CHAPTER 2
"ACCEPTING THOSE BEERS WOULD MAKE HIM BEHOLDEN TO YOU"
NBA teams on the road in 2021 stay at the Four Seasons, the Ritz, or the nearest available resort. They fly in private jets and consume only the finest wines, meats, and cheeses. They never touch their own luggage and rarely interact with fans or media. They live in a bubble, and we're not talking about the COVID-19 Bubble at Disney World in 2020.
In late October of 1982, the Boston Celtics, on the eve of their thirty-seventh season, checked into a musty Holiday Inn in Richfield, Ohio. Each room at the Holiday Inn featured color television, air-conditioning, and individually wrapped bars of soap only a little thicker than a book of matches. The Holiday Inn's "minibar" was the vending machine near the steamy, rank indoor pool by the lobby bathrooms. The cheap drapes in the rooms fluttered when the wind whipped outside the hotel. Snowflakes sometimes feathered through window seams. Guests were required to pull their room door shut to secure the lock.
In 1982, no one was stalking this joint in search of NBA superstars. The Larry Bird Celtics were already established as champions and basketball royalty. They'd won the franchise's fourteenth banner just seventeen months earlier, and there was every reason to believe they'd be going back to the Finals for several seasons to come. But there were no New England transplants living in Shaker Heights trying to find the Celtics in the dank lobby of the Holiday Inn; no autograph-seeking greenflies, no overdressed, high-heeled young women in search of a wealthy basketball star. The Richfield Holiday Inn catered to bored businessmen and conventioneers.
The Holiday Inn was a couple of miles from the twenty-thousand-seat Richfield Coliseum, a spacious oval situated halfway between Cleveland and Akron. Harvey Greene, public relations director of the Cavaliers in the early 1980s, often drove out-of-town sportswriters back to the Holiday Inn after games because cabs wouldn't come to the arena late at night.
"My biggest fear working for the Cavs was the drive home from the Coliseum late at night during the winter," said Greene. "The first part of that drive was the one-mile stretch from the Coliseum to the Holiday Inn on a narrow, winding, desolate two-lane road through a thick forest in almost total darkness. I was always afraid I'd either hit a deer or skid on an ice patch off the road and into a ditch, never to be found. Toward the end of that drive, the Holiday Inn would magically appear in front of me like a beacon, bathed in the only light to be seen in that desolation. There was nothing else around. It reminded me of the approach leading up to the Bates Motel."
On the eve of the first game of the 1982¨C83 season, the Holiday Inn's restaurant/bar, Barney Google's, was empty except for Larry Bird and Quinn Buckner, who sat at one end of the bar near the overhead television. The Celtics had held their final practice of the preseason earlier that day before boarding a Northwest Airlines flight to Cleveland.
It had been an emotional week as Celtics players said goodbye to teammates Chris Ford and Eric Fernsten, both members of the 1980¨C81 championship squad. Fernsten was a popular, seldom-used big man, cut because the Celtics used their 1982 first-round pick on the six-eleven but extremely limited Darren Tillis. A terrific practice player who'd been Bird's teammate for the first three years of Bird's career, Fernsten was released just a few hours before the flight to Cleveland.
Ford was a ten-year veteran who'd played four seasons in Boston. He planned on playing at least one more year, but lost his backcourt job to NBA veteran Buckner, who'd been acquired in an off-season deal with the Bucks. Ford had started at guard alongside Tiny Archibald when the Celtics won the championship in 1981. Teammates called Ford "Doc," a nickname slapped on Ford by Cedric Maxwell when the gravity-challenged Ford made a Julius Erving¨Clike cradle-rocking dunk attempt during an otherwise forgettable practice.
That's how it works in team sports. At every level. An insignificant moment can stay with a player forever. In my high school in the 1960s, a kid named Dave Martin screwed up the end of a practice, missing a layup that would have sent everybody home for the day. When Dave's layup clanged off the rim¡ªadding another twenty minutes to practice¡ªa teammate screamed, "Jesus, Martin!," which became Dave Martin's name for the rest of his Groton life. More than forty years after the silly episode, I came out of a restroom at the Fours across the street from the Garden and encountered a young man with his sixtysomething dad. The young man said, "Dan, we're from Groton. This is my father, Dave Martin."
"Jesus?" I asked.
Affirmative.
An Atlantic City native who starred at Villanova, Chris Ford lives forever in trivia lore as the first man to make an NBA three-point shot. He wound up doing Celtics radio commentary the year he was cut by Bill Fitch, then rejoined the team as an assistant coach and eventually became head coach. On October 28, 1982, Bird, for the first time in his career, was grappling with the reality that Ford and Fernsten were not his teammates.
I'd made a point to introduce myself to Bird at media day and talked to him in reporter scrums during a preseason that included road trips to San Antonio and Nashville. The young Celtics superstar was shy and abrupt, clearly not comfortable with new people. He didn't speak with reporters during his celebrated senior season at Indiana State. He endured interviews like a child getting a polio vaccine. Bird was a national sensation when he led Indiana State to a 33-0 season and the NCAA title game against Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans in 1979. The Larry-Magic NCAA Final will forever be the highest-rated basketball television broadcast of all time. Bird never got over losing that game and was still carrying the hurt after winning NBA Rookie of the Year in 1980 and his first championship in 1981. He'd established himself as one of the best players in the NBA, but he was still obsessed with beating Magic.
Buckner was no stranger to fame and success. He grew up near Chicago where he was a high school state champ, then cocaptained Bobby Knight's 1976 NCAA champion Hoosiers, still the last undefeated team in NCAA history. He cocaptained the USA's gold-medal-winning team at the 1976 Summer Olympics. Selected by Milwaukee with the seventh overall pick in 1976, he played six seasons for the Bucks before he was traded to Boston. His Indiana/Knight/Midwest connections and winning pedigree made him an ideal teammate and drinking buddy for Larry Bird.
I knew enough not to approach when I saw Bird and Buckner at the bar. I was the new guy. Worse, I was a reporter. They had a lot of catching up to do. Probably swapping Bobby Knight stories. Still, it had been a long day and I was thirsty and had my newspapers to keep me company. I nodded in their direction as I pulled out a stool and took a seat at the loser end of the bar. Buckner nodded back. Bird took a swig from his bottle of Bud and looked straight ahead.
When the barkeep approached, I ordered something for myself and asked him to send a couple of beers to the fellows at the other end. When Buckner and Bird got their beers, Buckner raised his bottle and again nodded in my direction. Still nothing from Larry.
Ten or fifteen minutes passed and nobody else came into the bar. Bird and Buckner were safely out of earshot and everything was cool.
Until I blundered.
I haven't thought about this in almost forty years and wish I could go back in time and change the moment, but I can't.
Before I settled my tab and got up to leave, I sent another round their way. It was a moment of nervousness and insanity, violating every social and professional drinking code known to man. My face turns crimson just thinking about it.
At that juncture of my professional life, I'd been around famous athletes for more than seven years. I'd spent four seasons on the road with the perennial pennant-winning Baltimore Orioles¡ªa team that included Hall of Famers Earl Weaver, Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer, Cal Ripken, and Frank Robinson. I'd had lunch with Reggie Jackson¡ªat his request. I'd interviewed Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio and engaged in conversations with Richard Nixon and Ted Kennedy. I was neither starstruck nor clumsy around famous people. I was three years older than Bird, for God sakes. So how could I have been so ham-handed and stupid?
When the barkeep made the approach with my pathetic offer of another round, Bird shook his head. I cringed. A new writer sending down one beer was suspicious, but tolerable. Offering a second round was a boundary violation. They must have been thinking, "What's this new guy trying to do? Does he think he can buy his way into the inner sanctum?"
It was the most humiliating rejection I'd felt since my first high school mixer when Temple Bruner shook her head after I'd shuffled across the cafeteria floor to ask her to slow dance to "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
Bird was right. I deserved to have my shot blocked. I'd established that the new guy was a tone-deaf weirdo who couldn't be trusted. The Celtics' biggest star, predisposed to keep his distance from writers, now had good reason to steer clear of me. And the Celtics hadn't even played their first game of the season yet.
"I can tell you what that was," Buckner told me thirty-seven years later. "Larry was advanced with his thinking. Was then. Is now. Accepting those beers would make him beholden to you. He didn't want that to be a debt he'd have to pay if you asked him a question he didn't want to answer. He wanted to have control."
Larry Joe Bird was born in rural southern Indiana on December 7, 1956 (the same day Bill Russell and K. C. Jones left the Melbourne Olympics with gold medals), the fourth of Joe and Georgia Bird's six children. He had two older brothers, Mike and Mark, and an older sister, Linda. After Larry, Georgia gave birth to two more boys, Jeff and Eddie. Larry's dad, Joe Bird, was uneducated but had been a fairly good basketball player before he left high school and went to work in his early teens. He served his country in the Korean War and bounced from job to job when he came home. The work he liked best was finishing instruments at the Kimball Piano and Organ plant. When Larry was a small boy, one of the pianos Joe Bird worked on was supposed to be featured on a national television show, and the family gathered around their tiny black-and-white TV to see Dad's piano on television. The segment never aired.
Like her husband, Georgia Bird changed jobs a lot. She worked at a chicken farm, a shoe factory, and a nursing home. She was a waitress and a cook. But there was never money for a family car, and the Birds were always moving. Larry remembered the embarrassment of his family running up $700 worth of credit at a local store. All of the Bird boys took turns living with their maternal grandparents, John and Lizzie Kerns. John and Lizzie's house was near a streetlight, which allowed the boys to play their basketball games at night. When they weren't playing ball or doing chores, the Bird kids were hunting mushrooms, a favorite southern-Indiana pastime. Bird's favorite TV show was Bonanza, which featured a family that lacked for nothing.