Bird Watching (9 page)

I had a pretty easy time of it once I retired. I could play golf whenever I wanted to. But after a while I got tired of golf. Then I got tired of fishing. I was bored. So I’d be in and out of Naples a lot. At least every week Dinah and I and the kids would take off and go somewhere, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t feel like I was getting anything accomplished. I knew I was too young to stop working. One thing I was sure about: I didn’t want to spend the next twenty or thirty years of my life doing nothing. I needed some kind of challenge, and during the five years I was retired, that challenge was definitely missing.

Dinah knows me inside out, and she could tell I was getting restless. One of the greatest things about Dinah is she doesn’t care what I do—she’ll be there to support me. She is ready to try new things, ready to go anywhere. I could tell her tonight we are packing up and moving to Los Angeles and she’d say, “Really? Okay.” I know I’m really lucky she’s that way, but it’s how we’ve been for as long as we’ve been together.

Before we had the kids, we’d be sitting in French Lick and I’d say, “You want to go to Terre Haute?” She’d tell me, “Give me five minutes.” She’d throw some stuff in a bag, and we’d be gone. Then we’d get to Terre Haute and I’d say, “Let’s go to Vegas and visit our friends for a couple of days.” Dinah would call them up, throw some more stuff in a bag and—boom!—we’d be gone. It was just the way we lived. We never really had one place that we settled in. It’s crazy, really, when you think about it. We had all these houses—one in Indiana, one in Naples, one in Boston—but we never really had a home.

I don’t know why it was like that. Maybe because when I was young we moved all the time. My parents didn’t have a whole lot of money, and it seemed like we never really knew what we were going to do from day to day. I think we moved about fifteen times by the time I finished high school. But it never really bothered me much as a kid. As long as we were together, I didn’t care where we lived.

Now we have Conner and Mariah, and they are terrific kids. They are a handful sometimes, but Dinah and I don’t mind. When Conner was a baby he went with us to Barcelona when I played on the 1992 Olympic Dream Team. He kept us up all night, because he was so confused with the time difference, but I didn’t care. I was just happy he was there with us. When we started talking about a second child, Dinah said she wasn’t sure. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t think I could ever love another baby like the way I love Conner.” But let me tell you: Dinah and our little girl are ridiculous together. They are inseparable. I know Dinah meant it when she said she could never love another child as much, but about three minutes after she was holding that little girl, that took care of that. Same with me.

As Conner and Mariah got older, they started hearing a little more about their dad and how he used to be a pro basketball player. Conner started getting a little curious about it. He’d ask me questions like “Were you good?” or “Did you have to practice a lot?” (The answer to both is yes.) One day he came home and asked me if I knew Michael Jordan, and if I did, could I please have him come over to the house so he could meet him? I told Conner he had already met Michael Jordan in Barcelona when he was little, and that he played with Jordan’s kids during the Olympics. He was satisfied with that answer, and I didn’t hear much about Michael Jordan for a while.

Then Conner came home from school one day and said, “Now what is it you do again, Daddy?” I didn’t know what to tell him. At that time, in 1997, I was supposed to be working for the Celtics in their front office, but I wasn’t doing much at all for them, and I knew I wanted to get out of there. That’s when I realized, “Maybe it’s time to go back to work.” I didn’t want my kids growing up thinking all their daddy did was play golf all day.

At least three different teams had offered me head coaching jobs over the years. Two asked me to keep our conversations private, and since I gave them my word, I won’t say who they are. I will tell you that the Pacers were one of the teams that approached me in 1993, the year they eventually hired Larry Brown. But the timing wasn’t right, again because of my back. I was still in such a bad way that I never considered it.

When my back got stronger, I didn’t miss playing, but I started to miss the competition. I used to turn on the Miami Heat games, but I hardly ever followed the players. I was watching their coach, Pat Riley. Mostly I just watched the decisions he made during the course of the game. He was so excellent at motivating his guys, and it fascinated me. No matter what Miami game you were watching, it seemed like their players were always at the right spot. He spread the court very well, and guys played very hard for him. Even when his players went down with injuries, he always seemed to find ways to win. To me, that’s unbelievable. I found myself keeping track of Miami’s schedule so I could watch all their games.

Pat Riley was, without question, the toughest coach I ever played against. We had some great battles with the Lakers in the eighties, and Riley was one of the big reasons L.A. gave us so much trouble. He really hated the Celtics, and it showed. He was always talking about how much he disliked Boston Garden, because of the dead spots on the floor, or because the locker rooms were too small, or how there was no air-conditioning, and the hot water didn’t work (he used to blame Red Auerbach for that). It seemed like he always had something to say, but you can be sure none of it was by accident. He always had his reasons. He knew how to work the media, the referees, and his opponents.

Of course at the time I would never have admitted that. As a player, I totally dismissed Riley to the media. I never had anything good to say about him, even though in my heart I knew he was a very real threat to our championship hopes. He was one of the few coaches who could actually force me to alter my game.

It seemed like Riley was always making some kind of adjustment to slow me down. I’d score six or eight straight points, he’d call a time-out, and then they’d come out with a different look, hoping to knock me out of my rhythm. Riley gave me all sorts of problems back then, but I never said so. I would never let him know. It was so important during the Finals not to give the Lakers even the slightest edge, so whenever someone asked me about Riley, I’d shrug it off. He was a Laker! There was no way I was going to admit to anyone that he was giving me fits!

Sometimes he’d come out of the time-out and have his guys double-team me all the way down the court. When the game got really tight, Riley would bring Magic Johnson down to double me. It’s one thing having Norm Nixon, who was one of their guards, doubling me. Smaller guys never bothered me, because I could always pass over them. But when Riley sent Magic, who was about 6 foot 9, down there, he was bigger, with longer arms, and it made it tougher for me to see the floor.

Another trick Riley used was to instruct his guys to make me overextend to receive a pass, thinking it would keep me off balance, or away from a more comfortable passing position. Sometimes it was something as simple as pushing me out a little farther away from the basket, or preventing me from operating on one side of the floor. The Lakers were always using someone different on me too. People have told me that it was Riley who got his defensive forward, Michael Cooper, to become totally focused on guarding me. He convinced Cooper that he could make a career out of it, and he was right. Cooper was one of the tougher guys I went up against. I read a story once where Cooper said he used to watch films of me while he was lying in bed with his wife. I believe it. That is the kind of dedication, I’m sure, that Riley demanded of his players.

All I know is Riley’s Lakers teams always had something ready to throw you off. They were constantly changing up. I knew even back then Riley was different.

Then he left L.A., took over with the New York Knicks, and changed styles completely. It’s amazing how everyone thought Pat Riley could only play one way, as a wide-open, run-and-gun type of coach, because the Lakers played that way, and if you got physical with them, they didn’t like that. But once Riley got to New York, he changed. All of a sudden he was the aggressor. He got those guys to play really tough, just like he’s done with the team he has now in Miami. Those guys will go after you, they’ll bump you. It’s a battle every night. It’s a sign of a good coach when you play both ways, both the finesse and the physical game. That’s what I made up my mind I wanted to do if I did get into coaching.

I found myself thinking about coaching more and more. It would have to be the right situation, I was set on that, and the more I thought about it, the more Indiana made sense. It’s not like I grew up a Pacers fan my whole life, because the truth was I didn’t follow pro basketball at all very much as a kid. I was more interested in pro baseball (I was a St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs fan). In a lot of ways, Indianapolis was a million miles away from French Lick and West Baden, where I grew up. We hardly ever went up there—Indianapolis might as well have been a foreign country. Even when I started playing for the Celtics, I didn’t get to know Indianapolis at all, except for the hotels we’d stay in. I always had a lot of people visiting me when we played the Pacers, like my mom, my brothers and my sister, and my friends from home, but it wasn’t like we all went out to dinner or anything. I had a game to play, and they understood that. Sometimes after the game a few of my buddies and me would go to the hotel lobby for a couple of beers, but that was about the extent of it.

There was a time when I thought I might play for the Indiana Pacers, because they had the number one pick in the 1978 draft. I was a junior at Indiana State at the time, and I was eligible for the draft, but my plans all along were to go back to school for my senior year. I got a call from my friend Ed Jukes, who ended up being my financial adviser during my career, and he said he had gotten a call from the Pacers general manager, Bob Leonard, who said Indiana had the number one pick and would like to use it to take me in the draft. Ed told him, “I don’t know, you better talk to Larry about it.” So Leonard, who everyone called Slick, says, “Well, I’d like to sit down with Larry.” So Ed and I drive to Indianapolis and we meet Slick at a hotel room in the Hyatt Regency.

Actually it was a suite, so I guess they were trying to impress us, especially since at that time the Pacers really didn’t have any money. They had paid millions of dollars to come into the NBA from the ABA, and they had no television rights or anything, and I think they only had about twelve people running the whole franchise. In fact, Slick told me up front the Pacers really wanted me to play for them, but they couldn’t pay me very much.

We had been talking a little bit when Slick asked me, “Would you like something to drink?” I asked them what they had, and he said, “We’ve got beer, sodas, whatever you want.” So I said beer. He asked me what kind I wanted and I said, “Heineken!” In college I’d drink all this other stuff, the cheaper the better. I don’t think I had ever had a Heineken in my life. But I figured, hey, why not? They said I could have anything.

It’s funny how things work out, because more than twenty years later, Slick Leonard and I have become good friends. He does the radio for all the Pacers games, so he travels with the team, and nine times out of ten he ends up in my room having a beer with me after the game. Every time I see Slick he starts teasing me. He says, “Some old hillbilly you turned out to be. You came up here and ordered a two-dollar bottle of beer back when just about everything else cost fifty cents.” Slick has a long memory, just like me.

The Pacers never did draft me in 1978, because I told them I had promised my mom I would go back to college for my senior year and graduate. Indiana was in a position at that time where it needed to do something right away. The Pacers couldn’t afford to wait a whole year to get me. And at the same time they were talking to me, they were trying to re-sign one of their free agents, Dan Roundfield. It turns out Slick offered Roundfield $200,000, which was $200,000 more than the Pacers actually had, but Roundfield ended up signing with Atlanta for $420,000.

Having lost Roundfield, and knowing they had no chance of getting me for at least a year, the Pacers ended up trading the number one pick to Portland for some players and the number three pick. They ended up taking Rick Robey, a big center from Kentucky, with the third pick. In fact, the day I went into my interview with Slick he asked me about Robey, who I had played against in some All-Star games, and I told him I thought he’d be a solid NBA player. As it turns out, Robey and I became teammates for four years with the Celtics, and he became one of my best friends. We had a lot of fun running around town together and drinking beers. The year after Robey got traded from Boston to Phoenix, 1984, was the first time I won the MVP. Robey always says I should have given him the trophy, because if he was still in town I never would have won it, and I have to agree with him. I loved Robey, but he wasn’t good for my career.

I was taken in the 1978 draft by the Boston Celtics, with the sixth pick. They knew I planned on finishing my senior year at Indiana State, but they were willing to wait. The Pacers weren’t, and I figured any chance I had of being part of their franchise was gone.

Over the years, Indiana tried to trade for me many times. They approached me about various jobs when I retired. But for whatever reason, nothing ever came of it. But that changed in the spring of 1997, when the Celtics had put me in charge of their coaching search. I called and asked permission from the Pacers to talk to Larry Brown about the opening Boston was going to have at the end of the season. Their president, Donnie Walsh, said yes, then asked me if I would be interested in talking to them about their coaching vacancy if Larry Brown did in fact move on. I told him I’d be willing to listen. The next day Donnie Walsh called the Celtics and asked permission to speak with me. Since I was going to Indianapolis to scout the Final Four for the Celtics, I agreed to sit down with Donnie while I was there to discuss any possible future I might have with them.