When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [35]
He slept fitfully that night, with his throbbing finger robbing him of any prolonged sleep. Bird's alarm was set for an early morning wake-up call to go mushroom hunting, and he was hell-bent on sticking to his plans. There is a six-week period each year when rare morel mushrooms grow in Indiana. They range in size and color, depending on the month, and they are extremely difficult to find. Bird had been hunting mushrooms for years and was annoyed that his aching finger threatened to ruin his day. It never once occurred to him that it also might ruin the upcoming season of the Boston Celtics.
He popped a couple of aspirin and went hunting anyhow. After emerging from the woods just before dark, his brother informed him, "There's a doctor looking for you. He checked your x-rays, and you need to get to Indianapolis right away."
The news was alarming: Bird's knuckle was shattered, and he needed surgery to remove bone chips and insert several pins to stabilize the finger.
"How long is it going to take before it's healed?" Bird asked the surgeon.
"Healed?" the surgeon replied. "Son, I'm not sure it will."
After the procedure, the doctor attempted to immobilize the finger by putting a clip behind Bird's fingernail. Then he attached a mechanism running the length of his wrist to hold the finger in place. One evening, while Bird was watching television, the clip gave way and the fingernail ripped off, leaving Bird yelping in pain and splattered with his own blood.
He had not yet signed a contract with the Celtics, nor had he informed them of his injury. When Auerbach learned of his draft pick's surgery, he summoned Bird to Boston. By then, the forward was working out again, yet he still visited the godfather of Celtics basketball with some uneasiness.
"I just didn't have the same feel for the ball as I did before," Bird said. "I was sure Red would notice."
Team physician Dr. Thomas Silva didn't like what he saw. He told Auerbach that the knuckle would never repair completely and Bird would not have the same range of motion. In his estimation, the young forward was damaged goods. The Celtics boss listened, then directed Bird out to the court. He threw him the ball and told him, "Shoot it."
Bird buried one jumper. Then another. Then another. Although his feel wasn't the same, his range was intact. So Auerbach threw him a bounce pass, then a chest pass, then an overhead pass. Bird nimbly caught them all.
"If he was in pain," Auerbach said, "he did a pretty good job of disguising it. He was one tough kid."
The general manager put his arm around his young forward. "I'm not worried about this," Red said.
For the first time since he arrived in Boston, Bird exhaled.
As time went on, Bird's finger built up calcium deposits and became grossly disfigured. Once, while Bird was posing for a cover shot for Sports Illustrated, the photographer told Bird to hold up his finger to signify that he—and the Celtics—were number one. But when Bird held up his ghastly digit, it looked more like "We're number ten." The photographer shot him using his opposite hand instead.
Although he still went on to bury some of the biggest shots in NBA history, Bird concedes nearly 30 years after the fact that Dr. Silva's diagnosis was correct. "I never could shoot as well again," he said.
Magic Johnson spent the better part of August 1979 working solely on his own perimeter game. Dr. Charles Tucker, a school counselor from Lansing and a former ballplayer who became Magic's agent, warned him that teams would sag off him and double-team Kareem until the kid proved he could stroke the jumper.
"No one is going to sag off me without paying for it," Magic grunted in between sessions.
He signed a five-year, $2.3 million contract with a $175,000 signing bonus, and he couldn't imagine what he'd do with all that money. Buss asked him to move to Los Angeles to get acclimated