There’s one thing I was good at right away. I can usually sense when guys are tired or frustrated, or if something is bugging them. Dick and Rick like to push the guys, but some days I have to tell them, “Listen, back off this kid today, his body won’t let him get it done today.” Don’t get me wrong: I get disappointed when I don’t get the effort, but I’m not going to go in there and curse somebody out. It’s not in my makeup. I wouldn’t want somebody doing that to me. But I do spell it out for them. I say, “Reggie, I’m asking you to play thirty-five minutes. Mark, you’re going to play around twenty, twenty-five minutes,” and right on down the line. I say, “I’m not asking you to go out and play hard for eight hours. If you can’t go for some reason, then don’t insult me. Come in and tell me you can’t play. Tell me before the game. Don’t wait until fifteen or twenty minutes after you’re in there. Don’t make me pull you off the floor when you know already you don’t have it that night. Be honest.”
That happened a couple of times in my first season. I’d pull the guy into my office after the game and say, “Hey, you let your teammates down. Why?” Most of the time, it turns out they are having some kind of personal problem. Maybe their wife gave them hell, or the baby-sitter didn’t show up, or something. You never know with these guys. But I want to know about that stuff beforehand, not when we get down by 15 points. I think these guys know by now that it’s not something I’m going to hold against them.
There’s something else you’ve got to remember in dealing with these guys. Each of them has physical limitations. You take a guy like Mark Jackson. He’s a real warrior, and he’ll give you everything he’s got, so when Dick Harter gets frustrated with him because Allen Iverson is beating him off the dribble, you’ve got to step back and say, “Of course Iverson is doing that. He’s a lot quicker than Mark.” So then you have to realize that it’s not lack of effort, it’s simply lack of speed, and then you think of a way to help Mark adjust. This is something I did my entire career. I was hardly ever quicker than anyone I guarded, so I had to compensate in other ways and make up for it with smart team defense.
One thing I never had a problem with as a player was preparation. I was a self-motivated person, and I didn’t need anyone kicking me in the rear to get me jump-started. The difference is, now that I’m a coach, I have to get twelve guys on the same page. That’s completely different. When you call out a play, everyone has to be in a certain area at a certain time or it doesn’t work. It’s the coach’s job to make sure everybody understands exactly what is expected of them, and to make sure they are ready to play.
So now, all of a sudden, instead of walking onto that floor making sure I’m in the right frame of mind, I’ve got to check with this guy or that guy, who might have had a so-so practice the day before, to make sure he’s with us. You can’t believe all the things that are going through my head, trying to get these guys prepared. They worry you sick.
There’s another difference I’ve noticed since I got into coaching: I’ve started dreaming about winning championships. When I was a player I never had any dreams. But now that I’m coaching, I have this dream we’re in the NBA Finals, and we’re playing Seattle, for some reason. We usually win, and then I wake up and realize that hasn’t happened yet.
Bill Fitch used to tell us, “You guys should all have to coach for a day. Then you’d understand what we go through.” He’s right. The one thing about being a player is if you win a game by one point, you walk out of there as happy as can be. But if you win a game by one point and you are the coach, you walk out of there and just remember all the mistakes you made.
I can’t believe it, but that’s what happened to me. That’s why I’m on borrowed time in this coaching business. When I was playing, I always wanted to take the last shot, instead of putting the ball in someone else’s hands and letting them decide my fate.
I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it.
On Endorsements and Lifestyle
H
ere’s something else I’ll never get used to: the demand for celebrity athletes to endorse products.
When I first started doing commercials, even coming from a small town, I didn’t want to do anything for a shaky company. It had to be a big-time company, like McDonald’s or 7UP. I never did an ad for something I didn’t respect.
Some of the commercials look like a blast when they’re done, but what you see in thirty seconds can take a whole day. It’s unbelievable what can foul up what you thought was a perfect take. Maybe it’s because this guy doesn’t like the lighting, or that guy didn’t like the way one of the actors said their lines. That’s my only complaint about commercials. They just take up too much time. Everything is union, so everybody has got to do their own little thing. During a taping someone might call out that they need a ladder, but if you ever touched the thing some guy would start shouting, because that’s his job—to move ladders. That kind of stuff drove me crazy. Also, they make you wear makeup. I really hate that.
My first big commercial was for 7UP in 1979, the year I was a rookie with the Celtics. I guess I was a little nervous at the start, but it took so long to film the thing that by the time it was over I was just tired. I always liked 7UP just fine, but when my agent, Jill Leone, picked me up after filming that ad, I ordered a glass of milk at dinner. I drank close to two cases of 7UP during that taping, and I couldn’t even look at another 7UP for a long time after that.
The other thing you have to get used to with all these commercials is the special effects they use. I did a commercial for Canon cameras in 1980, and they shot it in Boston. They wanted to create the feeling of a musty old gym, so they filled the room with all this smoke. Rick Carlisle, who was my teammate at the time, was in that commercial with me, which turned out to be a mistake, because the people at Canon wanted a shot of me dunking the basketball, and they made me stand on a crate to do it. As you can imagine, Rick had something to say about that. Back then I was dunking on guys all the time. Sometimes I see old footage and I can’t believe I could do all those things, because after my heel surgery and two back surgeries I never moved the same again. Anyhow, I told the people at Canon I didn’t need any crate, but after doing it about fifty times I understood why we had it there. If I had to dunk that many times for real, I would have been exhausted!
The first commercial I ever did for McDonald’s took fourteen hours. I couldn’t believe it. I remember thinking to myself, “You won’t catch me wasting time like this anymore.” My job was to say a few lines and bite into a cheeseburger. The producer didn’t seem to have too much of a problem with me and how I was eating my burger, but on almost every take he found something wrong with one of the other actors. I must have bit into about two hundred burgers before we got it right. They had to keep running back and heating up fresh trays of burgers every time somebody messed up. It would have been funny if I wasn’t so irritated at blowing an entire day. Jill went to the shoot with me, and that’s the day I turned to her and said, “Four hours. That’s it. From now on, if they take any longer than that, we’re not doing it.”
So after that, whenever a company called about endorsing a product, Jill would explain to them my four-hour rule. In the beginning, Jill said most of them were horrified at even considering such a time limit, but somehow she was able to convince them I would arrive on time (early, actually), ready to work. She would always send me the script and the storyboard ahead of time, so I always knew what was going to be expected of me. What it did was cut out a lot of the schmoozing and eating and chit-chat that can go on during the filming, which I never liked anyway. My way of doing business is go in, be organized, move quickly, and get it done. After a while these companies realized it was going to save them a lot of money to do it this way. What it meant for the agency handling the commercial was that they had to settle on a final script for the shoot, rather than shooting it one way, then deciding whether they liked it or not and trying it a different way.
Some commercials just seem to drag on forever. But some of them are a piece of cake. Remember that Gatorade ad that ran during the 1997–98 season with everyone singing how they wanted to be like Mike? There was no way I was going to sing anything, especially about wanting to be like Michael Jordan, not when I was hoping my team would be going up against him in the playoffs. Gatorade really wanted me in the ad, because of my connection with Michael, so we reached a compromise. I’d do the commercial, but I wouldn’t sing. I ended up having to say one line: “I’m not gonna sing.” It took all of a half hour to shoot it. I had on a suit and tie and I was sitting in a Learjet, and we shot it at an airport hangar in Indianapolis. Easiest one ever.
There were some offers we got that I just wasn’t going to do, no matter how little time it took. One of them, back in the eighties, was for a financial services company. In the first place, I had my doubts, because I didn’t like the idea of advising people on how to invest their money. They were going to pay me around $250,000, but they wanted me to dress up like a ballerina. I told Jill to forget it. All the money in the world wouldn’t convince me to dress up in a tutu! I noticed they ended up getting a pro football player to do it. Good for him.
There is one guy who is great to be around when you’re making commercials. His name is Joe Pytka, and he’s one of the top television commercial, video, and feature film directors in the world. He organizes all the shoots, and he treats everyone like crap, and both me and Michael Jordan love him.
Pytka is a big guy, and he loves to play basketball. He could care less that we’re Michael Jordan and Larry Bird, we’re just two guys who will shoot baskets with him on the breaks. He’ll grab two or three guys on their down time so he can get a game together.
One day when Michael and I were doing a McDonald’s commercial together, we were standing there all ready to go, but we couldn’t get started because Pytka hadn’t finished his basketball game yet. People were all ticked off because this director was keeping Michael Jordan and Larry Bird waiting, but it’s why I absolutely loved the guy. To him we were all the same.
Joe is also very, very creative. He was the director for that Nothin’ But Net McDonald’s commercial that Michael and I did where the ball went off the rim, off the backboard, off the roof … I guess the McDonald’s people had a lot riding on the ad, because it was going to run during the Super Bowl, which is when television time costs you the most money. At that time, 1993, I had never done an ad with Michael Jordan before. We shot the commercial in a gym in Chicago, and I got there early like I always do. Michael was nowhere to be found. So here’s this director, Joe Pytka, who I’ve just met, and we’re waiting around for Michael, and Joe starts shooting baskets. He grabs a couple of other guys, and they all start playing. I’m not sure, but I think he was doing it to loosen me up. It worked, because let me tell you, Joe Pytka is a good director, but he’s a lousy basketball player! Before I knew it, I was talking trash to this guy, telling him, “You’ve got the worst game I’ve ever seen.” Michael was about two hours late that day, which normally would have really ticked me off, but I was having fun with Pytka.
One thing about Joe Pytka, though. If you didn’t take the work seriously, he got really steamed. The year after the first commercial Michael and I did, which was a real big hit, they wanted to do a sequel. This time they added Charles Barkley to the script, and made it like we were in outer space. We were all dressed up in space suits, and somebody was laughing on the set, or goofing off, so Pytka says to all of us, “If you guys think this is such a big joke, I’m leaving.” And he walked out. Everyone got really quiet. Nobody seemed sure what to do, so I had to follow Pytka out into the hallway in that stupid space suit and tell him, “Joe, I’ve only got two hours left, and then I gotta leave. So get back in here and finish this commercial.” What I remember about that filming session is that Charles was having trouble saying his lines. He was supposed to open this door, which was one of those facades you see on movie sets, and I was going to be standing there. It took Charles about eight or ten takes before he finally said the right thing. We were all thinking, “Phew, we can finally get out of here,” when one of the assistant directors came over and said, “Cut. We gotta do it again. Charles isn’t holding the Big Mac bag right.” I’m thinking to myself, “You’ve got to be kidding.” I looked over at Pytka and we both rolled our eyes.
Joe was one of the directors for the movie
Space Jam.
I think every little kid in America saw it. I think kids know me more from
Space Jam
than anything else. I had no idea how popular it would be.
I got a call from Jill one day telling me that Warner Bros. wanted me to be in this movie with Michael. I didn’t want to have to go all the way out to Los Angeles, and I told Jill I wouldn’t do it, but then she called back and said Michael would really appreciate it if I’d change my mind.
In the end it was really worth it. We had a lot of fun. Most of my scenes were on the golf course with Michael and Bill Murray, who kept every day interesting. They flew me into the Los Angeles airport and then they took me by helicopter to some place in the middle of nowhere. I still can’t tell you where it was, except it was beautiful, and it had a great golf course.
The movie people really took care of us. They had this big room in the hotel filled with food, drinks, anything you wanted. One cooler had beer, another had soda, another had sandwiches. And then there was this big cooler marked MICHAEL ONLY. You weren’t supposed to touch that one, because it was all Michael Jordan’s special stuff they flew in just for him. So one day Bill Murray and I are sitting in there, and I go over to Michael’s cooler and lift up the lid. There was this girl there, and her only job was to make sure everything was just right for Michael Jordan, and she starts yelling at me, “Larry, you can’t go in there!” I said, “What are you talking about? That’s bull. Everyone here is family.” She was getting all red and nervous and said, “No, no. Those are all the things Michael told me he wanted, and if you take something out of there, Michael won’t be able to have it, and we just can’t let that happen!”