BIRD’S NEST

What you need to know about this nook of southern Indiana is that the barns are see-through and the radios run laps.

Also, the kid living in Larry Bird’s old house wears two earrings and owns a baby raccoon that wears a blue collar.

The big hotel in town is holding a convention for Dalmatian owners eager to talk through the gray areas of owning such pets, and the most discriminating homeowners have a thing for plastic lawn trolls tastefully arranged around the 50-gallon propane tanks.

Traveling southbound toward Orange County, the poorest in the state, according to those who live here, you learn from a billboard that Lawrence County was THE HOME OF THREE ASTRONAUTS--Grissom-Walker- Bowersox--but that the real action is several barreling dump trucks farther down the road, in Martin County, which claims THE BEST GYPSUM, THE BIGGEST CATFISH.

WE HAVE GREAT MOUNDS OF HYDRATED CALCIUM SULFATE apparently was too long, and wouldn’t have left room for the catfish.

Orange County doesn’t have a boastful sign along State Road 56, although it intersects with Larry Bird Boulevard in French Lick.

Because he is a more precious state resource than even calcium sulfate, and has a better jump shot than most of the area’s bottom-feeding species, Bird is revered here. But you knew that.

And you knew the area and its poverty, by name and by face.

*

In the dank, concrete basement of Bird’s childhood home on Washington Street, electricians Robert Anderson and Leroy Sanders replace frayed wires with new ones. The men are covered with sweat and grit and spider webs.

They finish each other’s sentences. Maybe their friendship is that close. More than likely, the topic is as old and worn as that little faded yellow house they stand beneath.

“The town’s been dead for . . ., “ Anderson starts.

”. . . quite a while,” Sanders says.

“Fifteen years, anyway,” Anderson nods.

They glance at each other and shake their heads, the brave faces struck for a stranger gone for an instant.

Upstairs, the woman who rents the home recently asked the owner if she could replace some marred bedroom paneling. A previous tenant must have carved his name into the wood, she said. Her request was denied, so she hung a picture over the block letters, “L-A-R-R-Y B-I-R-D.”

Sanders balls his right hand and bangs reassuringly on the cinder-block wall.

“It needs a lot of work,” he says of the house. “It’s a sturdy old place, though. Just needs some cosmetic repairs.”

*

If only French Lick could say the same.

Bird grew out of French Lick to revive two NBA franchises, winning three NBA championships with the once-great Boston Celtics and then coaching the ABA-great Indiana Pacers to these NBA finals against the Lakers.

In his third season with the Pacers, he has said he won’t coach beyond the deciding game of the series but hasn’t said what he will do next. The Pacers have offered him a front-office position, though he’s already an executive vice president.

“Whatever he wants to do,” Pacer President Donnie Walsh said.

Two hours south, a town does not hold its breath.

The people of French Lick love Bird, and he won’t abandon them.

They love that he has a home in neighboring West Baden, and that he lives in it for a few months each summer, and that he hasn’t totally forsaken them for year-round residence in balmy Naples, Fla., where he has a home to go with his golf addiction. He waves back at them from the seat of his mountain bike. He pours money and sporting equipment into Springs Valley High School. He remains “just Larry” to them all, and to his childhood friends in particular, of whom there appear to be many.

“He’s so common around here,” said Sue Throop, who works the cash register at French Liquors in the heart of town. “He’s just another guy.”

But, short of standing beneath that “Larry Bird Boulevard” sign and firing wadded $100 bills into the open windows of passing pickup trucks, Bird does not possess the remedy for what ails them. What they could use is a supermarket. Maybe a clothing store. A place to buy shoes for the kids. Some money to spend in those places and some honest hope.

“There’s just nothing going on,” said Philip Wilson, who is helping to build a small, brick community center across the street from the car dealership that went out of business years ago.

Many of the outlying barns stand so neglected that the wall boards have dried and shriveled, so that the structures appear to be made of vertical blinds, partially opened to allow in the morning sun. Built perhaps with very small gaps that encouraged air flow, the barns have become translucent, almost ghostly, as if erected by the very waves of heat that rise from the ground on scorching-hot summer days.

Much of downtown French Lick is boarded up. Slowly, the spirits of many of the people here have become tattered and vacant as well. But none of that is Bird’s fault.

For years the folks here could turn on their television sets and watch Bird win basketball games, then championships and then Hall-of-Fame induction, and they could board the school bus that took them to Indianapolis when the Celtics came to town. For the last three years, they have watched Bird prove to be an adept coach.

They cheered and pounded his back when he returned. And he always returned.

“I think Larry will keep a place here, for home’s sake,” Wilson said.

None doubt that. He owns a simple brick home atop a knoll on a rural road with other, much smaller simple brick homes. A white split-rail fence contains a large piece of property whose lawn is mowed so exactingly, and with the lines so parallel, it could be the freshly vacuumed carpet in your grandmother’s living room.

“You can’t miss it,” Wilson had said. “Nobody else has a swimming pool, tennis courts or a full basketball court.”

Sure enough. And there, behind one of the baskets, is a Celtic logo. A swing set is propped on the edge of the court, perhaps so Bird’s three children could pump away and watch him shoot free throws.

*

On the other side of the tracks, literally by about 30 feet, and on the other end of French Lick, Sanders and Anderson extract themselves from the basement on Washington Street. It is sticky hot and their expressions show it, not to mention their shirts.

A tour bus, probably packed with a couple dozen dog owners, drove past an hour earlier. The tourists surely noted that the corner house up the street could be had for $17,000.

Georgia Bird’s former home is overrun with weeds, some standing a foot tall in the gutters over the front porch. The small garage with the corrugated metal roof at the end of the driveway holds up what is left of an old backboard. Shelby, a lanky 15-year-old who lives in the house with his mother, says he was told the backboard was Bird’s. It would make that backboard at least three decades old, a longshot but certainly not impossible in French Lick.

Shelby will be a sophomore at Springs Valley in the fall. He says he would like to play basketball, just like the former resident. He smiles when asked about living in such a historic place.

“It’s cool,” he grants, nudging his pet raccoon back through the screen door. Then he waves shyly and goes back inside.

Anderson, a schoolteacher for nearly three decades before becoming a contractor, attended high school with some of Bird’s siblings. When Larry returned to French Lick, after a month up the road at Indiana University, and collected garbage for money before enrolling at Indiana State, it was Anderson’s brother, Red, who hired him. Sanders was a friend of Bird’s father, Joe, who committed suicide in the throes of a divorce and left Georgia to raise six children on her own.

“He doesn’t come around as much since he started coaching,” Anderson says.

It is a town of maybe 2,000. So when you drive in along SR 56, you squeeze uncomfortably past the I-gotta-get-outta-here dreams of the teens throwing under-inflated basketballs at bent rims at the high school, the 20-somethings pulling on cigarettes on the loading docks at Pluto Corp., the middle-aged women serving coffee at the Villager.

Larry Bird isn’t all they have. But he’s a good part of it, and they of him.

“He likes being in his skin,” Walsh, the Pacer president, has said, “and part of his skin is French Lick. That’s what makes Larry interesting, the fact he’s so grounded.”

Sanders, 64, wasn’t even a great fan of basketball unless Bird was involved.

“The only time I ever watched it is when he was playing and when he coached,” he says. “I never miss a game, and I get on him when they lose. When he retires again, I probably won’t watch near as many games as I did. I don’t know.”

Bird, in a suit, on an NBA sideline, is better than none at all.

“It helps [morale],” Sanders says. “I think anyway. Don’t you?”

“It has to,” Anderson answers blankly.

Sitting on an overturned plastic bucket at the community center, Wilson isn’t so sure. He mourns the loss of businesses and tourism, and the erosion of a community once so attractive that Al Capone visited regularly.

“There’s a lot of history here in this town,” Wilson says. “The sad thing is that most of it is dying or already dead.”

As Bird sits on the verge of something dramatic--either retirement from coaching, another NBA championship or both--Wilson said, life isn’t expected to change much over the next week in the legend’s hometown.

If the Pacers were to win the NBA title, he says, “He’d probably get talked about for a week or two in the coffee shop at the Villager. Back when he was doing so great in Boston, everybody tuned in. People don’t talk about him around here like they used to, though.”

Jim Burton, a student manager for Springs Valley’s last state finalist basketball team in the late 1950s, worked beside Wilson. He says, “I’d be glad. That’s it. I like to see him win.”

Then a smile crosses Wilson’s face, and he scratches the back of his head with a screwdriver.

“Maybe he could come back to French Lick,” Wilson says, his eyebrows raised, “and coach at the high school.”

He laughs at the absurdity.

Maybe Bird lifted this town’s morale in his glory days in college and with the Celtics. Maybe. But that’s a tougher chore now. He’s still “just Larry,” still a guy they know. But, the stakes are higher now. If he wins, they’ll be proud. If not, they’ll understand.

The fact is, the barns are see-through. And that’s a problem he can’t fix.

INSIDE

Buss Giddy

but From Afar

Though he’s not in Indiana, Laker owner Jerry Buss feels the mounting mania surrounding his team. Page 8

Forgotten but

Very True

Though it’s obscure, the Indiana Pacers have already beaten Los Angeles for a basketball championship. Page 9

SERIES REPORT: Page 8

PETE NEWELL: Page 9