Bird Watching (12 page)

My mom had something like it. You’d be sitting with her, and then all of a sudden you could hear her breathing a lot harder. She’d say, “There goes my irregular heartbeat.” She’d sit there for a minute, then say, “I can’t go up the stairs right now.” I’d say, “Aw, c’mon, Mom, what are you talking about?” But when I started getting it, I started thinking to myself, “Holy cow!” Mom said it was hereditary, but all my doctors say it’s not.

Dr. Yee should be really happy with me, because I’m paying attention to everything he asked me to. I take my medicine, and I haven’t had my heart go out for almost seven months. According to Dr. Yee, as long as my arrhythmia is sporadic like it has been, there’s no major cause for concern. I exercise every day like I always have, and I’m feeling great.

Donnie wanted to make sure we have a defibrillator courtside, but that’s for the players as much as for me. The NBA has been a lot more focused on heart ailments since Hank Gathers died. NBA player Monty Williams also has a heart condition. So I think all the teams became more aware, and figure a defibrillator makes sense. The last thing anyone wants is for something to happen like it did to poor Reggie Lewis, the Celtics star who died of heart failure while he was shooting baskets. I don’t know exactly what happened to him, or why, but I still can’t believe it happened at all. It’s just a complete shock when somebody that young is gone all of a sudden, just like that.

I was in Florida when it happened. I heard a news flash on television, and I almost fell over. I called Dave Gavitt right away, and he told me it was true. It was a sad, sad day. I felt so awful for his family. I was never really close with his wife, Donna, but I know her and like her. She tells it like she sees it, and I respect that about her.

I wasn’t in Boston when all of Reggie’s care and treatment had been going on. I knew that the Celtics doctor, Arnie Scheller, had put together a top team of cardiologists so Reggie could get the best care he could possibly get. Next thing you know, the
Boston Globe
had a story about how Reggie and Donna switched hospitals in the middle of the night, and that got me worried. I don’t know why that happened, but I’m sure Donna and Reggie had their reasons.

I guess the part that gnaws at me the most is wondering if it had to happen. I know it would have been really tough for Reggie to give up basketball—he loved it so much—but he had a little boy and a little girl on the way when he died, and now they don’t have a daddy.

When Reggie died, I think we all had the same thought: you never know what’s going to happen. I just wish he was around. Reggie was a great kid. When he was a rookie and wasn’t playing very much, he used to come in for me at the end of a game and he’d shoot every time he got the ball. What was so exciting was to watch him develop into the kind of player he became. He worked very hard to improve his ballhandling, his defense, and his shot selection. He could always shoot the ball, and when he finally got to where he was the guy the team counted on, the heart problems happened. It doesn’t seem fair.

I’m sure it made it harder for Donna and Reggie that it was all so public. That’s one of the worst things about being a professional athlete. People think everything that happens to you is their business too. Like when I went to Indianapolis to get my shock treatment. I wanted to make sure nobody knew about it, so we scheduled it for real early in the morning. I made sure I went in a side door and that as few people as possible saw me. The good thing was it didn’t take very long, and by the time word got out that I was at the hospital, I was already long gone.

It’s mind-boggling sometimes, what you have to go through to guarantee your privacy. But we’re used to it. This is the part of my career that I have never liked.

When I was playing, some guys used to use aliases when we checked into hotels on the road, but I never did that. I just blocked off my phone. Of course, that was after being around the league a couple of years. I remember during my rookie year we played an exhibition game in New York City. I was rooming with Tiny Archibald, and the phone rang and I picked it up, and somebody was on the other end telling me they were going to kill me. I hung up, and Tiny said, “Who was that?” I told him, “Some guy that’s going to kill me.” The phone rang again, and this time Tiny picked it up. He chewed that guy out for a good ten minutes, but I really wasn’t upset about it. I just went on. I knew the guy wasn’t really going to kill me. You have to get used to that kind of thing when you are in the public eye. I’ve received so many death threats, I’ve lost count. But I understand everyone deals with it differently. I read that Karl Malone decided he needed to start carrying a gun after he received threats.

The best threat I got was during the 1984 Finals in Los Angeles. We were warming up for the second half against the Lakers and my coach, K. C. Jones, called me over. He said, “Larry, I’ve just been told there’s been a threat made on your life. You can handle this however you want. See those men all around the rim of this arena? They’re security personnel. They can escort you to the locker room, and you can watch the rest of the game there. You can leave the building if you want. Or you can keep playing. It’s totally up to you.” I said, “Okay, K. C.,” and I went back into the layup line. After a minute or so, K. C. says to me, “Larry, I see you’re still out here.” I said, “K. C., of course I’m still out there. It’s the Finals! We’re playing the Lakers!” K. C. said, “Great, great. But Larry, do me a favor, will you? When we come back in the huddle to start the second half, can you stay at center court? I’m afraid this guy might be a bad shot.” K. C. said it with a totally straight face, but I knew it was his way of trying to defuse the situation. He was trying to get me to relax. He was the best at that. Anyhow, when my team gathered in the huddle to start the second half, I ran to the middle of the group and draped my arm over K. C.’s shoulder.

You’ve got to understand that a lot of these threats are just kids, or people who are frustrated because you are beating the hell out of their team. I know Michael gets his share of it. Magic did too. That’s the way it goes. Get on with life.

The truth is, I’ve never cared so much about someone that I would be that intensely involved with them. I can’t believe anyone would walk across the street to meet me, because the truth is I wouldn’t walk across the street to meet anybody else. If somebody told me Miss America was outside the door, I’d wish her all the luck in the world, but I’m just not into that stuff.

When I was a kid we never went to any pro games, but one time our coach took us to Louisville, Kentucky, to see an ABA game. We were all seventh-graders, and my buddies were saying, “Hey, let’s get some autographs.” I said, “What do you want those for?” They said, “It’s fun. C’mon, we’ll show you.” So they give me a piece of paper, and Dan Issel is walking off the court. My buddies are hollering at him, and I’m kind of standing back with them, and Issel says, “No, no, not now,” or something like that. We got turned down. That was exactly what I was afraid of before I went down there. So I never asked anyone after that.

I understand exactly what position Dan Issel was in. I did then and I do now. I can honestly say I’ve signed as many autographs as probably anyone else in the world my age, but I can just do so many. I know every time you turn one more guy down, it could be Larry Bird left standing there, but it’s impossible to please everyone. Autographs are tricky, because so many people are into reselling them. You wish it was all little kids who want to take it home and put it in their scrapbooks, but it isn’t.

During the All-Star game a few years ago, when they announced the fifty greatest players of all time, the league wanted us to sign these commemorative lithographs. David Stern told me I had to sign these things, and I told him I’d sign when I had time and when I wanted to do it. They kept hassling me about signing, to the point where I almost didn’t do it. Finally I told them I’d do it before the game. So I go to sign the things, and come to find out Shaq didn’t sign, because he wasn’t even there, and neither did Jerry West, because he wasn’t there. They made this big stink about me not signing, but it was okay for these other guys to skip out? They made me out to be the bad guy, and that’s fine. I don’t really care.

I know some people feel I’m unapproachable, but the one thing they don’t understand is that I get very uncomfortable around crowds. I always try to stay away from situations where I might run into a group of people. What I never liked was when I’d go somewhere thinking there wouldn’t be much of a fuss, and then all of a sudden there’s a hundred kids all around you, pressing toward you. That’s when I become jittery. Unfortunately, that happened all the time when I was playing.

One thing I always hated when I was with the Celtics was trying to get home after the game. The way I would get out of Boston Garden was to walk down a ramp and out through the back of the building. I’d always peek out, and I wouldn’t see that many people, but the minute I stepped into view all these people who were sitting waiting in their cars would jump out and start running at me. I never did like that. So I started hanging around late after the games, having a soda in the locker room, waiting for the people to go home. Sometimes I’d even order out for a pizza. After a while, the Garden security figured out a way to get my car for me, pull it around back, and sneak me out a door right next to the train station. Even so, there was always somebody there who would figure out it was me. Sometimes they’d even follow me home.

People in Boston really did amaze me sometimes. I lived in a house in Brookline, which is a suburb of Boston, and my street was a shortcut through to the interstate. The first few years of my career I mowed my own lawn, and I’d always be able to get the back and the sides done pretty good, but whenever I tried to finish the front, people always stopped. One after another, they’d see me and put on the brakes, right in the middle of the street sometimes, and come over and try to strike up a conversation. After a while, I realized I couldn’t mow my lawn anymore. It wasn’t safe! For the most part, the people were pretty respectful. Most of ’em would drive by and honk the horn, and Dinah would say, “There go the fans.” Once in a while someone would run up and ring the doorbell after we went to bed. Dinah and I got used to spending most of our time in the back of the house. We had a screened porch, and it was nice and quiet, and sometimes it felt like we lived in the country. Our neighbors weren’t much of a problem either. Bob Woolf, who handled my first contract with Boston, lived right near us, and then on the other side there was an older couple. We didn’t hear much from them at all, except one day the guy came over and complained about one of our tree branches sticking out on his property.

I can pinpoint the day I lost my privacy forever: when
Sports Illustrated
put me on the cover of their magazine and called me college basketball’s best-kept secret. At the time, our Indiana State team was surprising everyone. I was a junior, I had never felt better about my game, and it should have been an exciting time. But that cover took care of that. My life was never the same. Within days, the phone at the school was ringing off the hook. Everyone in America wanted an interview. Back then I was sort of self-conscious, and I really didn’t want to talk to anybody. The other thing I couldn’t believe was how long it took for those photographers to get the shot they wanted for the magazine. We were there for ten hours with
Sports Illustrated
. I don’t know why anyone would need so many pictures. They kept taking them and taking them. The one they decided on for the cover was me standing in my uniform, surrounded by these cheerleaders who were saying, “Ssshh,” because I was this secret weapon. But they took pictures of me in a lot of different poses. In one of them they had me run through a hoop. I was so fed up. I told our sports information director I would never pose for another magazine cover—ever! When I got to the pros, my rule was, “One hour. If you can’t get what you need by then, you’re out of luck.”

About the time of the first
Sports Illustrated
cover, the media and other people started calling me the Great White Hope. It seemed like a silly thing to me, but I just never thought about it that much. I wasn’t going to get caught up in it. Once in a while some guy on another team might make a crack about it, but for the most part I ignored it.

When I got to Boston I started hearing about it again. I had never been there before I got drafted by the Celtics, and I didn’t know much about the place, but I knew the Celtics and the people in the city were following me after I got drafted by them. I knew there was talk about me going to Boston and doing this and doing that, but I had no idea how high the expectations were and how that would affect my new teammates.

So I walk into camp, and it’s my first day, and there’s Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe waiting for me. Cedric Maxwell, who was sitting with those guys, says, “Here comes the Great White Hope.” I’m standing there thinking, “Oh no, not this stuff again.” Luckily it didn’t last long. Once I started playing and proving to them I belonged, I didn’t hear anything about the Great White Hope anymore. That was true all through my first NBA season. Once I got on the court, I took care of the stereotypes. I was a basketball player. Period.

I never understood why people made so much of race. I remember when I first got to Indiana State. I had to sit out a year to regain my eligibility, but I would go up to the gym all the time and work out. Every day around two o’clock during the off season, a group of guys would meet at the gym and play pickup games. They were all black. I was always up at the gym shooting around during that time of day. One afternoon, one of my teammates said, “Hey, why don’t you come over here and play some games with us?” I could tell the other guys didn’t want me to play. They had never really heard of me at that point, and they were really good players. So I waited my turn and got into a couple of games, and after about three days kicking butt out there I was in charge of the whole thing. That was the only way to do it—to go in there and show them what you got. Now all of a sudden these guys are asking me, “Can we have the next game, Larry?” Those guys were good. They could get up and down, and make passes. They didn’t care what color you were—as long as you could play.