The fire and the quiet

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

When it is over, after Bird leaves, Walsh says: "He's the only guy."

They cook a deal that will offer Bird part ownership of the team, the $4.5 million a year and the option of becoming team president whenever everyone agrees. Walsh gives Bird the option of calling back and taking a deal that will do away with Donnie Walsh.

"Larry wants to coach, but the plan was that he will move into upper management and I will phase myself out," Walsh says. It is early one morning in his office. To keep the Pacers alive, Walsh was offering to hire the man who will take over his job. "I wouldn't have done it for anybody else," he says.

Now, alone at his desk, Walsh is thinking about that Simon and Garfunkel lament for lost American heroes ... Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Walsh laughs a small laugh. Until he started spending more time with the man who might take his job, he never understood how popular Larry Legend is around the country. How people in Indiana, everywhere, still look for Bird. Not Donnie Walsh, who quietly fiddled for years with ways to build the Pacers, but Larry Bird.

Walsh, brightening, offers the speech: "You can't do better than to have Larry Bird back in Indiana. It's basketball. This is the guy to go forward with," he insists, saying the same thing he has been saying over and over again since the May announcement.

This is the guy to go forward with.

"He would rather coach right now than be the president of the team," Walsh quickly adds.

The Indiana papers had already printed stories about how hiring Bird could be good for business, how Bird's hiring could even boost the sales of Pacers merchandise around the country. How, really, Bird could do things for Indiana that Walsh simply never could.

In a blink, Bird could walk off a golf course and into ownership of Walsh's team.

"Where has Joe DiMaggio gone?" asks Walsh, surrounded by all the memories since he started in the Pacers'front office in 1986. He answers his own question.

"He's right here in Indiana."

"K.C. Jones is watching Larry Bird carefully bending over and pinching the little white ball onto a tee. It is around the same time that Donnie Walsh is plotting his bittersweet plot.

It is on the back nine in Florida, not far from Naples, because this is what Bird has been doing since his tortured back caused him to give up all those nights in The Zone.

K.C. Jones, elegant and almost regal, watches and waits until he can't wait anymore.

"Larry," asks Jones, who coached Bird and watched him go to The Zone, "what do you do?"

Bird fishes around for a club. "Oh, I go here and then I go over there and I do this and I do that," Bird says.

Right then, KC. Jones thinks: "What a waste." And, too, he remembers a few things ... the promises ... The Zone.

Against Rick Pitino's Knicks. Bird grabbing the diagram board. Bird drawing the right play and promising: I'll drive the guy ... see ... I'll drive him hard Against Seattle, three seconds left. The Celtics break from the bench. Before the official hands the ball to Dennis Johnson, Bird staring into the hooded eyes of the SuperSonics' Xavier McDaniel and explaining, promising, how the game will end: I'm getting the ball from D.J. Then I'm going to take two dribbles back. To my left. Then I shoot and stick it.