There’s a hotel bill from April 1979 in the old files of Bob Woolf, the lawyer who negotiated Larry Bird’s first NBA contract. It’s made out to Bird and a woman named Dinah Mattingly, from Bird’s first trip to Boston as a draft pick. The bill shows only a room charge and tax, unusual for a young athlete on the road, according to Woolf, who negotiated rookie contracts for a living.
That bill is one of the earliest dated records of a relationship that has lasted since. Dinah Mattingly, the daughter of an FBI agent born in New York State, has been married to Bird since 1989. He retired from the NBA in 1992 with three championships and three MVP awards, a Hall of Fame plaque, and a museum built around his career in Terre Haute, Indiana. There’s no record of her ever giving an interview about any of it.
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Dinah Mattingly before the fame
The FBI agent detail, along with most of what’s known about her early life, comes from one source, a 1988 Sports Illustrated profile of Bird written by Frank Deford, published the same year Bird proposed to her. It’s one of the only pieces of substantial reporting ever done on Bird’s personal life, and the first place her name shows up in print with any real detail.
She met Bird at Indiana State University in the mid 1970s, years before Boston drafted him in 1978, while he was becoming the best college basketball player in the country and nobody outside Terre Haute knew his name yet. Deford wrote that Bird had already been in love with her for twelve years by the time the piece ran in March 1988. That puts the start of the relationship at 1976. The hotel bill confirms they were still together three years later, in the spring of 1979, before Bird had officially signed with the Celtics or played a single NBA game.
A marriage that left a mark
Bird had already been married once. He married his high school girlfriend, Janet Condra, in 1975. It ended within a year. Their daughter, Corrie, was conceived during a brief reconciliation attempt after the divorce and born in August 1977. Bird told Deford in 1988 that the marriage “scarred me for life.”
For years afterward, he resisted the idea of marrying again, Dinah included. “I’ve told Dinah, ‘Now why get married and ruin a good relationship?'” he said in that same interview. “But she really doesn’t like it one bit when I say that.”
He proposed anyway, in 1988, handing her a diamond ring while driving his Ford Bronco. Dinah told friends, only half joking, that he had waited until his Doberman, Klinger, died before he could bring himself to do it.
Two children, adopted on purpose
They married in 1989. A year earlier, in that same interview, Bird said he expected they would adopt rather than have biological children. They followed through. Conner and Mariah Bird were both adopted. The couple never had biological children. Bird has an older daughter, Corrie, from his first marriage, who was raised largely by her mother.
What stayed the same
French Lick, the small Indiana town where Bird grew up, was still the center of his life when Deford visited in 1988, nearly a decade into his career with the Celtics. He spent his off-seasons there, in a house he had built with a regulation basketball court, sleeping late, splitting afternoons between tennis and golf, and settling most nights into dinner and a couple of beers before bed by nine. Dinah had rebounded for him for hours during his college years and tended his injuries afterward. Once they were together full time, her life settled into his, in French Lick, among the people Bird had known since he was a kid.
After some games, he had one question for her. “Did it look like I was hustling out there tonight?”
Their son’s arrest
In February 2013, their son Conner, 21 and a student at Indiana University, was arrested after his ex-girlfriend said he threw a phone at her and drove his car at her twice during an argument. He initially faced several charges, including a felony count of intimidation with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors dropped that charge days later, saying there was no evidence he had tried to hit her with the car. Conner pleaded guilty in 2014 to a single misdemeanor count of criminal recklessness and received a deferred sentence. Neither parent has commented on it publicly.
Where things stand
Bird turned 69 this past December. He still holds a consultant role with the Indiana Pacers, the organization he first joined as head coach in 1997. He and Dinah have been married 37 years now. His wife still hasn’t given that interview.
