Found this great article as I was redoing Larry Bird's IBN Profile and had to post it. From an article originally published in Sports Illustrated on March 21, 1988, found on CNN/SI.com: Larry Bird; A Player for the Ages...
A Player for the Ages By Frank Deford
Boston's Larry Bird, in what may be his finest season, gets Red Auerbach's vote—over Bill Russell—as the best ever
The little country boy in Indiana had a recurring dream. In it, he has found a million dollars cash, and he has dug a hole for it under the front porch, and he is hiding there with it. His older brothers walk up and down the steps just above him, but he stays so quiet, they don't have an inkling that their kid brother is down there with a million dollars cash. ''I had that same dream all the time—over and over and over and over,'' says the man who was the little boy.
A lot of grown men have another dream. In it, they're Larry Bird. It's just as reasonable to imagine you're Larry Bird as to imagine you've found a million dollars. Sure, Larry Bird is 6 ft. 9 in., but he doesn't look particularly tall, no taller than the other tall men out there on the court. And he doesn't appear to be fantastic. He isn't sleek. He isn't fast. It seems that he can barely get his feet off the floor. He essays push shots, from another era. He's white, from another era.
But Larry Bird is not a Great White Hope. Anybody who thinks that misses the point of Larry Bird. Little white boys today would much prefer to grow up to be Michael Jordan or Dominique Wilkins, for however clever and hardworking, they're also truly spectacular players. They can fly. But when kids imitate Larry Bird, mostly what they do, so humdrum, is reach down and rub their hands on the bottoms of their sneakers. Even with a last name that cries out for a sassy nickname, Larry Bird remains, simply, Larry.
He seems merely the sum of little bits—a bit more clever than you and me, a bit more dedicated, a bit better on his shooting touch, a bit better with . . . but certainly nothing out of the ordinary. Larry Bird is like when you first learn fractions and you have to change everything to 12ths—12ths!—to make it possible to add up the thirds and fourths and sixths and stuff. All the other great players are so obviously whole numbers.
And so, as improbable a basketball star as Bird is, he's tantalizingly possible. Not the Great White Hope. Never. White hopes are supposed to beat up on the other races, defend Caucasian honor. Bird is simply one of those grown- up daydreams: I wish I could be pretty; I wish I could be back in high school and know what I know now; I wish I could be king of the world; I wish I could find a million dollars; I wish I could be Larry Bird.
He looks up, chuckling at how the little boy got his dream right after all. ''Well, I guess I found the million,'' Larry Bird says. ''Even found a little more to go with it.''
BOB WOOLF, BIRD'S ATTORNEY, brings out a hotel bill dated April 6, 1979. It was for Bird and his girlfriend, Dinah Mattingly, at the Parker House, when Bird first visited Boston. Bird inspected the city, met Red Auerbach and went to a Celtics' game, wearing a hideous tan sport shirt. He watched as the home team lost its seventh in a row before 7,831 fans. That season the Celtics finished last in their division and sold out the Garden exactly once. Auerbach had sagely drafted Bird the year before, as a junior eligible, but Boston would lose the exclusive rights to him if he didn't sign soon, before the next draft. Woolf suggested a million a year, and Auerbach, apoplectic at that, countered with half a million, maybe, if you counted the perks. He said, ''It's been proven. A cornerman can't dominate the game. A big man, occasionally even a guard. But one man playing a corner can't turn a franchise around.''
Larry said, ''I'm just from a small town, and it don't make no difference where I play at.''
Boston stood solidly with Auerbach. The Globe editorialized that pro basketball had ''achieved the ultimate and the ultimate appears to have limited appeal.'' For that matter, America appeared to stand solidly with the Globe. Bird himself said, ''I can see why the fans don't like to watch pro basketball. I don't either. It's not exciting.''
So Bird went back to Terre Haute, where he was finishing up at Indiana State, and played softball and hung around with Dinah. One day on the diamond he broke the index finger on his shooting hand. He ambled over to a teammate, a fellow named Danny Miracle, and shoved the twisted digit toward him. ''Pull it out, Dan,'' Bird said. ''Pull it out.''
Miracle, looking at a minimum $500,000-a-year hand, recoiled in horror. ''I can't do that, Larry,'' he said. Irked, Bird moved on to find someone who would straighten the damn thing out so he could play some more ball.
Back in Boston, Woolf stood by his demands, and his children were hounded and threatened in school. Finally Auerbach and Woolf settled on a $650,000-a- year deal, which made Bird the highest paid rookie ever. Now the pressure was squarely on Bird. He shrugged and said, ''If I fail, I fail. I've failed classes before. I know the feeling.''
But the Celtics were saved. Within a year, not a seat was available in Boston Garden, and one hasn't been for going on nine seasons. The Celtics went from 29-53 in 1978-79 to 61-21 in '79-80, best in the league, and they've never had a losing month since the cornerman, who couldn't possibly turn a franchise around, joined them.
Several weeks ago, at a $1,500-a-couple dinner honoring Bird, with the proceeds going to the New England Sports Museum, a $250,000 statue of Bird by Armand LaMontagne was unveiled. Auerbach stood up that night and said, ''If I had to start a team, the one guy in all history I would take would be Larry Bird. This is the greatest ballplayer who ever played the game.'' To say this took an extraordinary amount of ''soul-searching'' on Auerbach's part. It meant that Bill Russell was No. 2.
Today the Celtics are in first place, as usual, and Bird, at the age of 31, is enjoying what may well be his finest season in spite of a broken nose and a fractured bone under his left eye, which has forced him to wear protective goggles. He has even slimmed down some, and not long ago, driving along in his Ford Bronco with Dinah, he put out his hand to her. Larry has been in love with Dinah for 12 years, and she in love with him. In his hand was a big diamond ring. He said, ''You can wear this if you want to.'' She opted to.
Now, the most illuminating thing in this whole saga is that hotel bill from 1979. You see, except for the basic room charge and the tax, there was nothing else on it. No room service, no restaurant charge, no long-distance phone calls, no nothing. Having dealt with many other athletes, Woolf naturally assumed that the kid would charge at will. But that wasn't how Larry Joe Bird was raised back in French Lick, Indiana.
''Larry has a way of making everybody he comes into contact with a better person,'' Woolf says. ''If you think the Larry Bird on the court has character and is unselfish—well, off the court he's even more so.'' Among those who know Bird well, the same catalog of qualities is cited again and again: honest, loyal, steadfast, dependable—his existence shaped by the contradictory, almost mystical ability to be the cynosure, yet always to contribute to those around him. Mel Daniels, who was an assistant coach at Indiana State when Bird played there, said it best: ''It's like a piece of Larry goes to each player by the things he does.'' Tony Clark, a Terre Haute radio executive who grew up with Bird, says, ''Larry epitomizes the word friend. Do you understand that?''
Yes.
''Then you really don't have to know anything else about him.''
Evidently what we see of him in public, working at his vocation, is an extension of the person. It hasn't always been easy to understand this, though, because Bird is an exceptionally private man. Of course, every celebrity loves to swear that he's really very shy. It's an appealing lie. But Bird is shy. Bill Hodges, the coach who helped recruit him for Indiana State, says, ''Larry was the most shy and introverted guy I'd ever been around in my life.'' Bird was so self-conscious in high school that he wouldn't go to watch his older brother Mark—who also wore No. 33 and was a star for Springs Valley High—play basketball until his final varsity game. It ran in the family. ''My father was proud of us, but he wouldn't go see us play,'' Larry says. ''Dad didn't like crowds either.''
The son's inherited inhibitions were magnified by the fact that he was thrust into the glare as if he were some archeological treasure. Before his junior year at Indiana State, Bird was an unknown quantity on a second-level team. Moreover, even then, a decade ago, there already existed the reverse racism that makes basketball cognoscenti chary of any white player.
Basketball had long been the realm of small-town boys—backwater Hoosiers being, in fact, the beau ideal—but by the 1970s the sport had been so completely transformed into a black urban exercise that Bird might as well have dropped in from Paraguay or Sri Lanka. Ironically, too, for most of the Republic's existence we had reveled in the folk wisdom that country bumpkins were the true brains, certain to get the best of city slickers.
Almost overnight, though, the reverse became true; a new myth held that ''street smarts'' were the best kind. Bird's utter genius on the court had to be accounted for in some way, however, and so he was explained away as some sort of idiot savant of the hardwood.
Moreover, when he became an overnight sensation in 1979, his shyness was at its most severe because the events of the previous few years had left him hurt and defensive. Bird had left high school for Indiana University as the consummate small-town hero, but he shuffled back to French Lick less than a month later, even before the Hoosiers' preseason practice had begun. Overwhelmed by the huge Bloomington campus, broke, lonely and intimidated by the wardrobe and wherewithal of a more worldly roommate—''a damn mistake I made,'' says Bobby Knight, who would have been Bird's coach—Bird flat out quit. Worse, back in French Lick, he sensed that many of his devoted fans felt that he had let them down, embarrassed the town. To this day Bird remembers who the fair-weather friends were.
Then within the year Larry's father committed suicide. Joe Bird was a laborer who was well liked in the Springs Valley and admired for the work he could do with his hands, but he could never seem to escape creditors and alcohol.
At Indiana State, where Bird matriculated a year after leaving Indiana, his life began to come back together, but then in 1975, at 19, Bird, who had never spent much time with girls, rushed into a disastrous marriage. Within a year they were divorced, but, as a final blow, Bird discovered after the marriage had ended that his former wife was pregnant. Their daughter, Corrie, was born in August 1977, before his junior year. Bird says he isn't allowed to spend much time with his little girl. He and his ex-wife aren't friendly, and however much he loves his child, he still flagellates himself for the youthful union that produced Corrie.
''When I was a kid I thought people who got divorced were the devil,'' he says, shaking his head. ''And then I go out and do it myself right away. Getting married was the worst mistake I ever made. Everything that ever happened to me, I've learned from it, but I'm still scarred by that. That scarred me for life. That and being broke are the two things that influenced me most. Still.
''That dream I told you about—finding the million dollars. I have one other dream, too. The bad dream. I still have it sometimes. My wife is trying to get me to come back to her, but Dinah is there, too, and I keep saying to Dinah, 'I don't want to go with her, I don't want to go.' ''
The Birds are known for their tempers, but Larry is so pale—the limpid eyes, the white-on-white mustache—that his face lends itself more to the gentler emotions. He turns almost tender now: ''And Dinah was with me through all that stuff. She was there. I don't know how many times that poor girl stood under the basket and passed the ball back to me. Over and over, standing there, throwing it back to me so I could shoot. And then all the time takin' care of my injuries.'' And a quick broad smile: ''Course, we've gotten a lot of beer drinkin' in together, too.''
Dinah jokes with friends—well, maybe it's a joke—that Larry finally gave her the engagement ring only after his beloved Doberman, Klinger, died. And Bird still evades the direct question about matrimony: ''I've told Dinah, 'Now why get married and ruin a good relationship?' But she really doesn't like it one bit when I say that.'' She can take some heart when Larry slips a little and says he thinks when he and Dinah get married that they might adopt children rather than have their own.
Anyway, they'll live back in French Lick, where they spend the off-season now, in the house Larry had built with the regulation basketball court and the satellite dish. Lu Meis, a department store executive who befriended Bird in Terre Haute and is now his partner in Larry Bird Ford-Lincoln-Mercury in Martinsville (which boasts a parquet showroom floor), says that once he went with Bird up to Indianapolis to inspect a house Bird was thinking of buying in the big city, but all Bird really seemed interested in was the sprinkler system, which made such a nice lawn. No, Larry Bird will stay in French Lick.
In a way Terre Haute serves as insulation, a halfway house between the French Lick cloister and the city where Bird spends most of the winter working. One almost expects visas for Boston to be distributed in Terre Haute. A radio station brings in Celtics games. The newspapers sometimes feature the Celtics over the Indiana Pacers. Larry Bird memorabilia is a cottage industry. At Larry Bird's Boston Connection hotel, the locals flock to watch Celtics games via satellite on the big screen in the Bird's Nest Sports Lounge—rarely tossing so much as a glance at the Indiana Hoosiers game on the tiny TV screen by the bar. The hallowed MVP Club dining room showcases a photograph of Larry taken by Kenny Rogers. In the coffee shop, also known as the Boston Garden Family Restaurant, miniature Celtics championship banners hang from the ceiling, and the place mats lovingly depict Larry's hands, life-size, complete with his crooked fingers.
Available at this shrine are more than 100 Larry Bird mementos, including Larry Bird golf balls, Larry Bird shower curtains, Larry Bird playing cards (he's the joker), Larry Bird chocolates and Larry Bird clothes for Ken (Barbie's significant other).
Max Gibson, a Terre Haute businessman, is Bird's partner in the hotel venture, and, says Bird, Gibson is the closest thing to a father figure he has had in his life since his own father died. Larry, the fourth in a family of six children, has always gotten along well with older men. But he's zealous in making sure that anyone—of any age—who would cozy up to him is not just poaching on his fame or fortune.
Except for Dinah, an FBI agent's daughter, who was born in New York, and whom he met at Indiana State, all of Bird's best pals go back to French Lick. They were the boys with whom he fished for bluegill or looked for mushrooms under the elm trees or played basketball. ''Cars or girls—they didn't interest Larry at all,'' says Gary Holland, his coach at Springs Valley his senior year. Sundays, for example, Bird would meet up with Tony Clark and maybe another guy or two and they would drive off to some bigger town where there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, pick up a big bucket, and then come back to the Valley and play ball all day. Nights, Tony says, they would just ''cruise around to see who's around.''
Essentially, when he's back in French Lick in the off-season, Bird lives much the same life, only Dinah makes a prettier sidekick. They rise when the spirit moves them—Bird is a legendary sleeper—and while she jogs, he works out at the high school, using the equipment he donated. Then after lunch he'll get in some golf or tennis. Or maybe they'll play tennis together.
After dinner Larry and Dinah hang out and have a few beers around the Valley. ''We're usually in bed by nine o'clock,'' he says.
Could he live this sort of existence year-round after he's through playing? Bird shakes his head at this question, and his tiny little mouth drops open in amazement. ''Why not?'' he says. In the Celtics' media guide, Bird's biography reads ''favorite food is steak and potatoes . . . favorite TV show is Bonanza. . . .''
Why not indeed?
Boston's Larry Bird, in what may be his finest season, gets Red Auerbach's vote—over Bill Russell—as the best ever
The little country boy in Indiana had a recurring dream. In it, he has found a million dollars cash, and he has dug a hole for it under the front porch, and he is hiding there with it. His older brothers walk up and down the steps just above him, but he stays so quiet, they don't have an inkling that their kid brother is down there with a million dollars cash. ''I had that same dream all the time—over and over and over and over,'' says the man who was the little boy.
A lot of grown men have another dream. In it, they're Larry Bird. It's just as reasonable to imagine you're Larry Bird as to imagine you've found a million dollars. Sure, Larry Bird is 6 ft. 9 in., but he doesn't look particularly tall, no taller than the other tall men out there on the court. And he doesn't appear to be fantastic. He isn't sleek. He isn't fast. It seems that he can barely get his feet off the floor. He essays push shots, from another era. He's white, from another era.
But Larry Bird is not a Great White Hope. Anybody who thinks that misses the point of Larry Bird. Little white boys today would much prefer to grow up to be Michael Jordan or Dominique Wilkins, for however clever and hardworking, they're also truly spectacular players. They can fly. But when kids imitate Larry Bird, mostly what they do, so humdrum, is reach down and rub their hands on the bottoms of their sneakers. Even with a last name that cries out for a sassy nickname, Larry Bird remains, simply, Larry.
He seems merely the sum of little bits—a bit more clever than you and me, a bit more dedicated, a bit better on his shooting touch, a bit better with . . . but certainly nothing out of the ordinary. Larry Bird is like when you first learn fractions and you have to change everything to 12ths—12ths!—to make it possible to add up the thirds and fourths and sixths and stuff. All the other great players are so obviously whole numbers.
And so, as improbable a basketball star as Bird is, he's tantalizingly possible. Not the Great White Hope. Never. White hopes are supposed to beat up on the other races, defend Caucasian honor. Bird is simply one of those grown- up daydreams: I wish I could be pretty; I wish I could be back in high school and know what I know now; I wish I could be king of the world; I wish I could find a million dollars; I wish I could be Larry Bird.
He looks up, chuckling at how the little boy got his dream right after all. ''Well, I guess I found the million,'' Larry Bird says. ''Even found a little more to go with it.''
BOB WOOLF, BIRD'S ATTORNEY, brings out a hotel bill dated April 6, 1979. It was for Bird and his girlfriend, Dinah Mattingly, at the Parker House, when Bird first visited Boston. Bird inspected the city, met Red Auerbach and went to a Celtics' game, wearing a hideous tan sport shirt. He watched as the home team lost its seventh in a row before 7,831 fans. That season the Celtics finished last in their division and sold out the Garden exactly once. Auerbach had sagely drafted Bird the year before, as a junior eligible, but Boston would lose the exclusive rights to him if he didn't sign soon, before the next draft. Woolf suggested a million a year, and Auerbach, apoplectic at that, countered with half a million, maybe, if you counted the perks. He said, ''It's been proven. A cornerman can't dominate the game. A big man, occasionally even a guard. But one man playing a corner can't turn a franchise around.''
Larry said, ''I'm just from a small town, and it don't make no difference where I play at.''
Boston stood solidly with Auerbach. The Globe editorialized that pro basketball had ''achieved the ultimate and the ultimate appears to have limited appeal.'' For that matter, America appeared to stand solidly with the Globe. Bird himself said, ''I can see why the fans don't like to watch pro basketball. I don't either. It's not exciting.''
So Bird went back to Terre Haute, where he was finishing up at Indiana State, and played softball and hung around with Dinah. One day on the diamond he broke the index finger on his shooting hand. He ambled over to a teammate, a fellow named Danny Miracle, and shoved the twisted digit toward him. ''Pull it out, Dan,'' Bird said. ''Pull it out.''
Miracle, looking at a minimum $500,000-a-year hand, recoiled in horror. ''I can't do that, Larry,'' he said. Irked, Bird moved on to find someone who would straighten the damn thing out so he could play some more ball.
Back in Boston, Woolf stood by his demands, and his children were hounded and threatened in school. Finally Auerbach and Woolf settled on a $650,000-a- year deal, which made Bird the highest paid rookie ever. Now the pressure was squarely on Bird. He shrugged and said, ''If I fail, I fail. I've failed classes before. I know the feeling.''
But the Celtics were saved. Within a year, not a seat was available in Boston Garden, and one hasn't been for going on nine seasons. The Celtics went from 29-53 in 1978-79 to 61-21 in '79-80, best in the league, and they've never had a losing month since the cornerman, who couldn't possibly turn a franchise around, joined them.
Several weeks ago, at a $1,500-a-couple dinner honoring Bird, with the proceeds going to the New England Sports Museum, a $250,000 statue of Bird by Armand LaMontagne was unveiled. Auerbach stood up that night and said, ''If I had to start a team, the one guy in all history I would take would be Larry Bird. This is the greatest ballplayer who ever played the game.'' To say this took an extraordinary amount of ''soul-searching'' on Auerbach's part. It meant that Bill Russell was No. 2.
Today the Celtics are in first place, as usual, and Bird, at the age of 31, is enjoying what may well be his finest season in spite of a broken nose and a fractured bone under his left eye, which has forced him to wear protective goggles. He has even slimmed down some, and not long ago, driving along in his Ford Bronco with Dinah, he put out his hand to her. Larry has been in love with Dinah for 12 years, and she in love with him. In his hand was a big diamond ring. He said, ''You can wear this if you want to.'' She opted to.
Now, the most illuminating thing in this whole saga is that hotel bill from 1979. You see, except for the basic room charge and the tax, there was nothing else on it. No room service, no restaurant charge, no long-distance phone calls, no nothing. Having dealt with many other athletes, Woolf naturally assumed that the kid would charge at will. But that wasn't how Larry Joe Bird was raised back in French Lick, Indiana.
''Larry has a way of making everybody he comes into contact with a better person,'' Woolf says. ''If you think the Larry Bird on the court has character and is unselfish—well, off the court he's even more so.'' Among those who know Bird well, the same catalog of qualities is cited again and again: honest, loyal, steadfast, dependable—his existence shaped by the contradictory, almost mystical ability to be the cynosure, yet always to contribute to those around him. Mel Daniels, who was an assistant coach at Indiana State when Bird played there, said it best: ''It's like a piece of Larry goes to each player by the things he does.'' Tony Clark, a Terre Haute radio executive who grew up with Bird, says, ''Larry epitomizes the word friend. Do you understand that?''
Yes.
''Then you really don't have to know anything else about him.''
Evidently what we see of him in public, working at his vocation, is an extension of the person. It hasn't always been easy to understand this, though, because Bird is an exceptionally private man. Of course, every celebrity loves to swear that he's really very shy. It's an appealing lie. But Bird is shy. Bill Hodges, the coach who helped recruit him for Indiana State, says, ''Larry was the most shy and introverted guy I'd ever been around in my life.'' Bird was so self-conscious in high school that he wouldn't go to watch his older brother Mark—who also wore No. 33 and was a star for Springs Valley High—play basketball until his final varsity game. It ran in the family. ''My father was proud of us, but he wouldn't go see us play,'' Larry says. ''Dad didn't like crowds either.''
The son's inherited inhibitions were magnified by the fact that he was thrust into the glare as if he were some archeological treasure. Before his junior year at Indiana State, Bird was an unknown quantity on a second-level team. Moreover, even then, a decade ago, there already existed the reverse racism that makes basketball cognoscenti chary of any white player.
Basketball had long been the realm of small-town boys—backwater Hoosiers being, in fact, the beau ideal—but by the 1970s the sport had been so completely transformed into a black urban exercise that Bird might as well have dropped in from Paraguay or Sri Lanka. Ironically, too, for most of the Republic's existence we had reveled in the folk wisdom that country bumpkins were the true brains, certain to get the best of city slickers.
Almost overnight, though, the reverse became true; a new myth held that ''street smarts'' were the best kind. Bird's utter genius on the court had to be accounted for in some way, however, and so he was explained away as some sort of idiot savant of the hardwood.
Moreover, when he became an overnight sensation in 1979, his shyness was at its most severe because the events of the previous few years had left him hurt and defensive. Bird had left high school for Indiana University as the consummate small-town hero, but he shuffled back to French Lick less than a month later, even before the Hoosiers' preseason practice had begun. Overwhelmed by the huge Bloomington campus, broke, lonely and intimidated by the wardrobe and wherewithal of a more worldly roommate—''a damn mistake I made,'' says Bobby Knight, who would have been Bird's coach—Bird flat out quit. Worse, back in French Lick, he sensed that many of his devoted fans felt that he had let them down, embarrassed the town. To this day Bird remembers who the fair-weather friends were.
Then within the year Larry's father committed suicide. Joe Bird was a laborer who was well liked in the Springs Valley and admired for the work he could do with his hands, but he could never seem to escape creditors and alcohol.
At Indiana State, where Bird matriculated a year after leaving Indiana, his life began to come back together, but then in 1975, at 19, Bird, who had never spent much time with girls, rushed into a disastrous marriage. Within a year they were divorced, but, as a final blow, Bird discovered after the marriage had ended that his former wife was pregnant. Their daughter, Corrie, was born in August 1977, before his junior year. Bird says he isn't allowed to spend much time with his little girl. He and his ex-wife aren't friendly, and however much he loves his child, he still flagellates himself for the youthful union that produced Corrie.
''When I was a kid I thought people who got divorced were the devil,'' he says, shaking his head. ''And then I go out and do it myself right away. Getting married was the worst mistake I ever made. Everything that ever happened to me, I've learned from it, but I'm still scarred by that. That scarred me for life. That and being broke are the two things that influenced me most. Still.
''That dream I told you about—finding the million dollars. I have one other dream, too. The bad dream. I still have it sometimes. My wife is trying to get me to come back to her, but Dinah is there, too, and I keep saying to Dinah, 'I don't want to go with her, I don't want to go.' ''
The Birds are known for their tempers, but Larry is so pale—the limpid eyes, the white-on-white mustache—that his face lends itself more to the gentler emotions. He turns almost tender now: ''And Dinah was with me through all that stuff. She was there. I don't know how many times that poor girl stood under the basket and passed the ball back to me. Over and over, standing there, throwing it back to me so I could shoot. And then all the time takin' care of my injuries.'' And a quick broad smile: ''Course, we've gotten a lot of beer drinkin' in together, too.''
Dinah jokes with friends—well, maybe it's a joke—that Larry finally gave her the engagement ring only after his beloved Doberman, Klinger, died. And Bird still evades the direct question about matrimony: ''I've told Dinah, 'Now why get married and ruin a good relationship?' But she really doesn't like it one bit when I say that.'' She can take some heart when Larry slips a little and says he thinks when he and Dinah get married that they might adopt children rather than have their own.
Anyway, they'll live back in French Lick, where they spend the off-season now, in the house Larry had built with the regulation basketball court and the satellite dish. Lu Meis, a department store executive who befriended Bird in Terre Haute and is now his partner in Larry Bird Ford-Lincoln-Mercury in Martinsville (which boasts a parquet showroom floor), says that once he went with Bird up to Indianapolis to inspect a house Bird was thinking of buying in the big city, but all Bird really seemed interested in was the sprinkler system, which made such a nice lawn. No, Larry Bird will stay in French Lick.
In a way Terre Haute serves as insulation, a halfway house between the French Lick cloister and the city where Bird spends most of the winter working. One almost expects visas for Boston to be distributed in Terre Haute. A radio station brings in Celtics games. The newspapers sometimes feature the Celtics over the Indiana Pacers. Larry Bird memorabilia is a cottage industry. At Larry Bird's Boston Connection hotel, the locals flock to watch Celtics games via satellite on the big screen in the Bird's Nest Sports Lounge—rarely tossing so much as a glance at the Indiana Hoosiers game on the tiny TV screen by the bar. The hallowed MVP Club dining room showcases a photograph of Larry taken by Kenny Rogers. In the coffee shop, also known as the Boston Garden Family Restaurant, miniature Celtics championship banners hang from the ceiling, and the place mats lovingly depict Larry's hands, life-size, complete with his crooked fingers.
Available at this shrine are more than 100 Larry Bird mementos, including Larry Bird golf balls, Larry Bird shower curtains, Larry Bird playing cards (he's the joker), Larry Bird chocolates and Larry Bird clothes for Ken (Barbie's significant other).
Max Gibson, a Terre Haute businessman, is Bird's partner in the hotel venture, and, says Bird, Gibson is the closest thing to a father figure he has had in his life since his own father died. Larry, the fourth in a family of six children, has always gotten along well with older men. But he's zealous in making sure that anyone—of any age—who would cozy up to him is not just poaching on his fame or fortune.
Except for Dinah, an FBI agent's daughter, who was born in New York, and whom he met at Indiana State, all of Bird's best pals go back to French Lick. They were the boys with whom he fished for bluegill or looked for mushrooms under the elm trees or played basketball. ''Cars or girls—they didn't interest Larry at all,'' says Gary Holland, his coach at Springs Valley his senior year. Sundays, for example, Bird would meet up with Tony Clark and maybe another guy or two and they would drive off to some bigger town where there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, pick up a big bucket, and then come back to the Valley and play ball all day. Nights, Tony says, they would just ''cruise around to see who's around.''
Essentially, when he's back in French Lick in the off-season, Bird lives much the same life, only Dinah makes a prettier sidekick. They rise when the spirit moves them—Bird is a legendary sleeper—and while she jogs, he works out at the high school, using the equipment he donated. Then after lunch he'll get in some golf or tennis. Or maybe they'll play tennis together.
After dinner Larry and Dinah hang out and have a few beers around the Valley. ''We're usually in bed by nine o'clock,'' he says.
Could he live this sort of existence year-round after he's through playing? Bird shakes his head at this question, and his tiny little mouth drops open in amazement. ''Why not?'' he says. In the Celtics' media guide, Bird's biography reads ''favorite food is steak and potatoes . . . favorite TV show is Bonanza. . . .''
Why not indeed?
Comment