The fire and the quiet

Sporting News, The, Nov 3, 1997 by Bill Minutaglio, Dave D'Alessandro

The thing is the silence.

It's that drop-to-your knees hush as you push down the narrow, hidden lane out where the buildings get scarce and slowly surrender, one by one, to a croak of somber trees.

It's that noiseless vacuum when you pull into the wedge of a parking lot in front of the last building left on the street--a hangar, a big shed really, that looks as though it should be a Midwestern gasket factory thunderclapping like a thousand dead men's bones. But there are no nagging snaps from a clock being punched. No toothy, gnashing gears. No skeleton's tap-dance sound coming from a rhythmic conveyer belt.

There's just ... the perfect, distraction-free, waiting station where the train sometimes takes the chosen ones from instinct to the unconscious.

All the way to The Zone.

In the shed, in the middle, half-swallowed by weak light, a 40-year-old man is standing by himself. Larry Bird is 30 feet from a hoop. He cradles a mottled basketball. He stares hard for three, four, maybe five seconds. He rocks, in a heartbeat, from side to side. He turns a scowling face completely away from the basket--The risk? Of what?--and, almost as an afterthought, explodes and shoots.

Bird, a slice of a smile on his face, back to the basket, is already strolling. Now, there are slightly sudsy-sounding footprints pressing into the hardwoods. His eyes are focused somewhere other than on the crescent trail.

Behind him, the bruised-fruit of a ball stabs through the net. It cracks onto the floor. Bird is rubbing his hands. He folds himself into the bleachers. Back into the waiting station.

Michael Jordan ... Magic Johnson.

"The thing is we would just get in The Zone more often than anybody else," offers Bird, his narrow, watery eyes fixed on the almost-empty Indiana Pacers practice facility. "There are some great basketball players, but they just couldn't perform in the right situations like we could. I don't think there is any question that when we were playing our best basketball, we were on a level that nobody else in the league could get to."

His cockiness orbits into the rafters. Bird was up early this August morning, running his stiff-backed three miles. He pinches a loose fold of his yellow golf shirt and puss on his unmarked baseball cap. It is exactly two months before he starts his first season as a $4.5 million-a-year coach/part owner.

"I always felt that I could play with anybody. I never felt that anybody was better than me. I was prepared. When I got on the basketball court, I always thought I could beat them ... beat anybody," he adds.

Beat anybody.

Beat the people who invariably will say he is just an arrogant man passing through the coaching ranks. The ones insisting Larry Bird wants to put two easy years into the side-lines and then run the whole show himself, to lord over an NBA franchise from his front office.

The ones who no doubt will say Larry Bird, the coach, will never find the quiet ... The Zone ... that came so easily to Larry Bird, the player.

The ones who say Larry Bird will never beat anyone.

"I've been in The Zone," Bird says. "No one can stop you. I could beat a team by myself."

This time, he'll have to do it without the quiet ... without the ball.

It is the Final Four weekend and Donnie Walsh, turning 56, is planning to phase himself out.

He built the piers and beams under the Indiana Pacers, cobbling the smaller market through 11 years of plodding, steady success against the big-city, big-name outfits.

Now, the team president is drawing the blueprint for his removal.

For months, Larry Brown, the Pacers' wanderlust coach, has been quietly tipping off other people that he isn't coming back. Walsh hears the rumors third-hand. And then Walsh, always tapped into the inner NBA circles, a phone glued to his ear starting early every morning, begins reading that The Godfather, Red Auerbach, is pushing harder than ever for Larry Bird to come back to work for the Celtics.

Walsh begins worrying that Bird is thinking about working somewhere else, anywhere other than the state where Bird grew up, where he played high school and college ball, where children are still named after him. Donnie Walsh, it probably will say in the news, lost Larry Bird.

There is one card to play. Walsh calls Bird's home in Naples, Fla., and arranges a meeting, during the Final Four weekend, in the office of Pacers owner Herb Simon.

Walsh doesn't know what to expect: Maybe a cardboard incantation about hard work, plenty of stories about the championship years with the Celtics; a tick-tock countdown of all the good coaches he played for. Bird had turned the Pacers down four years ago; why wouldn't he do it again?

Walsh braces himself. "There's a lot of ways to do it, but you've got to pick your own way," Bird begins.

Walsh listens hard. Bird says he wants to compete and that coaching is the only thing left. Bird says he'll hand the ball to his point guard and let the players play. Bird says he will consider coaching only an older team. A team like the Indiana Pacers.