Before the championships. Before the mythology. Before Larry Bird became “Larry Legend,” he was a kid from French Lick, Indiana, hauling trash and wondering where his life had gone wrong.
That’s the story author Keith O’Brien tells in “Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird,” set for release March 3 (or 3/3, a nod to Bird’s retired jersey number).
The New York Times bestselling author of “Charlie Hustle” spent years tracking down everyone who crossed paths with Bird during his formative years — players, coaches, staffers, teammates — everyone except Bird himself, who declined to be interviewed.
Despite this, O’Brien didn’t let that stop him from unearthing a narrative that could have ended before it ever really began.
In the fall of 1974, Bird dropped out of Indiana University, walking away from legendary Hoosiers coach Bobby Knight. He returned home to French Lick, a tiny town in the second-poorest county in Indiana, and got a job with the city.
Those miracles came in the form of two men: Bob King, Indiana State University’s head coach with bad knees and assistant Bill Hodges, who understood poverty and being overlooked. In spring 1975, during one of Bird’s darkest chapters, they convinced him to leave French Lick and play for the Sycamores — a program that couldn’t fill its arena.
What followed was basketball wizardry. O’Brien traces the construction of a team built from “castoffs and leftovers, ready to work.” By March 1979, that squad went undefeated in the regular season and captured the nation’s attention, culminating in the NCAA championship game against Magic Johnson’s Michigan State team — a matchup watched by more than 50 million people that would forever change college basketball and the NBA.
O’Brien tilts the camera elsewhere — capturing Bird practicing jump shots in the wee hours, shunning reporters who described him as a “Great White Hope.”
The book also reveals painful truths: Bird’s father, a war veteran, died when Bird was a teen. When Bird arrived at Indiana University, he had almost nothing to put in his dorm room closet.
But most moving is what happened after the Sycamores lost to Michigan State. Five thousand people waited at the airport. Streets were lined as the team drove back to Terre Haute. An estimated 10,000 waited inside the arena.
O’Brien will appear at several Indiana events surrounding the book’s release, including March 4 at the Johnson County Museum of History in Franklin and March 5 at Morgenstern Books in Bloomington.
“Heartland” is available wherever books are sold as early as March 3.
Contact Multimedia Reporter Noral Parham at 317-762-7846. Follow him on X @3Noral. For more news, visit indianapolisrecorder.com.
Noral Parham is the multi-media reporter for the Indianapolis Recorder, one of the oldest Black publications in the country. Prior to joining the Recorder, Parham served as the community advocate of the MLK Center in Indianapolis and senior copywriter for an e-commerce and marketing firm in Denver.
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