Bird Watching Read Free

pain was so intense that I had to stop after about a mile and get out and walk around.
    Somehow I managed to play Game 5 at the Garden. A lot of times I would feel lousy heading into the game, but after Dan worked on me a bit, and all my adrenaline got pumping, I could block it out. I knew I’d pay for it later, but that was later. We beat the Pacers in Game 5 and won the series, but not before I banged my head on the parquet floor chasing after a loose ball. I don’t remember much of it, to be honest, because when they took me into the locker room I was in a daze. But I do remember one thing: after all I had been through with my back, no lump on the head was going to keep me out of the playoffs. I remember sitting in the locker room with our team doctor, Arnie Scheller, and after my head started clearing a little bit, I said to him, “Do I have a shot? Can I get back in there?” He said, “Hey, you’ve done enough. That’s it for you.” So we sit in that training room some more, and I keep hearing the crowd. They’re chanting, “Lar-ry! Larry!” I look at Arnie, and I said, “Aw, hell!” and I get up, I run through that tunnel, back onto the court, and the place goes absolutely nuts. Later, when I got hired by the Pacers, Donnie Walsh said he knew I would play. He said he knew I’d come back, and the place would go crazy, and we’d win the game, which is exactly what happened. Even so, we couldn’t sustain the momentum. We ended up losing to Detroit in six games in the next round, and a couple months after that I had my first back surgery.
    The procedure involved shaving the disc, as well as widening the canal where the nerves that led to my spinal cord sat. I knew the surgery was not going to solve all my problems. In fact, the pain was back within a couple months. Fusion surgery had been an option, but the surgeons warned me that very few professional athletes had ever played again following fusion surgery, and I wasn’t interested in being a guinea pig. The truth? I was just trying to buy myself some time.
    The same day I had my first surgery, I went out and walked ten miles. My surgeon was very optimistic. He said, “You should come back in January and I’ll take another look, but I think you are going to do just fine.” Well, Arnie brought the surgeon to one of our first games of the season. This doc knows nothing about basketball—he’s an old hockey player. He came in after the game and he said to me, “Larry, the way you play this game, you’re not going to last another month. I had no idea you did all this stuff. Hell, you don’t spend any time on your feet.” He looked kind of worried, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was feeling great!
    At the time, we were 28–5, and on our way to the best record in the East at the All-Star break. Not very long after that, I was shooting around before the game, and I turned a little funny, and boom! There goes my back. I couldn’t believe it. I knew right then that was the end of it. I was in and out the rest of the season.
    Once I realized my back was still going to mess me up no matter what, I seriously considered retiring right then and there. Dave Gavitt, who had come to the Celtics in 1990 to run the team, kept talking me out of it. Not too many people can change my thinking when my mind is made up about something, but Dave was different. We hit it off from the first day we met. Dave had a lot of innovative ideas about how to help the team, and I loved talking about basketball with him. You can tell he was a former coach—he had some really good Providence teams back in the seventies—because of how he approached people. He understood how a player saw the game, and understood that a team needed to have an identity, and that whatever went on in the locker room, or on the floor, was something that should be shared among each other, like a family.
    I was really excited when Gavitt took over as the team’s CEO. We needed someone with his