This is the thing that is most difficult to work out about the way Larry Bird played basketball: He often made the simple play, the play that, if you watched Bird enough, he had educated you to believe was the most pragmatic. Yet in performing a routine act, he somehow made it spectacular, somehow made it memorable, somehow made it different. His execution was such that it never felt like forced flash, but rather, part of this grand plan to deliver the winning play. Lots of players could ball-fake, but how many made their defender completely turn away in the process? Lots of players made nice passes, but how many made the split-second decision to, when faced with a defensive wall, whip the ball through the opponent’s legs to a free teammate? And lots of players have come through in the clutch, but why launch from afar off two feet when you can do so off one?
Follow basketball closely enough and by now you will have heard this about a great player: ‘He makes his teammates better.’ For Bird, that wasn’t enough. He made his opponents play harder, his fans smarter, the league greater. Lots was made of what Bird wasn’t — couldn’t run, couldn’t jump, supposedly not athletic — so how about this for an alternate legacy to the game: He made those qualities less important. He didn’t render them useless, but he accentuated other elements — confidence, intellect, coming through when your team needs you most — and helped broaden the scope of what a great basketball player could possibly be comprised of.
I can’t describe what you’re about to see. Just watch.
For Bird, in winning Rookie of the Year in 1980 and helping the Celtics to a 32-game improvement, it was already too late: Basketball had changed forever, especially in Boston. And to think it started so innocuously.
He was drafted in 1978 while still at Indiana State and, by his own choosing, not yet available.
His first rookie camp was at Camp Milbrook in Marshfield, Mass., outdoors with wooden backboards. And his first exhibition game was in a practically empty Madison Square Garden against the Sixers. And that, it seems, was the last time he was off the grid. For when the 1980s commenced, Bird’s standing in basketball was quickly established: The greatest all-around forward to ever wipe the bottom of his sneakers.
Here, we trek back to the beginning. To training camp, to before a jumper was hit in anyone’s face or a word of trash was uttered.
Here is Bird, after his FIRST DAY as a Celtic on Sept. 11, 1979, talking expectations for his first season.
