Larry Bird dedicate his award Legend of the Year Award at NBA All-Star to

Larry Bird wins Legend of the Year Award at NBA All-Star Weekend

Story by Cameron Tabatabaie • 3mo

 

When My Father Talked About Larry Bird

larry bird shooting free throw

The Boston Celtics legend was the north star of my youth, present in every debate and stretch of silence with my dad. This was true on the night when my world stopped, leaving me on a sidewalk seeing stars.

 

By Jeremy CollinsPublished: Jun 16, 2024

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You first see Larry Bird’s jumper up close in December 1984 at the Omni pregame shootaround. Bigger, blonder than on TV, he drains shot after shot, swish after swish. You strain on tiptoes, age eight, and your father scoops you up and sets you on his shoulders and wraps his hands around your ankles. Not all swishes are equal. Some swush as if Bird has spotted a bull’s-eye within a bull’s-eye.

 

You live in Atlanta as Hawks fans, but your dad grew up south of Bird in New Albany, Indiana. He’d trained at various points to be a pastor, lawyer, and professor, but instead of a congregation, court, or classroom, he has you for an audience. Together, you share Larry Bird. Each morning, he recounts Bird’s box scores, and the digits spin through your school days. He tags tales of Bird with the refrain that Larry Bird was once a garbage man, lacing our official record with this article of faith. A god? Swish swish swush. A garbage man. With each shot Bird takes at the Omni, your dad squeezes your flesh hard enough to leave a mark.

 

You’ll never get closer to Bird, the north star of your youth, but he’s present in every debate and stretch of silence with your dad. This is true even on that December night in 1991 when your world stops, spins off its axis, and leaves you on a sidewalk seeing stars. He could not catch you then, for there are places the child must go where the father cannot follow. Your dad pointed beyond Bird to the unfinished project of America. It wasn’t a lesson you wanted. It required vision. To see the whole floor. To recall the game’s one time greatest player, who hitched home after twenty-four days at Indiana University to work as a garbage man. You didn’t want a lesson. You wanted to beat your old man in one-on-one and he would not, under any circumstance or weather, yield.

 

Inside the cold, fluorescent-lit room at the Internal Revenue Service, rows of massive computers generate numbers that refuse to add up for your father. As a computer programmer for the IRS during the summer of 1991, in the last days of Larry Bird, your dad brings his work and the numbers home. Your own number is fifty. Fifty free throws. You both shoot fifty in sets of ten. Your dad keeps count.

 

Bird shoots one hundred. Sets of twenty. His goal? One hundred straight. When he gets ninety-nine in a row, he banks the last one. “There were some days,” Bird tells The Indy Star in 2015, “I couldn’t miss. I could try to miss and wouldn’t.”

 

At the line, your dad sinks free throw after free throw and recounts Bird at the line against the Clippers, immune to the tricks of the San Diego Chicken. He details the left-handed jumper of New Albany’s Terry Morrison, who played AAU with Bird for Hancock Construction. He then asks if you know what’s happening to Hoosier families right now. Poor families like the Birds once were. Farm families in Fort Wayne? Working families in Gary? You don’t. You’re fourteen. “Right now,” he says, “and across America, the rich hoard third homes and second yachts while steelworkers and mill workers donate blood to feed their families.”

 

His words form a background noise, a music you try to tune out. When he tells you to bend your knees deeper and hold your follow-through longer, you tune in. Swish.

 

“Thirty-five for fifty,” he says.

 

His total is forty-five. You silently keep count and check his work. He doesn’t cheat, your dad. You have no way to check his words on supply-side economics. Some nights, you shoot alone until he flips on the floodlights and arrives with a big red cup. Diet Coke & Jack. He sermonizes on off-shore tax shelters and the military-industrial complex. Hard to follow, such talk. You hate the red cup, a cheat code for a frequency you can’t access. On those nights, his shot is true, but his defense is not. You resent these games when he’s not at his best. You resent even more that he still beats you.

 

a man and a child

Courtesy of Jeremy Collins

The author (left) and his father (right).

So you post him up and put a shoulder in his chest. He gets winded easier, sweats more. A whiskey sweat and Brut aftershave. A scent you’ll wear to bed. You armbar him. You don’t get his righteous fury. You can’t see the root of his rage. You begrudge his intelligence, his capacity to string together words, paragraphs, and pages in the air. When he shoots, you shout and complicate his landing. Take that, you think. You don’t know what you disagree with but know you want to. With no words to match his, you pump fake and go to the rim and you’re both airborne as your arms tangle and gravity claims its rights. His bear hug and boozy laugh break your fall.

 

“Foul,” he says.

 

You head to the top of the key, breathing hard.

 

“No foul,” you call.

 

He points to your busted lip.

 

“Sorry,” he says and motions for a time-out.

 

“Check ball,” you say.

 

He picks up the ball, sighs, dribbles, and nails a foul shot. Grabbing the red cup, he goes inside.

 

For the rest of the summer of ’91, you play more H-O-R-S-E. If you get ahead, he switches to his left hand. Lefty free throws. Left hooks. Left-handed corner jumpers.

 

“Not fair,” you say, but it is fair and a cold-blooded Larry Bird would never utter such words.

 

“Is life?” your dad retorts.

 

You both weigh life’s relative fairness in front of the TV on November 8, 1991. Hawks at Celtics. The camera zooms in on a pale Larry Bird. “Magic,” your dad says.

 

Magic Johnson announced a day earlier that he’d contracted HIV. Back in Lansing, Earvin too rode the garbage truck with his father before dawn. Some wonder if Magic has days left, but it is Bird who looks at death’s door.

 

“See how he runs,” your dad says. Bird’s stride stiffens. “Look how he avoids contact in the post. The jumper, his timing, is off,” he says. At halftime, the score is close. Your father yawns.

 

“Larry should’ve walked away last year,” he says and wishes you good night.

 

“Bullshit,” you say.

 

Your father turns, and the air shifts. You’ve never cursed under his roof.

 

“Say again?” he asks.

 

You want him to stay up even if it means a lecture. You want to talk Larry Bird.

 

“Ten bucks Bird plays the rest of the season.”

 

He shakes his head.

 

“Ten says he makes second team All-NBA.”

 

“No, son.”

 

“Fine,” you say, “but Bird will finish the year.”

 

“I hope you’re right,” your father says. “Good night.”

 

He’s the toughest player who ever lived and they’ll never be anyone else close.

You’re fifteen. Fathers don’t tire. Magic won’t die. Bird can’t break. In the second half, Bird is a shadow. The Hawks win easily. “These have been the two toughest days since my father passed away,” Bird says post-game. “I’ve been depressed, and I’ve been out of it.”

 

Bird finishes 5-14.

 

“That was the first time in my life I played in a game that I didn’t want to play,” Bird tells Rick Reilly in 2012. “I didn’t have anything that night.”

 

But Bird rallies—Lar-ree, Lar-ree!—as if woven into the hoop universe is the truth that Larry Bird will simply never stop being Larry Bird.

 

“Twenty-seven against the Suns,” you announce to your dad.

 

“Thirty-two against Orlando and ten rebounds,” you add.

 

“Thirty-one against New York,” you herald, “and twelve boards.” Your dad nods.

 

The Knicks game is on the eve of his birthday. Bird turns thirty-five—the eighth oldest player in the NBA. “I didn’t think I’d ever come back,” he says, “I thought it was going to be my last game every game out.”

 

On the night he goes for thirty-one against the Knicks, Bird hits fourteen of fourteen free throws. Swish swish swush.

 

When we talk about Larry Bird now, we say things true and false. On June 7, LeBron retweeted Bird’s sixty spot in ’85 against your Atlanta Hawks. “Larry Legend was SOOOOOOOOO DAMN NICE! One of them 🐐’s!” J.J. Reddick argued last year that Bird would not be a top five three-point shooter in today’s NBA. The 2024 NBA Finals return to Boston for Game Five. First Take will have a Take. Tatum’s legacy compared to Larry Legend? Good? Great? What will Stephen A. say? After Game three of the 2023 Western Conference Finals, LeBron tipped his hat to Nikola Jokic for his unblockable “Larry Bird style” jumper.

 

The YouTube video NBA Players and Legends Explain How SCARY GOOD Larry Bird Was hits 8.2 million views. Another, Larry Bird Trash-Talking, has 4.4 million views.

 

“That’s how we talk about Larry Bird now,” author and Boston native Howard Bryant tells you. “As a trash-talker. But do you know how tough he was? He played a tough brand of basketball that translates to every era, every team. And yet when you think about who he is as a player, what has endured is the shooting and trash-talking. Go back and watch Bird in his prime. He is a beast—8.8 defensive rebounds a game. People don’t tal

k about his game. They talk about the trash talk and his shooting, but they don’t talk about his game.”

 

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