Bird Watching (35 page)

The Larry Bird exception was in the news a lot during the lockout. When I signed the contract that put that rule into motion, I had no idea the ramifications would be so huge, but my attorney, Bob Woolf, did. I remember him telling me, “Whatever you and Magic do will help the whole league.” Then, when my contract was up, he said, “You’ve got to make sure this contract is the right thing for everyone.” At the time, I didn’t understand that. But what Mr. Woolf meant was that if I made a big jump in salary, then the sixth man who was making $100,000 before could now make $250,000. After the Larry Bird exception became official, Mr. Woolf told me, “You’ve just changed the entire financial landscape of the NBA.” He knew. He could see it coming. But even he couldn’t have known how far this would go. Having been on both sides of it now, I think it’s time to realize that things aren’t like they were before. It was time for both parties to agree on what is best for the league, not what is best for themselves. You keep hearing how certain teams are losing money. I’ve been hearing that since I came into the league. There’s something wrong when the same teams have the top five draft choices, year after year. It’s ridiculous. Teams like Sacramento and the L.A. Clippers, do they really deserve franchises?

The players didn’t want to take a pay cut, and I don’t blame them. But I also wonder about the agents and the influence they have on this league. Too many guys forget the agent works for them, not the other way around. Yes, Bob Woolf was my attorney during my playing days, but when it came down to negotiating a contract, I usually did most of the work myself.

I remember the contract I signed in 1984, just after we won a championship. Red Auerbach called me in the summer and said, “Come down and let’s get this contract done.” I said, “Should I bring Bob Woolf?” He said, “You can if you want.” So Mr. Woolf and I go down to the Celtics offices, and Red’s got his general manager, Jan Volk, in there, and it’s going fine, but then we start getting down to the numbers. At the time, Moses Malone was making $1.8 million. I said, “Red, I’m just going to tell you. I want to be paid the same as Moses Malone.” Red said, “That’s one point eight million. We can’t pay you that. It’s too much.” At the time, that was the highest salary in the league, but I had just been named MVP, so I said, “That’s what I want, Red.” So Red turns to Jan, who was their salary guy, and Jan says, “We can’t afford that.” At that point, Mr. Woolf jumps in, and he and Jan are talking back and forth, and Red looks at Mr. Woolf and says, “Look, we don’t need you in here.” So I turn to Jan and say, “Look, we don’t need you in here.” And you know what? They left. Red and I kept at it, and it got down to a difference of $25,000, on some bonus clause. I don’t remember what it was, but I would have sat out the whole year before I’d let Red hold me up over $25,000. I ended up getting my $1.8 million, and the $25,000, and I was happy with that. I didn’t want $2.3 million, or $2.5 million, which is what Mr. Woolf wanted me to ask for. I knew Moses had a contract coming up the next season, and he’d probably get more than I was getting, but I didn’t care about all that.

The one thing I hated was when contract talks got into the papers, but once in a while it couldn’t be avoided. I remember in 1988, my contract was due to be up after one more season, so the Celtics told me they wanted to get an extension done that summer, before the 1988–89 season. Red said, “You and Jan work it out, okay?” I said, “Fine, but I want it to be done before training camp.” That summer, Jan was calling me every three weeks or so saying, “We’re going to get this done soon.” I kept saying, “Let’s stop talking about it and just do it and get it over with. I don’t want to spend the summer thinking about this.” I was getting ticked off. The next time he called I said, “Jan, stop screwing around. I want this done.” Jan said, “Okay, Larry, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll fly in to Indianapolis and we’ll meet there.” So Jan flies in, and I pick him up at the airport, and he says to me, “How far away is that hotel you own?” I say, “About seventy-five miles.” Jan says, “I’ve got some time, let’s drive over and have lunch.”

On the drive there, we don’t discuss the contract at all. We have lunch, and still we haven’t talked about the contract. I’m thinking, “Well, on the way back, we’ll probably do it. We’ll have a good hour.” We drive back, and still nothing. I pull in, and I’m getting mad now, and Jan gets out of the car and says, “By the way, we’ve got to get this contract thing settled.” I couldn’t believe it. I said, “We had all day, Jan.” He said, “Well, I’ll call you.” By that time I was livid. I called Jill Leone, who worked for Mr. Woolf at that time, and had become the person I trusted to handle my affairs, and I told her, “I’m so sick of them treating me this way, I’m going to play the year out.” She said, “I would too.” I didn’t want to leave Boston—I always told Red I’d never go anywhere—but when I showed up for training camp I told reporters I was done with Jan, and I would only deal with Red. I told them, “They sent a boy out there to do a man’s job.” It was the wrong thing to say at the wrong time, but it was how I felt. And it was effective. Before you knew it, Red was telling reporters, “We’ll take care of this within the week.” Sure enough, a few days later Red comes to practice and tells me, “Alan Cohen wants to meet with you. Tonight.”

Alan Cohen was one of our owners, the most knowledgeable basketball guy among them. By this time the Celtics knew I was upset about this. I can remember Dinah saying to me, “Don’t you go down there and get mad. Kill him with kindness.” I had all my stuff. I had everything. I had every contract in the league printed out on my sheet. So I go up to Longfellow Place and Alan says to me, “You want a beer or something?” I said, “No, I’m fine.” All of a sudden Alan starts going at me. He’s yelling and cursing at me for criticizing Jan in the papers. He said, “How dare you talk about our general manager like that?” I told him, “Alan, all I did was tell the truth.” He finally calmed down a little bit, and he said, “You know we want you to stay here.” Then he starts talking dollars. It wasn’t even close. I knew what I wanted when I went down there. So I started running down these contracts, starting with Patrick Ewing. Cohen said, “We can’t pay you Patrick Ewing’s money. He’s in New York. They always pay more than guys are worth.” We go down the list to Michael Jordan, and he says, “Aw, c’mon, Jordan is a young star on the way up,” and then we get to Magic and he says, “You can’t count Magic. That’s L.A., Showtime and all that.” I said, “I don’t care what it is. We’re talking about players here. You average them in, and that’s what I want.” Now I had talked to Bob Woolf before I went down there, and he said, “If we get around three point two million a season, you should be satisfied.” But I got so mad at Alan Cohen, I started thinking to myself, “The heck with this. I want a million dollars more.” I wouldn’t budge until I got that and we agreed to it. I walked out of there thinking, “When I take this back to Bob, he’s going to die, because I got a million more than he would have asked for.” I was feeling pretty good about myself until I got into that car and started thinking, “I probably could have got ten million. Cohen is probably sitting up there laughing his butt off. He got me.” But I was happy. I got what I felt was fair.

Truth is, I loved Alan Cohen. He was one of those owners who not only loved the game, he really understood it. He knew talent. The year the Celtics took Michael Smith in the draft, Alan Cohen wanted Tim Hardaway. I always remembered that. The last time I really dealt with him, I was retired, and was helping the Celtics evaluate talent for the draft. Cohen said to me, the night of the draft, “How do you like Nick Van Exel?” I said, “I love the kid. I know he’s got a shaky background, but as a player he’s got all the heart in the world, and he’s fearless.” So Cohen says to me, “Let’s get him.” That was the year we took Acie Earl with the nineteenth pick. We didn’t have a second-round pick, but my friend Quinn Buckner, who had been named Mavericks coach, had three of them for Dallas. We thought Van Exel might slip to the second round, so Cohen said to me, “Call up Quinn.” I called Quinn ten times after our first-round pick and he kept hanging up on me. He kept saying, “Don’t call me anymore. Who are you after, anyway?” I said, “I’m not going to tell you.” Then he’d hang up on me again. I said to Alan, “He won’t do it.” At this point everyone else on the Celtics has gone home, because they weren’t figuring on us having another pick. So Cohen says, “Call him again.” I did, but that darn Quinn. He wasn’t going to help us.

The thrill of trying to make moves was one of the parts I liked best about my brief time in the front office. I had input with the Pacers too, and it was frustrating to go all the way into December of 1998 without any training camp or signings because of the lockout. I was anxious, and bored. But it did enable me to enjoy my induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, which came about in October of 1998. I really had no idea what to expect. I really didn’t know that much about the Hall of Fame. Jill Leone gave me as much information as she could, but I still wasn’t sure what kind of feel it would have. I had never seen it on television. I found out later that’s because our induction was the first time NBC televised it.

You get to choose someone to present you to the Hall of Fame, but he or she has to be a Hall of Famer themselves. Then you can also have an escort who was influential in your career. My choice as my escort, Bill Fitch, was a no-brainer. He was the first and best pro coach I had. I learned so much from him, and I’m still learning. The day of the induction, he came up to my hotel room and we diagrammed a few plays. My choice to present me was Bill Walton, my friend and teammate who played with me on our 1986 championship team.

I always used to say, “Thank God Bill became a Celtic. Now we have someone to pick on.” Bill brought a different energy to the team. Usually we had guys who would come and just try to fit in. Not Bill. He came in with a lot of personality, and it seemed he had something to say about everything. He was very vocal about being ready to play, and he was constantly talking about winning a championship. We thought about all those things, but nobody talked about them much until Bill came along. Then all of a sudden we were talking about it all the time. Bill’s words held weight, because he was a guy who had been there. His 1977 Portland Trail Blazers team, which won it all, was awesome. They were the epitome of basketball, and Bill was the center of it. The more I got to know Bill, the more I liked him.

I had no idea what to expect of Walton when he came to the Celtics. I had been following him his entire career, even back to college. I knew he was a tremendous passer for a guy his size, and I knew he could throw perfect outlet passes. I remember very clearly when Notre Dame beat UCLA, Bill’s college team. I was happy about that, being an Indiana boy, but what I remember more was how dominant Bill was. What I loved about him was he wasn’t mechanical, like so many big men were back then. If you watched him closely, it was almost like you could see the play developing in his head. And I never saw anyone close up the middle and front the way Walton did. He was an outstanding defensive presence.

One night, during that great ’86 championship season, Bill, Quinn, and I drove down to French Lick after a game, because we had the next day off. We stayed overnight. We got up, ate, and went down to the basketball court I had built in our backyard. We were messing around down there, and Bill said, “Do you have a jar?” I said, “What for?” He said, “I want to take some dirt home from the court of the famed Larry Bird and sprinkle it on my own court in San Diego.” I thought Bill was kidding. He wasn’t. So I got him a jar and I said, “Go take some dirt out of the neighbor’s yard. We don’t have very much good topsoil around here.”

Bill was pretty excited when I called and asked him to present me to the Hall of Fame. Later he told people he was surprised I chose him. He said he had no idea I thought that much of him. I guess I’m not the best at telling people. I just assume they know. There were some of my friends who were a little surprised I didn’t choose Red Auerbach. He would seem like a logical choice. Some of the media speculated I was snubbing him because of our so-called disagreement, but my feeling was, Red has done it a million times, and I really wanted to have someone that played with me. Bill Walton was not only a good teammate, he is a very good friend. Red ended up there anyhow, because he presented Lenny Wilkens.

At my press conference I tried to keep it light. People asked me lots of questions, including asking me to rank the best games, the most memorable, and so on. Those are impossible questions to answer. Everyone kept asking me to pick my favorite championship, but I told them you can’t ever say one was better than the other. They’re different, with special meaning for special reasons. When we won in 1981, it was our first one, so obviously that was incredible. In 1984 we beat Magic, so that was a little revenge from college. I wouldn’t have considered my career complete if we hadn’t ever beaten the Lakers in the Finals. As for our third championship in 1986, that was considered one of the best teams ever, so hey, we should have won. What I always think is so great was that Magic won a title in his first year, and I won one in my second year.

People were asking me if Magic and I resurrected the NBA. I told them, “I don’t believe that’s totally true. I’m sure there was more excitement by Magic and me coming into the league together, after playing each other for the national championship, but two guys didn’t change this league around. There were plenty of players before us and after us.” I truly believe that. People have put that Michigan State versus Indiana State game on some sort of pedestal, but I admitted at that press conference, “We met our match in Michigan State. They were the better team. If we played them ten times—and you know me, this is hard for me to say—they would have beaten us eight times.” I told them I appreciated that I was joining an elite group of athletes, and what an honor that was, and that growing up as a kid I didn’t even know what the Hall of Fame was. But when you go through your career and have success and accomplish things, this is the way you know it’s all worthwhile. I reiterated what I had been saying since I took over for the Pacers, which is that I had no plans to coach in Indiana beyond my three-year contract. Someone asked me what was in my future, and I joked, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll work as vice president for Bill Gates at Microsoft.” I quickly added, “But I sort of hope not. Then I’d have to go into the office every day.” Later that afternoon a representative from Microsoft contacted Jill by fax and asked her to thank me for the mention, and to offer their services to me should I have any interest in the company in the future. You forget, sometimes, how closely people monitor your words. That was an interesting reminder.