Basketball legend Larry Bird obviously had a dominant career with the Indiana Sycamores after he initially signed with the Indiana Hoosiers. Bird was named national college player of the year in 1979 and was a two-time All-American in 1978 and 1979. But as it turns out, he initially didn’t want to go to either school.
During a recent conversation between basketball legends Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas and Reggie Miller, Larry Bird had a pretty shocking admission that he wanted to go to Kentucky before signing with Indiana, but claimed that Kentucky stopped recruiting him.
“Well, I wanted to go to Kentucky,” Bird said. “But Kentucky quit recruiting me, so it was down to Indiana State and IU, so I went to IU.”
I didn't know Larry Bird wanted to go to Kentucky. How'd they mess that up @wildcatnews? Kentucky loves shooters, what could have been. pic.twitter.com/U496tDHltN
— Vince Cali (@_VinceCali) February 21, 2024
Kentucky sports historian Oscar Combs offered a little more context to this claim by Bird, indicating that it might not have been that simple.
“It’s a long, somewhat complicated conversation and one with disagreeable takes. One UK official told me UK’s then rigid academic criteria for out-of-state students prevented UK from pursuing him, but would have been accepted had he lived in Ky. Others say that wasn’t the case,” Combs said in a post on X, the social media website that was formerly known as Twitter.
Obviously, Kentucky was one of the most dominant teams in the country at the time, so adding a player like Bird certainly would have been something.
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