At the end of his career, Larry Bird’s doctors had to “unlock his spine” before games, but he continued to show up for work.

At the end of his career, Larry Bird’s doctors had to “unlock his spine” before games, but he continued to show up for work.

One of the greatest players of all time, Larry Bird, was a 13-year NBA player for the Boston Celtics. Considering that he only played 105 games in his final two seasons owing to a bad back and missed almost a full season due to bone spurs in his heels, his accomplishment is even more astounding.

Watching those final two NBA seasons, 1990–91 and 91–92, was excruciating because Bird occasionally had to lie on the floor to relieve the pressure in his ailing back. You won’t believe how agonizing the entire ordeal was for Larry Legend after hearing the doctors’ account of the lengths they had to take years later to bring him onto the court.

In 1985, Larry Bird—a modest superstar for the Boston Celtics—infamously suffered a back injury while undertaking an on-brand task of constructing his mother’s driveway all by himself. Although the back injury hampered him for the final seven seasons of his career, it really started to become an issue in 1988.

Dan Dyrek, Bird’s orthopedic therapist, stated that Bird “had lost the structural stability of his spine” by the 1990s. “It would attempt to lock itself into abnormal positions in an attempt to create artificial stability.”

The Celtics star was in a lot of agony. Dyrek likens the situation he finds himself in with his back problems to “sticking your finger in a door while someone is still pushing on it.”

Bird tried his best to play through the discomfort, but he was also concerned about whether he was doing anything that would negatively impact his quality of life in retirement. However, he went through with it because, as he had heard his father teach him years earlier, “If you get paid to go to work, you gotta go to work.”

Thus, Dyrek and his colleagues would do whatever it took to get Bird on the court in the final two years of Bird’s career.

In order for him to play basketball, Dyrek said, “we had to unlock his spine, realign it, and do techniques that would hold that for four hours, six hours, that type of thing.”

Although Larry Bird acknowledges that he “probably should have retired in ’88, ’89,” he attributes his continued success to competition and his desire to face Magic Johnson in the NBA Finals one more time.

Without the back injury, where would Bird rank on the NBA all-time list?