After getting loose and laid after a gig, we didn’t want to eat breakfast and haul our asses to a warehouse or someone’s basement or whatever and practice for four, five hours.

[Off tape]

This is the Larry Bird speech.

Yeah.

’Cause we were about to hit Indy for some gigs and I hadn’t been back since my dad died and I was tweaking. Preach had his eye on me, and straight up, we’d been at it, no breaks, except for a funeral, for over a year.

Lotsa road. Setting up. Tearing down. Booze. Women. Drugs. Brawls.

So, I guess Tommy had enough of us moaning, and he says, “You know, Larry Bird went out and shot hoops for hours every night as a kid.”

We all knew who Larry Bird was, but we had no idea why Tommy was talking about him.

“Every fuckin’ night, he’s out there for hours, throwing a ball at a basket,” he says. “Night after night. Now, the guy is tall. The guy’s got talent. He could get on a high school team and be a star just bein’ nearly seven foot. He could get on a college team mostly for the same reason. But this tall, white guy isn’t gonna be shit beyond that, unless he practices.”

We got in then.

[Chuckles]

“Man’s poor as dirt,” Tommy tells us. “He doesn’t wanna be poor and live in a tiny town in southern Indiana the rest of his life. Doesn’t want his momma poor for the rest of hers. What’s he gonna do about that?” Tommy asks. “He’s got two things. The guy is nearly seven feet tall and he can handle a ball. That’s what he’s gonna do about it.”

[Smiles]

Then he says, “You can have talent. And honest as fuck, you don’t need it. Half the people who are rich and famous are famous ’cause they’re pretty. Probably dumb as rocks, half of ’em. Most of ’em would work at McDonald’s if they didn’t have a killer smile. That sucks, but it’s the way of the world.”

And you know, he was right about that.

“You can have passion,” he says. “And you need it, ’cause this shit is hard work, and if you don’t got the fire for it, you’re gonna fail.”

Gotta say, Tom was right about that too.

But Tommy was right about a lot of things.

“But you want respect,” he says, “you gotta be good at what you do, and to be good at what you do, you gotta practice, you gotta go at it hard, and gotta do it a lot. No one who’s got talent, money and respect gets it pissin’ about and givin’ thirty percent. They earn it because they give it their all.”

[Lengthy pause]