Larry Bird was 18 years old when his father committed suicide.

The next sound Georgia Bird hears is the death of her husband. Her husband is calling home to tell her he loves her, but Joe Bird has a shotgun in his hands. It’s ’75, and Georgia Bird is at home tending to the regular business of running a house: barely being able to make ends meet, trying to get bills paid, waiting on tables to keep food in the fridge and a family together. I hustled home, found that Sports Illustrated, cut that photo of Bird out and put it on my bedroom wall. Too depressed to finish the game, many of the players just left. Bird had only missed one shot the whole game and scored 37 points. We couldn’t grasp it until Billy Packer (who earlier that had said publicly that Bird was overrated) tossed out Larry Bird’s stats for the game. For some reason, we couldn’t imagine Mark Aguirre losing it was incomprehensible to us. About 100 people piled on top of each another-myself included-to watch the rest of DePaul’s season. He was yelling as he ran across the court with the TV, “DePaul is losing! DePaul is losing!” As he hooked the 13-inch black-and-white up, the stands emptied and the game stopped. Somewhere in the middle of the fourth quarter, someone brought a television from the Y’s office and plugged it into an outlet in the corner of the gym. Kids on both teams begged for the game to be postponed until after the DePaul-I. Every young brotha in Chi was trying to see Mark Aguirre do his thang, but many simply wanted to see if Carl Nicks was telling the truth. It was for the league championship, but a lot of us didn’t want to go, because DePaul was playing in the Final Four that afternoon. The last Saturday of March, ’79, I had a basketball game to play at the neighborhood Y. But I used to listen, because the more Carl talked, the more my mind went back to that picture. At times, he claimed that Larry Bird was the best basketball player he’d ever seen, and a lot of people thought Carl was on crack. He’d tell stories that were hard to believe. Carl Nicks, a ballplayer from Chicago who ran with Bird, used to come home from Indiana State and talk madness about this white boy.

You could see the release, the rotation of the ball, the finish. Sports Illustrated had this picture of his jump shot in motion across a two-page spread. I’ve had these “experiences” since ’78 that connect us. My life with Larry Bird is different from my life with DOC, DT or anyone else. Doing so will only make you look foolish. Surely one of the most polarizing players in NBA history, regardless of race, you could not doubt Bird’s skills. In this feature from SLAM 28, Scoop Jackson gave his account on what Bird meant to him and the League. Larry Bird chan ged the game, and gathered a few haters while he was at it.

Onyer bird