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basketball expertise making personnel decisions. I was sure he’d be the one that would win us our next championship—until my back interfered.
    I went into Dave’s office about four months after my first back surgery and told him, “Dave, I don’t think I can go on like this. I’m not the same player I was. I can’t play the way I want to anymore, and I’m thinking I should retire.” He put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Larry, I didn’t come here to throw you a retirement party. I came here to help you win a championship.” He gave me a little pep talk about how special our team was, and how the NBA would probably never see another front line like me, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish again, and then he got into the whole thing about the Celtics tradition and what it meant to the city of Boston, which was why he had given up his job as commissioner of the Big East to take over the Celtics. I’m telling you, Dave was a pretty persuasive guy. He could get you all fired up. I knew he would back me up, whatever I decided, and I guess I didn’t want to let him down. Besides, I agreed with him on one thing: we still had a chance to win a championship. As long as we still had a crack at that, it was going to be hard—impossible, really—for me to give up playing.
    The last championship we won was in 1986. It was a dream season. Everybody played at the top of their games—me, Robert, Kevin, Dennis Johnson, Danny Ainge—and we had a great bench. We also had the two best centers in the league. That was the year Bill Walton played with us, and he was just phenomenal. He is the best passing big man I’ve ever seen, and I marveled at the things he could do, even though his feet were a mess and he wasn’t anywhere near the player he had once been. That didn’t matter on our team. Bill did what he could do, and that was more than enough. But what people tend to forget is that one of the big reasons Walton was able to have that kind of success was because of Robert Parish. Robert was an All-Star center, and he started every game, but there were many times when it was Walton, not Parish, who was on the floor in the fourth quarter. On a different team, with a different guy, that could have caused all sorts of problems. Some players get really protective about minutes, or when they are on the court and how much credit they’re given, but not Robert. He was a true pro. He really didn’t care how much he played, or when, as long as it worked for the team. That’s why that year was so great, because it was all about winning. I’m sure there were some days that Robert wished he was out there, but he would never have said so. I’m sure, also, there were times Robert got tired of all the media attention Bill got—and believe me, it was a lot, which I appreciated, because it took some of the spotlight away from me—but in the end, Robert knew his team respected him, and that’s all that really mattered.
    Those are the kind of things I told my Indiana team when I took the Pacers job. Never mind what the outside world thinks—what do the guys who are on the court with you, day after day, think? Because they are the ones who know whether or not you’ve given them everything you have. I used to laugh when I read things in the paper about how important this guy was to our team, or how that guy wasn’t helping us. Because many times they had it all wrong. Take Greg Kite. He was a center from Brigham Young who got drafted by the Celtics in 1983, and Bob Ryan, a sportswriter for the
Boston Globe,
was constantly killing him. He’d say things like, “He’s a twelfth man that doesn’t belong in the league, this and that,” but what people don’t understand is that most fans only see the games. They don’t see practice. I always thought the practices were so important—I still believe that—to prepare other guys to play. That’s why our 1986 team was so successful. We had Walton going against Parish every day. We had