WHERE LEGENDS BEGIN POOR

About this book

In the winter of 1974, Larry Bird — the boy who would become the greatest basketball player many had ever seen — was driving a garbage truck through the frozen streets of French Lick, Indiana, and wondering if that was all his life was going to be. He had walked away from Indiana University. He had walked away from Bobby Knight. He had walked away from everything the world had decided his future was supposed to look like, and come home to the poorest county in Indiana, where the hills were beautiful and the options were not, and where a young man with no plan and no money and a father newly in the ground could disappear very quietly and very completely if nobody reached out a hand in time. Two men reached out. Bill Hodges was an assistant coach at Indiana State University in Terre Haute — a school so overlooked that its basketball arena could not fill its own seats, a program so far outside the national conversation that recruiting Bird felt less like a strategy and more like a prayer.