Bird was double teamed most of the night.
A lot of folks forget he was at Indiana with Bobby Knight for a little while. Guess he didn't like it and transferred to Indiana State.
Bird only stayed at Indiana a week or two into his freshman year. I’m not even sure if he got through freshman orientation. The basketball players of course met up “informally” for pickup games as soon as they got to campus, as they do at all schools, but Bird dropped out long before basketball practices began. I don’t know what the mix of motivations were. Bird was a young kid who may simply not have been ready to go to college. He was never much of a student. He may have been intimidated by the size of IU, which is big. Knight always insisted that his players go to classes and make their grades; IU in the Knight era was one of the premier no-cheating, graduate with a real degree schools (while Dean Smith, as we now know, was running a whole generation of NBA all-stars through a clown program at North Carolina, though the NCAA declined to do anything when the massive scale of Carolina’s cheating became known). Bird wouldn’t have been freaked out by the basketball, but he may have panicked when he first met up with his academic advisor and tutors, and was told he had to actually read the material and write the paper.