Did you know the Twitter logo is named after a basketball legend?

Twitter was launched in 2006. But there still are many people who do not know that its logo — a bird — has a name. It’s Larry T Bird. The inspiration behind the name was Larry Bird, the basketball legend who was in Mumbai recently for the NBA games. Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, is from Boston. And Boston means Boston Celtics and Larry Bird. Stone is on record saying the logo was named after the sporting idol.

There is some irony in a symbol for a microblogging platform being derived from a man who wouldn’t care about microblogging. Twitter is often noise. Bird is often silence. In his playing days, he was a reputed trash talker, and therefore a troll of sorts. But that was only on court. By personality, Bird prefers to stay out of the limelight, unlike his flashier contemporaries Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.

Seeing Bird in Mumbai was a surreal New India moment, a white 6'9" hero from the American heartland with outsized achievements in the same row as Malaika Arora. And when the crowd chanted his name and Priyanka Chopra wanted a picture with him, all he exhibited was a smile and wave of the hand. No banal ‘Namaste India’ greetings or odes to Tandoori Chicken. Bird did seem animated, however, when a local dance troupe performed ‘Govinda Ala Re’.

Biz Stone, born in 1974, was a teenager in the 80s and early 90s, and therefore most absorbent to the Bird era, perhaps the greatest era in basketball, when forces like cable TV, sneaker brands, Spike Lee, Jordan, Magic, and Bird combined to take the game to hitherto untouched heights. Boston won three NBA titles in the ’80s. In 1992, Bird was also a star member of the swaggering US Dream Team at the Barcelona Olympics. Bird came from a town called French Lick in Indiana. In his initial years, they called him ‘The Hick from French Lick’. He espoused working class values. Work hard till you bleed, take no prisoners, keep a low profile. A Converse commercial featuring him and his great rival, Magic, showed Bird quietly practising in French Lick, and Magic driving up in a limo and challenging him to a game.

A blue collar background is associated with a dull playing style. But Bird’s basketball had aristocratic flair. He could pass to teammates with his back to them. He could sink three pointers from almost anywhere, the ball rising from his hands like a sun, completing an arc and disappearing into the basket. Once, before a three point competition among pros, he walked into the locker room and asked, “Who’s coming in second?” The line would make a great tweet. It has punch. It is short. But Larry Bird is not on Twitter, even though a part of him is.