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Bob Cousy, the smoothest passer basketball had ever seen, a man who both guarded and coached Oscar Robertson, says without the merest reservation, "Bird is simply the best who ever played this silly game." He includes Center Bill Russell, Cousy's Boston teammate, whose presence had the most to do with the Celtics' eleven National Basketball Association championships in 13 years. By basketball's nature, it is fundamentally a pivotman's game, the expected province of the Los Angeles Laker Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the Philadelphia 76er Moses Malone, but Forward Bird forwardly deposed Malone as the league's MVP last season after placing second three straight years. Another incongruity, a slightly troubling one, has to do with the fact that nine black men and Bird started the last All-Star game. Granting it is unseemly, is it even conceivable that the best basketball player in the world is white? "It's weird," agrees Marques Haynes, the old Fabulous Magicians barnstormer, a neutral expert, "but it's true."
Not merely white, Bird is a paler shade of paste. As a moment of silence descends over him at the foul line, a youthful voice calling out from a courtside row can be heard in the mezzanine: "Larry Bird, why are you so white?" Bird laughs later. "It's amazing. I guess I'm a white superstar in a black man's game, but it's open to all colors." Sometimes from exertion he turns a flamingo shade of pink. Perching on one leg at nearly every pause in the game, he compulsively rubs and preens the tops and bottoms of his feet with both hands, an interesting reaction to a confessed sense that he is slipping, when he is not. All over Boston, kids are doing it.
When the old Detroit Pistons star George Yardley, 56, acknowledged recently that he never would have been able to play professional basketball as it is practiced today, the two-hand set shooter Bob Davies, 65, wisely consoled him: "You can only be a little bit better than your competition." Gretzky and Bird could use each other for competition. Some day they will be explained by the numbers, but the statistics will be as unreliable as Babe Ruth's. "It wasn't just that Ruth hit more home runs than anybody else," observed Red Smith, who rode trains with Ruth and felt no need to exaggerate his ample stature. "He hit them better, higher, farther, with more theatrical timing and more flamboyant flourish. Nobody could strike out like Babe Ruth. Nobody circled the bases with the same pigeon-toed mincing majesty."
When a grandfather some day starts to describe Gretzky and Bird, will he begin with all of the things they could not do, and then wonder? Is it that Gretzky knew precisely where his teammates were heading, or did he put the puck in a place that made them proceed there? Somewhere far below Wilt Chamberlain in points and Robertson in assists, Bird should be just a respectable presence on all of the lists. But two men in one class are too few for a list. Anyone who really wants to know why they were the best will have to have seen them.