It is in this little window of time, the fall of 1974 and the early winter of 1975, where I do believe Larry Bird nearly slipped away forever.
You're listening to The Brian D. O'Leary Show, your sanctuary for serious content in an unserious culture.
Welcome back, folks, to the Brian D. O'Leary Show.
That is me.
Today on the show, we have Keith O'Brien.
Keith has written a brand-new book, released as we recorded today, March 3rd, 2026,
entitled Heartland, A Forgotten Place, An Impossible Dream, and The Miracle of Larry Bird.
This is an important book, and as you will see in the interview, it is a subject that we don't hear a whole lot about when we talk about Larry Bird.
It takes place roughly between the years of 1973 and 1979, when Bird was in high school through college.
And we know about that iconic 1979 national championship game between Byrd's Indiana State Sycamores and Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans that really launched the Byrd Magic rivalry.
It launched, without us knowing at the time, relaunched really, the Celtics-Lakers rivalry.
It would rejuvenate the NBA when both of these fellows turned pro.
It provided real fertile ground for the next generation of stars or the generation just after, including Michael Jordan.
and the NBA as we knew it in the 1980s and 1990s
and really led to the Dream Team,
which the two iconic stars on that team were Bird and Magic.
And even though they were both out of the NBA at that point,
Bird had just retired and Magic had retired for the first time a year earlier.
We also, in the book, for those of you who are watching on video, we talk a little bit about Sports Illustrated.
And in my office, well, my old office, I had all sorts of old Sports Illustrated covers that I've kept over the years.
And this one is from, oh gosh, 40 years ago, 1986, not quite 40 years ago, June 9th.
NBA showdown. Larry Bird leads the Celtics against the Rockets in the NBA finals.
That was the year the Rockets beat the Lakers, surprisingly.
Next, I've got a 1988 cover. The legend lives on. Larry with the Kareem goggles.
That moment in time where he looked a little too close to the rival from the Lakers.
next
Bird struggles a little bit in 89
what's wrong Larry
Bird is struggling and so are the Celtics
but interesting
same time that was in
December
of 89
and Mark Langston signed a big
contract I believe it was
with the
California Angels and then
Nadia Comaneci escaped
to the United States from communist
Romania, I believe it was.
It was an interesting story I remember reading.
Speaking of the impact of Sports Illustrated at the time.
Finally, I have this one.
Is there Life After Larry from March 23, 1992?
Bird is about to retire from the NBA, about to go onto the roster of the Dream Team,
which we didn't know a whole lot about at that time.
But eventually he becomes one of the most iconic stars on that team,
even though he didn't play a whole lot.
But it says, is there life after Larry for the Celtics?
With Magic gone and Bird going, the NBA goes into its transition game.
Interesting foreshadowing to what would become of the NBA.
The NBA continued on quite strongly in the 1990s.
and we can quibble about its impact today.
It's probably more popular than ever and a gross market share,
but the cultural impact of the NBA really was bird and magic.
And one thing we did not get into in the interview
was the foreshadowing that David Halberstam talked about in his iconic book called The Breaks of the Game,
which chronicled the Portland Trailblazers after their championship season of 1977.
And then the aftermath of that and Bill Walton leaving the Portland Trailblazers.
Eventually, he would join Larry Bird with the Celtics, notably in their 1986 championship season, winning the sixth man of the year.
Anyway, the late Bill Walton, supporter of the former version of this show, which we called Sportlanders, the podcast.
We thank Bill for his support there.
The late Bill Walton.
Rest in peace.
However, this book is about Larry in his college days.
Again, we don't hear a whole lot about what happened in his college days other than they had a phenomenal 1979 team that was undefeated leading up to the championship game against the Michigan State Spartans, led by, of course, Urban Magic Johnson.
We dive into it a little bit.
We got a short interview with the author Keith O'Brien coming up.
He's been making the rounds for his book coming out.
again on March 3rd. It's called Heartland, A Forgotten Place, An Impossible Dream,
and the Miracle of Larry Bird. Atria Books, March 3rd, 2026. And we'll have all that information
and link to buy it on our show notes. And appreciate you folks listening. Here's Keith O'Brien.
Welcome back to Brian DeLeri's show. We've got Keith O'Brien with us today. Keith,
Today, as we're recording, it's March 3rd, 2026.
He's got a new book out called Heartland, A Forgotten Place, An Impossible Dream, and The Miracle of Larry Bird.
Atria Press?
Atria Books, yes.
Atria Books.
All right.
So, Keith, welcome.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, big day for you today.
I know you're making the rounds and we've got a little Kermit in the voice, but it's okay.
I do.
I apologize.
Yeah, it's okay.
It all works.
So I wanted to get to something real quick before we talk Larry Bird, because as I was telling the audience before, I've got Larry Bird, Sports Illustrated covers all over my office.
And now they're taken down.
I moved offices.
But regardless, you worked in Oregon for a short bit.
I am I'm from Oregon.
So I just wanted to get your perspective on on Oregon.
And I think you were down in Salem, Willamette Valley, farmland, relatively similar latitudinally to French Lick, where Larry Bird's from.
Yeah, that job in Salem was feels like a lifetime ago.
it was one of my first newspaper jobs at the Salem Statesman Journal.
Okay. I was going to ask Statesman Journal. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we, uh, sad to see you go,
but that was a long, like you said, a long time ago and, uh, I'm no longer there right now either.
So, uh, but I, I am an Oregonian at heart. So I loved, I loved Oregon. It was a great place.
It is a great place. And, uh, I would have stayed out there if I could have gotten a,
a bigger job and then state and state and state and state so you've moved on uh to new orleans
was it new orleans after salem and then on to boston for the globe okay and your your job
essentially uh was to write feet you know your feature writer and then that has moved into
several books now. The one before this was about Pete Rose. Very interesting character-wise.
But tell me, tell us a little bit more about that career arc.
Well, yeah. So, I mean, I have moved up through newspapers, left Globe about, I guess, 15 years
ago now, and started writing books, doing radio and NPR magazine stories. And, you know,
even when I was at newspapers, you know, I was interested in narrative, narrative, nonfiction,
long form narrative. And, you know, books, I think are the, you know, the greatest way to
spin out that particular medium. So I've been, you know, really happy, you know, with work I've
been able to do. Just happy to keep the word factory here open, Brian. And I'm really happy
too with my new book out today.
Yeah yeah let dive into it a little bit So you mentioned you worked for The Globe for a little bit and I used to get the Globe every day I was a student at Boston College And I got there a little bit after Larry Bird retired from the NBA But it was one of these neat things where you drive around like some relatives out there that Larry Bird house And it like what It just a normal house in a neighborhood Just a normal guy
And, you know, Bird was a hero of mine growing up.
But the interesting thing about your book, Keith, that I think is a real interesting piece of the puzzle to this whole dynamic of how the NBA eventually takes off.
And you don't particularly address it in the book, but it's this lost chapter of Larry Bird's life.
We know all about the 1979 championship game, undefeated Indiana State versus Michigan State and Magic Johnson that, you know, takes on a life of its own later.
But we don't know a lot about Byrd's college years and what they were really like.
And so you this is what the book is about.
And it starts out very, I thought, very interesting.
Toward the beginning.
You talk about Larry Bird's time at Indiana University as a Hoosiers basketball player that people might know about, but he left.
He left very soon, and it's talked about in basketball circles, but I thought there was a really straightforward explanation in your book why he left.
Tell us a little bit.
Well, you know, yeah.
So Heartland is, you know, an origin story.
It's the story of Larry Bird's rise in rural Indiana in the 1970s.
And it is the story of the enduring miracle of his 1979 Indiana State team, because that miracle does still endure.
You know, before all that, as you indicated, Brian, Larry gets an opportunity to play at Indiana for Bobby Knight.
It was the dream, of course, of any high school basketball player in Indiana in the 1970s.
But it might not have been Larry's dream.
You know, everybody in town in French Lick, West Baden, where he grew up, wanted him to sign with Indiana.
Larry does that.
But, you know, Bobby Knight doesn't really know Byrd.
You know, he doesn't make an effort, doesn't know who he is at all as a person.
And Larry at this time in his life is, you know, coming out of a troubled home, coming out of one of the poorest communities in the state of Indiana.
You know, he arrives on campus in Bloomington in August 1974 with $75 in his pocket.
That money is soon gone.
You know, Larry feels poor. He feels alone. And he's not getting any love from the members of his new team, that Bobby Knight Hoosier squad. That's a really good team, Brian. In the next two years, they're going to lose like one game without Larry. You know, they don't need him. He feels that.
And, you know, I have new reporting in the book about, you know, some of his last scrimmages there on campus before he walked into the office of assistant coach Dave Bliss and said he was going home and did just that.
Hitchhiked back to French Lick.
Yeah. And then he hung around town, his hometown, and he eventually got work as a garbageman, trash collector.
He loved it. And he wasn't. It sounded like. He didn't really know where his life was headed at this point. He loved basketball, but he didn't necessarily have this dream about being a college basketball player, pro basketball player. He just loved the game.
yeah it is in this little window of time the fall of 1974 and the wind early winter of 1975
where i do believe larry bird nearly slipped away forever you know uh he comes back people
are disappointed that he's there including his own mother larry doesn't understand why people
are disappointed as he said you know uh he wasn't looking to be a a college star uh he if he didn't
want to do anything if it wasn't going to make him happy. And, you know, he briefly enrolls at
vocational school in West Baden Springs. It's a little town contiguous to French Lick. He drops
out there, doesn't last there, and is soon, you know, working for the street department,
fixing the roads, collecting trash. And, you know, by February 1975, Bird is effectively playing
pick up basketball. I mean, in a men's league, it was called the industrial league. It was
a workaday guys who had mortgages and wives, children and day jobs.
But this is Indiana too. And this is no ordinary men's league really. I mean, these are
Indiana's culture of basketball is insane. And so these, these plumbers so-called as we,
the guys would like to call them today. These are actual probably plumbers that can play ball.
Well, yeah, some of them are our former college stars who are now, you know, playing in their
20s. Others were older. You know, one of the guys on Larry's team was in his 30s. He was a social
studies teacher at Springs Valley High School where Larry went to school. So it's a mixed bag,
You know, but my point is, you know, by that point in time, you know, he has drifted to the edge of the basketball map.
Nobody is looking for him.
There is not a single story being written about him.
He is gone.
Yeah.
And then and then it develops.
And I was going to say when I was reading this book, Keith, it read like a novel to me.
This is you could have changed the names and it would have made a great story.
I mean, the conclusions, you know, with what we know, you know, who the guys are now and that all that stuff would have been had to had to been changed a bit.
But man, the story alone read like a novel.
You could like I said, you could probably change the names and it'd be an amazing story.
But it's Larry Bird, the iconic one of the iconic players of entire basketball history.
And I was thinking about the hero's journey a little bit.
Did you frame it this way?
Like Larry Bird as the hero, you know, Joseph Campbell, I guess.
But, you know, departure, initiation, return.
Did you frame the story this way or did it just turn out that's Larry's life?
You know, I didn't frame it that way exactly.
I do agree with you that this story, Larry Bird,
and then the Indiana State basketball team in 1979 is collectively one of the great underdog stories
of the past 50 years. And, you know, as I wrote the book, I did think about Bird in one way.
You know, I thought about him as like a son, a son that exists in this universe. And, you know,
this is a story of a team, a time, a place. It's bigger than Larry, but Larry is that son.
And these planets, you know, are all orbiting him, you know, in this in this little window of time where everything's going to change for all of them.
Yeah. And let's talk about, well, the participation you got from a lot of the ex-players and ex-coaches is remarkable. Their reflection on what this period of time meant to them, the aftermath.
I mean, really, Larry Bird is the only person that really makes it in the pros after Indiana State.
But you didn't get to talk to Larry Bird.
You talked to everybody outside.
How did that go?
Did you try to approach Larry Bird?
Did you try and do this without Larry's input at all?
Or how did that work?
No, I mean, of course, I want to talk to Larry.
I want to talk to everybody and certainly want to talk to the to the person at the center of this narrative, as I just laid out.
So I did try, tried multiple times.
You know, and I'll say this, you know, one thing I've learned over the years, including during the reporting from my book, Charlie Hustle, the book on Pete Rose, is that while it's great to have the participation of the subject at the center of the narrative,
You can often get a more accurate picture by talking to 12, 20, 40, 100 people around that person and get that kaleidoscopic view.
You know, that's what I think I've done here.
And, you know, this is a story that's bigger than Larry.
And, you know, all of these players who were with him on this journey are forever changed by this moment.
You know, they will not be the same when this is over.
Part of the reason is because of Larry. Part of the reason is because of that miracle run in 1979. But all of those guys, you know, were participating.
team yeah and you you see it like you know toward the end the these guys really reflect on what
being on this team meant they didn't really know it at the time and time can change the perspective
and all that stuff but one of the themes that went through the book was that larry didn't talk
to the press in the first place so i didn't you know like no figuring that you didn't sit down
with Larry, that didn't surprise me. He just, he's a shy individual. He was very famous
for a long time And the NBA I think he got probably better and being a coach and an executive he got better with the media but not really And so it didn really surprise me that he didn want to sit down with it with anyone
I mean, he probably didn't care who it was coming at him.
But I think when you talk in the book about why he didn't talk to the press,
most of his career there, certainly his last year at Indiana State,
He was almost a media boycott until the NCAA tournament where he was required, supposedly required, to talk to the press.
And he still didn't really do much of it.
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Thanks again.
You're absolutely right.
There is like a, at times when I was writing this book,
I felt like it was like a meta exercise, a meta moment.
You know, here I am, you know, writing about Larry,
He was, you know, trying to escape the media spotlight at the moment in his life when everybody else would have wanted the media spotlight.
And all these writers coming to Terre Haute at that time, having to write around Larry in order to write the profile that they were supposed to write for the New York Times, the New York Post or Sports Illustrated or Chicago Tribune, whatever.
And here I was, you know, trying to do the same thing in 2026.
Almost a half century later.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
And you mentioned Sports Illustrated.
And, you know, we're roughly the same age.
Not exactly.
But when we came up, I'll speak for myself anyway, Sports Illustrated was the thing.
And Larry Bird was on the basketball preview as a junior, I believe.
and they indiana state you know based on their year before was going to take the world by storm
they started off gangbusters and then fizzled toward the end but read about that in the book
but as far as sports illustrated goes it was the the place to be as a sports fan to get your nose
into that magazine, it has changed almost entirely.
It has virtually no impact today.
And it is crazy to me that almost everything I learned about sports was either from the
local sports page in the Oregonian or from Sports Illustrated and the Sporting News.
And that is not the case anymore.
We can turn to wonderful books like yours to find out these backstories.
Tell us a little more about, you know, if you have any opinion on Sports Illustrated's role in this whole thing.
I mean, Sports Illustrated, as you indicated, that was everything in the 1970s and 1980s.
It was the Bible.
You know, players fell over backwards to be profiled, you know, by the side.
And Bert didn't really seem to care about that either, right?
No, he didn't.
It's an incredible story within the book, you know, that I wanted to write, you know, in an unprecedented way with unprecedented details, because, you know, that photo shoot, which takes place on October 30th, 1977, in a photo studio in Chicago, is going to change Larry's life.
And, you know, Indiana State, the officials there, the coaches, the sports information
director, they know it.
They know this is a life changing moment.
But I'm not sure that Larry did.
You know, he's still quite young.
But what he did know was that he didn't want that spotlight.
He didn't want to talk about things that weren't related to basketball.
And, you know, so I wrote essentially a whole chapter in the book about that photo shoot
in Chicago talking to the last surviving cheerleader who was with him, to the sports
information director who arranged it, and to the photographer himself, a man named Lane Stewart,
who worked for Sports Illustrated in the 1970s. Yeah, shot some iconic photos, iconic covers.
And, you know, Lane Stewart was fascinating in his interview with me. You know, he said that
He had a specific idea for what he wanted to do with Larry, the image he wanted to capture.
But once Larry got there, Lane struggled.
Lane couldn't get what he wanted.
Larry seemed to not be able to do what Lane wanted or he didn't care.
And so Lane really spun his wheels that afternoon for hours and hours trying to get one shot would work.
And that is that iconic photo that's in the book. That's now, you know, a 33 foot mural in Terre Haute, Indiana. Many people have seen it. A red cover with Larry standing in the middle, two cheerleaders flanking him on either side as the cheerleaders hold a finger to their lips as if Larry Bird is a secret.
Yeah. And that was in a day where doing photography like this really up until about 20, 25 years ago, that was a big deal because you got to get all your prints out and go through every print.
And man, he got the one. He got the one that you mentioned. And it's not like these digital photography today where you can just snap, snap, snap, snap and film doesn't matter. You can tweak it and edit it and AI now, you know, you could do anything you want with it.
But it was the one photo, which I thought was very surprising.
And it tells a lot about, you know, again, how iconic Sports Illustrated was and how seriously they took their craft.
And, you know, today, you know, I can't say that much about them.
But so that so that season was the 1977-78 season, if I recall.
After that season, Larry, they get eliminated from the NIT, Indiana State does.
And their team basically turns over once again to this iconic 1978-79 team.
But in that summer, you have an interesting set piece in this book.
Larry is into softball, playing softball with, again, just guys on his town team.
And they go up to a tournament in South Bend, Indiana, and another iconic Indiana college ballplayer is on one of the other competing teams.
That's right. It's a stunning story.
And the player who was on one of the other teams was none other than the quarterback of Notre Dame at the time, a future Hall of Famer himself, multi-time Super Bowl champion, Joe Montana.
and you know Bird loves softball anybody who knows Indiana back in the 70s but even still today
you know softball is a big deal and Larry loved to play he thought of himself as a baseball player
you know he he thought he was good and it's crazy to think that in the late summer of 78
you know at a moment where Larry has already been drafted by the Boston Celtics and already decided
to return to college at a time when he is not going to be paid for that. Not a cent.
You know, Larry is out there, you know, risking injury in a softball tournament up in South Bend,
Indiana. And, you know, Larry Bird's team will win that weekend in South Bend. They're going to
win that state title. And, you know, one of my favorite photos that I dug up in the reporting
for the book is a photograph of Larry Bird on that dusty field holding his trophy as the sun is going
down. You know, the only championship that Larry Bird wins in high school and college is not on a
basketball court. It's out there on the dusty softball fields of Indiana. Right. Yeah, it's wild
too. And then and then I thought it was just curious. I mean, not that it's giving away too
much about the book, but their season ends in 1979 after the championship game in Salt Lake City
against Magic Johnson. Again, iconic, which leads to the, you know, if we had more time, we could
get into that impact on the NBA. I think it's crucial to the whole history of the NBA as we
knew it in the 1980s. But Larry Bird, to finish his college degree, he had to do his student
teaching and he was still student teaching and he took up a job as an assistant baseball coach
for uh the school in Terre Haute and not only that but the baseball coach says Larry
come on and play a game for us and I think he played a two ends of the double header played first base got a couple base knocks RBI all this stuff and and a photo out there I seen of Larry with a big wad of tobacco and playing ball for the Sycamore Baseball Club
And it was wild.
It's crazy.
I mean, yeah, you know, he plays one Saturday afternoon doubleheader with the Indiana State baseball team.
He was good friends with the baseball coach at the time.
And, you know, he is, you know, serving as an assistant coach on that high school team at West Vigo High School, which was the most rural, most remote high school in the Terre Haute School District at the time.
And, you know, I love this scene in the book because it's something that would never happen again today.
Never.
You know, Larry has played in the most watched basketball game of all time.
He could leave right then and go sign with the Celtics, finish out the 79 basketball season in Boston.
Red Auerbach, the president of the Celtics, actually wants him to do that.
Larry Bird decides to stay.
And, you know, he's hitting fungos, you know, to the guys in the outfield and cutting the outfield grass.
He'd love to cut the outfield grass.
And the head coach of the West Vigo team that spring would say that he had the only $3 million lawnmower in America, Larry Bird.
Yeah, wild. And we got a couple more minutes left, looks like it.
So today, as we're recording, is the release date of this book.
And I've had it for a while, thanks to an advanced copy, which is very nice.
But today's March 3rd. And the calendar, it's 3-3.
Was that in Larry Bird's jersey number, of course, is the iconic 33 for both Indiana State and Boston Celtics, not the Olympic team from 92.
But, you know, they didn't have numbers like that then.
But was this was this a intentional release or is that just a happenstance?
I know books come out on Tuesday usually, but it was a happy it was a happy accident.
You know, we wanted to have the book come out around the beginning of March Madness.
and it just so happened that the first Tuesday of March was March 3rd, 3-3.
But maybe there's some cosmic kismet there.
I don't know.
Yeah, I think that you could draw these happy accidents and kismet
through Larry Bird's entire basketball career
because I would say, I would leave you with this.
if he does not play Magic Johnson in that championship game and Magic Johnson and Larry
Bird do not go to the exact teams they go to in the exact year, that ends the Bird Magic
thing. It ends the Celtics-Lakers rivalry that it existed from the 60s on. And it probably doesn't
even usher in this next generation of Jordan. The ground's not fertile enough at that point.
Um, that that's my contention with this old, and I think it's just a lot of happy accidents.
I agree with you. And, and listen, there is an alternative universe where one year earlier,
uh, Larry Berg gets drafted by the Indiana Pacers, the Portland trailblazers or the Kansas
city Kings. You know, I mean, he ends up in one of those markets, uh, and signs there the
following year i mean the whole story is different i agree yeah he would have played magic more and
if he played with portland but uh but they couldn't sign him right that that was that was
thing he wasn't gonna necessarily go to where he wasn't you know really i didn't know i mean
it's just it's just a strange happenstance circumstance and we're i think all as basketball
fans happy that it existed um so keith thanks for your time appreciate it and under the
weather a little bit, but, um, for folks who haven't read Heartland yet, and I'd encourage
you to go buy it as soon as possible and plow through it as I did a months ago.
But, um, give me the one thing about this book that folks won't get anywhere else.
You know, the, the most powerful thing to me about this book is about what happens after,
that epic championship game in March 1979. You know, when the team in Indiana State returns home
to Terre Haute, the reception they received there and how that moment really still reverberates
today. You know, I'm speaking UD here on Tuesday. I'm in Indiana. You can see my hotel room behind
me. Last night, I was at an event, a launch event in Terre Haute, in the convention center
you know, maybe 100 yards from the arena where Larry Bird became famous. Last night on that stage,
about 10 players and the head coach from that team, you know, joined me to talk about this once
again. They're bound by it forever. It has changed their lives forever. And that to me makes Heartland
more than just a sports book. I think it's a compelling human narrative.
All right. And so where can we find your work, Keith?
Well, I mean, you can pick up Heartland anywhere you buy books.
And you can check out more about me on my website at KeithOB.com.
All right. We will do that and pop out all in the show notes and appreciate your time.
Once again, Keith, and go out and get Heartland immediately.
I implore all you listeners to go out and get it.
Thanks again, Keith.
Thanks for joining us, folks.
It was wonderful to have Keith O'Brien on the show.
Once again, that's called Heartland.
His book is called Heartland, A Forgotten Place, An Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird.
Atria Books published on or released on March 3rd, 2026.
And again, you can find the links in the show notes on our podcast, The Brian D. O'Leary Show, or at Substack, at Brian D. O'Leary, and go to X, at Brian D. O'Leary, and YouTube, at Brian D. O'Leary.
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So at Brian D. O'Leary on all those main channels, you can find us and find more information about the work we do and particularly this interview with Keith O'Brien.
Once again, folks, thanks for joining us.
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And then, you know what I'll do?
I'll throw in, if you type in the code email,
E-M-A-I-L,
you get $27 off that strategy document.
And I think that is going to pay for itself
really quickly for you,
if you take it seriously.
And you should, if you're a sub stacker.
If you're not, join us at Brian DeLerry on Substack.
And we promise to have a lot more content on there this year.
And it's been slow at the beginning of the year, but the year is picking up.
And again, go out and get Keith O'Brien's book.
It's called Heartland, A Forgotten Place, An Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird.
Atria Books, March 3rd, 2026.
And you can find that all at our Substack or on our podcast in any form on X, on YouTube.
And once again, on Substack and the Brian Dealer Show that you can find everywhere podcasts are distributed.
We prefer Fountain.
And we can talk about that later.
But Fountain is the app that I use.
Just fountain.fm.
Okay, folks, thanks again for tuning in to our interview with Keith O'Brien.
Have a great day.
Thank you.