Larry Bird

• 1. Introduction

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  Larry Bird walked into the locker room at the inaugural Three-Point Shootout during the 1986 NBA All-Star Weekend and asked who was going to finish second. Then he won the contest. That moment captures something essential about him: the absolute certainty, the quiet menace, and the follow-through. He is the only person in NBA history to be named Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player, Finals MVP, All-Star MVP, Coach of the Year, and Executive of the Year. No one else has held all six titles. Michael Jordan once said that Bird taught him everything he knew about getting in people's heads. Pat Riley, who coached against Bird in three NBA Finals, put it this way: if he needed a player to take a shot to save his life, he would choose Larry Bird over Jordan. How does a boy from French Lick, Indiana, the son of a World War II veteran who died by suicide, become the player that even Jordan defers to? The answers reach from a rural Indiana driveway to the courts of Barcelona.

• 2. French Lick to Terre Haute

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  Bird was born on the 7th of December 1956 in West Baden Springs, Indiana, to Georgia Marie Kerns and Claude Joseph Bird, a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War. His mother worked two jobs to support Larry and his five siblings. Joe Bird committed suicide in February 1975, while Larry was still in high school. Bird has said that being poor as a child still motivates him to this day.

  Basketball became his escape. At Springs Valley High School, he averaged 31 points, 21 rebounds, and 4.0 assists as a senior and became the school's all-time scoring leader. He wore jersey number 33 because his brother Mark had previously claimed it; he kept that number through college and his entire professional career. Bob Knight offered Bird a scholarship to play for Indiana University, but after less than a month in Bloomington, Bird dropped out. The size of the student body overwhelmed a kid from a small town. He returned to French Lick, enrolled at Northwood Institute in nearby West Baden, and spent a year working municipal jobs before finally arriving at Indiana State University in Terre Haute in 1975.

  At Indiana State, Bird averaged 30.3 points, 13.3 rebounds, and 4.6 assists per game over his college career. He led the Sycamores to their first-ever NCAA tournament appearance and carried them through an undefeated regular season. Indiana State finished 33-0 heading into the 1979 national championship game, where they met Michigan State and a point guard named Earvin Johnson. That game drew the highest television rating ever recorded for a college basketball game. Bird scored 19 points but made only 7 of 21 shots; Indiana State lost 75-64. His first-round loss to Magic Johnson would set the terms for the next decade of professional basketball.

• 3. The Celtics and the Trio

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  Boston selected Bird with the sixth overall pick in the 1978 NBA draft, but he refused to sign immediately and returned to Indiana State for his senior season. His agent, Bob Woolf, told Celtics general manager Red Auerbach that Bird would simply enter the 1979 draft if Boston did not meet his price, at which point their rights would expire and he would likely go first overall. After protracted negotiations, Bird signed a five-year, $3.25 million contract on the 8th of June 1979, making him the highest-paid rookie in sports history at the time. The NBA subsequently changed its draft eligibility rules to prevent teams from drafting players before they were ready to sign, a rule that became known as the Bird Collegiate Rule.

  In his career debut, Bird recorded 14 points, 10 rebounds, and five assists in a 114-106 win over the Houston Rockets. Boston improved its win total by 32 games over the previous season and finished first in the Eastern Conference. On the 14th of November 1979, he recorded his first career triple-double. By season's end he was named Rookie of the Year.

  Before the 1980-81 season, the Celtics drafted forward Kevin McHale and acquired center Robert Parish from the Golden State Warriors. The trio of Bird, McHale, and Parish is regarded by many as the greatest front court in NBA history. Together they reached five NBA Finals, winning three championships in 1981, 1984, and 1986. During the 1981 postseason, Bird averaged 21.9 points, 14 rebounds, 6.1 assists, and 2.3 steals per game. The 1985-86 Celtics, who won 67 games after a trade for Bill Walton, are ranked by some as one of the greatest teams ever assembled, with journalists Peter May of the Boston Globe and Bill Simmons of Grantland listing them at number one.

• 4. Three Straight MVPs

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  Bird won the NBA Most Valuable Player Award in three consecutive seasons from 1984 to 1986, a feat accomplished by only two other players in league history: Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. No forward has ever done it before or since.

  In the 1983-84 season, Bird averaged 24.2 points, 10.1 rebounds, 6.6 assists, and 1.8 steals per game. In the NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, a flagrant foul on Kurt Rambis in Game 4 sparked a brawl and caused Los Angeles to lose their composure. Boston came back to win that game and won the series in seven. Bird was named Finals MVP with averages of 27.4 points, 14 rebounds, and 3.6 assists per game.

  On the 12th of March in the 1984-85 season, Bird scored a career-high 60 points against the Atlanta Hawks, a Boston Celtics franchise record. The performance came nine days after McHale had set the previous franchise record with 56 points. Bird averaged 28.7 points, 10.5 rebounds, and 6.6 assists that season for his second consecutive MVP.

  The back injury that would eventually end his career arrived not in a game but in a driveway. During the 1985 offseason, Bird injured his back shoveling crushed rock to build a driveway at his mother's house. He played through it, but the problems never went away. Before the 1985-86 season, the Celtics traded for Bill Walton, an All-Star center with a long history of injuries. The gamble paid off. In Game 6 of the 1986 Finals against the Houston Rockets, Bird recorded 29 points, 11 rebounds, and 12 assists as Boston won its third championship in six years. He won three consecutive Three-Point Contest championships during those same years, and once practiced three-point shooting with his eyes closed.

• 5. The Rivalry With Magic

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  Magic Johnson appeared at Bird's retirement ceremony on the 4th of February 1993 and described Bird as a "friend forever." That friendship was built on years of competition that neither man had chosen and neither could walk away from.

  Their careers were mirror images. Between them, Bird and Johnson captured eight NBA championships during the 1980s. During that decade, either Boston or Los Angeles appeared in every NBA Finals. They met three times in the Finals, with Magic winning in 1985 and 1987, and Bird winning in 1984. The contrast between them seemed almost designed for television: Bird was an introvert from a small town playing in blue-collar Boston; Johnson was the gregarious face of Los Angeles and the fast-paced Showtime offense the Lakers ran. A Converse commercial for its Weapon line of shoes played on this contrast, filming Bird practicing alone on a rural court in French Lick while Johnson arrived in a limousine. The court was actually one Bird had built on property he purchased for his mother.

  Journalists characterized their rivalry in terms of race, region, and style, but as one observer put it, take a chainsaw to their souls and they were fraternal, if not identical, friends. Both players shared charisma, extraordinary passing skills, deft shooting, and a team-first orientation that the league had never seen before. Their rivalry transformed the NBA from, as one description had it, a struggling and barely profitable league into a financial and marketing success. At the 1987-88 regular season opener between the two teams, Magic Johnson banked in an off-balance shot from near the three-point line at the buzzer for a 115-114 Lakers win at Boston Garden.

• 6. The Mind of a Trash-Talker

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  Xavier McDaniel once recounted that Bird predicted a game-winning shot against him before taking it, then added afterward: "Damn, I didn't mean to leave two seconds on the clock." That combination of prediction and delivery defined Bird's psychological approach to the game.

  Michael Jordan explicitly warned his rookie teammate B.J. Armstrong not to respond to Bird during a playoff series, instructing him: "Not a single person. Not one word. No one talk to Larry Bird." Jordan has since credited Bird as the greatest trash-talker and mind-game player of all time, saying Bird taught him everything he knows about getting into opponents' heads. During the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals against the Detroit Pistons, Bird repeatedly belittled Dennis Rodman's defensive abilities and at one point asked Pistons head coach Chuck Daly to send in someone capable of guarding him.

  Pat Riley, who coached against Bird in three Finals, offered a distinction between Jordan and Bird when it came to clutch performance. Jordan was his choice to save a game; Bird was his choice to save his life. Jordan himself considers as his favorite compliment the description "God disguised as Michael Jordan," specifically because it came from Bird after Game 2 of a first-round Celtics-Bulls series during the 1986 playoffs, when Jordan scored an NBA playoff-record 63 points in a 135-131 Celtic win. Jordan later said that when Bird acknowledged his performance, he transitioned from perceived hotshot rookie to recognized player. The compliment from Bird, Jordan explained, gave him credibility that nothing else could have provided.

• 7. After the Playing Days

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  Bird announced his retirement from the NBA on the 18th of August 1992. The Celtics immediately retired his jersey number 33. He had joined the Dream Team that summer in Barcelona, averaging 8.4 points per game alongside Johnson, Jordan, and others on the first United States Olympic squad composed of NBA players. Bird and Johnson served as co-captains after Jordan declined the role when it was first suggested by head coach Chuck Daly.

  Bird served as a special assistant in the Celtics' front office until 1997, then accepted the Indiana Pacers' head coaching position despite having no previous coaching experience. In the 1997-98 season, he led the Pacers to a 58-24 record, the franchise's best as an NBA team at the time, and pushed the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls to seven games in the Eastern Conference Finals before losing. The Bulls won the championship that year. Bird was named Coach of the Year. He led Indiana to back-to-back Central Division titles in 1999 and 2000 and a berth in the 2000 NBA Finals before resigning, having kept his original promise to coach for exactly three years.

  In 2003, Bird became the Pacers' president of basketball operations. One of his first acts was to replace Isiah Thomas with Rick Carlisle as head coach. After the 2011-12 season, when Indiana secured the third seed in the East with a 42-24 record, Bird was named NBA Executive of the Year, completing a set of six major NBA honors that no one in the history of the league has matched. The Missouri Valley Conference Men's Basketball Player of the Year trophy bears his name, a bronze statue of Bird in his Sycamores uniform stands in front of Hulman Center on the campus of Indiana State University, and in 2022 the NBA named the Eastern Conference Finals MVP trophy the Larry Bird Trophy.