When My Father Talked About Larry Bird
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.
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.”
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 talk about his game. They talk about the trash talk and his shooting, but they don’t talk about his game.”
Bird works now as a consultant for the Pacers but lives in Naples, Florida. In May, the Larry Bird Museum opened in Terre Haute, Indiana. Admission is free to the public. The warmth and water of the Gulf Coast provide a balm for Bird. No bone chill or icy Hoosier hills in Naples. Only flat sugar beaches and placid seas where he can fish the reefs or cast inland or just be a grandad and build castles made of sand. At the Larry Bird Museum, you can’t exit through the gift shop. There is no gift shop.
“He’s the toughest player who ever lived, and there will never be anyone else close,” Jackie MacMullan tells you. MacMullan coauthored two books with Bird and covered the NBA for nearly forty years. “There’s just no one ever that will put his body through what Larry Bird put his body through ever again. For starters, training staffs will not allow it. But his mental and physical toughness, no one else will ever match it.”
What you, your dad, and MacMullan cannot forget is that toughness. In the winter of 1991, you don’t yet know how to divine the forces that shaped your dad. But Bird gives you a clue. Earlier that spring, he enters the Eastern Conference Playoffs a god in ruins. Without structural stability in his spine, he endures much and risks more.
Before game five against the Pacers, your dad says, this could be it. In the second quarter, Bird dribbles left, loses possession, and dives for the ball. Unable to break his fall, his face slams and bounces against the parquet floor. Your father stands, his jaw set, as Bird walks off the court.
In the trainer’s room, Bird sleeps. Does Bird dream of his father? They used to fish a small lake hidden between wooded hills in Orange County. The still waters belied the storm within Joey, a WWII and Korean War vet. In his sleep, Joey screamed and thrashed. Sober for stretches, drowning in others, images return of a dead friend, a frozen ditch, and the open eyes of a young North Korean soldier he killed. On February 3, 1975, Joey died of suicide. Larry was eighteen, a garbage man, five months home from Bloomington.
Lar-ree! Lar-ree! The right side of his skull pounds. Doctors say his day is done. Lar-ree! Lar-ree!
When Bird was fourteen, Joey came home in anguish. His ankle, Bird tells Frank Deford, was “all black and blue and red.” Joey had Larry and his brother Mark remove the boot. Before dawn, they got it back on.
With seven minutes left in the third, Bird jogs through the tunnel and onto the court. Marv Albert’s voice rises: “And here comes…Larry BIRD!”
He misses, then hits four straight. Top of the key. Baseline. Fade-away swush. Bird snags rebounds, Bird leads the break, Bird sinks free throws. Time-out Pacers. The rafters rip open, and you lean into your father, whose arm is around you and you wonder why he’s crying, but those tears are yours.
Bird finishes game five with thirty-two points, one traumatic brain injury, nine assists, seven rebounds, and a back broken. You clip the box score at breakfast and slide it into your red wallet with Velcro straps.
If you press him with a question or get your dad going on Larry Bird, he can swerve from historical and political diatribes and back into stories. You love his stories. They remind you of what it was like before the Last Days of Larry Bird when you weren’t out for blood on a basketball court.
“How did you watch games growing up?” you ask.
“I listened,” he says as he shoots. “I had a radio, a flashlight, and The Book.”
The Book?
“The Book was a big blank notebook. Heavy cardboard cover. I wrote down what was True. ” he says.
In the Book, he put the starting five of Crispus Attucks High, 1955 Indiana State Champs. In the Book, he placed Jerry West’s thirty-eight points against Louisville in the ’59 Final Four. Before long, the Book went beyond basketball.
In the Book your father marked the Kennedys and King slain. He wrote the names of Detroit, Watts, Chicago, names of Vietnamese hills and hamlets. If education simplified the world for his father W.T., the son of a farmer, it revealed complex levels of strata for your father.
Behind the pulpit, he tells you, did not feel true.
“I wanted to ask questions, so I went to law school, but those weren’t my questions.”
When your shot comes up short, he holds the ball and shows you again: deep knee bend, greater rise, hold your follow-through.
Back in Indiana after law school, he worked the assembly line at Ford, and read of Kent State and My Lai. In the unquiet evenings, he walked along the Ohio River.
He returned to the prophets in the Hebrew Bible--the social critics who challenged the powerful. Learn to do good, Isaiah cries, Seek justice, Rebuke the oppressor, Defend the fatherless, Plead for the widow. Here were his questions. A Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Emory brought him to Atlanta.
He learned Aramaic, followed Watergate hearings, and Indiana’s run to the Final Four. He excelled in his courses, but his dissertation stalled. Unlike the Book, the pages blanked. Necessity soon called.
“Your mother was expecting,” he says, and smiles. “You.”
Bills would be due. New pressures. And that need would determine what could be True.
He knew five languages and added a few more: COBOL, C++. He took a programming job at the IRS.
"I went from Pharisee to tax collector,” he says.
And while he began a career that could not love him back, a revelation appeared. An Indiana State Sycamore. A center playing guard. A hoop savant. Number 33 was true in the way the plumb line between fence posts was true. True in the way the 272-word simplicity of the Gettysburg Address was true. True in how at the end of King’s Dream, he lets freedom ring twelve times. The beauty of full human expression, awe. If your father felt a disconnect between his talents and his days, here was this blond and blue-eyed bringer of truth.
Your dad takes you to see Magic’s Lakers, Jordan’s Bulls, the loathsome Pistons, and Larry Bird. On school nights, he bends bedtime as Bird torches your Hawks. You watch in ’85 as Bird catches fire. Corner swish. Runner swish. Everywhere Bird. Everywhere swush. On the bench, Hawks hide their faces.
“There are nights,” Bird says that season, “when Jesus Christ couldn’t guard me.”
When Bird drills a twenty-eight-footer falling out of bounds, the Hawks bench erupts and your dad leaves the room. “It couldn’t be real,” Dominique Wilkins says afterward, “But it was.”
Real, too, is the ’88 Eastern Conference Playoffs. Hawks vs. Celtics. Game seven. Stuck at a church retreat in north Georgia, you sneak out of a ropes course and find a cafeteria pay phone to call collect. Your dad provides play-by-play in the fourth quarter. Rebound Bird. Putback Bird. Bird for three. Twenty in the final frame.
Later at night, a bearded youth minister strums a guitar under a necklace of stars and asks you all to close your eyes and imagine the awesome power of God. You picture Larry Bird. Deep in the corner. For three.
Your dad’s stories sluice up your backyard, the trees, your hoop. Just as Joey was a buddy to Larry, your father is your friend. Everytime Bird reels in a fishing line he puts into motion the initial pressure of Joey’s callused hands, just as you still cannot pick up a book without the echo of your father.
Out back, his stories surprise you the same way as when he switches from his right to left hand to pour in jumpers.
You ask how he and Bird can shoot with either hand.
“Practice,” he says.
On the playground, shooting hoops, you tell friends that your father and Larry Bird are “ambiguous.”
What was not ambiguous for your father was what his father wanted him to be.
“What should I be?” you once asked.
“That,” he said, opening to a blank page, “is up to you.”
So before and after school, you shoot on that backyard hoop your father and grandfather cut from a black maple tabletop. And in the spring, as honeysuckle swallows the woods whole, if you can swish the very first shot of the day, a halo of pollen explodes from the net.
Gun to your head, the bit goes, who is the best pure shooter in NBA history? Steph? Ray Allen? Bird? Gun to your head: Who would you want to shoot a free throw if your life depended on it? Gun to your head—we say this when we mean it. Truth is you don’t know what you might say with a gun to your head. And your shot is money the night you walk home from freshman basketball practice at Shamrock High in December 1991. You like to walk after practice. The walk is a mile. Maybe more. You replay scrimmage highlights as you pass homes decked for Christmas and your breath takes shape in front of you.
Two guys approach. Older. You recognize neither. One is tall, wearing a Georgetown Starter. The other is shorter with a whisper of a mustache. You step to cross the street but stop. Scared? Outnumbered? Last week against Tucker, with your dad in the stands, you scored sixteen points. From the line: six of six. Just like Larry. Be a Bird. Hit free throws. They’re free. They’re yours. Your sidewalk, too.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, Bob Knight told you and hundreds of basketball campers in Bloomington that summer. For I am the toughest sonuvabitch in the valley.
They see you jab step, hesitate, and head straight down the lane: chin up, shoulders square.
Bird watched a scrimmage that day on a stationary bike. Team officials say the inflammation is unrelated to his surgery, but hear that spin bike hum. That’s the canary in the coal mine. A swan’s song. Bird at dusk.
Both guys nod, pass you by, and the short guy asks for the time. You pivot and he pulls a 9mm from his waistband and trains the gun to your chest. You see a yellow dust gather, swirl, and explode. Three clouds pop canary yellow. The pollen. The ring of pollen from your early-morning hoop.
Here is how the world will end.
Not with a bang.
But a swush.
They request your Jordans. What are your options? Sweep the leg? Grab the gun? You take a seat. The gun is pointed at your head. You unlace the right shoe. The same black Infrared 6’s Jordan wore when he soared over the Lakers in the finals. He hits you with the gun on the back of your head. Yellow go the clouds. He faces you to encourage faster footwear removal. The gun is shaking. His hand on the gun is shaking.
You had the first Jordans. The originals. Red, white, black. The ones Jordan wore when he scored sixty-three versus Bird in the playoffs and after Bird said, “That was God disguised as Michael Jordan.”
The only god here is the gun. All action bends to it. Final are its words. Both shoes are off, laces out.
“C’mon,” the short guy says to his tall companion, who is unzipping your bookbag and plucking out your red wallet. The Velcro cracks. Inside, he eyes your lunch money, a family photo, a Braves ticket stub, and the box score of Bird’s game five against the Pacers. He slides your wallet into his pocket.
The words fly from you as if torn from a gust.
The tall guy seizes the gun and points it at your head.
“Say it again,” he demands.
Steady is his hand. Steady, too, is the finger.
“You heard me,” you say and close your eyes.
And a bang will do, too.
Bang goes the world every day.
You brace for a blast and wait. You open your eyes to stars. Dim and ancient, they blink. Brake lights splash red on a station wagon and a bus down the street. School-zone traffic scattered your assailants. You stand and the world spins and you grab the end of your shorts. You wait for your breath and keep waiting.
The walk is a mile. Maybe more. Points and distances blur. At home you tell your parents a version of what you’ll later tell the police officers in your kitchen. The report they file bears no mention of yellow clouds, the word you spoke, or Bird’s box score.
And Bird won’t make it to New Year’s. Cortisone injections, an immobilizing brace, hours of treatment: Nothing holds. After twenty-eight games of the ’91 season, that’s it. He’ll reemerge hobbled in the spring, make a Dream Team cameo, but it’s over. The last days of Larry Bird and your night on the sidewalk are unrelated, but that’s not what you feel.
You shrug off the incident to teammates and teachers even as you walk the hallways scanning for your shoes. At practice, your instincts twist. You pass up open shots. You float. You rotate a step late on defense. You lose your starting spot. On bus rides after road games, you gaze out the window.
Watching hoops with your dad, he asks how you’re doing. You get the question, but joke about needing a new pair of shoes. He doesn’t push. If he needs a therapist, so do you. You feel shame about your shoes. Shame you didn’t fight back. Angry you feel shame. Angry you didn’t cross the street. Shame for what you said. You share with no one the full details of that night, and this secret compounds your shame and adds to your anger.
You’re fifteen and can’t sleep, and the cracks your father finds in America you find within yourself. Some nights he stands by your bedroom door, silhouetted there. You know he’s checking on you, but you close your eyes and pretend. He eases your door shut, and the whole room goes dark.
Now you stand in the hallway of Rose, age twelve, and Grace, age nine. What we talk about is Caitlin Clark, Simone Biles, and Katie Ledecky. No single star dots their sky. Your backyard hoops now consist of curating Taylor Swift playlists, as games of H-O-R-S-E include intricate dance moves. Sometimes at dusk, after they’ve gone inside, you take a dribble and find the old spots. You hoist up shot after shot and ignore the click in your knee and bark in your shoulder, and you keep shooting until—swush—and then you go inside.
You call your dad. He’s seventy-six. You talk about his twelve grandkids. He’s kept an eye on the Finals, even though his sports track now toward the Premier League. He admires Kyrie’s use of the left hand, and wonders if Luka’s lack of composure in key moments is related to his conditioning. He breaks into a near rhapsody on the smarts and want-to, energy and will of Atlanta native Jaylen Brown. He marvels at Brown’s capacity to play on both ends. He praises his chase down defense late in game two and his left-handed layup to follow. He wishes Brown was a Hawk and says his drive is equal to his talent.
You ask about the first time he saw Larry Bird. It’s a story you know, maybe better than your own, but you want to hear him tell it. He says he knew Bird was poor and had lost his father. He quotes Freud on how a man doesn’t become a man until his father dies.
“That death was literal for Bird,” he says, “and then you’re alone in a whole new way. So there was this bare-knuckle intensity to his game. This artistry. You felt that. And you felt this other thing, too.”
He pauses, searches.
Ruach, he says, using Hebrew. “Life force. The wind that moves through all things. God’s breath.”
Long ago, you marked days and nights by Larry Bird. Each year on December 7, Bird’s birthday, you count your stars and recall your Jordans and a word you cannot take back. The same word barreling through our history.
While Bird’s day returns each year, there was only one Larry Bird Night. February 4, 1993. Boston Garden. At evening’s end, Magic joined Bird at half court and the two embraced.
For the event, the artist LeRoy Neiman painted a portrait of Bird shooting from the corner. Each of the 1,033 signed prints sold for $1,033. Bird gathered the money and gave it to thirty-three nonprofits. The Boys & Girls Club. PBS. A homeless shelter. Across his youth, the Birds moved fifteen times, and in those years he dreamed of finding a bag with a million dollars inside. In fourth grade, for lunch money, he swept the school cafeteria where his mother, Georgia, worked. At thirteen, he stocked Agan’s grocery, next to where Georgia fried doughnuts. One hundred hours a week she worked. And he was not exactly a garbage man, Larry Bird, but an employee of the French Lick Street Department. They picked up trash, cut grass, and painted park benches. He went on to find that million-dollar bag many times over, but on his way out the door, he created one more for folks he’d never know.
Under the spotlight that night, Larry Bird waved goodbye and held his face high. See that face. An American face. A face we’ve known all along.
“He has a face like a Hoosier Michelangelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful.”
Whitman wrote those words about Lincoln, but they’re the sort of words we use when we talk about what we talk about when we talk about Larry Bird.
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