Bird Watching (29 page)

I’ll remember a lot of different games in my first season for a lot of different reasons, but there was one in particular that was really important to me. It was the first time we went to Boston to play the Celtics. It was on Sunday, January 18, 1998, and it was televised on NBC. The Celtics were going to retire Robert Parish’s number at halftime that day, so I knew there would be a lot of old faces around and the place would be jumping. People kept asking me leading up to that game if it was special. I said the stuff a coach usually says—“It’s just another game”—but that wasn’t really true, and everybody knew it. The part that was true was that I had no connection at all to their new building, the FleetCenter. I never played in there, and I had no feeling for the place. I’m glad about that. It would have been really difficult to go in and play the Celtics at Boston Garden. I have so many great memories of that old building, and I’m thankful we didn’t have to play the game there. Walking into the FleetCenter was like walking into Reunion Arena in Dallas, for all I cared. But the minute we got there and I saw Grant, the security guard, in the hallway, and Mr. Randall, who helped out with uniforms, I started getting all revved up.

Even so, I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. It was a zoo that day. The place was loaded with media. Kevin McHale had flown in for Robert’s halftime ceremony, and of course Robert was around, and the atmosphere was absolutely electric. It felt like a playoff game in there. If I didn’t have to coach a game that afternoon, I would have been back in the locker room hanging out with Chief and Kevin, but instead I was trying to get my guys prepared for this game. Bill Walton, who was working for NBC that day, came in to talk to me. Bill and I are old friends. I told him the truth. When he asked me how big this was, I said, “It’s the biggest game of my life.”

The one thing I made sure of was that there were no distractions. I didn’t want anybody messing with our routine. For most of the pregame I stayed in the back of the training room where nobody could find me. I remember seeing Jim Gray, the guy who does the sideline reporting for NBC, before the game. I went up to him and told him, “Jim, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk to my players while they’re preparing for the game.” He said, “Larry, you know I don’t do that.” I said, “Don’t make this the day you start.” Truth was, I wasn’t really sure I could trust Jim Gray. I knew his job was to get information, so I figured he’d be snooping around as much as he could, trying to get the upper hand on a scoop. I don’t mind having television people around, as long as they understand the boundaries. Truthfully? I’d do a lot more for those guys if they would come to me instead of snooping around. It’s the one thing I can’t stand. I don’t like it when one of these TV guys grabs one of my players and says, “Go in there and tell me what the coach says to you before the game.” I know Jim Gray does that. If they want to talk about it after I finished saying my piece, that’s fine. But don’t send somebody in there to spy. You won’t get very far with me when you pull that crap.

When I went in to talk to the team before the game, I knew there was no use telling them it was just another game. The players could tell how I felt. Mark Jackson came up to me beforehand and said, “Don’t worry, Coach. We’ll win this one for you.” I said, “Win it for yourselves,” but there was no point in hiding it. I wanted this game really bad. There were only two times all season that I was nervous, and it was the two times we played the Celtics in Boston.

You’ve got to realize, Boston was my whole life for thirteen years. That city couldn’t have been any better to me. They made me feel like one of them. I couldn’t imagine playing for any other team than the Boston Celtics. It was so important to me for our team to win this game. I wanted to show the fans, my old teammates, Red Auerbach, everyone, that I knew what I was doing. It may sound funny, but I wanted them to be proud of me. I don’t think I realized how much I missed the city of Boston until I was back there. Dinah and I loved living there so much. The great restaurants, all the excitement, the Freedom Trail, all of that. It wasn’t until my second year in the league that I realized how much history was in Boston. After that, whenever I had friends come to town, I’d say, “C’mon here, you’ve got to see this, it’s Paul Revere’s grave …”

I remember the first time I was in Boston, when Bob Woolf brought us out there to meet with the team. We were staying at the Parker House, which is this really nice hotel right near the State House. So we’re in the room, and before we left to go over to the Celtics offices I open the curtains and I hear all this noise going on outside. I look out there and it’s just a mass of people, protesting with signs. I said to myself, “What kind of place is this?” I had never ever seen anything like that. It just blew me away. Once I had been living in Boston a few years, I got used to the fact stuff like that happened all the time. After a while, I’d have friends in from out of town, and we’d walk by some Hare Krishnas, or some group trying to ban nuclear weapons, and I’d say, “Oh, there are the protesters,” like I had been seeing this sort of thing my whole life.

I hadn’t been back to Boston in a while, so I was thinking about all that went on there. The night before the game, my friend Dan Dyrek came over to the hotel, and we did a little reminiscing. I was telling him how I found out I was drafted by the Celtics. I was on the golf course, but it wasn’t a big deal to me, because I knew I was going back to school, so in my mind anyone who drafted me was wasting their time. I could care less. I was playing golf with a couple of friends in this real small town in Indiana, and we came back, all of a sudden the news is on, and the news says, “Larry Bird has been drafted by the Boston Celtics.” It was the first I’d heard of it. Nobody from the Celtics had called me beforehand, or on the day they drafted me either. But what started happening after that was Red began showing up to our games. I remember one time Tommy Heinsohn was doing the game for Home Box Office, and Red was there, and he came back into the locker room after the game and talked to me a little bit. I always knew when he was around, because people were always telling me, but it didn’t affect me one way or another.

When I started playing for Boston, that changed. We always knew when Red was in town, and it fired me up, because I didn’t want to disappoint him. I guess going back to Boston that day, I was feeling some of the same things.

I saw Pitino briefly before the game, but I didn’t talk to him. I haven’t talked to him since I left Boston. Just like any coach, I wasn’t about to go down there and shake his hand and wish him luck, because if I told him “Good luck,” I wouldn’t have meant it. The Celtics are Pitino’s organization now. He can do whatever he thinks is right.

The game was close, which is what I expected. Our guys struggled a little with Boston’s pressure in the first quarter, but by halftime they were figuring it out. I didn’t have long to talk to them, because I had to go out for Chief’s ceremony, but I told them I expected a much cleaner effort in the second half. I wasn’t comfortable with the game at all. Both Rik and Reggie gave us some breathing room in the second half, and I put Derrick McKey in for the fourth quarter and told him I wanted him to put the clamps on Antoine Walker. He did a great job of that. When Reggie hit a big three with about a minute to go, I thought we had it, but I wasn’t going to celebrate until the buzzer went off. When it did, we had won 103–96. You would have thought the Celtics had won, the way the crowd was going crazy. They really had given me an unbelievable welcome. They held up signs for me, and they kept running highlights of my career on the scoreboard. I’m surprised Pitino let them do any of that.

Walking off that court that day, I had so many mixed emotions. I wanted to win so badly. I was so happy, it was unbelievable. I had a lot of friends and fans sitting in those stands who watched me grow up in Boston. I was so pumped up, I could have run all the way home. The only thing that was disappointing was it took away from Chief’s day. I thought it was a bad choice on the part of the Celtics. It wasn’t supposed to be all about me, it was supposed to be all about Robert, but it didn’t turn out that way. Those fans should have been chanting, “Chief, Chief,” not “Larry, Lar-ry.” I would have liked Chief to be given his proper due. I would have liked to have been able to honor him in a way that had nothing to do with me, but I had a team there and a game to play, and it just made it difficult. I never even really got to talk to Chief because there was so much commotion.

I look back at what has happened to the Boston Celtics, and I think it’s a shame. They’ve gone through some problems, and they’ve made a lot of bad decisions. Whether Dennis Johnson should have had a chance to be the head coach or not, I can’t say. But should he be a part of what’s going on with that franchise? Yes. He’s earned that right. That’s my personal opinion. Kevin McHale, he made up his mind he was going back home to Minnesota after he retired, but they never asked him to stay. So they read in the papers he plans on going back to Minnesota. But why not go in there and talk to him? Why not see if there’s a way to get him to stay? He’s done a great job in the Timberwolves front office. He could have been a big plus for the Celtics organization. He’s intelligent, and he knows what’s going on. But they just let him go. Now you hear Robert say he’d like to go into coaching, but the Celtics don’t reach out to him. That’s one of the things that made the Celtics so special in the first place. They were family. They looked out for each other. But you don’t see that anymore. Even Danny Ainge. They traded him, which was their choice. But after he’s done playing, don’t you want to talk to a guy like Danny Ainge, who you know is going to make a great coach? And what they did to Red Auerbach was wrong. The Celtics are everything to him, and to humiliate him like that, to take away his title of president, why? What good did it do? I’ll never forget the first time I met Red. I was playing in a college All-Star game in Atlanta, and he was going up the escalator, and I was going down. I didn’t think he’d know who I was, but as we were going by each other, he reached out and shook my hand. I remember turning to one of the other guys and saying, “What’s he doing here?” A long time later I found out that his friend Bobby Knight had told him about me and suggested that he go see me play.

People ask me if it was hard to leave the Celtics. Maybe ten years ago it would have been, when there were still people there who I liked and respected. But there’s a whole new group of people in there now who I don’t even know. They don’t mean anything to me. But I’ll always have feelings for Red. He taught me so much about the NBA. I just wish they would have left him alone and let him finish his life as president of the Celtics, which is what he deserved. As for me, I can’t ever see going back with the Celtics and working for the owners they have now. I always liked Paul Gaston—I still do—and he treated me well, but he made a lot of bad basketball decisions.

We played Boston three more times that season. We played them six days later in our place, and won 95–88. We played them again at Market Square Arena in early March, and we won again. Our last game with them was on April 12, at the FleetCenter. By then we had won 54 games and were coming off a big overtime win in Atlanta. I was feeling as good as I had ever felt about our team. The Celtics, at that point, were coming to the end of their season, since they weren’t going to be a playoff team. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to sweep the Celtics. I never said that to my players, but they were aware of it. This is how I know. We did beat Boston for the fourth time, 93–87. A few days later, we were back in Indiana and Mark Jackson said the team had something they wanted to give me. He handed me a ball, which was painted yellow and blue, the color of the Pacers. On the ball the guys had inscribed the score of each game with the Celtics, and the dates. Then, in big letters, they had written, COACH LARRY BIRD, PACERS SWEEP OVER CELTICS, 4–0. I don’t keep many of my old trophies or awards in my house, but that ball is in my study, where I can see it.

The problem with the NBA season is that for every high moment, like beating the Celtics in Boston, there’re just as many low moments. There’s one game during my first season of coaching that I’d like to forget forever: our March 29, 1998, loss to the San Antonio Spurs. We knew we were in trouble before the game even started, because we weren’t going to have Reggie Miller that night. He had been suspended by the league for a flagrant foul against Charlotte center Vlade Divac in the game before. Reggie didn’t like the way Vlade was throwing his body around, so late in the game he threw an elbow that caught Vlade in the chin, and he got tagged with a flagrant foul. It wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do, but I wasn’t as upset as I might have been, because at least Reggie showed a willingness to get physical if needed. That was something I hadn’t seen enough of from our team. I knew we were going to have a tough time scoring without Reggie, but I never expected what happened. We scored only 55 points, and set a new NBA record for the lowest amount of points since they started using the 24-second clock. Unbelievable. I scored more than that once in one game, by myself!

But I knew it was going to be an uphill battle, and not just because we were going to have to do it without Reggie. That night, Rik came hobbling into Market Square Arena, and we didn’t know if he was going to play or not. His feet were causing him terrible pain, and he wasn’t sure if he could suit up. He hadn’t given us a definite answer either way, but we knew once we had our team meeting, because he took his shoes off in front of all the guys. I knew at that moment, when those guys were sitting there and they saw Rik do that, and they just dropped their jaws, that it was a lost cause. Rik didn’t understand. He didn’t realize that when they looked at him and thought about playing the game without him, it just deflated the hell out of them. I tried to get the guys fired up. I tried to get their minds off what we didn’t have, but it was no use. The tone had been set.

So we start the game, and we couldn’t buy a basket. I felt sorry for our guys. They were playing against a really good team that they wanted to beat, and they really weren’t playing all that badly. We just couldn’t hit anything in the first twenty minutes or so. We went into the locker room at halftime, and we had scored only 34 points. I couldn’t go in there and get all over them. I’m not that type of guy, and besides, I could see it coming. To compound matters, we weren’t hitting any of the shots we normally hit. We couldn’t drive on them, because all of a sudden we weren’t big enough, and they are such a great interior defensive team. We couldn’t get any easy passes. We had trouble converting shots. It was apparent very quickly that scoring was going to be scarce. Defensively, our guys were moving and working hard, but it doesn’t matter if you can’t generate anything on the other end. We lost the game 74–55, and we were all pretty miserable. We shot 27 percent in that game. I wouldn’t have imagined that was possible.