Painfully shy with the press, noticeably unsettled by prolonged ovations, Bird carried himself like a savant of sorts, someone blessed with prodigious gifts for basketball and little else. This was a man who didn’t mind that one of his nicknames was “the Hick from French Lick.” We assumed that he was dumb, that he couldn’t express himself, that he didn’t really care about the fans, that he just wanted to be left alone. This changed near the end of Game 7 of the Eastern Finals, the final act of a remarkable comeback trilogy against Philly.
