Bird Watching (24 page)

Dinah has always been great about me taking off like that. I want my own kids to be that way. I want them to be independent and be able to go out and do the things they want to do. Before we had kids, Dinah was the same as me. She’d pick up and go. She was like one of the guys. Once our children came, it changed, especially since now I’m traveling a lot during the season. Now when I’m home, I want to stay home. I want to be with my family. We have a big backyard, and it’s fun just to run around with the kids out there. Conner is really into computers, so we play solitaire almost every day, to see if we can beat the computer. In the summers, both Mariah and Conner can’t wait to go down to French Lick—mostly, I think, because we have a pool there.

I loved growing up in a small town. It was all I knew. We didn’t have a family car, so we weren’t able to drive around to other towns or see other states. I didn’t care. What was in front of me was just fine. We lived near this big hill, and whenever I was going someplace, my dad would say, “You know, Larry, if you run up that hill, you’ll get there faster.” So I’d go out and run up that hill as fast as I could. Who needed a car? When I was growing up I knew everyone in town. For the most part I still do. I enjoyed that immensely. Obviously it would have been beneficial for me to have more competition to play against in the summer. Those were the only times I ever wished I lived in the city, but hey, you live with what you have. One thing I did have was a lot of places to play basketball. We had courts all over town. One good thing about a small town—if someone stole the nets, you knew who did it, and you could get them back. Everyone played sports. I remember like it was yesterday my mom saying, “Will you kids go out and play ball?” I heard that over and over.

I didn’t have a real love for the game until I was about thirteen years old. I never watched any basketball on TV. All I was concerned about was my game, and how I was playing. I can remember being in fifth and sixth grade, looking up at the clock in school and wondering if it was ever going to move, because I couldn’t wait to get out there and play ball. When I got older, my high school coach, Jim Jones, would give us drills to work on, and I’d work on them all day, until I got them right. But the older I got, I noticed the drills seemed to come a little easier to me than to some of my friends. I was moving along a little quicker, whether it was a pick and roll, or shooting drills, or whatever. I could just tell I was improving a lot faster than my friends. I guess that’s the first time I realized I might be different from them.

I knew one thing: I loved to compete. I was always trying to keep up with my older brothers, Mark and Mike. When I was little, they were always bigger and stronger, and they were constantly challenging me. I wanted so much to keep up with them. I hated to lose, and it seemed like I always lost to my brothers. It was a lousy feeling that I never forgot.

I can still remember the first time I was in a real pressure situation. I had broken my ankle my sophomore year in high school, and I came back just in time to play in the sectionals. I didn’t start or anything. I was sitting on the bench. I could barely run, and the coach kept telling me, “Listen, Larry, if you don’t come around, you’re not going to be on this team.” I understood that. Anyhow, he put me in this state sectional game, and I had the ball, and I just turned around and shot it, and it went in. Everyone started cheering and clapping and going crazy, and I absolutely loved it. I remember running down the court thinking, “This is the best!” The game came down to about four seconds to play, and we’re down by one, and some guy fouls me. I go to the free throw line, and for some reason I stood there thinking, “You know, I haven’t practiced all year, but I’ve been with this team, and I’m gonna make these free throws and we’re gonna win this game.” From then on, when I was in a situation where the game was on the line, I thought back to that day, and how I felt, and what I did—which was hit both free throws. The next day, the paper said, “Bird steals the show.” That game changed my life. From then on I was hooked. I thought about basketball all the time. I spent hours making up drills to make myself better.

It’s a nice feeling to know that the people I grew up with are proud of me. Especially Mom. She wouldn’t say a whole lot to me, but other people told me how she used to brag about my accomplishments. The nice thing about French Lick was the people there didn’t make too much of a fuss. When I went to Indiana State and started getting a lot of attention, people were happy for me, but when I came home in the summer I was just one of the Bird boys. Of course, that’s changed some since I went to the pros. I’ve thought before about being the only kid from French Lick, Indiana, to ever make it to the NBA, and that’s awesome. I’ve always said there could be another, but the chances, I guess, are slim.

People in West Baden and French Lick have gotten used to me being around, especially in the summer. I did all my off-season conditioning there when I played for the Celtics. I went through my routine every day, starting real early in the morning, and after a while the people in town just knew, “Oh that’s Larry doing his workout.” They’d wave or honk if they saw me, but when you start out as early as I did, sometimes at five-thirty or six o’clock in the morning, there aren’t too many people up anyway.

The first thing I’d do is run. I’d run two and a half, three miles every day. Any more than three miles back then, and I’d get stiff. My back would start acting up, or my knees and my legs would give me trouble, because of all the pounding. I always felt that if I kept it to around two or three miles, it would get me loosened up for what else I was going to do. From there I used to go to my old high school gym, at Springs Valley High School, and do my sit-ups, which meant anywhere from 300 to 500 of them. Then I’d start working on the court on ballhandling drills, and start my shooting, and then do some suicide wind sprints, and then mix it all in together. Then I’d go lift weights. A lot of times I’d get on my bike and ride through town. I always rode a loop around Route 145, and it was about eleven and three-quarter miles, and I’d always try to make it back home in forty-three minutes. That was always a good pace.

Once I started having really bad back problems, Dan Dyrek put me on a special program, and it was absolutely brutal. It was about the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. He had it set up so one day I’d run for distance, then one day run sprints, but for some reason I always felt I still needed to run my three miles first, because that’s what I had always done. That would get me loosened up for my basketball drills. I just felt I shouldn’t drop that part of my workout. Dan had me lifting too, but it was different than what I had been doing on my own. His program was a tougher program. It would take me a good two hours just to finish my lifting. It wasn’t a lot of repetitions, but it was three sets of twelve on every exercise. One of his drills was one of the best exercises I ever had. I’d be on a stationary bike, and I’d take ten-pound weights, and ride the bike, and alternate lifting these things over my head while I’m trying to keep my form. I’d do that for five minutes and I’d be dying. Then I’d get off the bike and jump rope real fast for two minutes, then hop back on the stationary bike and start over. Dan had me do that three times in one set. That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Then he’d have me run these 440yard dashes, which I always tried to do in seventy-five seconds or less. After everything else I had already done, that seemed easy.

Once I finished all my conditioning drills, then I’d go play basketball. The basketball would last as long as I felt I could play that day, usually one and a half to two hours. I never scrimmaged. There weren’t a lot of people in French Lick to choose from, but I concentrated on drills anyway. When someone like Rick Carlisle would come up to Indiana to work out with me, I’d change the routine a little. We’d still run, and we’d still ride the bikes, and we’d lift and play some one-on-one. A lot of different guys came out over the years, and I liked it when guys like Rick Carlisle came out, because he wanted to work. Rick Robey came a few times, but he wasn’t going to go through all of that. Another old teammate of mine, Brad Lohaus, came out a couple times and went through all of it with me.

At the end of the summer, when it was getting close to training camp, usually the last two or three weeks I was home, I’d run up this hill. It was about a mile long from bottom to top, and the first quarter-mile is straight up, very tough. It doesn’t ever level off, it’s just one slow incline. It was my test, to see what kind of shape I was in. It’s one of those hills where I bet Dinah and my friend Corky twenty dollars they couldn’t make it to the top. Corky barely made it, and Dinah didn’t make it. She would now, because she runs a lot these days. I took Brad Lohaus up that hill a couple times, and he’d start out right there with me and we’d be running real slow, because that hill goes straight up, but then you’d see him start falling back, falling back, and by the end we’re barely moving, but I was still way in front.

Some days I’d run, play my basketball, and then get on my bike for twenty-five miles. At that point I had a regular ten-speed bike, nothing special. Later on I got me a fancier bike with twenty gears, but you don’t use but two or three of them anyway. I rode from my house to Wickliffe, which was around twenty-one miles. I’d take off from my house around ten o’clock in the morning and get there by around eleven, or a little bit after that, and when I got there I’d get a cold beer, and I’d have my friends from town, Sam Sanders or somebody, meet me out there. Wickliffe is a town of around thirty people, and we always went to this one place and got these schooners, they call them. They are iced mugs of beer, real heavy. I love those things. Anyhow, I’d hang out with whoever it was that met me there, whether it’s Sam, or my friend Rex Stackhouse, and then we’d throw that bike in the back of the truck and I’d ride home—in the front seat of the car. By then it would feel like three in the afternoon, but it was usually only lunchtime.

I guess it felt later because I’d always start early, and these workouts would really last. Some of those workouts went four or five hours. That program Dan Dyrek did damn near killed me, and it took a lot of time. We didn’t have strength and conditioning guys back then to work out a program for you, but I preferred to do it myself anyhow. I never felt like I needed somebody to push me. I understand some players do, and a lot of my players are doing programs with personal trainers and strength and conditioning people. I’m all for that. It’s like I told my players: “I don’t care how you do it, but I want you coming in here at the start of each season well conditioned.”

Now that I’m retired, I don’t need to go through such grueling workouts. I couldn’t anyway—my back would never hold up. But I still do use the summer to get myself back in shape. I’m an early riser, so I usually get up and put on my running stuff by six or six-thirty in the morning. I run from my house all through town and back around, but then I stop at the Honey Dew, where I know I’m always going to see some of my buddies. Sometimes I sit there for five minutes, and other times for an hour. Rex, Sam, and Jimmy Evans are usually there, talking about the news of the day. Sometimes there will be ten or twelve guys, sometimes just a couple, but there’s always somebody. It’s gotten so the crowd at the Honey Dew knows to expect me.

I really enjoy talking with those guys. Most of them are in their sixties, and some of them are even older than that. I don’t know why most of my friends are older. It’s just how it worked out. When the word gets out that I’m home, they know where to find me. When I’m in French Lick, I spend a lot of my free time down in my garage. There’s a little table in there, and when my buddies drop over, we just hang out, have a beer or whatever, and talk or play cards. We don’t talk about basketball. We talk about life. We talk about fishing. We tell stories of back when we were twenty. Some guys, all they talk about is their job. Most of them are big-machine operators, whether it is bulldozers, backhoes, trench lines. Rex helped lay the pipeline in Alaska. He told us he had to drive three or four hundred miles if he wanted to buy a drink. Sam is a painter, and he always has a good story to tell. Maybe it sounds boring to some people, but I just love it. I’ve had some of my most enjoyable times sitting there in that garage with my friends.

Sometimes I go down to that garage by myself. I take my car down there, and I go through the whole car and I clean it. I’m a very neat person, and I don’t like my car to be dirty. So I get it just the way I like, then put everything away and sit down and have a beer. Next thing I know, it’s three hours later. Sometimes Conner will come down, and that means Mariah is going to come down after him. People just sort of wander in and out of there.

I go down to that garage to think about almost everything. I made some of the biggest decisions of my life in that garage. When I was thinking about whether I wanted to coach or not, I went down there and just went over it again and again in my mind. Nonstop. I’d drive myself crazy like that for a couple hours, then I’d get up, go to the refrigerator, grab myself a beer, and sit down and think about it some more. My wife used to come there—she still does—and say, “Well, Larry, I guess we know where to find you. Same seat as always.”

When I was younger I used to spend time in some of the local bars in French Lick. We used to go to this place called the Hoosier, but that burned down some years back. There’s another bar I used to like called Jubil’s, which is still there. It’s nothing fancy. It’s a regular bar, with linoleum floors, and I used to like to go down there to say hi to the guys. But what started to happen was I’d go in there for one beer, and then I’d say, “I gotta get going now,” and as soon as I started out the door, somebody else I hadn’t seen in a long time would come in there and he’d want to buy me a beer. Next thing you know, nursing one beer turned into three or four hours! I’m enjoying it, because I’m with ten guys, drinking Miller Lite, but Dinah is home cooking and waiting for me. Dinah didn’t believe me for a long time, that I’d be halfway out the door before somebody else pulled me back in, but it’s true. But I don’t go down there anymore. After a while people like to start telling you what you need to do. Then you got guys who sit there and get their nerve up, and then they start asking you for stuff. I had this one guy I knew from Naples, who I met fishing. He was always asking me for stuff—autographs, basketballs, you name it. I’m telling you, it was nonstop. So one time he wanted to come up to French Lick, and when he got there I said, “I just want to show you something. You’re always asking me for autographs for your friends, and you think you’re the only one that’s asking me. Well, you watch. Because almost everyone that comes up to me is gonna want something.” Sure enough, about eight to ten people came over, some friends, some not, and they all wanted this, that, or the other thing. I turned to that guy and said, “See? Now you understand what it’s like. You’ve got to stop bugging me for things.” After that he stopped. If he hadn’t, I probably would have told that guy to get lost, except I liked to go fishing with him.