Larry Bird

[1]In the early 1970s, a skinny boy named Larry Bird desperately wanted to play basketball with the older kids near the Lost River in West Baden Springs, Indiana. Larry tagged along with his brothers down the hill to a small water plant. Someone had drilled a telephone pole into the ground and attached a wooden backboard to it. There was no pavement — the kids played on grass, beating it down with their sneakers. But in those pickup games, the older boys left Larry out because he was younger and smaller. Being shut out made Larry angry and hungry to compete. That fire would burn inside him for the rest of his life.

[2]The Bird family moved into French Lick, a small town with only about two thousand people. Larry's dad loved his kids, but the family struggled with money. They moved a lot, and Larry's mother had to take on two jobs to help pay the bills. Larry found fun outside the house, running with a small crew of friends. The boys searched for lost golf balls in the weeds to sell back to golfers for pocket change. And they would head to a little court to play basketball. In those days, no one thought Larry was going to be great — not even Larry.

[3]Larry made the eighth-grade basketball team, but he kept missing practice. His coach made the hard choice to cut him. The rules were the rules. For a kid who wanted so badly to compete, getting cut from a team stung. But Larry Bird was not the kind of person who stayed down for long.

[4]Larry Bird's path to college was anything but smooth. He had dropped out of school three times. But coaches from Indiana State University talked him into giving college one more try. This time, Bird did well. Fans loved watching him play. TV stations showed clips of Bird instead of commercials, and his team, the Sycamores, kept winning. In Bird's last year, 1978–79, Indiana State won every game in the regular season. They became the number-one team in the country. Then, in the NCAA championship game, a Michigan State team led by Magic Johnson beat them. Bird earned College Player of the Year honors, but that championship loss hurt.

[5]The Boston Celtics needed help. Their record had sunk to 29 wins and 53 losses, and fans were staying away from Boston Garden. When Bird arrived for the 1979–80 season, everything changed. The Celtics jumped to 61 wins and only 21 losses. Bird played in every game and led the team in scoring and rebounding, earning Rookie of the Year honors. Before Bird's second season, the Celtics made a trade that brought star players Robert Parish and Kevin McHale to Boston. Together with Robert Parish and Kevin McHale, he led the Celtics to three championships during the 1980s. Over the course of his career, Bird would end up being selected as an All-Star (a designation given to the best players in a year) twelve times.

[6]Then, towards the end of the 1980s, Larry Bird started to have intense pain in his back. By the early 1990s, the pain had grown so bad he could barely bend over to tie his shoes. The player who had once outworked everyone on the court could no longer keep up. On August 18, 1992, Bird announced his retirement.

[7]Bird drifted away from basketball for years after retirement. Then, in 1997, he accepted the head-coaching job with the Indiana Pacers. He had never coached a game in his life. He won Coach of the Year in his very first season. He led the Pacers to the NBA Finals in 2000. After stepping down as coach, Bird took a new job with the Pacers. He became the person who decided which players to trade for and how to build the team.

[8]By 2012, Bird had also won an award for best team builder in the NBA. That made him the only person in NBA history to win MVP, Coach of the Year, and the top award for running a team. The boy who had been cut from his eighth-grade squad and left out of pickup games had done it all: he had succeeded as a player, a coach, and a leader off the court.