Jayson Williams was a rookie for the Philadelphia 76ers when he first crossed paths with the legendary Larry Bird in the NBA. As expected, Williams’ first meeting with the Boston Celtics icon was unforgettable.
If Williams remembered it right, Bird torched him and the Sixers. However, that wasn’t the most epic part of the story. While on the bench, Williams said Bird kept provoking him.
To his surprise, Williams was shocked that the NBA legend still remembered him from that game. In the 1998 All-Star game, Bird, who was the coach of the East All-Stars, reminded Williams about it in typical Larry Legend fashion.
“I remember when I first came in the league, it was my second game, he must have lit me up for 45 points and I wanted to get in the game. He kept going, ‘Put the rookie in! Put the rookie in! Put the effing rookie in!,” Williams told Scoop B Robinson this past April.
“So, when I got there to the locker room, he just looked at me and said, ‘Your minutes are on the board. That’s how you know when you’re going to play when you go into an All-Star game.’ And I looked at him, I said, ‘Thanks, coach.’ He just said ‘You effing rookie!’ [laughs],” he continued.
Bird walked the talk
Williams and Bird overlapped in the NBA for two seasons. In other words, he had to deal with Bird’s sharp tongue in his first two seasons in the league. Celtics icon was already in his twilight years at the time. However, Williams confirmed that Bird’s trash-talking game was still in its prime.
“All the time,” Williams said when asked if Bird always talked trash. “But he can back it up, though.”
Bird said he toned down on his trash-talking
It’s totally understandable that Williams could never forget how Bird talked trash in his final years in the NBA. Like Williams, almost everybody in the league experienced the same thing with the one and only Larry Legend.
However, Bird himself once claimed that he had already toned down on his trash-talking game during that period. Whether it was true or not, nobody could tell. But from Williams’ perspective, it seems like Bird didn’t lay low one bit in his trash-talking.
“It helps me feel better, it gives me confidence,” Bird said of his trash-talking. “I really don’t talk as much as I used to, because I can’t back it up like I used to.”
Bird turned to his trash-talking skills to gain an advantage over his toughest and fiercest rivals. The good thing was that he backed it up with his exceptional game more often than not.
Williams’ Bird story is just another account in which the Celtics icon proved that he is the NBA’s king of trash talk. There have been a wide array of savage trash-talkers who graced the hardwood, but even some of them admitted that nobody did it better than Bird.
It’s also worth noting that, based on William’s story, Bird was still a trash-talker even during his coaching tenure. In retrospect, this only goes to show that Larry Legend’s competitive nature remained intact regardless of his age.