You first see Larry Bird’s jumper up close in December 1984 at the Omni pregame shootaround. Bigger, blonder than on TV, he drains shot after shot, swish after swish. You strain on tiptoes, age eight, and your father scoops you up and sets you on his shoulders and wraps his hands around your ankles. Not all swishes are equal. Some swush as if Bird has spotted a bull’s-eye within a bull’s-eye.
You live in Atlanta as Hawks fans, but your dad grew up south of Bird in New Albany, Indiana. He’d trained at various points to be a pastor, lawyer, and professor, but instead of a congregation, court, or classroom, he has you for an audience. Together, you share Larry Bird. Each morning, he recounts Bird’s box scores, and the digits spin through your school days. He tags tales of Bird with the refrain that Larry Bird was once a garbage man, lacing our official record with this article of faith. A god? Swish swish swush. A garbage man. With each shot Bird takes at the Omni, your dad squeezes your flesh hard enough to leave a mark.
You’ll never get closer to Bird, the north star of your youth, but he’s present in every debate and stretch of silence with your dad. This is true even on that December night in 1991 when your world stops, spins off its axis, and leaves you on a sidewalk seeing stars. He could not catch you then, for there are places the child must go where the father cannot follow. Your dad pointed beyond Bird to the unfinished project of America. It wasn’t a lesson you wanted. It required vision. To see the whole floor. To recall the game’s one time greatest player, who hitched home after twenty-four days at Indiana University to work as a garbage man. You didn’t want a lesson. You wanted to beat your old man in one-on-one and he would not, under any circumstance or weather, yield.
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