Larry Bird's falling apart
I think he's a good example of pushing your structure to accelerated collapse
Youtube
I grew up in New York loving the NBA.
Naturally I was a Knicks fan.
Players like Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Charles Oakley…. they were my squad.
But I was also there to catch the tail end of Larry Bird’s career. As he didn’t officially retire till August 1992 when I was 15 years old.
So I probably had a solid 3-4 years where I was a big NBA fan and was able to watch Larry play.
He was an icon of that era. A guy that didn’t have the body of a professional athlete, but played with the heart of a lion.
So I was pretty sad when I came across this video below on Youtube recently.
Larry has been in a long, slow decline
Years back Larry underwent spinal fusion surgery to stabilize his spine and deals with lingering pain in his back ever since.
He was diagnosed years back with Atrial Fibrillation (AFib), an irregular heartbeat, that can make him feel like he’s going to faint.
He has occasional cognitive lapses where he forgets what he is talking about.
And he has visibly aged a lot as you can see from the images above.
But it is a ‘natural’ collapse. I don’t think he ever did orthodontics or anything unnatural to his teeth.
And in my view the way he is aging is perfect evidence of this. His collapse started around 1985 when he first started having back issues. It is now 2025… a full 40 years later and yet he still functions relatively ok at 68 years old.
It would be a far more rapid collapse if he’d done orthodontics
If he had done ortho you would have seen something far faster like what we’ve seen in my past stories about Bruce Willis.
Or Wendy Williams.
Or Lil Wayne.
Or Brett Favre.
All of these people look better than him and are almost all younger, but their drop in function is far faster and far worse than Larry’s.
Why?
Because of this line I love to repeat… “the body is extremely smart in how it compensates to keep you alive.”
A person may not look good (as clearly Larry hasn’t for quite awhile now) but they will function pretty well.
However if you tinker with it unnaturally through something like orthodontics, you damage the body’s ability to do compensate. Which is why the folks above may look better than Larry does, but function a lot worse.
The video talks about how Larry pushed himself too hard
Another point I’d like to make is how Larry is a classic case of exercising himself into deeper and deeper levels of compensations.
His back issues started in the mid-1980’s. It was well known that throughout the 80’s he was playing through increasing levels of pain and missed quite a number of games.
He had to have surgery on both heels during the 1988-89 season.
Then he had achilles injuries and bone spurs.
During the season of 1991-92 his back limited to just 45 games, but he still put up All Star-level numbers:
Points per game: 20.2
Rebounds per game: 9.6
Assists per game: 6.8
This is a person who was mentally wired to push his body to its utter limits. He was famous for saying:
“Everytime I play i was wondering if I was gonna be in a wheelchair.”
But was that a good thing? Absolutely not in my view.
You are forcing the body to compensate deeper and deeper. And that is clearly evident from how his body was evolving.
As you can see in the pic above he’s probably one of the few NBA players that played with such a poor profile. And that profile is indicative of things that were happening in his spine.
The fact that he forced himself to continue playing through it all is why his profile looked this bad by his early 60’s (pic below).
In my view it should be nearly impossible for a NBA player to have a profile this bad in his early 60’s without having done something unnatural to his teeth like ortho.
But the fact that Larry achieved this is a testament to just how hard he pushed himself.
But he could still recover from it all in my view
The last point i want to mention is that even at this level of collapse I think Larry could come back from it all and play at the NBA level by mastering these biomechanics.
It would probably take him a solid 5-6 years before he unravelled everything, but my experience tells me it is possible.
And yes that sounds crazy today… but in 20-30 years I almost think it’s going to sound obvious.
We’re going to realize that age and the structure of your body have almost no direct relationship once you understand how these biomechanics work.
I think one day we will see pro NBA basketball players in their 60’s and beyond.
Closing thoughts
The current aging paradigm is that you gotta keep exercising. It is what ‘keeps you in shape’.
And so all over the place I see older folks trying to walk or hit the gym despite having very twisted bodies.
Let me be clear that I think that this is absolutely stupid. They are not doing anything useful by forcing themselves to do that and just forcing their bodies to compensate faster.
And the only reason that this is not absolutely obvious to everyone is because it is impossible to run a perfect test. How would this person have aged if they hadn’t done any of the exercise?
Larry is a good reflection of this. His body was falling apart but just kept playing.
Then he retired and despite all his back problems he famously forced himself to jog five miles a day for years.
What did that achieve?
His body collapsed to the point where he can no longer jog nor do any strenuous activity. And that probably happened many years earlier than it had to.
You can thank the existing exercise paradigm for that Larry ;)
Reviv is about challenging yourself to think and challenging the assumptions we were born with.
Don’t take what I say as gospel… observe and then decide for yourself.
P.S. Note that we have just launched on Amazon in the US and in a little while it will have Prime 2-day delivery.
Hi there. Does the R2 place the tongue at the roof of the mouth?
Hi, After Marpe, my teeth bent outwards. Does biomechanics fix this situation?