Larry Bird: The Making of an American Sports Legend.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan

Larry Bird: The Making of an American Sports Legend. Daniel Levine. McGraw-Hill, $1795. Red Auerbach had this way of turning racial prejudice to his advantage.

In the fifties, when another team balked at drafting a black player, the wily Boston Celtics chief got himself Bill Russell and a dynasty. Twentytwo years later, after racial stereotypes had come full circle, Auerbach drafted a slow white guy named Larry Bird. Three more championship banners now hang from the Boston Garden's already crowded rafters.

For all of Bird's prowess, there has hovered over his career a cloud of racial suspicion. When he entered the NBA in the late seventies, fan interest was declining, and many team owners thought the reason was a lack of white stars-or players, for that matter. Through no fault of his own, Bird became the Great White Hope.

Though he has more than proved his mettle, some blacks think Bird has gotten more than his share of glory In Spike Lee's movie, She's Gotta Have it, a Larry Bird put-down line is a black in-joke. Isiah Thomas, the Detroit Pistons star, exclaimed in a moment of pique that were Bird black, he'd be considered just another good player. (Bird had just stolen a Thomas pass for a last-second playoff win.)

Churlish as it was, Thomas did give voice to something many had mused upon but had kept to themselves. TV commentators made matters worse, constantly noting Bird's "knowledge of the game" and his spartan practice regime. It all fed the notion that black players get by on raw physical ability, while whites prevail through brains and work. It was no accident that Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder, in his muchpublicized comments on the physical superiority of black athletes, singled out basketball players.

There is a great irony here. In breaking basketball's reverse color line-a number of bona fide white stars have entered the league since-Bird was refuting these racial stereotypes rather than confirming them. Yes, Bird is slow. And, as he freely acknowledges, he's afflicted with what is called in basketball circles "White Man's Disease" (i.e. , he can't jump either).

But an unauthorized biography of Bird by Daniel Levine, a freelance writer, reveals that Bird shares something more basic with many of his black counterparts in the NBA: a background of poverty and family disruption. In so doing, he reminds us that blacks dominate the NBA today for pretty much the same reason that tough white kids with names like Heinsohn and Cousy dominated...