HEARTLAND

A rough route to hoop fame.

O’Brien follows up his top-notch Pete Rose biography, Charlie Hustle (2024), with another sturdy portrait of a Midwestern sports legend. His protagonist declined to be interviewed, but he’s gamely tracked down most everyone around Larry Bird during his storied college career. Though chapters on Bird’s early struggles would’ve been stronger with his voice, this is a smart, well-paced narrative of his Indiana State University team’s rise from basketball obscurity to the 1979 Final Four, where his showdown with Michigan State’s Earvin “Magic” Johnson boosted the sport’s profile and profitability. Bird overcame a lot to get there. As a kid in tiny, memorably named French Lick, Indiana, Bird’s father, a war veteran and a heavy drinker, killed himself when Bird was a teen. He agreed to play for Bobby Knight’s powerhouse Indiana University squad but soon quit, apparently overwhelmed by the big campus. O’Brien’s interview with one of Knight’s 1970s players informs a poignant image—Bird arrived with almost nothing to put in his dorm room closet. Months later, Bird was employed as a laborer when, in a scene worthy of a rags-to-riches movie, a persuasive Indiana State coach found him and his grandmother at a laundromat. O’Brien’s Bird practices his jump shot in the wee hours and shuns reporters. He was described in the press as a “Great White Hope” figure in what “was seen by millions of Americans as a Black game,” O'Brien writes. The Bird vs. Magic ’79 title tilt has been exhaustively analyzed, and O’Brien wisely keeps his game account brief, with gratifyingly close attention to Xs and Os. Throughout, his journalistic legwork yields colorful specifics, as when Bird chats with a cheerleader about “one of his hobbies: squirrel hunting.”

Expertly told, a star athlete’s origin story reveals that his life might’ve taken a different turn.