Dan Shaughnessy book excerpt: The time Larry Bird hustled me out of $160, and other Celtics stories - The Boston Globe

NBA teams on the road in 2021 stay at the Four Seasons, the Ritz, or the nearest available resort. They fly in private jets and consume only the finest wines, meats, and cheeses. They never touch their own luggage and rarely interact with fans or media. They live in a bubble and we’re not talking about the COVID-19 bubble at Disney World in 2020.

In late October 1982, the Boston Celtics, on the eve of their 37th season, checked into a musty Holiday Inn in Richfield, Ohio. Each room featured a color television, air conditioning, and individually wrapped bars of soap only a little thicker than a book of matches. The “mini-bar” was the vending machine near the steamy, rank indoor pool by the lobby bathrooms. The cheap drapes in the rooms fluttered when the wind whipped outside the hotel. Snowflakes sometimes feathered through window seams.

It was here, ahead of the Celtics’ season opener against the Cleveland Cavaliers, that I first had my shot blocked by Larry Bird. Not literally, of course, though Larry would hustle me out of some cash a couple years later during a shooting contest. It was more like a shot across the bow to the new reporter on the beat — and one of the most memorable moments in my nearly four years covering Bird.

In 1982, there wasn’t anyone stalking this joint in search of NBA superstars. Bird’s Celtics were already established as champions and basketball royalty. They’d won the franchise’s 14th banner just 17 months earlier and there was every reason to believe they’d be going back to the finals for several seasons to come. But there were no New England transplants living in Shaker Heights trying to find the Celtics in the dank lobby of the Holiday Inn, no autograph-seeking greenflies. The Richfield Holiday Inn catered to bored businesspeople and convention-goers.

Globe Sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy writes about covering Larry Bird in his upcoming book.

On that night, the Holiday Inn’s restaurant and bar, Barney Google’s, was empty except for Larry Bird and teammate Quinn Buckner, who sat at one end of the bar near the overhead television. The Celtics had held their final practice of the preseason earlier that day just outside Boston before boarding a Northwest Airlines flight to Cleveland.

It had been an emotional week as Celtics players said goodbye to teammates Chris Ford and Eric Fernsten, both members of the 1980-1981 championship squad. Fernsten was a popular, seldom-used big man. Ford was a 10-year veteran who’d played four seasons in Boston. He planned on playing at least one more year, but lost his backcourt job to NBA veteran Buckner, who’d been acquired in an offseason deal with the Milwaukee Bucks.

I’d already made a point to introduce myself to Bird at media day and talked to him in reporter scrums during a preseason that included road trips to San Antonio and Nashville. The young Celtics superstar was shy and abrupt, clearly not comfortable with new people. He endured interviews like a child getting a polio vaccine.

I knew enough not to approach when I saw Bird and Buckner at the bar. I was the new guy. Worse, I was a reporter. They had a lot of catching up to do. Probably swapping Bobby Knight stories. Still, it had been a long day and I was thirsty and had my newspapers to keep me company. I nodded in their direction as I pulled out a stool and took a seat at the loser end of the bar. Buckner nodded back. Bird took a swing from his bottle of Bud and looked straight ahead.

When the barkeep approached, I ordered something for myself and asked him to send a couple of beers to the fellows at the other end. When Buckner and Bird got their beers, Buckner raised his bottle and again nodded in my direction. Still nothing from Larry.

Ten or 15 minutes passed and nobody else came into the bar. Bird and Buckner were safely out of earshot and everything was cool.

Until I blundered.

I haven’t thought about this in almost 40 years and wish I could go back in time and change the moment, but I can’t.

Before I settled my tab and got up to leave, I sent another round their way. It was a moment of nervousness and insanity, violating every social and professional drinking code known to man. My face turns crimson just thinking about it.

At that juncture of my professional life, I’d been around famous athletes for more than seven years. I was neither starstruck nor clumsy around famous people. I was 29, three years older than Bird, for God’s sakes. So how could I have been so ham-handed and stupid?

When the barkeep made the approach with my pathetic offer of another round, Bird shook his head. I cringed. A new writer sending down one beer was suspicious, but tolerable. Offering a second round was a boundary violation. They must have been thinking, What’s this new guy trying to do? Does he think he can buy his way into the inner sanctum?

It was the most humiliating rejection I’d felt since my first high school mixer, when Temple Bruner shook her head after I’d shuffled across the cafeteria floor to ask her to slow-dance to “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Bird was right. I deserved to have my shot blocked. I’d established that the new guy was a tone-deaf weirdo who couldn’t be trusted. The Celtics’ biggest star, predisposed to keep distance from writers, now had good reason to steer clear of me. And the Celtics hadn’t even played their first game yet.

“I can tell you what that was,” Buckner told me 37 years later. “Larry was advanced with his thinking. Was then. Is now. Accepting those beers would make him beholden to you. He didn’t want that to be a debt he’d have to pay if you asked him a question he didn’t want to answer. He wanted to have control.’’

For all of his self-ridicule about being an uneducated hick, Bird would prove to have the best grasp of the reporter-player relationship of all the Celtics players during my time covering the team. He noticed everything, loved gossip, and had a sharp needle. When I appeared in the locker room, pen and notebook ready, he liked to say, “Hey, Scoop — ever notice how quiet it gets in here all of a sudden when you walk in?”

Over time, our relationship thawed. We found common ground in our small-town upbringings, his in French Lick, Indiana, and mine in Groton, Massachusetts.

On an off-night in Milwaukee that season, I wound up drinking with Bird, Buckner, Rick Robey, and M.L. Carr. We talked about growing up in small towns with no stop lights and lots of farms. Bird said all the kids he knew were having sex early in their teens. This must have been a southern Indiana thing — there was none of that in Groton. He told me he wanted to adopt two kids. When Buckner interrupted our conversation, Bird giggled and said, “Hey, Bucky. I’m telling my life story here.”

He said his high school issued varsity players one pair of sneakers before the start of the season and another pair before the tournament in February. Converse All Stars. White high-tops. The best high school basketball shoe ever made.

Those were the basketball shoes of my bench-warming varsity days. I told Bird about the magical Groton High gym only a half mile from my house.

“Same with us,” he said. “There was one night when I had a helluva game going. I had 30-something points in the first half and people were thinking I was going to break the Orange County record. My dad was at home. He didn’t go to many games. Well, my uncle called him at halftime and said, ‘You’d better get down here. Your boy is going to do it tonight.’ We didn’t have no car, but he walked over. I ended up with 54 points and 38 rebounds.”

Imagine living a half mile from the high school gym — having a son as good as Larry Bird — and not bothering to leave the house for a home game.

When our hefty hotel bar tab landed on the table, I reached for my wallet, but Bird said, “I got this, Dan.”

It was like witnessing a total eclipse of the sun.

Shaughnessy, who was nicknamed “Scoop” by players, covered the Celtics as the Globe’s beat reporter at the height of the team’s stellar run in the mid-1980s. He can be seen to the right of Danny Ainge wearing glasses.Lipofskyphoto.com

In the mid-1980s, on nights when the Celtics played games at the Boston Garden, Bird would get to the gym early to work on his shooting. His game-night partner was assistant equipment manager Joe Qatato, also known as Joe Q, or Corky. Joe Q didn’t ask anything of Bird, which made him a Larry favorite. Bird kept Joe Q’s high school football photo in his locker — a grainy image in which the balding Qatato had a full head of hair.

Hours before every game at the Garden, Bird and Joe Q could be found on the parquet for 20 minutes of perimeter shooting. There were no fans and early-arriving media members knew to leave them alone. Anybody watching could log Bird making 15 or 20 consecutive medium-range shots. If Larry missed, he’d blame the Garden’s bull gang.

“If the basket was straight, that shot would have been nothing but net,” Bird would tease after a rare miss.

I was early to the Garden for every home game and knew enough to leave Larry and Joe Q alone. My press row seat was about 10 chairs down from the Celtics bench. During his late afternoon routine, Bird occasionally wandered toward my workplace to gossip or break chops.

In one instance when he was approaching an NBA record for consecutive free throws made, he came over to me and asked, “What you working on tonight, Scoop?”

“I’m working on your free throw streak for our early edition,” I told him. “Don’t make me look bad by missing one. My story will look dated and stupid if you miss.”

“Don’t worry about that, Scoop,” he said before going back to his pre-game drill.

In the first half of that night’s game, Bird went to the line for two free throws. After he drained the first attempt, he turned to his right and winked at me before making the second.

That was Larry in a nutshell: the embodiment of confidence, and always playing a game within the game.

In 1985, Bird would open up to me during an interview at the Richfield Holiday Inn — the scene of my ham-handed attempt to buy him a beer. He was about to win another MVP and my boss wanted a 3,000-word profile to set up the playoffs and the inevitable finals rematch with the Lakers. I brought a bucket of ice and a couple of Cokes from the hotel’s first floor vending machine and pulled up a chair in Bird’s hotel room while he stretched across his bed, looked at the ceiling, and talked about his humble roots and rise to stardom.

“I really don’t need anyone to build my ego,” Bird said. “When I’m home in Boston, I want to go out and eat, pay my bill, and get the hell out. Back in French Lick, I don’t have those problems, and that’s why I go back there. It’s the same with nice cars, Mercedes and all that. I can’t see putting $50,000 or $60,000 into a car when our house growing up was worth $10,000. I just can’t buy that. And clothes never did catch my eye. I never really enjoyed ‘em. I always wore what I felt comfortable in. I’ll wear pretty much anything if I get it for free.

“When I was at [Indiana] State, finishing to get my degree, they had me teaching special needs kids in a high school. That was tough. It gave me a lot of respect for people who do that.

“I thought I’d wind up being a construction worker, pouring concrete. I wasn’t very good at shop in school, but I’d been around construction. As far as basketball goes, I just wanted to be the best player on my high school team.”

Bird led Boston to three NBA championships and picked up three consecutive MVP awards during the ’80s.John Tlumacki/Globe staff / File

During the 1985 Eastern Conference Finals against Philadelphia, Bird’s ever-crooked right index finger was newly mangled and swollen.

The day before Game 5, Bird practiced with his right hand taped in a web-like fashion. His ring and pinky fingers were wrapped together, as were his middle and index fingers. At the end of practice, he stopped on his way to the locker room and took questions.

“Larry, you can’t play in a playoff game with your hand taped like that, can you?” I asked.

“You never know,” he teased. “It’s a different feeling. I don’t like anything taped because then it just doesn’t feel like it usually does. It’s difficult to shoot when you have something on your hand. Although I don’t think Greg Kite has anything to worry about. He could wear a cast.”

“But seriously,” I pushed. “You’re not going to tape it like that for the game tomorrow, are you?”

“Scoop, I could tape my whole hand up and make more shots than you.”

“Well, yes, that may be true, but let’s talk about tomorrow night and the playoff game.”

It was too late. He wasn’t letting this go.

“No, Scoop, let’s go for it,” he insisted. “You and me. I’ll tape my whole hand up. One hundred free throws. Five dollars a throw. We’ll see who can shoot free throws with tape on his hand.”

“You’re gonna tape all four fingers and your thumb?” I stuttered.

“That’s right, all five wrapped up and I’ll still make more shots than you. What do you say, Scoop?”

I quickly did the math in my head. Worst case: I miss 100 and he makes 100 and I’m out $500, plus the humiliation. But I’m a good free throw shooter and he’s going to have trouble with this and it will make for an easy off-day story to set up Game 5. Maybe I can even get the boss to forgive any losses.

“You’re on,” I told him.

Shoot for money.

Bird got a roll of tape and wrapped a long piece around the four fingers of his right hand, then folded the fingers over his thumb and wrapped another piece of tape over his balled fist. I inspected his hand and it looked like he was wearing a soft cast. He would have to shot-put his free throws.

We agreed on three warm-up shots, followed by 10 sets of 10. We would rebound for each other.

“You want to go first?” he asked.

Yeah.

“You don’t like the pressure, do you?” he laughed.

I made 6 of 10 in my first round and felt pretty good about it. When Bird stepped to the line and hit 6 of 10 with his shot-put motion, I felt even better.

In round two, I made six again. Larry made seven. As we switched places for the third round, he said, “You owe me five bucks.”

I made seven in my third round. When Bird drained his first attempt in round three, I heard him say, “I got this figured out.”

And he did. Swish. Splash. Zing. He started making all of them.

“Couldn’t you at least hit the rim?” I asked, not having to move to collect one made shot after another. This must have been what it was like when little boy Larry Bird rebounded for big brother Mark on the court across from the laundromat in French Lick.

Larry was in my head when I went back for round four. Suddenly I was standing at the free throw line in December of 1970, while Littleton fans jeered after I back-rimmed the first of two late-game misses.

At the end of five rounds my tab was up to $45.

“How about calling it a day? I offered.

“Give me $45, plus $25 for a buyout, and we’ll stop now.”

Sheesh. He must have done this before. I was getting hustled by one of the great hustlers of all time.

I foolishly turned down the buyout and the second half of the competition is a blur. I was Beezer Carnes. I saw $5 bills flying out of my hand every time I released a shot. I expected Jack Nicholson to pop up from under the floor and give me the choke sign.

The worse I got, the better he got. Bird made 46 of his last 50. He made 73 of 80 after figuring it out in the first two rounds. He made 86 of 100 free throws with a taped fist. I made 54.

“You owe me $160,” he said.

At the time, Bird was in the golden days of his three-year MVP reign, and his relationship with the press was more relaxed. In his early Boston days, Bird had fumed when newspaper or magazine articles detailed his failed first marriage, his daughter from that marriage, and his alcoholic dad’s suicide. He seemed at peace with that by 1985.

“The only thing I hate now is when they want me to talk about injuries,” he said. “Other than that, I really don’t care what’s written if it’s the truth.”

We were going to put that one to the test before the summer was over.

Dan Shaughnessy is a Boston Globe sports columnist. This story has been adapted from “WISH IT LASTED FOREVER” by Dan Shaughnessy. Copyright © 2021 by Dan Shaughnessy. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @dan_shaughnessy.