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play under a sacred set of rings.

CHAPTER 4

THE LEGEND

“I’m the Three-Point King”
    Larry Bird stood on the floor of Reunion Arena in Dallas on the morning of February 8, 1986, where eight hours later he would compete in the NBA’s first three-point shooting contest during All-Star Weekend. Standing nearby was Leon Wood of the New Jersey Nets, who is now an NBA referee but who was then one of the favorites in the competition.
    “Hey, Leon,” Bird said, “you changed your shot lately? It looks different.”
    That was nonsense, of course. But Wood, a second-year player known for his three-point range—he wasn’t shy about attempting shots from a couple of feet behind the three-point line—looked stricken.
Man, if Larry Bird says my shot has changed, I wonder if …
    Then Bird started talking about the red-white-and-blue balls, the ones that would be worth two points (instead of one) at each of the five racks of five balls that were set up for the competition. Bird said they felt slippery. Wood looked stricken again.
    Scratch Leon Wood from the list of potential winners. The others would come later.
    At this point in time—midseason, 1986—Larry Joe Bird was the undisputed king of the NBA. He was on his way to his third straight Most Valuable Player award, and his Boston Celtics were on their way to the NBA title. But it went beyond that. It was Bird’s bravado, his utter belief in himself, his trash talk (legendary around the league, if largely unknown to the general public, since Bird did it subtly), the street game that came wrapped in a pasty package that made the early-to-mid-1980s
his
game,
his
time.
    Bird’s package of skills—shooting, rebounding, passing, court savvy, competitiveness—had been there since his rookie season, 1979–80. We tend to think of him as the ultimate workaholic, endlessly polishing a shooting stroke that he had fabricated back in his high school days, and to an extent he was. But he was also a natural, someone to whom, as he always admitted, the game came easily. He just
saw
it differently from most everybody else.
    Bird well knew that at age twenty-nine and seven years into his Hall of Fame career, there was nobody like him. And that was even taking into account his creaky back, which he first injured in the summer of 1985 when he was shoveling gravel at the home he had built for his mother in his native French Lick, Indiana. Even early in that marvelous 1985–86 season, Bird had sometimes needed the magic hands of his physiotherapist, Dan Dyrek, just to get out of a prone position. A month into the season Dyrek had been called to Bird’s suburban Boston home and couldn’t believe that the star was in that much pain. But the back gradually improved—it would never really get better—and Bird was on his way to another transcendent year.
    Shortly after All-Star Weekend,
SI
sent me to write a story about whether Bird was, in fact, the greatest player ever. Magazines love these greatest-ever stories—men, in particular, are inveterate list makers, adept at wasting hour after hour in fervent arguments about whether Keith Moon or John Bonham was the greater drummer or whether
Taxi Driver
or
Raging Bull
was the greater De Niro vehicle—and, predictably, I got into the spirit and pretty much decidedthat Bird was the greatest ever, backed up by several quotes from unbiased observers, one being John Wooden. “I’ve always considered Oscar Robertson to be the best player in the game,” the Wizard of Westwood told me. “Now I’m not so sure that Larry Bird isn’t.”
    (Never mind that the following season I would find a different all-time best, Magic, and a couple of years after that another, Jordan. That’s how it goes in the list-making business; you have to have a short memory.)
    I recall several things from that Bird story, beyond him telling me that
Bonanza
was his favorite TV show. Chuck Daly, later his Dream Team coach, told me that Bird deliberately “once knocked