fighting through injuries

Bird’s legacy was flush with examples of valiant performances while fighting through injuries, including persistent elbow troubles, double bone spurs in his heels (which eventually required surgery), and a chronic back condition that plagued him in the final six seasons of his career.

In 1982, while Bird was vying for a rebound against Milwaukee, he was elbowed by big man Harvy Catchings on the side of his cheek. The pain in his face and his jaw was excruciating. His skull had been depressed by the blow, but Bird refused to come out and finished the game. Afterward, Dr. Silva sent him to the hospital, where doctors drilled a hole in the side of his head and inserted a medical apparatus to pop his zygotic arch back out.

Bird hated sitting out so much that he often didn’t tell his coaches when he suffered an injury. When Dell Curry tagged him with an elbow and fractured his eye orbiter in the mid-eighties, Bird ran around in the second half with double vision.

“I was seeing two baskets,” he confessed. “I had to guess which one to shoot at.”

After the game, when he noticed blood dripping from his nostril, he blew his nose, causing his eye to protrude grotesquely.



When the Game Was Ours, by Larry Bird, Earvin “Magic” Johnson & Jackie MacMullan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009