, follow them and then just play.
“Most of these guys never saw me play except on that classic sports thing,” Bird says. “But they know I paid my dues, that I played hurt. I don’t ask them to do what I did. I ask them to come out, work hard and play the best they can. They don’t have to be superstars. Otherwise, they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them. I try to stay away until there are little flareups.”
Let them do their job and Bird does his. And everyone, at least these days, seems very satisfied.
