This is some pale stuff out there on the wing. All the other basketball players, Celtics and Pacers alike, have cleared the side, and they have left two of their own all alone. This is the isolation play, an offensive maneuver as simple as milk, yet responsible in large part for the wild and unruly success that has overtaken professional



basketball in the past decade. It is out of this alignment that Michael Jordan is cleared for takeoff, and it was out of this alignment that Magic Johnson ground up the hapless on his way to the low post, and it is out of this alignment that Charles Barkley is freed to do both, often on the same play. It is a wonderful set piece—a scorer and a defender, alone with each other, the center of all focus. It is a prideful moment for both players—the Ur-matchup of the American game. One-on-one.

Anyway, this is some pale stuff out there. Larry Bird has the ball cocked high and waiting. He is guarded by an Indiana Pacer named Detlef Schrempf, a blond German with a brush cut who makes Larry Bird look like Sam Cooke. Bird has Schrempf on a string now, moving the ball just slightly, faking with his fingertips. Other Celtics heckle the Pacer forward from the bench. More tiny fakes, and Schrempf is hearing imaginary cutters thundering behind him toward the hoop. His eyes cheat a bit over his shoulders. Finally, with Schrempf utterly discombobulated, Bird dips the ball all the way around his opponent’s hip. Schrempf half-turns to help defensively on the man to whom he’s sure Bird has just passed the ball. Bird pulls the ball back, looking very much like a dip who’s just plucked a rube’s gold watch from his vest pocket. He throws up that smooth hay-baler of a jump shot from just above his right ear, and it whispers through the net. The play draws cheers and laughter, and even Bird is smiling a little as the two teams head down the court again.

A few days earlier, Connie Hawkins was nominated for the Basketball Hall of Fame, the final vindication of what poet Jim Carroll has written about basketball, “a game where you can correct all your mistakes instantly, and in midair.” Hawkins was a glider and a soarer. A legend in Brooklyn long before he was twenty, he fits snugly between Elgin Baylor and Julius Erving on the path of the game that continues upward to (for the moment) Michael Jordan.

Hawkins’s best years were wasted in exile on the game’s fringes; his innocent involvement in the point-shaving investigations of 1961 truncated his college career and put him on an NBA blacklist until 1969. He will go into the Hall of Fame only because some people saw him do something wondrous and they told the tale. It is a triumph for the game’s oral history, for its living tradition. There is a transcendence about Connie Hawkins and about his legend. It resides out of time and place, floating sweetly there in the air above all convention and cavil.

In large part, of course, this living tradition is an African-American tradition. In reaction to it, basketball’s overwhelmingly white establishment assailed the skills of legends like Connie Hawkins, deriding their game as “playground basketball,” the result of some atavistic superiority that must be controlled by (predominantly white) coaches for the greater good. Black players were innately talented, of course, but they were lacking in the Fundamentals, which virtually always were defined in a way that brought the game back to earth and removed it from the largely black custodians of its living tradition.

Withal, both sides were talking past each other. The game’s white establishment was talking about strategy and tactics. Black players were talking about the psychology of defining oneself as a person by what one did on the court. From this emphasis on psyche came the concept of Face—a philosophy of glorious retribution by which you dunk unto others as they have already dunked unto you, only higher and harder. It’s this competitive attitude that makes the Fundamentals interesting. And it’s this guilty knowledge that made basketball’s white establishment so determined to minimize its obvious importance. Soon, these views ossified into the attitudes by which black players are praised for their “athletic ability”—code for the Super Negro not far removed from William Shockley’s laboratory—while white players are usually commended for their “intelligence” and their “work ethic.” Both sides internalized these notions, and they were irreconcilable.

By the late 1970s, the NBA, having expanded far too quickly and recklessly for its own good, was floundering. Competition had vanished. So had most of the fans. There were some drug busts, common enough in all sports. At the same time, the league was perceived as becoming blacker; by 1979, 70 percent of the players were African American. People made the usual foul connections. There were the nods and the winks in the executive suites. Disillusioned fans drifted away, and pretty soon the NBA found its championship series being broadcast on tape delay.

In 1979, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson began their careers with the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, respectively. There was a frisson of expectation as soon as they went around the league. By season’s end, Bird had been named the NBA Rookie of the Year, and Johnson had propelled the Lakers to the title, scoring forty-two points against the Philadelphia 7Öers in the seventh game of the final series. Over the next decade, the two of them played so well and drew so many fans that they are now given undisputed credit for saving professional basketball. Neither one ever evinced eye-popping athletic skills; Bird may be the only great player in history more earthbound than Magic. Their importance lies in the fact that the two irreconcilable halves of the game found in them—and, especially, in Bird—a common ground.

The most fundamental of the traditional Fundamentals is that a great player must make his team greater. Thus does a whirling dunk count only the same two points as a simple layup. Both Bird and Magic pass this test easily. However, the game’s living tradition demands that this be accomplished in a way that ups the psychic ante, that forces the cycle of payback onto the opposition. Neither man has ever shrunk from this imperative. What Bird did to Schrempf, he did not do merely to score two points for the Celtics but to break his opponent’s will, just as once in a championship game, he looked down to see where the three-point line was, took a conspicuous step back behind it, and then sunk a coup de grace through the Houston Rockets.

In short, the NBA has succeeded because it has become the world’s premier athletic show. Playground ball has triumphed completely. It’s hard to imagine now that college basketball once thought it was a good idea to ban the dunk, or that former UCLA coach John Wooden still thinks it’s a good idea. Wooden, supreme guru of the Fundamentals, now sounds like a hopeless crank. What Bird and Magic did was difficult, and damned-near revolutionary—they made the Fundamentals part of the show. They did it by infusing the simple act of throwing a pass with the same splendid arrogance that so vividly illuminated Connie Hawkins midflight.

“What you’ve got to understand about Larry is that he plays a white game with a black head,” says Atlanta’s Dominique Wilkins. “If he could do a three-sixty dunk and laugh at you, he’d do it. Instead, he hits that three, and then he laughs at you.”

‘There’s no doubt about it,” adds Indiana’s Chuck Person, who has enjoyed a spirited rivalry with Bird. “Larry’s a street kid.”

It comes from his life—a lost, lonely kid whose father was an amiable drunk who one day called Larry’s mother on the phone and, with her listening, blew his brains out. There was grinding poverty. There was hopelessness. Compared to this life, Magic Johnson had it easy, as did Michael Jordan. Compared to this life, Spike Lee, who uses Bird as a cartoon foil, was one of the Cleavers. Instinctively, Larry Bird understands the country’s most pernicious division as one of class and not of race—a distinction that a decade of public demagoguery has done its damndest to obscure.

‘The poorer person,” he muses, “the person who don’t have much will spend more time playing sports to get rid of the energy he has.” And anger and desperation? “Yeah, them too. Why go home when you got nothing to go home to?”

All his life, he has resisted the notion of being anyone’s great white hope, because it never seemed logical to him. “I’ve always thought of basketball as a black man’s game,” Bird says. “I just tried to do everything I could to fit in.”

Long ago, Indiana was a demographic fluke. Unlike the other midwestern states, it was settled from south to north rather than from east to west. It was flooded with refugees from Tennessee and the Carolinas. They brought with them so much of the Old South that, by 1922, the Ku Klux Klan was virtually running the state. An Indiana town called Martinsville is famous for being the home of two institutions—John Wooden and the modem Klan. When Jerry Sichting, a former NBA player and now the Celtics’ radio commentator, left Martinsville to go to Purdue, his black team-

mates shied away from him. “I said I was from Martinsville, and I got that look,” Sichting says. “It’s still out there, no question.” Larry Bird is from French Lick, which is thirty miles down Highway 37 from Martinsville. Thirty miles south.

Bird seems to have grown up remarkably free of prejudice. Throughout his career, he has managed to stay admirably clear of those who would make him a symbol through which to act out their own fears and bigotry. He has called Magic Johnson his role model, and he referred to former teammate Dennis Johnson as “the greatest player I ever saw.” He even delighted in bringing NBA pal Quinn Buckner home to French Lick and into the worst redneck joints in town. “Yeah,” recalls Buckner. “He took me to some places that I might not have gotten out of in less than three pieces if I went in alone. But Larry truly doesn’t look at it that way. He doesn’t want any part of that great white hope stuff. He never did.”

“Just the other day,” Bird says, “a guy come up to me and says, ‘Here, sign this. Put on it that you’re the greatest white player to ever play the game.’ To me, that don’t mean nothing. The greatest player ever to play the game. That means a helluva lot more.”

Unfortunately, Bird has been a lightning rod. The Celtics, whose historical record on racial matters is positively revolutionary, have been forced to carry the weight of Boston’s abysmal history in the matter of race relations. They were criticized for lightening up their roster in the early Eighties, although it’s difficult to make the case that it’s immoral to draft Bird and Kevin McHale, or to concoct a roster that won the NBA title three times in the decade. However, on a larger scale, the Eighties was generally a decade of reaction in racial matters. Bird’s first season coincided with the ascendancy in culture and politics of the shibboleth of the Oppressed White Male. A society that could straight-facedly equate Allan Bakke with Rosa Parks evolved easily to one that could see no metaphorical distance between Clarence Thomas and the Scottsboro Boys.

Those comforted by the prevailing reactionary Zeitgeist were looking for a hero, and Larry Bird and the Celtics qualified. Those revolted by it were looking for a villain, and Bird and the Celtics qualified there too. Thus, when it became fashionable to make Larry Bird into the greatest player of all time—certainly an arguable proposition, particularly up until about 1986— few people were objective about it anymore.

In 1987, after losing to the Celtics in a conference playoff series, Isiah Thomas blurted out the problem. Defending statements made by rookie Dennis Rodman, he said, “If Bird were black, he’d be just another good guy.” The comment was graceless and ill-timed, but it was also the truth. Had Bird been black, his physical abilities would’ve been emphasized at the expense of his intelligence and his diligence at practice.

Thomas’s statement was excoriated for being racist, which it certainly was not. To identify a racial problem is not racist. One might as well call a black man racist who points out that white people are rather heavily involved in redlining his neighborhood.

By downplaying the comments and refusing to respond, Bird got Thomas out of the situation so deftly that Thomas later credited Bird with saving his public career. Bird would not have been able to do that had he not effectively defused the issue among his peers by connecting with the game’s psychology. While he passed and rebounded and got praised for his mastery of the Fundamentals, he exhibited such cutthroat competitive flair that the dunkers sensed a kindred spirit.

“I always said that Larry was one of the most creative players I ever saw,” says Celtic center Robert Parish. ‘That same kind of thing that makes people do a dunk makes Larry throw that touch pass over his shoulder.”

Neither was Bird blind to what was happening elsewhere. Just last fall, Celtic rookie Dee Brown was thrown to the ground by police in the chichi suburb of Wellesley because some clerk thought Brown “looked like” the man who had recently robbed the bank.

“It’s still a scar,” Bird says. “You hear that Boston is a tough town for blacks. I don’t know. I can’t speak for them because I’m not black. I’ve seen some incidents, though. Dee Brown. Robert Parish got stopped a couple of times. Just for being black, you know.”

Joe Bird’s son never talked about him. It was part of a past buried so deeply that when a writer from Sports Illustrated mentioned Joe’s suicide in an article, some of the boys from French Lick were said to have gone looking for him. But the son talked about Joe Bird this year. Talked freely, if not easily. Talked because a black man, a friend in L.A., was threatened by a fatal disease, and suddenly there was a connection between an amiable and self-destructive drunken white man in a hard little town in Indiana and an amiable and doomed black man in the fastest lane of all. The son of the first saw the connection there between his father and his friend, and he saw it clearly, far beyond the cold balm of convenient banality.

“I thought about when my Dad passed away,” said Larry Bird on the night after Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for HIV. “I thought about how I wandered around for a week, just numb. That’s what this is like.”

He said it in that light little twang, the one that the people in southern Indiana brought with them from Tennessee, the one that made even Elvis sound modest in conversation. In truth, Bird has grown up remarkably unmarked by the benefits of his celebrity. “Larry doesn’t care about being a famous white player,” says Dave Gavitt, the Celtics CEO, “because Larry doesn’t care about being famous, period.” Indeed, as far as commercial endorsements are concerned, he falls well behind both Johnson and Jordan. He has, however, consciously worked to change the racial debate in a way not easily done. He has proven himself in his way on someone else’s terms.

It would have been easy for him to grow up hard in the native bigotry of his place. Once grown, he could have easily sensed in his bones that that bigotry is general throughout the land and exploited it shamelessly. If there are people who would make him the best player ever simply because he is white, then that’s their problem. If the Celtics became white America’s team, then that’s white America’s fault. Larry Bird, as an individual basketball player, has defined his enormous abilities in an African-American context, and he has triumphed within it.

In his play—and, therefore, in his life, because the two are inextricably bound—he has declined to profit from the advantages that spring from the worst in our common culture. There are politicians, men infinitely more powerful than Larry Bird, who have proven unable to resist this same impulse. One of them plays horseshoes in the White House now.

They say that basketball’s greatness is in its ability to bring people together, but that’s a lie. Glib and facile people say that about every sport, and yet sports are as riven by class and race as any other major institution of this culture. Those people are closer to being right in basketball, though, than they are in any other sport. Basketball, much more than baseball or football, unites and makes whole two cultures, and it obliterates the artificial divisions created by faceless, fearful men who cling to their own pathetic advantages. Those who would turn Larry Bird into a symbol useful to that vicious endeavor—and those who would use him as a straw man against whom they could fight back—are all blind to his true genius. They are frightened of the best possibilities of America.

On this night, before he talked about his father and Magic, Larry Bird began the game by throwing a floor-length, behind-the-back pass that nobody could recall having seen Bird ever throw. But everyone on the floor knew it for what it was—an homage, extended in high style and in the game’s truest and most precious currency. Everyone who ever had dunked on a man, or had defied both aerodynamics and orthopedics to drop a shot full of life and music, identified it immediately. Dominique Wilkins, trailing the play, saw it for what it was—an entertainer’s play, but a bounce pass sure enough, with the arm extended right through to the fingertips, following through just the way that Clair Bee and Nat Holman and all those other guys wrote it down years ago, before the game moved into the air for good. The Fundamentals, but Showtime, too, beyond all measure.

“Larry,” said one of his coaches, “was just saying goodbye.”