Larry Bird was my favorite basketball player as a kid. I liked him so much I read his autobiography, “Drive,” and did a book report on it for school. I suppose I felt some kinship with the kid from French Lick, Indiana, who led an iconic basketball franchise to glory.
Now, I wasn’t near the gym rat that Bird was, but I did spend a fair amount of time shooting hoops. Growing up on the farm, a trip into town to the gym wasn’t always feasible. So my dad poured a concrete pad above the corrals that measured maybe 20 feet by 20, and planted a basketball hoop at one end. Back when he had been playing ball at the seminary in the early ’60s, there hadn’t been a three-point line, and it didn’t occur to him to make the pad big enough for one. So I used to stand in the gravel beyond the concrete to take threes like Larry Legend. An airball meant chasing the basketball into the weeds, so you had to be serious to take that shot. A really wild shot meant the ball rolled into the corral, where cattle regularly did what cattle do, and your ball might get smeared up in a cow patty.
That wasn’t the only hazard to playing ball on an outdoor court on the high plains. The puncture vines we knew as “goatheads” grew in abundance in the gravel barnyard. The only way to keep them back was hand-to-hand combat armed with a hoe. But there they grew in abundance and usually gained the upper hand as summer progressed. So if you weren’t on point with your rebounds, the ball would end up in the goatheads and you’d be pumping up a flat ball.
Also, the court was directly across the way from the chicken coop. The chickens had the run of the barnyard, and from time to time one of the critters would answer nature’s call on my basketball court. Sure, I might have cleaned up the constant mess before shooting hoops or, as young boys are wont to do, I would skip that part and seek to dribble around the droppings. This is the farm boy way to improve your ball handling skills.
All this was going on while Larry Bird led the Celtics to glory. The farm was a long, long way from the Garden, so I never got to see him play, but I did follow his exploits in the paper and then went out to imitate him in the barnyard. So you’d think after all of this practice with farm-grown hazards, I’d have developed some Larry-like skills. Not so much, unfortunately. Like Larry, I was pretty slow afoot but unlike my hero, I did not have a killer jump shot. Nor did my practice on gravel-based three-pointers translate to the hardwood. In high school, I made the freshman squad and then somehow squeaked onto the sophomore team. I played sparingly but mostly I was just happy to be there. A week before tryouts my junior year, the varsity coach called me in and asked if I had considered training for spring track that winter instead of basketball. Message received, coach.
And it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I finally made it to the Garden. I took my son because why should he have to wait a lifetime? My previous experience of the Garden consisted of a quick glance at the façade from Interstate 93 while trying to not get killed getting onto Storrow Drive. I confess I thought I was going to get to see that famous old parquet floor; somehow I missed the memo that it had been torn up back in 1999. But that was the only disappointment I experienced. The whiz bang light show, the thumping music, the superhuman exertions of the athletes, the nonstop action of the game itself … what a show! And there in the rafters hung the banners Larry Legend helped win.
I pointed this out to my son, who nodded dutifully at the history lesson but was vastly more interested in the modern-day Celtics, busy trouncing Detroit out on the court. A ball player himself, my son likes to shoot the threes like the NBA stars. He has only the slightest inkling who Larry Legend is and he’s never enhanced his dribbling skills by dodging chicken droppings. The game moves on, as they say. And as for me, well, I’m still just happy to be here.
Email Court Merrigan at court.merrigan@gmail.com with ideas for future Marblehead First Time columns.
Court Merrigan
Wyoming transplant Court Merrigan is a new Marblehead resident. His column “My Marblehead First Time” appears regularly in the Current.
