Larry Bird built his reputation on intensity, preparation and an almost obsessive desire to win. That is part of what made one pregame encounter so surreal for Reggie Miller and Mark Jackson during Bird’s time coaching the Indiana Pacers.
The story, retold by Miller and Jackson on The Mark Jackson Show, began shortly before tipoff. Miller and Jackson were Indiana’s captains, and while the team was going through its layup line, the two realized they needed to ask Bird something before the game. With only a short amount of time remaining, they left the floor and headed toward the locker room to find their coach.
Bird was not in his office. The players were eventually directed toward the shower area, where they expected to find him preparing for the game in some conventional way.
Instead, they turned the corner and saw something neither of them expected.
“We go around the corner, and Larry Legend is sitting in a chair,” Miller recalled. “He’s got a pack of Newports, just smoking away.”
According to Miller, Bird reacted as casually as possible, simply asking the two players what they needed. By that point, Miller and Jackson had effectively forgotten why they had gone looking for him in the first place.
“We’re good coach. Don’t worry about it. We’re good,” Miller remembered them telling Bird.
Bird apparently took the response at face value and told them he would see them on the court in a few minutes. The players walked away stunned.
The moment was especially jarring because of who Bird was to them. Jackson described playing for Bird as an extraordinary experience, noting that he and Miller had grown up admiring one of the greatest players in NBA history before eventually competing against him and then being coached by him. Seeing that same basketball icon sitting in the back of the arena smoking a Newport moments before a game did not fit the image they had carried of him.
It apparently affected them on the court, too.
Miller later joked that he could not make a shot during the first half, while Jackson remembered it as possibly the worst first half the two ever played together as Indiana’s starting backcourt. Neither player told Bird at the time just how much the encounter had thrown them off.
Bird coached the Pacers for three seasons, from 1997 through 2000, taking over a veteran group built around Miller, Jackson, Rik Smits, Dale Davis and Chris Mullin. His approach was famously direct and low-maintenance, and Indiana quickly became one of the Eastern Conference’s strongest teams. Bird won NBA Coach of the Year in his first season and ultimately led the Pacers to the 2000 NBA Finals.
The Newport story offers a very different snapshot of that era. Bird could demand conditioning, accountability and championship-level focus from his players while apparently remaining completely unfazed himself just minutes before tipoff.
For Miller and Jackson, that image never disappeared: two captains rushing off the floor to find their legendary coach, only to discover Larry Bird sitting near the showers, cigarette in hand, looking as relaxed as if there were no NBA game about to begin.
