Of all athletes, then, Larry Joe Bird has been most at one with his sport consummate with basketball.
His pedigree, the heritage, was just as exquisite. He came from Indiana–the Hoosier–where basketball has meant the most for the longest time, to go on to the Celtics, who have been the sovereignty of the sport for–eerily–exactly as long as he has lived. Bird came into this world in December 1956, the very week Bill Russell and K. C. Jones came home from the Melbourne Olympics with gold medals to join the Celtics and lead them to their elusive first title that season.
Still, Bird has been a consequential figure quite beyond his talents. Very few athletes cast that kind of a shadow; no one, for example, in football has ever played the role that Bird and Magic Johnson did together in basketball. Babe Ruth assayed it for baseball, while Jackie Robinson and Billie Jean King were society’s instruments for American sport. But it’s rare. No, certainly professional basketball wouldn’t have closed up shop without Bird and Magic appearing as dei ex machina, but, yes, they changed history and made a lot of other folks rich.
In 1979, when Bird at Indiana State (where?) and Johnson at Michigan State met in the NCAA championship, basketball was already accepted as a black game. The old snapshot of the freckle-faced farm boy hurling set shots at the barnyard hoop had been replaced by ghetto boyz dunking at the playground. The ’70s had produced some white players who were preeminent for a while-West, Havlicek and Barry at their peaks, Walton for his whole comet career-but Bird, from French Lick, Ind. (where?), loomed up out of nowhere, make-believe, a cross between the Devil’s own Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo., in “Damn Yankees” and Elvis, taking rhythm-and-blues crossover.
Bird was not only an instant hero in the NBA, but he and Magic utterly contradicted the growing negative racist impression of basketball that it was too uppity black. They were selfless and stylish alike, a rare combination upon any public stage. While Johnson, like Bird, is about 6 feet 9, he was a colossus at the position he played, some kind of mutant Cousy. But Magic still fulfilled the traditional playmaker’s role. Bird, though, a hoop Clausewitz, refigured for himself alone the whole game’s battlefield.
Red Auerbach, the permanent Celtic genius, explained pedantically to Bird, the draft choice, that his agent was out of line making wild financial demands. “Look, it’s been proven,” Auerbach growled. “A cornerman can’t dominate the game.” Years later I was there in Boston on the night Auerbach stood up and looked over at Bird and swallowed and said: “This is the greatest ballplayer who ever played the game.” I couldn’t believe it because I knew how much it pained Red to say that-not for the honor he paid Bird, but for how, perforce, it diminished Russell, whom he loved first.
Of course, in black basketball, with the white-on-white hick from French Lick, race could never go completely away. The issue of race always missed the point with Bird, though. What mattered was that he was the classic disadvantaged minority, dirt-poor in his youth, the son of an alcoholic father who finally killed himself. Shy, intimidated off the court, a desultory student still given to bad grammar, Larry Joe left Indiana University, defeated by the size of the place and his confident suburban classmates with their fancy mall wardrobes. He slunk back to French Lick, to a job on a garbage truck and a bitter, failed marriage … before, at last, basketball saved him.
There it was, you see. What always distinguished Bird from others who used sport to fight their way up from deprivation was that he never really considered basketball a vehicle. He never thought about college basketball in high school, or pro basketball in college. Playing for the moment was enough, for in the game he was at home, in his warm, comfortable refuge. That is why he always played the sport with such unusual fervor and despised all his lesser colleagues who didn’t.
Spirit, joy, delight-he played basketball with such obvious, hopeless affection. Maybe that’s why he could see the whole court so well, too. Larry Bird wasn’t only looking for the other players. He was just instinctively keeping an eye on all that he loved, so it came easy and natural for him to spot the open man and get it to the hoop.
