Honestly, I didn’t even want to write this.
For one thing, I’m busy recovering from a neck fusion surgery (again), and two, it’s just so stupid, it hardly requires any kind of a response.
But…
...I am.
So here we go. During a Larry Bird interview with Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe, Bird said he didn’t take my initial Deflategate story/tweet real seriously when it was published the night after the AFC title game.
"I thought it was a bunch of lying, if you want to know the truth," Bird told Shaughnessy. "That’s something Kravitz came up with, and I never believed any of it."
Now, there are two ways you can read that:
One is, he didn’t believe the Patriots engaged in any sort of wrongdoing involving the deflation of the footballs.
The other is, he thought I was making the whole thing up.
Read up on the Deflategate scandal
Let me tell you something: A lot of news stories were written during Deflategate, some of them wrong and some of them right, but the one that was 1,000 percent true and undeniable was my report that an investigation was underway regarding the inflation of the footballs. You DO know there was an investigation, right? The Wells Report, the federal court case, the impending federal court case. It’s been in all the papers, correct?
But my friends in New England, some of whom continue to have serious reading comprehension issues, continue to believe that because Brady was exonerated by a federal court, the original report – that there was an investigation underway – was somehow inaccurate.
As for Bird, first, he’s pandering. He made his bones, first in Terre Haute and then in Boston, so of course he’s going to tell New Englanders what they want to hear.
Second, he knows as much about Deflategate as I know about Bangladeshi history. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Bird has never read the Wells Report or any of the court briefs or anything else involved in Deflategate – as I have.
I understand that in New England, if Larry Legend says it, it must be true.
Here in Indiana, we know much better.
You want to talk about lying, Larry?
During the David West decision to opt-in or opt-out of his contract, Candace Buckner wrote nearly a week before West’s decision day that West had decided to opt out. Bird continually denied this. Over and over again, he denied it. Then, on draft night, Bird not only insisted that he had still not heard from West or his agent on his decision, but publicly insulted Buckner at a press conference. It might have been more good-natured than it sounded – Larry being Larry – but he was questioning her integrity, and the one thing you don’t do with a journalist, especially one who’s right, is question his or her integrity.
Well, I spoke to David West shortly after he opted out of his deal, and what he told me was that he and his agent spoke to Bird several days BEFORE the draft to inform Bird he was opting out. West wanted to do that as a courtesy, so Bird could go into the NBA Draft knowing that he needed somebody to replace West on the roster.
Who was telling the truth?
West, the consummate straight shooter, was telling the truth.
And Bird was lying.
Frankly, I was under the impression that Bird and I had a pretty good professional relationship. We’ve crossed swords before – he wasn’t happy that I wrote that he was forced by ownership to fire Jim O’Brien – but he’s always been available and very forthcoming in our conversations.
Now, that relationship has soured, at least from my perspective. It’s one thing to be lied to time and time again during the West saga, it’s another thing to have your integrity questioned by someone who doesn’t have the first clue what they’re talking about. I take that quite seriously.
We’ll see where things go from here.