Patrick Ewing and Larry Bird were both the main men on two iconic Eastern Conference teams during the 80s and the 90s. Bird led the Boston Celtics to multiple championships, cementing his place as one of basketball’s greatest. Ewing couldn’t quite do the same for the New York Knicks, but he gave the franchise his best years and got them closer to winning a championship than they have ever been since.
When Ewing was drafted into the NBA in 1985, he was already an NCAA champion, and the hype around him was massive. He grew up in the Boston area too, playing for the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Massachusetts. So naturally, there was a lot of talk about Bird when Ewing was in high school, and he revealed on the Dan Patrick Show that he didn’t like Bird or the Celtics that much.
Ewing explained that his friends would also talk trash about Bird, specifically his inability to jump high. But all that changed when he got to the league and faced Larry Legend himself, who left him in doubt about his basketball ability.
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“I remember, like I grown up in Boston, people all used to always talk about, ‘he can’t jump, he can’t do this, he can’t do that’. And you know, a lot of my friends was like that. So I got to the league, I called all my friends back up. I said, ‘All that trash you was talking, you need to squash all that.’ This man is great. Whatever you were saying, for a man who can’t jump, he’s demolishing everybody.”
Ewing’s friends aren’t the only people Larry Bird proved wrong, none of his doubters had any ammunition left by the time he was done playing in the NBA. There will never be another like Bird, his swagger, his confidence, and his ability to back all that up have their own special place in the history of the league.
