Larry Bird speaks on Boston's — and his — complex history with race

https://celticswire.usatoday.com/2019/10/13/__trashed-2/




Larry Bird speaks on Boston's — and his — complex history with race





Greg M. Cooper - USA TODAY Sports



By: Justin Quinn | October 13, 2019 1:21 pm




The city of Boston has a reputation for greatness in sports, but it also has a bad reputation when it comes to race. At the same time, the Boston Celtics were the first team in the league to draft a black player, field an all-black starting five, and hire a black coach.

This complicated legacy to one of the sport’s (and society’s) most uncomfortable conversations has been interwoven into the narratives surrounding the team from its earliest years up to the present.

For some, it was inescapable, as Bill Russell has related in tales of his early years with the team. For others, privileged by accident of birth with a skin tone that would allow them hear of such prejudice from a distance, it would still shape their engagement with the sport and city.

Perhaps no better example of the latter exists than Larry Bird, who recently recounted several of the ways the uncomfortable topic manifested in his years with the team in an interview with the Undefeated’s Mark Spears.

The two met up and discussed Bird’s career at the league’s most recent NBA India Games, part of a complex strategy being deployed by the league to grow the sport around the world.

Speaking on that most uncomfortable of topics, Bird opened up on the topic of Boston’s unsavory reputation in regards to race: “I heard a little bit about all [the racism],” said the Indiana native. “I know how Bill Russell was treated when he was there, and it gives you a feeling in your stomach.”

“It makes you want to throw up. But I can’t speak for anybody else that said that it’s forgotten because I didn’t go through that. I didn’t see a lot of that when I was out there. All I knew is when we came into the game that they wanted you to win. But you hear about things.”

Bird would sometimes find himself the subject of a racially-tinged ire, such as when he became the unwitting center of a debate raging around comments made by Isiah Thomas (then of the Detroit Pistons) suggesting much of the Indiana product’s fame was the result of his race.

Said Thomas in response to the furor his comments stirred up (via the New York Times’ Roy S. Johnson), “The controversy is that I said Larry Bird, if he was black, would be just another good guy. But I think you would all agree that the stereotypes do exist.”

”Larry definitely had to work hard to get where he is at, but so many times it’s been said about black athletes that their talent is ‘God-given’ or that it’s ‘natural ability.’ I had to work just as hard to get where I am. It’s not God-given or instinctive,” he added, pushing back against contemporary natives that blacks were simply more suited at sport biologically.

Decades later, the Hall-of-Fame Celtic echoed his sentiment at that time, suggesting that in ” … locker rooms after tough losses … there is no telling what’s said off the record, [in the] heat of the battle.”

“Stuff like that never bothered me. Everybody is going to have their opinion, they’re going to say what they’re going to say, you just go on about your business. I can remember after that game somebody come up to me right away after they talked to Isiah. But really, it wasn’t a big deal.”

“We had fierce battles against Detroit at that time, and we knew as we went on we were going to have a lot more. But I think I said it back then and I say it today, that stuff don’t bother me,” he added. A sly move to dodge the headline-angling reportage, perhaps seeking to stoke tensions for readership,  wise enough to avoid complicating a friendship between the two men.

Whatever Bird’s motivation for choosing that footing, it wasn’t the first time he faced such a perspective — even on his own team. After being drafted in 1978, he arrived in Boston a year later, and immediately clashed with forward Cedric Maxwell, who viewed the young wing as a threat for playing time.

“I had averaged 19 points and led the NBA in field-goal percentage the year before, and here comes Larry,” he said in an interview with Sports Illustrated’s John Papanek. “I said to myself, ‘This white boy can’t play.’ So in training camp we went against each other hard, every day. He’d score on me, I’d make sure I scored back on him. It was real fierce.”

“Pretty soon we got to respecting each other, and then we were playing with each other—him as the small forward and me as the big forward. It turned out great, because I’m quicker than most of the big guys who guard me and I still get to do all my scoring inside.”

“I realized that Larry could get me the ball when I was open like nobody I ever saw, and so could Tiny [Archibald], and [Dave] Cowens was a new man, and all of a sudden we win 60 games and make the playoffs,” Maxwell added, highlighting one of several incidents that may have guided Bird’s later response to the Thomas affair a half-decade later.

“Max was doing a lot of talking,” recounted Bird to Spears years later. “The only time I ever heard of his name was when I went to Boston to watch a game. I didn’t even know who he was. When I walked in, there he was, doing a lot of talking.”

“By the time our first practice was over, Curtis [Rowe] and Sidney [Wicks] both were cut, and Max is the only one left. … Cedric was doing all the talking. So, second practice, them two were gone and it was just Cedric. And it didn’t take long to get him quiet.”

To Mawell’s credit, he would take a similar response to attempts to fan divisions for headlines over the years, finding comments about the city like “although it’s OK if you’re an athlete, it’s not an especially nice place in which to be black” (via the Los Angeles Times’ Sam McManis), bent to somehow insinuate a dislike for Larry by some reporters.

“I don’t look at it as a black and white situation in Boston, even though I once got criticized a lot for saying that the city of Boston had a racial overtone,” he explained. “It’s just that Larry Bird is Larry Bird.”

While in no way even vaguely resembling the unnerving, even life-threatening experiences his black teammates faced, Bird’s even-keeled response to racial stereotypes when turned back on himself were probably guided by his peers’ response to such incidents, but perhaps also shaped by his early life.

As a preteen in French Lick, Indiana, he would sometimes play pickup basketball with black men working at a nearby hotel to work on his game. In an era when blacks and whites rarely interacted outside of fairly rigid social roles, a younger Larry Legend found himself a pupil of these men.

Men who would leave a lasting impression on the young hooper.

“Back then I would just try to develop my skills as a young player, and I got in games around there. But these guys were older. When you’re 9, 10, 11, you see somebody 20, you think they’re old. But it was a number of guys who would show up every day. In between games they’d smoke their Kool cigarettes and drink their beer, but great guys.”

Bird, known for enjoying a few brews of his own, would run into one of those men thirty years later — only to learn his former teacher had been following his career, proud of what the “Hick from French Lick” (as he is known) had become.

“They always seemed to let me get in there and play with them, and I always enjoyed that because I always looked at that group of guys … Score meant very little, but a lot of talking going on, a lot of fun.”

Though unusual circumstances can cause a sport to sometimes amplify divisions (as we have seen with China and ire over discussion of ongoing social unrest), it can also be a way to bring people together, cross-cutting social barriers in ways that can shape the view of influential people for decades to come.

Bird’s formative years helped elevate him to the status of an international figure, one whose participation in the 1992 Olympics’ Dream Team helped end the Cold War with soft power, accelerating the needed ties for the sport to take root in China, and setting the stage for the league’s expansion plans involving the very NBA India event Bird was interviewed at by Spears.

While Larry Bird, basketball, or acknowledgement of the ongoing pervasiveness of prejudice in the sport, city of Boston and world itself won’t erase any of the ills noted in this article, the sport still has a role to play in both the domestic issues of race, and international conflicts much bigger than basketball itself.

How that happens depends on how new generations of players take up the mantel laid down by figures like Russell, Bird, and others. The league’s long-standing progressive bent has in recent weeks encountered a challenge unlike any previously in its nascent, unfolding international era.

Treating such potentially divisive topics with the care as did Maxwell and Bird did the topic of race may one day be the focus of a similar interview with a broader scope decades in the future. But it is also a moment fraught with risk, risk that can only be diminished with connection based in that common humanity the sport can make so brilliantly evident.



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