>>>Now I have Michael in my head. Here is another video. He was so scarily good I don't even mind the rap. He was not of this planet.
>>>
>>>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26K6HU6Cz_E>>
>>I agree. He may even have been almost as good as Larry Bird. ;)
>
>Blasphemer! ;-)
>
>Bird was great, no question, but Michael had moves he couldn't even dream of making.
No. It's just that Michael looked graceful doing them. Bird looked like Ichabod Crane on stilts when he made some of his shots. But he could make shots from every impossible angle and body position. The guy was a basketball freak.
>
>I did get at least one useful thing from Larry Bird: his unorthodox jump shot. When he was playing I still played a lot of hoops and was a decent enough pickup game player. (I don't claim to have been great, just better than the average bear and able to hold my own against good players). I noticed that Bird shot his long distance jumper exactly the opposite way from how it is taught. They teach you to square up to the basket. He turned almost all the way sideways. I tried it and found it a much more comfortable way to shoot. He was one of the best three point shooters in NBA history. He routinely won the three point contest at the All Star Game until he got tired of it. One year he famously showed up in the locker room and said, "Which one of y'all wants to finish second?"
>
>The most amazing thing was he was briefly out of basketball and working as a garbageman. He was good enough in high school to earn a scholarship at Indiana, which at the time was the royalty of college basketball. He freaked out in Bloomington, dropped out, and went back home to French Lick. (I am not making that up). He was one of the guys hanging off the back of a garbage truck, picking up people's trash. Evidently he decided there wasn't enough upside in that career path and reinlisted at Indiana State, which has to be one of the most unlikely teams ever to reach the NCAA finals. (They lost in a classic to Magic Johnson's Michigan State team). The Celtics drafted him and the rest is history.
>
>And passing? No big man (he was 6'9") ever passed like that with the possible exception of Magic. Over the shoulder, behind his head, between his legs. It was like telepathy.
Yep. When you played with Bird, you certainly had to be paying attention.
