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Bird Article on ESPN
Ouch is all I have to say.
Chris
Bird couldn't stay ... now Celtics will pay
By Jeffrey Denberg
Special to ESPN SportsZone
ALSO SEE
Bird's leadership has
Pacers flying high
NBA Chat
He won't talk about it from the heart, keeps that
veneer up, but Sunday has weighed on Larry Bird's
mind for a long, long time.
Sunday, he goes back in time. Back to Boston, back
to the franchise he thought he would never leave,
ought not to have been forced to leave.
Sunday, Bird comes back, not to hallowed ground, the
site of the Boston Garden, the place where he
became Larry Legend. That's fitting, too. They now
play the games an alley away at FleetCenter,
which is named for a financial institution but
suggests the enema Rick Pitino gave Bird's old team
when he flushed out the old last summer.
Larry Bird
was the heart and soul of a grand old
team, the
architect of champions, inch for inch and
jump shot for
jump shot as good as any man who
ever played
the game who was not named Michael
Jordan.
But the
Celtics -- really the new faces who run the
Celtics and
only respect the old days and the old
ways as
marketing tools because they don't know
any better --
these Celtics discarded Larry Bird.
They
dishonored the guy who ruined his back for
the good of
the franchise by giving him a title and a
salary, then
telling him to go play golf because they
were going to
have that fraud, M.L. Carr, run the
team and
later coach it.
That's why
Larry Bird went home to Indiana and
that's why
the Pacers come to Boston on Sunday
with a team
that is rejuvenated and winning big
time.
Does the game
matter? NBC jumped on it a long
time ago. You
can bet it matters.
The Celtics
know that. They've designated Sunday
as Robert
Parish Day. They're going to have a
ceremony and
retire the old warrior's double-zero,
put it on
that banner bearing all the other numbers
they can no
longer use, including Bird's 33.
They need that distraction, something to stoke the
crowd, deflect the anger of the old-guard Celtics
fans who stopped coming when the franchise turned
terrible and moved to a yuppie arena they painted
to suggest the old one, like they put green and
white uniforms on stiffs so you'd think they were really
Celtics.
Now, here comes Larry Bird and inside his motor is
racing, but he won't tell you all of it, carefully
sidesteps the controversy, refused earlier in the
week to talk with NBC on camera.
What Bird will say is this: "I spent 18 years of my
life there. I grew up in Boston. I went there as a
teenager and left a man. I had a lot of fun. I still
remember leaving Terre Haute (Ind.) and driving
there for the first time. I didn't know what the
hell I was getting myself into. It was a great experience.
"The best times of my life were spent in Boston. We
always played at a high level and competed every night.
I just love the city. I love the toughness of the
fans when
they got riled up. I played very hard for the people
there
and when they had Larry Bird Night, they showed their
respect for me. They came out to see me off and say
goodbye -- that's what it is all about for me. I
will never
forget that."
The rest of it? "It matters to him. Believe me, it
matters
to him," a Pacers insider said this week.
"When we played Phoenix (Dec. 7 and Jan. 6) it
mattered to him because he was competing against
Danny," the insider said, referring to Bird's former
Boston teammate, Danny Ainge, now coach of the
Suns. "It was fun, too, because each team won a game
it didn't deserve to win by a point.
"Going against Danny, Larry was really into it. You
can imagine how it's going to be the first time he
brings a team into Boston, the media buildup,
national TV. Larry will stand there cool and he won't
yell, but he'll be churning inside."
It's how he played, an air of detachment betrayed by
the little needles he whispered so only the guys
he taunted knew.
It's how he worked, a perfectionist on his way to
the Hall of Fame, walking out every night to the
dimly lit court hours before the game to work on his
shots when only the ushers were in the building.
Always, he would stay a few minutes past the
designated time when the visiting team would arrive, a
calculated gesture so the traveling party would see
him, know he'd been out there while they were still
in the hotel elevator, know that Larry Bird was
stoking his marvelous game, know they were beaten
before they stepped foot in the locker room.
But over time, the men who made the Celtics great
grew old and moved on. Red Auerbach went into
semi-retirement. Don Gaston handed the team down to
his son Paul, who was clueless about the game
and became known as the Fortunate Sun.
And they sent Larry Bird to Florida to play golf
because he had no responsibilities and a clown named
M.L. Carr didn't want Bird to interfere while he
sacrilegiously took the franchise down to level of the
Sacramento Kings and the Milwaukee Bucks.
Now, it's payback time.
H-e-r-e's Larry.