When the Game Was Ours (26 page)

The incident left a permanent stain on Isiah's résumé. He was portrayed as the ultimate sore loser, unable to recover from the disappointment of Game 5 of the Conference Finals, when Bird picked off his floating inbounds pass in the final seconds of the game and relayed it to Celtics guard Dennis Johnson for the winning basket.

Yet none of it, not even Thomas's pointed criticism of her son, dissuaded Georgia Bird from abandoning her favorite point guard.

"Isiah was her number-one guy of all time," Bird said. "She followed him religiously when he was at IU. She felt that way even after '87. She told me, 'Oh, Larry. You two are out there working hard and things are going to be said.'

"You know who else she loved? Bill Laimbeer. He was at Notre Dame—another Indiana school. And she
knows
how much I hated that guy."

During the 1986 season, when the list of All-Stars had just been announced, Bird asked a group of Boston reporters if Laimbeer, who had been an All-Star the previous three years with the Pistons, had been selected again. Informed that Laimbeer had been left off the squad, Bird deadpanned, "Good. Now I won't have to worry about him getting on the bus and saying, 'Hi, Larry,' and me having to say, 'Fuck you, Bill.'"

Although Earvin Johnson had not played for one of the Hoosier state's finer institutions of learning, he was still a midwestern boy who played his college ball in close enough proximity for Georgia Bird to joyfully follow his career.

Georgia embraced Magic warmly, then fussed over her son's rival as if he were one of her own, offering him lemonade, iced tea, and a home-cooked meal that she had been planning for a week. By the time Bird arrived at the house and stiffly shook Magic's hand, Georgia Bird was already piling piece after piece of her signature fried chicken on his plate, adding gravy and mashed potatoes and green beans and corn.

She introduced Earvin to her own mother, Lizzie Kerns, who had baked one of her specialties, cherry pie, just for the occasion. Then she ushered Johnson over to say hello to Mark Bird, Larry's older brother, spouting statistics and highlights of Johnson's numerous basketball accomplishments in college and the pros. As his mother continued to fawn over Magic, Bird excused himself to take a shower.

"I think he was feeling a little uncomfortable," Mark Bird said. "Larry likes his privacy, and there were so many people around. It was a little awkward."

The camera crew had previously applied for permits to close Sawmill Road during taping, and the local newspaper had been contacted and asked to refrain from reporting the date the commercial would be shot in order to limit distractions. The crew had particular interest in shooting footage of a cornfield that was opposite Bird's property, so they contacted its caretaker, Ben Lindsey, for permission to film the area. Lindsey approached Bird and told him, "They want to drive my combine through the fields. Should I charge them for that?"

"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.