He Looks Like Monster and Plays Monster of a Game

The first look you get at No. 32 of the Boston Celtics basketball team, you’re only wondering if it can talk.

You check the neck carefully for rivets or bolts sticking out. You’re afraid if you bump into it, it’ll clank. Near the castle, wolves are howling and a white-faced aide is coming into a laboratory and saying, “My God, Doctor, it got out!”

Surely, this is a scientific experiment gone amok. Check the preternaturally broad shoulders, the articulated limbs, the deep-set eyes. Surely, sparks will fly off if you come near it. This thing shouldn’t be out in a thunderstorm.

You’re not surprised it’s listed on the program as coming from the iron ore country of northern Minnesota. Probably floated down the Great Lakes to the rolling mills of Pittsburgh in an ore boat. A 6-foot 10-inch hunk of scrap iron in sneakers. A runaway ingot.

Society has to protect itself any way it can from this kind of antediluvian creature. You call out the National Guard, evacuate the city, or hope it catches the common cold.

You turn Kurt Rambis loose on it. You get Magic Johnson to confuse it, taunt it.

In the prehistoric ooze of the Inglewood Forum Sunday, you saw the sad sight--as old as Gulliver, as new as the bride of Frankenstein--of the classic misunderstood giant being brought to bay by the forces of order and civilization.

Like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory baby, Kevin Edward McHale of the iron range McHales is basically a gentle creature who doesn’t deserve the reputation he’s got. He’s got a nice sense of humor. He pets dogs, eats cooked food and even goes to church on Sundays. It’s just that he scares people. He doesn’t mean to.

What he’s really trying to do is win basketball games, something he’s been programmed for.

Occasionally, that seems to mean flattening people who get between him and the ball, but that’s because Kevin doesn’t notice them. When he sees this basketball lying around, this light goes on in his head and he seems to hear a voice in his subconscious saying “Ball! Fetch!” He doesn’t notice the guy holding it till he’s run over him.

This has given McHale one of the most familiar double-takes in the basketball industry. His “Who--me’s?” are classics of their sort, largely because they are unstudied. Kevin actually feels astonishment when he looks down and sees an opponent sprawled on the floor. His look says, “Whatever are you doing down there, Kurt? This floor must be wet.”

Like Dr. Frankenstein’s original, McHale doesn’t understand the emotions he inspires and why he cannot find the sympathy and love he longs for.

They tormented him unmercifully at the game in the Forum quarters Sunday.

First, it was the Lilliputians of the audience who surrounded him like a pack of dogs on a trapped fox.

“Hey, McHale!” they shouted. “Who comes in for ya when ya foul out--the Loch Ness monster?”

“Hey, McHale! Make yourself at home--choke somebody!”

“Hey, McHale, show us that two-inch jump shot of yours! What’s your percentage with it--11?”

“Hey, McHale, who taught you how to play--the Boston Strangler?”

On court, the hectoring continued. You would think McHale was The Creature That Ate Pacoima the way they treated him. There was Magic Johnson jawing at him and slamming him in the back. There was Bob McAdoo aiming a slap at him. His own teammates were trying to pretend they didn’t know him.

The Laker-Celtic series seems to have taken on less the dimensions of a sporting event than a holy war, anyway.

It’s more than a game, it’s a war of the worlds. It’s the land of the bean and the cod vs. the land of the quiche. It’s the forces from the place where it snows in winter and rains in the summer vs. those from the place where it never rains and there is no winter. The land of beer and the bathtub vs. the land of white wine and the hot tub.

McHale became the focus of all this intercoastal hate and bared-teeth rooting when the series shifted to L.A.

The proposition goes this way: Poor benighted Boston can only win the contest by fielding a chorus of goons and a game plan of multiple contusions. Enter McHale.

L.A., on the other hand, is supposed to field a team of Fred Astaires and Gene Kellys, and win the game the way Busby Berkeley won Oscars.

They think the Lakers should wear leotards. Boston should wear hard hats.

To counteract this image, the Lakers had to destroy Kevin McHale. They did a good job Sunday. After the game, the unfrocked monster sat in the locker room with a sack of ice cubes on his knee and elbow, a cut on his cheek and a dozen microphones dangling before his face.

“Listen,” he said. “My wife likes me, my little girls like me, I don’t drink blood unless it’s my own. I don’t see what everybody’s getting so emotional about. It’s easy to get tangled up in this game. I’m not trying to make anyone hate me. I’m a nice guy just trying to do my job.”

Of course, that’s what Dr. Frankenstein’s creature thought he was doing, too.

They burned him anyway.