When My Dad Discussed Larry Bird
The legendary Boston Celtics player was my childhood’s compass, showing up in every argument and quiet moment with my father. That night, when everything stopped and I was left staring at the stars from a sidewalk, this was true.
Larry Bird’s jumper was first seen up close at the Omni pregame shootaround in December 1984. Larger and more fair-haired than in television, he scores with every stroke and flick. When you’re eight years old and straining on tiptoes, your father picks you up, places you on his shoulders, and puts his hands around your ankles. Swishes are not created equal. Some people swoon as though Bird has discovered a bull’s-eye inside 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.”
