When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [130]
It was precisely the play Magic had envisioned when he coaxed Bird onto the roster.
"I'll remember that basket for the rest of my life," Magic said.
"To this day," Bird said, "I have no idea how he saw me."
Bird was buoyed to have played without pain and to find that, even with all his downtime, his shooting stroke was intact. He went to his designated cubicle for his postgame interviews and regaled the press with pithy one-liners. But when Bird shifted slightly in his seat halfway through the session, he felt that familiar jolt of pain traveling down his leg. The pain was so sudden and so severe that Bird, nauseous from the burning sensation, began sweating profusely. He abruptly ended his interview, hobbled back to the hotel, and laid himself out on the floor.
That is where his brother Mark discovered him when he burst into Bird's room exclaiming, "That was awesome! Let's go celebrate!"
"I'm done," Bird said quietly. "It's over for me."
"What do you mean?" his brother asked.
"I mean, this is it," Bird said. "I can't keep going on like this."
Mark Bird hurried out to find the Dream Team (and Boston Celtics) trainer Ed Lacerte. Lacerte tried to alleviate the burning sensation of the compressed nerves by manipulating Bird's muscles, but his back was rock-hard, like an impenetrable brick wall.
"I'm sorry, Larry," Lacerte said. "I'm not sure what else I can do."
Bird had played his first and last game in the Tournament of the Americas—and quite possibly the final game of his career. He was relegated to the sidelines for the remainder of the pre-Olympic competition.
He had company. Patrick Ewing had cut and dislocated his finger on the rim during the team workouts in La Jolla and missed the win over Cuba. He was held out of practice for a few days, and in the interest of preserving his conditioning, he jumped on an exercise bike on the sidelines while the team went through their drills. Bird did the same. It made for an awkward scene: two tall, proud men who had been heated adversaries for years sitting side by side, pedaling furiously, going nowhere and having nothing to say about it.
Although he wasn't playing, Bird still offered some caustic commentary from his perch on the bike. When Barkley muscled Malone in the post, Bird kidded Utah's chiseled forward, "Charles owns you, Karl. Get used to it. You're a backup on this team."
Ewing eventually joined the verbal fray. When David Robinson jammed home an alley-oop pass, Ewing shouted, "Enjoy it now, David. When I get back out there, you'll be eating that." Bird chuckled. The two men got to talking.
They recounted their playing days against one another, when Bird would lure Ewing out to the wing and inform him, "You're no center. You're a glorified power forward. And there's no way you can stop me out here."
Bird usually punctuated his point with a jumper. Then it would be Ewing's turn to jog back and inform Boston's forward, "I'm going to take you into the post and kick your ass."
At the time, the acrimony was real. Years later, pedaling side by side, their past bravado seemed contrived. When Magic glanced over and caught Ewing and Bird guffawing over the misadventures of Clyde Drexler, who had been pickpocketed by Jordan on back-to-back possessions, he shook his head.
"I wasn't expecting that," Magic said. "Two of the quietest guys, and suddenly they were best friends."
Bird bestowed the nickname "Harry" on Ewing. Most of the guys thought it was after the big but lovable character in the movie Harry and the Hendersons, but Bird was harkening back to his junior season of college, when he played alongside Harry Morgan at Indiana State.
"Just call us Harry and Larry," he announced.
Lacerte printed up T-shirts that read THE HARRY AND LARRY SHOW ... TO BE CONTINUED IN BARCELONA—a takeoff on a Reebok Olympic advertising campaign that featured American decathletes