When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [149]
"Dino, this is Larry Bird," he said. "I want to talk to you about coming back to the NBA and playing with the Pacers."
"How did you get this number?" Radja said.
"I don't remember who gave it to me—what difference does it make?" Bird said. "If this is a bad time, I can call you back. I'm trying to make you an offer to come back and play."
"Oh, okay ... I see," Radja said.
"We have a chance to win a championship," Bird said. "We could use another front-court player. I thought you would fit in nicely with what we are trying to do."
"I'm sorry," Radja said. "How did you say you got this number?"
An exasperated Bird finally hung up. Years later, he ran into Radja during a scouting trip in Croatia. "You know, Dino, you cost me a real good chance of winning a championship," he said.
"I know, Larry," Radja said. "I'm sorry. I was going through some tough times."
In November 1999, in Bird's third (and final) season as head coach, the team stood at 7–7 and had just been thrashed by Seattle on the road. With Portland up next, Indiana was looking at the prospect of its first losing month since Bird arrived.
Bird had said little about the poor showing against the Sonics the night before. But when he gathered his team together minutes before tip-off against the Blazers, he let them know he hadn't forgotten.
"Listen," Bird said, "I'm going to give you guys one more chance tonight, because what happened in Seattle was an embarrassment to the game of basketball. If you guys don't play, don't worry. I'll find someone who will."
Indiana went on to beat Portland and won 15 of its next 17 games. It was the springboard to a 56-win season, a 25-game winning streak at home, and the elusive trip to the Finals against league MVP Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, and the Los Angeles Lakers.
The Lakers were heavily favored, and the Pacers couldn't match their depth or talent, even when Kobe went down with an injured ankle. After Indiana fell in six games, Smits retired, Jackson signed elsewhere, and Dale Davis was traded. Bird resigned, just as he said he would, despite entreaties from Walsh to remain.
He drove back down to Florida, looked around his beautiful home, and asked Dinah, "Now what am I going to do?"
Both Magic and Bird had visions of owning an NBA franchise. Johnson joined a bid to buy the Toronto Raptors headed by construction magnate Larry Tanenbaum and Labatt Breweries (a founding partner of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team), but they lost out to a group that swayed the expansion committee by proposing a centrally located downtown site accessible by public transportation.
Bird and businessman Steve Belkin formed a group to buy a new franchise in Charlotte, but the expansion committee instead chose a group headed by billionaire Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), making him the first African American majority owner in the NBA.
Both Magic and Larry walked away from their ownership bids bitterly disappointed. While they still enjoyed unparalleled cachet in basketball circles, when it came to buying an NBA team they were simply two more businessmen trying to cash in on the success of the very league they helped grow into a flourishing multimillion-dollar empire. Magic had already been a minority owner of the Lakers for years, but he still wistfully wondered what it would be like to have his own team.
Although Bird had been retired from basketball for almost a decade, he was still in demand for private shows and appearances for Fortune 500 companies. The most lucrative requests were for Magic and Larry to appear in tandem. During these occasional rendezvous, both men noted that the laughter came more easily and the camaraderie more naturally now that there were no championships at stake.
And every time they made solo appearances, they fielded the same questions: