Larry Bird’s trash-talking lore is the stuff of legend and few in NBA history have ever matched or come close to matching him. Of course, at the height of the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, it was Bird’s opponents in the Purple and Gold who received the lion’s share of it. Michael Cooper, a member of the Showtime Lakers of the ’80s, recently revealed one such situation where Bird made him and his teammates appear foolish.
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It was a championship game, and Bird was at his usual best, Cooper recalled on VladTV. He told Cooper how he was “going to wear his a** down”.
Telling those guarding him what he was going to do was a signature Bird move, and most of the time, he got it right. So, Cooper prepared himself for something, only for Bird to flip the switch and proceed to do something completely different. It caught Cooper and the Lakers off guard.
“So, I’m like, what, okay. I’ll get in my best defensive stance. He comes down on this side, and he comes off, and he comes off Robert Parish, and I’m trailing him, Kareem’s [Abdul-Jabbar] trailing him, and this is the play we had all talked about,” Cooper said.
“He comes up, he [Parish] throws Larry the ball, he catches it, he goes up in the air, I’m right there, I’m about to push this right down your throat,” he continued. “Kareem jumps up, and our hands are out… and I don’t know how this guy got that ball to Parish.”
It was top-tier deception. Everyone on the Lakers, even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, thought he would shoot and set up their defensive structure accordingly. Why? Because Bird said he would. Sadly for the Lakers, the Celtics icon was lying, and the play ended with Parish dunking the ball.
Bird, afterwards, started laughing. “He looks at me. I told you, motherf******,” Cooper recalled him saying, letting out a laugh himself.
It’s been decades, so it’s natural to remember this as an eventful incident in their glittering careers. But back when it did happen, Cooper and co. felt deflated. “You just are humiliated by that, because it’s what he says. He’s gonna tell you what he’s gonna do. And he goes out and does it…”
Cooper concluded by revealing that it was the last time Bird trash-talked to him, because he understood that they would plan differently. But he did acknowledge that Bird was the ultimate trash-talker.
