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me ass over tin cups” after he drilled a jumper in front of the Detroit Pistons bench. Celtics teammate Danny Ainge told me that Bird was so good that from time to time he deliberately dribbled into trouble just to increase the degree of difficulty on the play, something that Bird confirmed. (Years later Kobe Bryant would be crucified when Phil Jackson claimed that Kobe did the same thing.) Bill Walton related a night when Bird dribbled into the corner, drew a triple-team, then zipped him a pass that traveled through Joe Barry Carroll’s legs.
    Bird was also not shy about professing his proficiency at other sports, something that always fascinates me about pro athletes. (Jordan always mused about how well he could’ve done not only in baseball, a question to which we later got an answer, but also at sports such as track and football.) Bird told me, in all seriousness, that he was as adept at backyard badminton as he was at basketball. He also said that he wasn’t “weight-room strong but cock-strong,” a farmer’s expression that has nothing to do with the penis. And he loved to brag about his softball skills (a sport he enjoyed playing with his brothers for Terre Haute’s Platolene 500–Carpet Center team) as a power hitter and first baseman/outfielder. Bird had shattered a knuckle in a softball injury he had suffered years later and always claimed he couldn’t feel the basketball as well after that. I never knew whether to believe that.
    I was particularly intrigued by Bird’s ambidexterity, which wentwell beyond his ability to dribble with his left hand. Bird looked utterly comfortable shooting left-handed, as he did from time to time, and he both ate and signed autographs with his left. He just grew up that way. He says that he always picked up a pencil and wrote with his left, yet when a teacher sent him to the blackboard to write he used his right hand.
    There was about Bird the mystique of a street hustler, always with something up his sleeve, always some kind of trump-card chicanery at the ready. Quinn Buckner, a former Bird teammate who would later be on the committee that would select the Dream Team, tells of Bird’s wizardry during a practice shooting game called Knockout. “You’d be ready to win, and all of a sudden—I’m not making this up—Larry would throw up a shot that would not only knock your ball away from the basket but would also
go in itself
,” says Buckner. “The man could play pool and basketball at the same time.”
    Buckner conjures up a moment during a game when he was streaking downcourt and Bird wound up to throw him a long pass despite the fact that a defender was directly in the line between them. “So Larry throws this thing that starts way out to the left, veers around the defender, and curves
right into my hands
,” Buckner says. “Nobody in history—nobody—threw those kinds of passes.”
    That Bird had even agreed to compete in this 1986 three-point contest was a triumph for the NBA because no one was quite sure how that particular sideshow was going to turn out. But Bird had signed on for a few reasons. It appealed to the gunslinger aspect of his game—he loved the pre- and post-practice shooting games in which he engaged with teammates Ainge and Jerry Sichting. He loved the idea that, as talk about the three-point contest heated up, he was not necessarily considered the favorite since players such as Craig Hodges, Dale Ellis, and Wood were long-distance specialists. With a game on the line, Bird was everybody’s choice, of course, but that was not necessarily the case in an exhibition, where his relatively slow delivery would be a liability. Bird wanted to show that such an analysis was flawed.
    And so, a few minutes before the competition in Dallas was to begin and seven of the eight players who would be participating in the three-point contest were gathered in a locker room, suddenly the door burst open and in strode Bird, asking, “Who’s comin’ in