Larry Bird Once Took a Year Off in the NBA to Play High School Basketball

Most people have no idea about the absolutely unhinged connection between Larry Bird and Shawn Kemp.

It all started when Larry Bird, then 33 years old and already a living legend with the Celtics, caught wind of a teenage phenom out of Indiana: Shawn Kemp, who had just shattered all of Bird’s long-standing high school records.

Bird took it personally.

According to sources, Bird stormed out of a Boston practice after reading a local Terre Haute Tribune headline:

“NEW PRIDE OF INDIANA? SHAWN KEMP ERASES BIRD FROM THE BOOKS.”

He was never the same.

In the fall of 1991, at the age of 35, Larry Bird took a temporary leave of absence from the NBA, quietly re-enrolled at Spring Valley High School, and demanded to rejoin the varsity team as a “super senior.”

“We thought he was just here to inspire the boys,” said longtime Spring Valley coach Jeff Roundtree.

“Then he pulled out a 47-page scouting report he’d handwritten on our starting small forward and said, and I quote, ‘I can cook this boy with a broken femur.’"

And so began the most dominant, and disturbing, season in Indiana high school basketball history.

Larry Bird, wearing number 33 averaged 89.6 points per game. He led the state in scoring and flagrant fouls. Uncharacteristically he also averaged only 2.6 assists, all passes to himself off the faces of defenders and teammates.

He even attended classes, joined the drama club (starred as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire), and escorted a 60-year-old woman to senior prom... a woman later confirmed to be Shawn Kemp’s Aunt Beatrice.

That season, Bird not only reclaimed all his records, he obliterated them. During their game against Kemp’s alma mater, Concord High, Bird scored 143 points, hired a professional heckling crew from New Jersey to torment the crowd, and personally led a Shawn Kemp jersey burning ceremony midcourt while holding a boombox blaring Kenny Loggins.

He then sent Kemp a VHS tape of the game, labeled only: “Daddy Returns.”

The following season, Bird returned to the NBA. His first matchup against Kemp and the Seattle Supersonics was electric. Reporters described a strange tension every time Bird posted up on Kemp, leaning in, whispering in vivid, unsettling detail about the “sexual re-awakening” night for Aunt Beatrice.

“He had photos,” said former Celtics teammate Dee Brown. “Polaroids. One of them was taken from the front room of Kemp’s childhood home where he threw an after prom party after purchasing the property before burning it to the ground.

Bird dropped 40 points that night.

Aunt Beatrice was courtside, wearing a custom Celtics jersey. Number 33. Nameplate:

“Bird’s Nest.”

To this day, Shawn Kemp refuses to talk about it. But if you look closely at old game film, every time Larry hits a shot over Kemp, he mouths the same thing:

“I'm your Uncle Larry now.”