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second?” Then he reiterated his feelings about the slippery red-white-and-blue balls.
    It was pretty much over at that point. Bird didn’t even remove his warm-up jacket for the first two rounds—he always insisted that it was not a fuck-you move but just how he felt comfortable—and went up against sharpshooter Hodges in the final. It was no contest. Now in his absurdly bright red East All-Star uniform, Bird drained nine shots in a row at one point and even deliberately banked in the red-white-and-blue ball near the end.
    Bird was ecstatic. His first comments were directed to his Boston teammates who had kidded him that he wouldn’t win, and specifically to veteran M. L. Carr, who used to claim that he was the “three-point king.” So Bird stole his line. “I’m the three-point king,” Bird yelped, over and over. “I’m the three-point king.” Even later in his career, it would bring a smile to his face when someone called him the three-point king. He was, too, in a way that Bird didn’t even intend at the time. He probably wasn’t the first great three-point shooter, a title that might belong to Dale Ellis. But he was the first true superstar to incorporate the three-point shot into his game, and he remains the greatest combination of player and three-point shooter in NBA history.
    Bird would win the contest the next two years, too, but there was something about that first one. It came in the middle of a championship season, and it seemed to say everything about Bird—the deadly concentration, the balls-out confidence, the pure joy he got from playing the game better than anyone else. There was just something about Larry, something that earned him the sobriquet of “Legend” even if we allow for the fact that Jordan was a better all-around player and Magic (five championships to Bird’s three) was a greater winner.
    We cannot, ever, divorce Bird from his ethnicity. The fact thatmillions of white youngsters all over the world gravitated to Bird, found him almost godlike, is not racist, but it is certainly racial. Ditto for the millions who detested him purely because he was white, theorizing that his fame, trumpeted by a mostly white press, was chimerical.
    But those who knew him knew that his grittiness was hard-earned, legit, that his darkness-on-the-edge-of-town upbringing (his alcoholic father committed suicide when Bird was eighteen) was the foundation of his character.
    Years later Patrick Ewing told me everything I needed to know about what other players thought about Bird. Though Ewing grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and idolized Celtics legend Bill Russell, he was not a fan of Bird or the contemporary Celtics. He didn’t explain why. He didn’t have to. The Celtics were the white team and Bird the white leader. “All through high school,” says Ewing, “my friends and I
hated
him and
hated
his team.”
    But something changed when Ewing entered the league and faced those flinty eyes of the Hick from French Lick. So he picked up the phone and dialed his friends.
    “You know all that shit we were talking back then?” Ewing told them. “Well, forget about it. This motherfucker right here is the
truth
.”

CHAPTER 5

THE OUTCAST

Isiah Throws It Away … Then Throws It All Away
    He had it in his hands, right there, the whole game, the whole season, his long battle to make the NBA’s Terrific Triumvirate a Fantastic Foursome … all of it.
Right there!
His Detroit Pistons were leading the Boston Celtics by one point in Boston Garden in Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference finals. There were only five seconds left, and all Isiah Thomas had to do was successfully inbound the ball to a teammate and victory was his. Easy. Isiah was then, by his reckoning, the smartest guy in the room, all the time, every time. And he wasn’t far wrong.
    But then the situation started to devolve. Coach Chuck Daly motioned for a time-out, which the Pistons had, but nobody saw him. None of the veterans on