EP 986 Larry Bird and His Long Road to Success in the NBA

Most success stories start with an unimaginable backstory.  Larry Bird’s journey to NBA immortality involved one of the most hardscrabble roads to success.  In the fall of 1974, Bird-one of the greatest players ever to pick up a basketball-was lost and in danger of slipping away.  This self-proclaimed ‘hick from French Link’ was recruited to play for Bobby Knight’s vaunted Indiana University Hoosiers’ team, but his discomfort with the fit at the University saw Bird never play a minute for the team.  It all could have ended right there, but for the determination of Bob King and Bill Hodges to bring him to Indiana State University in Terre Haute, a school whose basketball team couldn’t even fill its arena.  I’m old enough to recall the March 1979 NCAA Tournament finals game that pitted Larry Bird against Magic Johnson.  The rest of the story involved these two men, very different in so many ways, bringing the NBA back from a perilous moment when the league was at risk of never achieving comparability with football and baseball.  Keith O’Brien, author of “Heartland: A Forgotten Place, An Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird,” is a great storyteller and he joined us recently for a virtual book talk for my town’s library, which is now available as a podcast.

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