Read Online Bird Watching by Larry Bird, Jackie Macmullan - Free Book Online Page A

but what the Celtics didn’t look at was he played the most minutes of anybody in the league. He had a total green light. Give that kid a green light, and he can score, but look how many games the Sixers won that year. Twenty-four. Is that worth $21 million?
    So if I knew I was leaving as early as 1995, why did I wait two years before I actually did go? I probably should have left sooner. We’d have ten guys in a room trying to make a decision on one player, and it drove me crazy. I’m not saying I had all the answers, but the way they tried to do things, it’s a wonder they got anything done. As much as that bothered me, I had my reasons for staying. The one thing my doctors told me after my fusion surgery was to be really careful about letting my back heal. They warned me, “Take it slow, or you could have some major problems down the road.” My feeling was, the Celtics had such great insurance, why should I have to pay for my care when I got hurt on their job? I stuck around because it made sense from a business perspective.
    In the last year or so before I left the Celtics, Dan Dyrek told me about a group that was interested in buying the team. He asked me to meet with one of the guys, who happened to be a friend of his. I talked to him, and I liked him a lot. His group said the only way they’d be interested in buying the team was if I stayed on. At that time it sounded like a great situation, but Paul Gaston didn’t want to sell. And I knew as long as Gaston was still there I wouldn’t be staying.
    It wasn’t easy watching what was happening in Boston. There was another move the Celtics made in the summer of ’95 that I didn’t like: signing Dominique Wilkins as a free agent. Gaston never even bothered to ask me what I thought about that one. The Celtics signed Wilkins without telling me. I heard about it on the news.
    It’s just as well they never did ask me about Dominique, because I would have told them it was a big mistake. From day one I knew there was no way that one would work out. Dominique was at the end of his career, only he didn’t know it. He still had a superstar’s mentality. He thought he was good enough to run the show, but his skills had deteriorated and he just didn’t have the same mobility or lift that he had in his prime. But what bothered me the most about that signing was that Wilkins wasn’t a Celtics kind of player. A true Celtic is a guy that’s going to do everything for the team. Dominique was always one of those guys who wanted to do it all himself. You can’t win that way.
    I had some great battles with Wilkins during the eighties, when he played for Atlanta. He was so good back then. There’s no question he’s a terrific basketball player, but I always felt we could beat his teams, because one guy can’t beat five guys, and Dominique always died trying.
    We were involved in a classic playoff series against Atlanta in 1988. The Hawks were a young, up-and-coming team, but even though people considered our “old” Celtics team dead and buried, we knew we still had what it took. The series against Atlanta was in the Eastern Conference semifinals, and Dominique and I got into some major scoring duels. Wilkins was at the top of his game, but even after seeing him score all those points I never doubted that we’d come out winners, because our guys knew how to make the pass to beat them. When the game was on the line, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish and I never worried about who was going to take the shot. We just made sure it was the best possible one we could take. We beat Atlanta in seven games because we played together. After that series the Hawks were never the same. In fact, I think they lost in the first round of the playoffs the following year.
    Dominique was a big name, and that’s why Boston went for him. You have to understand that at that time the fans were getting antsy. I was retired, and Kevin was retired, and Robert Parish had gone to play for Charlotte.