COMMENTARY : Bird Knew Just Where to Run, When to Jump

Talking to reporters after a game, Larry Bird ran a brush through his blond hair. He moved the brush with his left hand, which seemed odd for a right-handed shooter. His shooting hand rested against his blue jeans, his index finger swollen at the middle knuckle. As ugly as the finger was, it ran second to the little finger on Bird’s shooting hand. That one broke away from the others at an angle suggesting pain. The little finger seemed to have been twisted counterclockwise and left where it snapped.

“Your right hand OK?” a reporter said.

“Yep,” Bird said.

As it happened, the reporter’s question was born of ignorance. Bird’s shooting hand had looked that way for nearly 10 years.

He had broken the index finger in the spring of 1979 while playing the outfield in a softball game. A line drive bent the finger backward and shattered a knuckle. Not two months later, in Boston for a physical examination before signing his rookie contract, Bird allowed the Celtics’ team doctor to look at his hand--only he held out his left hand. And then he took Red Auerbach onto the parquet where, in Bird’s words, “I buried a bunch of jumpers.” No problem.

The misdirection of the little finger on his shooting hand happened in 1982 when Bird caught the finger on someone’s body under the hoop. Though the resulting dislocation tore ligaments, Bird’s medical treatment consisted of tape. As long as he could shoot, he could handle the pain. In his autobiography with Boston writer Bob Ryan, Bird said, “A doctor told me that the only way to treat it is to have a plastic knuckle inserted after I retire.”

Now, too soon by far, Larry Bird has time to get his fingers straightened out. But happily, he first spent a dozen fabulous years becoming one of the best basketball players ever.

He had astonishing athletic gifts, and he had the more astonishing gift of generosity. He used his talent first, last and always to make his teams better. Anything that polished his reputation was a by-product of the work, not the aim of it.

Much of the praise for Bird has been well intentioned but misbegotten. Everyone talks about how hard he worked. Yes, he worked and the work was important. But it wasn’t work that made Larry Bird into Larry Legend. Give a man six trajillion three-point shots in practice. He will never be Larry Bird unless he comes to that work with rare hand-eye coordination. As for Bird’s passing, it could be done only by a shooter who also has full-court vision, intelligence and imagination.

“You ever notice,” said Tom Callahan, the Washington sports columnist, “that when everybody’s off the floor, Bird’s on the floor? And when everybody’s on the floor, Bird’s off the floor?” Which was Callahan’s way of agreeing with Ryan, who once said it’s true that Bird is slow and it’s true he can’t jump much. But it’s also true, Ryan said, that Bird knows where to run and when to jump.

Auerbach, speaking at Bird’s retirement press conference, said it was easy to think of the young Larry Bird as a hick from French Lick. By squinting just the least little bit, you could see hayseed written on Bird’s brow. But if you looked into Bird’s eyes, Auerbach said, you could see the light was on full glow.

Bird’s first Boston coach, Bill Fitch, came to call him Kodak. When Bird saw something, it was captured on the film of his memory forever. A TV interviewer once stopped a videotape, wondering where the action came in the Celtics’ NBA championship game the year before. Bird said, “It’s the fourth quarter with 5 minutes and 40 seconds left.”

He could tell by the fight song. He said Houston’s band played the team’s fight song three times that night, the last time when Boston called a timeout during a Houston rally. That time Bird looked at the scoreboard and saw the 5:40.

What we saw in Larry Bird all these years was no illusion, no show, not a performance. It was a man’s life. He is the son of a woman who raised six children as a $2-an-hour short-order cook in French Lick, Ind. His father drank too much and had money problems. There was a divorce and then the father’s suicide by shotgun. Bird remembers his father teaching him important lessons: be strong, be independent.

The boy went from his little nowhere town to the big state school, Indiana University, only to leave the first month when he looked in his roommate’s closet and saw all the new clothes he could never have. He wasn’t running from Bob Knight. (“He’d have loved my game, and he’d have made me a better player,” Bird said.) He was running from a life he didn’t know.

He wound up at Indiana State University, a nowhere place, small and comfortable, where Bird grew into a basketball player so remarkable that he took the nowhere place to a meeting with Magic Johnson and Michigan State for the 1979 NCAA championship. Magic won that time, and in the next decade he and Larry did their beautiful dance of opposition another hundred times, each man winning some, losing some, each man incandescent forever.

By playing 61 games in this coming season, Bird’s contract with the Celtics would have been worth $12 million. He might have faked it. As he showed in Dream Team games, even with a bad back he can play some. But Bird is a dead-honest man whose integrity is whole. He has poured concrete. He has put up hay. He believes in value given for value received, whether it’s a $12 million deal or a beer in Monaco.

While working out in Monaco this summer, the Dream Team stopped by a local watering hole and Bird asked for a beer. The bartender slid a bottle toward him and asked for a sum of francs. Bird wanted to know how much that was in American money. When told the amount, he pushed the bottle back to the bartender and said, “Keep your $7 beer.”