by Larry Bird
I know one of the reasons Michael played so well was because there was all that talk of the young kid from the Lakers, Kobe Bryant, being the next Michael Jordan. Michael doesn’t like to hear that kind of crap. I know Michael well enough to be able to tell you that. So the kid goes out there and tries to do it all himself, and you knew that wasn’t going to work. If Bryant came out and had a hell of a game, and won the MVP, that would be different. But you can’t just hand him the ball and tell him to take over without him earning it first. Guys have too much pride in this league, especially the superstars. That’s why Karl Malone was upset. He wanted to play basketball. He’s trying to set the kid a pick, and Bryant’s waving off Karl Malone. That’s no good. But that’s what happens in those games. Guys get carried away. They think it’s their chance at the spotlight. But the funny thing about All-Star games is they’ve always been the same, from high school right on up. Guards control the game. They decide whether they’re going to bother to pass it, or who they’re going to pass it to, and whether they’re going to dribble the ball. If you’re a big guy, there’s nothing you can do but watch and be ready in case someone throws you a pass now and then.
I enjoyed being around the guys at the All-Star game. A lot of those young players are very talented, and I haven’t been around them very much, and it’s like anything—they’re nice kids when you spend a little time with them. When I played in those games, the winners got $2,000 and the losers got $1,000. Last year, I think it was $10,000 and $5,000. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen when players really want the extra money. Fans have this idea the All-Star game is just for fun, and nobody cares what happens, but believe me, that’s not true. These guys care—a lot. That’s why there’re always arguments about who was the MVP of the game and all that. The year I coached the team, it was obvious. Michael was the MVP, and nobody disputed it.
When Reggie, Rik, and I got back to Indiana, the city was really buzzing. It was nice to see people excited about the Pacers again. There have been times when the franchise has really struggled to get support. Indiana is the best basketball state in the country, but the emphasis has been on high school and college ball for so long that the pros have always seemed to come up a little short. When I used to play for the Celtics, we’d go into Market Square Arena, and there would be so many Boston fans that it felt like a home game. The big difference was I loved playing in Boston Garden, and I always had a brutal time at Market Square. I hated that arena. The sight lines were bad, and the rims were always too tight and too high. When I became coach of the Pacers, I had the guys who run the arena measure those rims. I stood right there with them while they did it. They use a pole to measure them. I said to the guy, “I’m telling you, that rim is too high.” He said, “No, look. It says ten feet.” So I said to the guy, “I know it does, but have you ever measured the pole?”
Before we started the second half of the season I gave my guys a little speech about how important it was to be consistent over the final two months of the season, to get your team ready for the playoffs. If you look at what Utah and Chicago have traditionally done during those months, I think you’ll find it’s pretty impressive. Our guys, for whatever reason, got into a little bit of a funk after the All-Star break. We come back after the break, and we beat Orlando and Miami, two Eastern Conference rivals, and then we play Dallas at home, where they’re having all sorts of problems, and we lose that game. That’s how it went for a month or so. Win. Loss. Win. Loss. It drove me crazy. I told our guys, “If you want to make a statement in these playoffs, this is the time you have to be getting your game together. This is no time to go into cruise control.” But my guys are veterans, and they know. Mark and Reggie helped out there. They got the guys in the right frame of mind. We won eight of our final ten games in April, and finished the regular season with 58 wins. It was the most wins the franchise had since they came over to the NBA. But as good as we were, we didn’t break the all-time Pacers record. In 1970, when Indiana won the ABA championship, they had 59 wins under Coach Slick Leonard.
Fifty-eight wins was nice, but what really made me feel hopeful was that these guys had proven they could play with the best in the league. They had proven they could beat Chicago, in Chicago. They had beaten Utah at home, and nearly beat them on the road. They had beaten Phoenix, in Phoenix. They took three out of four from Miami.
There was only one test left, and that was to see if they could win it all. When you really got down to it, our team all agreed on one thing: the one guy standing in our way was Michael Jordan.
CHAPTER 13
On Jordan, Magic, and Myself
One of the most frustrating games of my short coaching career was when we played Chicago at the United Center in February of my first season. Every guy on my team was turning down shots. They were completely out of sync. It was a difficult game for me to watch, because my guys kept hesitating. I didn’t know why they did that. I had never seen them do that before. Then I realized—it was Michael Jordan. My team was convinced they couldn’t beat the Bulls as long as Jordan was there. I spent the rest of the season convincing them it wasn’t true.
After we got beat in that February game, and looked so intimidated in the process, I called my team together and said, “Have you ever seen anyone knock Michael Jordan on his butt? Have you ever seen anyone challenge him, eyeball to eyeball? People might talk a little trash to him, but the truth is, everybody is scared of him. Including you guys.” They knew I was right. The guy had become untouchable. If you took Michael Jordan somewhere else in the world, and took the name off the back of his jersey, and put him out there where nobody knew who he was, guys would be beating on him and banging him. But here, it’s, “Hey, isn’t he amazing?” Even the refs are afraid of him.
I told my guys, “The next time we play Chicago, I want you to knock Michael Jordan flat on his butt if you get the chance. That’s part of the game, understand?” But they wouldn’t do it. He had them too psyched out. Michael Jordan played the mind game better than almost anyone. He really knew how to get inside people’s heads. Plus, I believe he had the second best player in the league playing right next to him in Scottie Pippen. You take Michael off that team, and Scottie moves down to fifth. But when Michael was out there with him, they were the two best in the league.
Michael did some of the things I used to do, like walk up to a guy on the other team and tell him, in a low voice, exactly how he was going to beat him. So now the defense knows what he’s going to run, but Michael gets the ball, does exactly what he told the guy, and beats him anyway. Believe me, having done it to people myself, it’s absolutely devastating.
Everyone was so worried about what would happen to the league when Magic and I retired, but I told them they shouldn’t give it any more thought. Michael Jordan was going to be The Man. No question about it. I said, “Guys, here is your next superstar. He’ll make you forget all about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.” I believed that, because I knew Michael was that good, and he had the right kind of personality to go along with it. In 1987, Jordan’s third season in the league, Chicago played our Celtics team in the playoffs, and Jordan scored 63 points against us. Afterward, everyone was just in awe. I told people, “That was God, disguised as Michael Jordan.”
It was a truly unbelievable performance. It was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever been around. We could not stop him. But to be honest, we didn’t spend much time talking about him in the huddle. All we were concerned with was winning the game. At the time, we were up 2–0 against Chicago in a first-round, best-of-five series, and we wanted to sweep them. Game 3 was in Chicago Stadium, and we wanted to get out of it as quickly as possible. People forget that Michael had 48 or 49 points in Game 1. That was a close one, wire to wire. We beat them 108–104, but we weren’t feeling great about it. There was a sense of, “We better get this series over with, because this guy is dangerous.” We were right about that. In that 63-point game, he just kept hitting everything. Everything. But in the end we
got the win. I walked out of there thinking what I always did when I saw a great individual performance like that: one guy can’t beat a whole team.
From the first time I saw Michael, I knew he was very talented, but I never would have guessed he would turn into probably the best player in history. My first impression of him? Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. I didn’t see him play much in college, but I remember back in 1984 when Michael was playing on the United States Olympic team, they had a bunch of us pros come up to Indianapolis and play against them. We showed up there all out of shape, fooling around, and we played some games against them in the Hoosier Dome. You could tell Jordan could jump, he could pass, you could see he could do a little bit of everything, but he wasn’t the kind of guy that you’d just sit down and watch the whole time. There were some other pretty good players on that team, like Patrick Ewing and Chris Mullin. It wasn’t like you watched only Jordan and walked away from there thinking, “I just saw the future of the league.”
When he got into the NBA and I played against him a few times, I remember thinking to myself, “Whoa, this kid has got a lot of talent. I can’t believe how high he can jump, and how out of control he is. He’s going to score a lot of points forever.” But I saw a change in Michael after a while. He wasn’t on fast-forward all the time. He was more patient on the floor. Then I started thinking, “Boy if they put some players around this guy, I wonder if he’ll calm down a little bit and use his passing skills.” Because I always felt he didn’t understand the game. Well, now I realize he always understood the game, he just didn’t have the players. Simple as that. It’s amazing to me that he could score as many points as he did and still play within the team frame.
The one reason I do feel badly for Michael is that he didn’t have one team, or one player, to shoot for year after year, like Magic and I did. If I didn’t play at the same time as Magic Johnson, I might have won a couple more championships, but I don’t know if they would have been nearly as worthwhile. I loved the fact that we both spent our careers fighting each other every day for those rings. I wouldn’t have traded that rivalry for anything.
But you can’t say Michael didn’t have anybody. There are a lot of great players out there—Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, David Robinson—it’s just that he’s so much better than everybody else. Is he better than Magic Johnson was at the peak of his career? No. He’s the best for an overall period of time, maybe, but when you put me, Magic, and Michael at the height of our careers, I don’t think you’d find that big of a difference. Yes, Michael is more spectacular, and Magic could pass a little better than both of us, and you could say this and that about my shooting or my rebounding, but we all had our different parts of our games that made us special.
What separates Michael right now is he did it over a long period of time. You look at the championships he won over the last four or five years, and it’s just amazing. People are always so surprised that injuries didn’t come into play more, because he played so hard. Of course, the thing is he did have injuries, but he’s one of those players who played right through all that. People don’t give him enough credit for that. They say, “Oh, Michael was never injured.” But he was injured. He had back spasms like everyone else. He had sprains and muscle tears and all that stuff, but he went in, he got his rest, he got his treatment, and then he went out and played. That’s the difference between Michael Jordan and a lower-level player. The best players just lace ’em up and go.
It’s funny how you get tied to certain people, because you played at the same time. Somebody takes a picture of a couple of movie stars, and everyone thinks they’re linked together for life. That’s just the way it is. Everyone wants to believe Larry Bird and Kevin McHale were the best of friends. Sure, Kevin and I had some good times together, but the truth is, Artis Gilmore and Quinn Buckner were probably the two best friends I had on the Celtics. But that doesn’t fit what the public wants to believe. Along those same lines, everyone wants to think that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird hang out together all the time. And after Space Jam came out, people want to think that Michael Jordan and I play golf together every weekend.
I loved to compete against Magic and Michael as much as anything I’ve done in my life. But I wasn’t hanging around with those guys. I didn’t want to. We were trying to win the championship, and I’m not into socializing with the guys who have what you want. It’s funny how everyone decided me and Magic were best friends after we did that Converse commercial back in the eighties. The commercial was shot in Indiana, at my house and on my court. The way it went was they had Magic pull up to the court in a limo and get out with his basketball stuff on, in Lakers colors of course. I’m standing there, and he challenges me to some one-on-one. It was a really popular commercial, and one thing about that shoot that turned out to be true was how Magic and I got a chance to know each other a little bit off the court.
Before that, whenever we played the Lakers I’d say hi and stuff to Magic after the game, but I don’t think Magic really knew where I was from, or what I was all about. And I’ve got to say the same was true for me. So anyhow, Converse arranges for us to do this commercial. My mom was there, and Magic charmed her right off the bat. He was there ten minutes, and she was offering him a drink and asking him if he needed anything. She loved him right away. I knew we were going to be spending a fair amount of time together, so I let my guard down a little bit. We had a great day. We went out riding on my four-wheelers. We drove around in my truck. For the first time, I saw him in a different way—a young guy from the Midwest who loves his family. When you took away all the glitz and glamour, that’s what was there. One thing people don’t realize is that when I talk about Magic, I’m talking about the basketball player. When I’m talking about the person, he’s Earvin. When we were in San Diego for our Olympic training, we sat around and played cards. That’s Earvin. But once we got into practice, or arrived in Barcelona and there was a crowd around, that’s Magic. They are two completely different people.
Magic and I are like Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. That’s just the way it is. I knew it was going to be like that forever after I played him in college for the national championship. I never came up against anyone, other than Magic, who could challenge me mentally. Magic always took me to the limit. Michael Cooper, who also played for the Lakers, challenged me on defense, but as far as the mental game went, he wasn’t on the same plane as Magic. Magic Johnson was the only player that could really get to me. He knew it too.
Magic Johnson was the best passer I’ve ever seen. You could never guess where he was going with the ball. You’d just have to try and react with him. It took me a while to realize that. He had a three-on-one break against me two times in one game, and I got a hand on both of them, just from sitting back and letting him make the move. A lot of guys have the tendency to come down right-handed, and pass it that way. What Magic did was come down and keep the ball on the left, then just before you could react to it he’d throw it across his body, off the dribble. That’s the hardest pass to defend against.
Magic was bad for basketball in one way. He made all these great passes, and then everyone else started trying to do it. You have to be special to thread the needle the way he did, or fire off those no-look passes. Magic knew how to do it. Most players don’t. I tell my guys, “Just make the play.” If you’ve got a look at a 15-foot jumper, and somebody is underneath the basket for a two-footer, just make the play. That’s all I ask. The best passers, like John Stockton, make the pass that gives you the highest percentage shot.
While it’s true that Magic and I developed a kind of friendship the day he came to French Lick, and it’s true we both always had respect for each other, it’s not like we all of a sudden started going on vacation together. It’s funny, actually. I’ll turn on the television and hear Magic say, “Larry and I were out to dinner the other night, and we were talking about this or that.” But the truth is, I can’t ever remember being able to go out to eat with Magic, other th
an when he came to my house that time to shoot the commercial, and during the Olympics. I’ll tell you what has happened a lot. Magic will come up, and there will be a lot of people around, and he’ll go, “Larry, we’ve got to have lunch next time you come to L.A.” I always say, “Yeah, sure, Magic, that would be nice.” But I know it’s not going to happen. We both have pretty busy schedules, so it’s hard to get together. However, we were able to do a television interview together on the twentieth anniversary of our Indiana State–Michigan State matchup, and it was great to see him. The truth is, I’ve never been into spending very much time out in public on the road anyway. Some guys like that sort of thing, and Magic is one of them. He handles a crowd better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Kids will be clambering toward him, and their parents grabbing for him, and he just smiles that big smile and touches as many of them as he can, then keeps on going. Even though all those people never got an autograph, they think Magic Johnson is the greatest, because he touched them or smiled at them. He just charms people to death. That’s not something I was ever very good at.
Even though Michael and I have been connected through the years, it’s not like I see him every week either. We do commercials together, and once in a while we might do some appearances. The last time I was really with Michael, we played in a golf tournament together. He wanted to come to Naples the next day and play there. So we did it. But he’s another guy who has all these people around. Don’t get me wrong, the way Michael does things is fine, that’s his thing, but it’s just not my style. I have the same friends I had years and years ago. I would never push them aside to bring someone else in. Michael has some buddies that have been with him a long time too. But he also has a bunch of bodyguards and people like that, and it seems as though he can’t go anywhere without a crowd around him. That’s the price you pay for stardom.