Bird Watching (3 page)

When I started my rehab that summer I knew I would never be the same. My legs felt different. The surgery took all the life out of them. I did all the exercises and all the workouts they gave me, but I couldn’t move the way I used to. I could still score and rebound and all that, but defensively it really affected me. I didn’t have the same lift, or side-to-side movement. It was very, very frustrating, but there wasn’t much use in talking about it. I could either play on or give it up, and I figured I had a lot more playing to do.

Of course, that was before I had any real idea of how bad my back would get. I guess I should have known. The doctors had told me I had congenital problems. I was born with a narrower canal than normal where the nerves lead to the spinal cord. Then there are the joints in my back, called the facet joints. They are supposed to be aligned a certain way. The left and right joints should be parallel to each other, but the ones on my right side were at all sorts of different angles. What all of this meant was my disc was going to slowly break down over the course of my life. Dan says I would have had back problems whether I was a professional athlete or not. Just through the wear and tear of every day, my spinal area was deteriorating, and the disc was degenerating. And the worse that disc got, the more excessive motion it caused in my back. That created a wobbly area that had very little stability.

All of that may have been true, but when you are a kid running around playing basketball and baseball and everything else, you don’t want to know that stuff. I didn’t have any major injuries as a kid growing up, unless you count a broken ankle that I got playing basketball. I had no way of knowing my back was going to give out on me.

My first real back problems cropped up in 1983, when I went home to my house in French Lick for the summer to do some work on my property. One of the first things I wanted to get done was to install some tile around my basketball court, to help with the drainage. I was never much on hiring people to do work I was perfectly capable of doing myself, and this job shouldn’t have been a problem. I needed some gravel to seal it, so I got my brother and his friend Eddie to help me spread it. They weren’t doing it the way I wanted, so I said the heck with it, and I took that truck full of gravel and did it all myself. It wasn’t the best idea I ever had. I woke up the next morning and I said, “Something is wrong.” My back was killing me. I couldn’t walk around, much less work out, and I was worried. I had only been with the Celtics for four seasons at that point, and we had already won our first championship, but I knew that if we were ever going to win another one I was going to have to be even better than I was the year before.

I didn’t want to have to tell the team I was hurt, so I didn’t do anything for about two or three weeks, hoping the rest would make it all better. But by then it was July, and I knew I had to get moving with my conditioning and everything for the season, so I called the Celtics team doctor, Tom Silva, and told him what had happened. He told me to put lots of ice on it. I did that for the rest of the summer, but it wasn’t helping much.

I remember really suffering through training camp. Doc Silva would alternate with heat and ice, heat and ice, but it wasn’t working. I remember after we played Philadelphia in an exhibition game at home, the pain was so bad I went to Silva again and said, “We’ve got to try something else.” He said, “Larry, I don’t know what else to tell you.” He called in Dr. Robert Leach, who examined me, then recommended I be seen by this physical therapist, Dan Dyrek, who he thought could help me. I agreed to see Dyrek at my house the next day.

He examined me in my living room, with Doc Leach and our trainer, Ray Melchiorre, watching. He was twisting me this way and that way, and digging into certain areas of my back, and everything he did hurt a whole lot. He explained what he was doing as he went along, and I was listening to everything he said, but I kept looking at Ray and Leach, because I knew them, and I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. I was only twenty-six years old, and I didn’t like the looks on their faces.

My first impression of Dan was pretty good. At least he wasn’t telling me I needed heat and ice, heat and ice, because it was pretty obvious that wasn’t going to work. I remember about an hour after they all left, I got up to turn on a light, and they were all standing in my driveway, still talking. I went back and told Dinah, “They’re still out there. You know what that means. My back must be pretty screwed up.”

Dyrek called me the next morning and explained that there was what he called a real “hot spot” in my back around the disc that he wanted to treat by mobilizing the tissues and tendons around that area. The idea was to manually manipulate that area to restore normal motion and take pressure off the disc. I said, “Let’s start today.”

That’s how my relationship with Dan Dyrek came about. It started out as professional, but he’s become one of my close friends. When you spend that much time with somebody, you find out what kind of person they are, and Dan was always a professional. I never worried that he would be talking to anyone about my treatments. And I could tell early on he knew what he was doing. When I first started seeing him, I was getting these major pains in my side that would last for more than ten seconds when I sat down. It was brutal. But after two or three weeks of seeing Dan, that pain gradually started going away. I ended up receiving treatment every other day for two years.

A couple of months after he started helping me, I offered Dan a couple of my tickets to a Celtics game. I knew he’d never ask for anything. I didn’t even know if he was a sports fan until I saw his face when I gave him the tickets. He looked so excited, and surprised. I’m not the type to just go out and give my tickets to anyone, but I really appreciated how much Dan was helping me. So I gave him two tickets to each game for the rest of the season. We spent so much time together that our pregame treatments turned into little challenges. Just before it was time to take the court, Dan would ask, “How are you doing?” and I’d say, “I’m feeling like I can score forty-three points tonight.” If I actually got to 43 points, we’d have some kind of prearranged signal, like a salute, and I’d turn and give it to him.

It was really important that I could trust Dan not to discuss my injuries. I didn’t want the fans and the media to know every little thing that was wrong with me, but even more important, I didn’t want the teams we were playing against to know! That’s why nobody knew about the neck problems I was having about this same time. But that was nothing compared to my back.

My next serious back episode was in the summer before the 1989–90 season, when I went to a fund-raiser that the singer Kenny Rogers put on each year. I love Kenny Rogers’s music, and I had been doing his charity event for three years or so and it was a lot of fun. He got four pro basketball players, four fishermen, four tennis players, and four golfers, and we all tried to play one another’s sports.

I was still having some trouble with my back, but Dan had gotten me to the point where I had long stretches of being pain-free. I was feeling pretty good about the upcoming season.

We were in the final minutes of this charity basketball game when I went up for a rebound and came down a little sideways. Michael Jordan was going for the ball too, and he landed on my back. Right away I knew I was in trouble. My back started tightening up, and I could feel the pain coming on. The game was almost over, which was a good thing, because I was done. I just kind of stood there until it ended, and then I walked off the court without telling anybody what had just happened. Dinah was there with me, and she got on the phone to Dan and told him we needed to come up to Boston to see him. It was awkward, because the fund-raising people kept asking me to play tennis, but I couldn’t, and I really didn’t feel like explaining why.

Within a couple of days we were in Dan’s office, and I could tell right away the news wasn’t good. I had torn additional portions of the disc wall, and my back was really traumatized. I didn’t know it then, all the way back in 1989, but that was the beginning of the end. Dan was able to treat me so I got better and was able to play, but I never came all the way back. For the rest of my career I had to rely on Dan to continually treat me and put things back in their proper place. We told the Celtics what had happened. They took it pretty well. The truth was, my back was so unstable, it was going to give way sometime. It wasn’t like it was this violent collision; Michael didn’t even land on me that hard. I was just at the point where I was an accident waiting to happen.

Nobody ever found out about that charity game—until now—which was good. There was nothing I hated more than talking about my injuries. It never helped them feel any better, and to me it always sounded like an excuse. Also, I found myself getting kind of superstitious. I remember one time, I had just finished practice at Hellenic College, which is where the Celtics used to hold all their workouts, and I was feeling fantastic. Peter May, a reporter who covered our team for many years, asked me how my back was feeling. I answered him, “Great!” I drove home from practice, lay down to take a nap, and I woke up with that horrible burning pain down my leg again. The next day, I was at the hospital getting injections. That’s when I decided, “That’s it. I’m not talking about my injuries anymore.” I know it was hard for the reporters covering the team, but they got used to it. They knew that if I was cranky, it meant something was hurting. Near the end, that was every day.

It was just a grueling process. Dan would check my back to see if it had lost its alignment, because things were so unstable, the bones were prone to shifting, and that set off all sorts of spasms. But the worst part about it was that my back prevented me from practicing, and without all that time in the gym, my skills were deteriorating. I loved to practice, and I needed to practice, and my game really suffered when I didn’t.

That played a part in my decision to retire, too.

My last game at Boston Garden was on May 15, 1992. We had beaten the Pacers 3–0 in the opening round of the playoffs and had Cleveland next. The Cavs were a good team, and had us down 3–2 heading into Game 6. It wasn’t a memorable performance for me. I remember feeling a little off balance all night. My shot didn’t feel the way I wanted it to feel, and everything was a little out of sync. But Reggie Lewis hit some foul shots at the end, and we won to tie the series 3–3. I wasn’t thinking it was the last time I’d play in the Garden, because I truly believed we were going to beat Cleveland and come back home for the next round. But that didn’t happen. The Cavaliers beat us at their place, and then—boom!—all of a sudden the season was over, and so was my career with the Celtics.

I hadn’t told any of my teammates I was done, so there weren’t any hugs or handshakes or anything like that. I’m sure some guys suspected, but nobody said anything. I just grabbed the game ball, stuffed it in my bag, and went home.

The official announcement didn’t come for about another three months, because I had to play for the United States in the Olympics in Barcelona. When we decided it was time to let everyone know I was retiring, we called up everyone that morning and told them. I didn’t want it to get leaked out ahead of time and have people camping out in front of the house. Better to get it over with all at once. Dinah decided to go back to Indiana. There was something going on in French Lick, and I think she really didn’t want to be around to see it end. I remember she called me the night after the press conference and said she was getting her hair done at the beauty shop when the announcement came on over the radio. She said it got her all teary-eyed and everything. It was a big change for both of us. We had gone through all this pain and sweat, and now all of a sudden it was going to be over.

There were a lot of reporters at the press conference, even though we hadn’t given them much advance notice. They wanted to know how I had spent the previous night preparing for the announcement. I told them I sat in my house in Brookline by myself, and watched old tapes of myself and cried. But that was crap, of course. I don’t know why I said it. It just came out, and it sounded good. I remember I did sit home and I started thinking about it, and said to myself, “My God, this is really over. I’m really out of here.” Then I started thinking back to when I first got there, and how I went in and saw the house that I really liked, and how much fun we had in that house, and then I started going through in my mind everything that happened during those thirteen years. More than anything, I was so thankful to have played in one place my entire career. That’s something I believe is truly special, and I’m so glad it was with the Boston Celtics. I used to tell people, if you haven’t played for the Boston Celtics, you haven’t played professional basketball. I suppose that’s a little bit of bull too, but it felt that way to me. I never tried to imagine wearing another uniform, because I couldn’t have. I would have retired first.

Some of my friends think it’s too bad the fans didn’t know which one was my final game, because they didn’t get to say goodbye, but they did. The Celtics held a retirement night for me, and it was one of the greatest things I’ve ever experienced. It was Dave Gavitt’s idea. At first I didn’t want any part of it. The way the Celtics usually retire jerseys is at halftime of a game, but Dave said it would be almost impossible to get the ceremony done in such a short time, and it would be disruptive to the game. His idea was to sell tickets to a Larry Bird Night, and donate all the proceeds to charity. The way he envisioned it was to have me onstage, in uniform, and have various people who were important throughout my career come up and talk with me. He also wanted to fly in Magic Johnson from L.A. to be there, which I thought was a great idea, because the two of us were so closely connected throughout our careers. Dave thought Magic should be in his Lakers warm-ups, and I should be in my Celtics warm-ups. I fought him a little on that, but I finally gave in. Dave also thought I should take one last shot, but there was no way I’d agree to that. I told him, “Dave, I’ve already taken all the shots I’m going to take.”