Larry Bird

Before the 1986 three-point contest he walked into the locker room, looked at the other seven shooters, and asked who was going to finish second.

He won it. He won the next two as well.

That is the story people tell about him because it is funny, and it undersells what it was actually evidence of: he was the best shooter in the building and everybody in the room, including him, already knew it.

Larry Joe Bird was born on 7 December 1956 in West Baden Springs, Indiana, and grew up in French Lick, a town of about two thousand people.

He went to Indiana State, a school with no basketball history, and took them to an undefeated regular season and the 1979 national championship game — where they lost to Michigan State and a point guard called Magic Johnson.

Boston had already drafted him, sixth overall, in 1978, and waited a year for him to finish college. He was Rookie of the Year in 1980 and Boston improved by thirty-two wins in his first season.

He played thirteen seasons and never played for anyone else.

He won the Most Valuable Player award three years in a row. Only two other players have done that.

The 1986 Celtics — Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Dennis Johnson, Bill Walton off the bench — are on every shortlist of the best teams ever assembled. They went 40–1 at home.

On 12 March 1985 he scored 60 against Atlanta, his career high. The Hawks' bench ended up standing and applauding.

Three championships, in 1981, 1984 and 1986, and Finals MVP in the last two. Five Finals in nine years.

Boston were down one to Detroit with five seconds left in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals, and Detroit had the ball on the sideline.

Isiah Thomas threw the inbounds pass. Bird came from nowhere, took it out of the air on the baseline, and while still falling out of bounds found Dennis Johnson cutting to the basket for the winning layup.

It is one play, it lasted about two seconds, and it is the single most replayed moment of his career.

In 1985 he hurt his back shovelling gravel to build a driveway at his mother's house.

That is the injury that ended him, though it took seven more years. Bone spurs required surgery in 1988–89 and cost him almost the entire season. The discs degenerated. By the end he was lying flat on the floor beside the bench during games because sitting down was worse.

He won Olympic gold with the Dream Team in Barcelona in the summer of 1992 and retired on 18 August, aged thirty-five.

Free throws: 88.6%. Three-pointers: 37.6%, in an era when most teams barely took them.

Pat Riley, who spent the eighties trying to beat him: "If I had to choose a player to take a shot to save my life, I'd take Larry Bird."

Michael Jordan: "Larry Bird is the greatest trash-talker and mind-game player of all time."

Magic Johnson: "Larry, there will never, ever be another Larry Bird."

The scouting report on him, which every opponent had and none of them could use, was that he was slow and could not jump. Both were true. He was a six-foot-nine forward with ordinary athleticism in a league that was getting more athletic every year.

What he had instead was a shot that went in from anywhere, hands that were better than anyone's at his size, and an understanding of where the ball was going to be that made the physical limitations irrelevant. Ten rebounds a game and six assists a game from a forward who could not out-jump the man guarding him.

And the talking. He told opponents what he was about to do and then did it, told them where he was going to shoot from and shot from there. Jordan called him the best at it there has ever been, which from Jordan is not a small thing to say.

He and Magic Johnson met in a college final in 1979 and in three NBA Finals after that, and the league they entered in 1979 and the league they left in 1992 are not the same business. Most accounts of how that happened start with the two of them.