When the Game Was Ours

by Larry Bird

  "Sure," Bird told him. "Get whatever you can."

  "I think they wrote him a check for $5,000 just to drive by his own field," Bird said.

  While the lighting crew pulled out their equipment and began setting up down at Bird's asphalt court, the Bird brothers pulled out their four-wheeler and offered Earvin Johnson a ride. Magic good-naturedly complied, jerking around the property like a newly minted cowboy on a bucking bronco.

  "From the looks of it," Mark Bird said, "he had never been on one before."

  After Georgia's carefully prepared feast, Bird shooed his family and the film crew away and disappeared with Johnson to the basement of the house.

  Initially, the conversation was halting. Bird made a crack about Magic having the upper hand again in light of the Lakers '85 championship.

  "The league is loving us," Johnson replied. "Do you know how much money they are making off you and me?"

  "I'd like to see a little more of it coming our way," Bird said. "And how about what they're paying these rookies that are coming in? I can't wait until my contract is up."

  The two superstars laughed. Each acknowledged that he had already earned more money in six years in the NBA than he had anticipated making in his entire lifetime.

  As they began to discuss their upbringings, they were surprised by the similarities of their stories. Each grew up poor in the Midwest, raised by parents who stressed pride and self-discipline in spite of their challenging economic situations. They compared notes on being crammed into a tiny bedroom with their siblings. Bird had shared a room with his sister Linda, who did not subscribe to his obsession with orderliness and left him in daily fits of rage from her clothes slung about her bed and the floor. Magic shared tales of his brothers and sisters sprinting down the hall in a desperate attempt to be the first to reach the one and only bathroom in the house.

  They swapped stories about their baseball exploits as teenagers and discovered they both had paper routes growing up. Magic and Larry also shared another childhood trait: each had spent most of his quiet moments dreaming of basketball greatness.

  Johnson told Bird about the afternoon he saw a wealthy Lansing businessman drive through the town center in a sparkling new Mercedes. Earvin, who was dribbling a basketball at the time, promised himself that, once he made it big in the pros, a blue Mercedes would be one of his first purchases.

  A luxury of that magnitude was foreign to Bird because nobody in French Lick or West Baden was driving much more than a station wagon or a pickup truck.

  "When everybody else around you is the same way, you don't even realize you don't have money," Bird said.

  That didn't prevent either young boy from occasionally longing for the finer things. Bird became fixated on a pair of suede tennis shoes one of his teammates wore to school. He was given two pairs of canvas Converse sneakers a year for being on the school basketball team, and knew they would have to last through the summer.

  "But then I saw those suede shoes, and it was all I could think about," Bird said. "I couldn't imagine I would ever have a pair of them, but then I got lucky. I found a pair for 20 bucks. I was just so happy.

  "I never would have asked my parents for anything like that."

  In his senior year of high school, when Bird and his classmates received the flier for their high school rings, he looked at the picture for a long while, then folded it carefully and threw it away. Two or three months after graduation, Georgia Bird said to him, "Hey, where's your class ring? I don't remember paying for it."

  "I didn't get one," Bird answered.

  "What?" Georgia Bird shrieked. "Why not? I would have found a way to pay for it."

  "I just didn't feel right asking," Bird shrugged.

  Young Earvin Johnson's wish list had included a pair of Converse's special Dr. J leather shoes to replace the $2 sneakers that were his standard footwear, but he never was able to scrape up the money to buy them. He made do with his own canvas Cons by sprucing them up with red laces, the color of nearby Sexton High School, where he planned on being a star someday.

  Magic owned two pairs of school pants and a suit to wear to church. The jacket was reversible, and he alternated his wardrobe weekly by turning that jacket inside out. What he really wanted was a pair of blue jeans, the ones the popular R&B singers (and a few lucky Lansing residents) wore.

  "I wanted those jeans so badly," said Magic. "But my dad told me it wasn't in our budget. There were just too many of us."

  Like Larry's father, Earvin Johnson Sr. had two full-time jobs to help defray the costs of raising ten active kids. He worked for General Motors for 30 years, many of them on the assembly-line late shift. Sometimes he came home pocked with burns from the sparks of the welding tools that seared through his T-shirt.

  Magic's father finished his shift at three in the morning, took a nap, then reported to his job pumping gas at the Shell station. In later years, he started his own trash collection business and promptly put his sons to work. Some of Johnson's favorite memories were riding the garbage truck with his father.

  The elder Johnson loved to watch professional basketball on television with young Earvin, who was nicknamed "June Bug" because he couldn't sit still. When the game ended, Magic pushed the couch aside, rolled up some socks, made a mark on the wall, and started shooting.

  Earvin Sr. would not tolerate smoking or drinking in his home. He assigned chores to each of his children and expected them to be completed in short order. It was not a wise idea in the Johnson household to challenge this simple edict.

  "We were going to earn our keep, like it or not," Magic said. "No Johnson child was ever going to be called lazy."

  Joe Bird also stressed the importance of hard work—and always finishing the job. Larry's father was a gregarious man who was popular in town and loved to roughhouse with his kids. He had a quick wit and a generous nature, but he also had a darker side. Joe Bird returned home from the Korean War haunted by his experiences, and although he rarely talked about what he had seen, his family was often woken in the middle of the night by the blood-curdling screams of his many nightmares.

  He worked a variety of jobs over the years—at a chicken farm, a piano company, a shoe factory. He would stay sober for months at a time, but once every few months Joe's wages never made it home, squandered on cigarettes and a few drinks with the guys after work. The Bird family was constantly in financial peril. Larry moved 15 times in 16 years, sometimes because the rent went unpaid, or the electricity was turned off, or simply because his mother preferred a change of scenery.

  Eventually, when Larry was 16, Georgia and Joe Bird divorced. On more than one occasion, Larry's father told him bluntly, "You'd all be better off without me."

  His son disagreed. He loved his father and enjoyed many happy afternoons playing catch with him in the yard. As Larry's celebrity grew, so did the scrutiny regarding his family, and Joe Bird was often portrayed in a poor—and inaccurate—light. More than one publication claimed Joe Bird was physically abusive toward his wife Georgia. If that happened, Larry said, he never witnessed it.

  "If something happened, it had to have been before I was born," Bird said. "All I can tell you is, I was with him for 18 years and I never once saw him hit my mother. I did see my mom chase my dad around the house and whack him with a broom, though."

  Bird was 19 years old when the police visited Joe Bird and notified him he was behind in his support payments again. Because it was a small, tight-knit community, the officers knew Joe, so when he asked for a couple of hours to put his affairs in order before they hauled him off to the jail, they obliged.

  Larry's father called Georgia, expressed his regrets, told her what he planned to do, then put the phone down and shot himself. Upon his death, his Social Security payments reverted to his cash-strapped—and deeply grieving—family.

  Although Joe Bird's suicide was an incredibly traumatic event, it did not destroy his third son. In fact, Bird maintained, it only made him stronger.


  "I never had an issue with it," Bird said. "I always felt my father did what he had to do. He made his own choices. The thing about it is, really, that he bailed out on us.

  "In some ways, he couldn't help it. He had his own demons from the war and all that. But you've got to move on. It was hard, but I did it. There was nothing I could do about it.

  "I don't look back much. Someone said to me once, 'Wouldn't you like your dad to be here to see all that you've accomplished?' I said, 'Well, I wish he would have stuck with us. I wish he hadn't given up so soon.'"

  Bird was already obsessed with basketball when his father died, but after that it became a welcome escape from the sadness that enveloped his family.

  From the start, the blond white kid in French Lick and the gangly African American from Lansing exhibited unusually disciplined work habits. While other boys were playing stickball, riding bikes, sipping a soda down at the drugstore, or lounging in the nearest swimming hole, Bird and Magic were on the court, outlasting whoever had joined them that morning to shoot a few hoops.

  Bird's childhood friend Tony Clark recalled numerous times when his mother would drive him past the outdoor courts and Bird would be there alone, shooting in the rain. "He had this drive none of the rest of us had," Clark said.

  When he was young, Bird would go along with his brothers and his mother to the grocery store at the start of the week. They would fill four baskets full of food, and Bird assumed they would eat like royalty for weeks. Instead, by Thursday, all that was left was some peanut butter and stray pieces of bread.

  "If you got a piece of that bread on Friday, you were doing pretty good," Bird said.

  He was in the fourth grade when the principal came in looking for volunteers to work in the cafeteria. Everybody raised their hands, but the principal picked Bird. He worked during most of the 45-minute recess for his neighbor, Phyllis Freeman, handing out milk, wiping tables, and busing the dishes. In return, he got a free lunch and a check for $5.50 every other week. Most days he'd catch only the last five minutes of recess. His friends asked him, "Where you been? You missed all the games."

  "I felt bad about it until I got that check," Bird said.

  He ran home with his pay stub and the refunded lunch money Mrs. Freeman gave him and proudly showed them to his mother. Georgia Bird congratulated her son on his hard work and let him keep the check, but took the lunch money back from him. "That's my hard-earned pay," she said. Later that evening, when Joe Bird came home, he scooped up the lunch money. "That's my hard-earned pay," he said.

  While Bird exhibited a wry sense of humor like his father, he was also proud and stubborn like his mother. He occasionally had trouble containing his emotions and could be surly if he felt he was slighted.

  Larry weighed only 130 pounds as a high school sophomore at Springs Valley High when he broke his ankle in practice with the junior varsity team. He knew immediately he had injured himself badly because he couldn't put any pressure on his foot. Coach Jim Jones, figuring it was a sprain, took the boy out back and taped up his ankle, right on the skin. Then he told the scrawny forward, "You'll be all right. Just get out there and move a little bit." Larry did what he was told. His foot swelled so badly that it took three weeks for it to calm down enough for the doctors to cast it.

  "Jonesy cost me almost a month of playing time for that," he said.

  He spent most of the season propped up on crutches, shooting free throws and working at Agan's Market in West Baden. When tournament time rolled around, Larry was healed but still limping slightly. Jones added him to the postseason roster anyway, and when the coach tapped him on the shoulder to go into his first varsity game, Bird galloped onto the court and promptly launched a 15-footer. It dropped through. He went on to win the playoff game for Springs Valley with two free throws from the line in the final seconds.

  "That was it," said Jim Jones. "Larry was hooked."

  Jones dropped by the outdoor courts each summer to see who was refining their skills. Jones told his players, "I'll be back to check on you." Sometimes he came back in 15 minutes. Sometimes he came back after 18 holes of golf. Each time his prized player was still there, working on his game.

  As a 6-foot-7 senior in high school, Larry led Springs Valley to the regional finals, where they lost to Bedford. Bird went home with 25 points and a series of bruises on his upper thighs from the opposing player pinching him throughout the game.

  The summer before his final year of high school, Larry went to visit his brother Mark, who was working at a steel mill in Gary, Indiana. In the evenings, Mark Bird played at Hobart High School, where most of the top college stars congregated. On the night Larry showed up, his brother marveled at how much taller and stronger he looked. When the college players started divvying up sides, Mark whispered to the guy who had picked him, "Take my brother. He's pretty good."

  The Bird brothers played together for almost four hours and didn't lose a game. Larry dominated play, first with his passing, then with his shooting. Mark Bird was asked repeatedly, "Which college does your brother play for?"

  "He's a high school kid," Mark answered.

  One of the guys who inquired about Larry played for UCLA. "Within a week, Larry was getting letters from John Wooden," Mark said.

  Earvin Johnson grew up chronicling the careers of all the UCLA Bruins, particularly center Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. When Magic was a teenager, he solicited the big man for an autograph following a Pistons game. While his future teammate did sign his scrap of paper, Alcindor was so dismissive that Johnson felt horribly slighted and brooded all the way back home to Lansing.

  "When I make it big," Johnson vowed, "I'm going to smile at every single person that wants my autograph."

  There was no doubt in Earvin Johnson's mind that he would be an NBA star someday. When he was in fifth grade and his teacher, Greta Dart, asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up, Johnson wrote "basketball player" in bold letters.

  "Sure, Earvin," Dart said. "Get your education first."

  Yet Dart couldn't help but notice there was something striking about Johnson's leadership capabilities, even as a 10-year-old. His ability to connect with his classmates and bring them together was remarkable. Dart was often the teacher on duty for recess when the kids traditionally played a spirited game of kickball. Magic, who was so much stronger and better than most of his friends, would choose Dart and two of the least athletic kids in the class to be on his team. Together, they'd go out and beat the top athletes in the school.

  "He was an organizer," said Dart. "He was always the one who took the kids that weren't included and found a way to make them part of it."

  Dart was a disciplinarian, and while she found Johnson to be charming, she also expected him to be responsible. In her first year as a teacher, she warned him that if he didn't finish one of his school assignments by Friday, she would not allow him to play in the big fifth-grade YMCA game the following day.

  Magic made the mistake of calling Greta Dart's bluff. When the paper didn't land on her desk, she forbade him to dress for the game. His formerly undefeated team lost without him.

  "The kids came in on Monday and said, 'Mrs. Dart, you should have let Earvin play,'" Dart said. "But Earvin didn't say a word."

  Johnson couldn't wait until high school so he could wear the uniform of the Sexton "Big Reds." Before he got the chance, his street was redistricted and Magic and his siblings were bused to Everett High School instead. It was a crushing development for his older brothers Quincy, who played football, and Larry, a basketball player who also had longed for the day he'd wear a Sexton uniform. While Sexton's population was made up mostly of African American students, Everett was a mixed-race school, and Magic and his siblings were wary of their new surroundings. Quincy endured racial slurs and bruising fistfights. Larry became involved in a series of scrapes with white students and clashed with the high school basketball coach, George Fox.

  Larry Johnson di
dn't like people telling him what to do. He showed up late for practice, and his effort was spotty. He was angry that he had to stay at Everett, and he took it out on everyone around him.

  "I felt like all these white teachers and white coaches were looking down on me," Larry explained. "It seemed to me they treated me like I was nothing. It wasn't like that—but back then that's how I saw it."

  Larry Johnson was riding the bench on a junior varsity team with a record of 1–6 when Fox called them together and said, "Do I have to call up that eighth-grader Earvin Johnson from the middle school to show you guys how to bring the ball up?"

  Earvin, who was already 6-foot-4, dropped 48 points on the Oddo Eskimos, a crosstown middle school rival. He entertained a packed gymnasium with behind-the-back passes and full-court jams while his brother Larry sat court-side, urging him to smash the school record of 40 points. He did so in three quarters, then sat back and watched his teammates from the bench in the final minutes.

  By the time Earvin was a ninth-grader, Larry Johnson had been bounced from the high school team because of his poor attitude. When he left, he angrily told Fox, "My brother Earvin will never play for you. I'll make sure of it."

  When Magic finally arrived at Everett, his initial interaction with Fox and the players was awkward. He was fiercely loyal to his brother Larry, but he also ached to play.

  "I've got to do this," he told his older brother, the anguish clear in his voice.

  In the beginning, Johnson's older teammates resented his abilities and, ignoring him completely, pointedly passed the ball among themselves. Yet, over time, their stance softened. Magic was too talented, too unselfish, and too charismatic to dislike.

  "What they figured out," said Larry Johnson, "was if they gave Earvin the ball, he was going to give it right back."