DANNY AINGE : Celtic Guard’s Game Face and Hard-Bitten Image Are Deceiving

Danny Ainge does not smoke, drink or curse. He does play for the Boston Celtics. In the opinion of many, three out of four isn’t bad.

This is what it is like to be Danny Ainge. When he isn’t wearing a Celtic uniform, he has the face of a cherub. But once Ainge steps into his black Celtic sneakers, a startling transformation takes place.

The clean-living, soft-talking Mormon leaves his milk-and-cookies image behind and becomes something entirely different.

He is the baby-faced assassin.

He is the hands-down winner of the MVC award as the Most Vilified Celtic, the keeper of the flame now that M.L. Carr has retired and taken his towel along with him.

Ainge jokes that he has considered entering Whiners Anonymous, a treatment clinic for the addicted complainer. But what we have here is an image problem.

How can a legitimate nice guy represent to many all that is evil in a player?

It’s a four-letter word: face. It’s Ainge’s face, all right, which he uses to scowl and wince better than anyone this side of Maurice Lucas. It is the kind of face some fans and a growing assortment of opposing players would like to use as an ashtray.

Some players wear their emotions on their sleeves. Ainge wears his on his face. If you ever wonder how Danny Ainge is feeling, all you have to do is look at the expression on his face.

“I don’t know why I do that,” Ainge said. “It’s something I’ve always done. I just get very emotionally involved. I play with as much intensity as I can, so when things are going good I get excited and when things are going bad, I get mad.

“That’s just the way I am. Some guys can go out there and play with a stone face. Some guys can’t. I can’t.

“I’m just the type of player you like to have on your team, but that you don’t like to play against. That’s perfectly OK with me. I don’t want the players I play against to like me. I mean, I want them to like me, but I don’t want them to like playing against me.

“I want them to think I’m going to bug them all night. That’s my objective. Bill Walton told me when he first got here, ‘If you’re not getting booed on the road, then you’re not doing your job.’ ”

Ainge said he does not expect to be the most popular player on the court in the Summit when Game 3 of the NBA championship series against the Houston Rockets begins (Channels 2 and 51, 12:30 p.m. PDT). Boston holds a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series, and a victory today would put the Celtics in a position for a sweep of the Rockets.

Ainge said he does not know how the game will turn out, but he is certain of one thing.

“I know that there will be 16,000 people booing me whenever I touch the ball,” he said. “On the road, you play to put the people back in the seats, and at home, you play to get them out of their seats.”

Ainge has been emptying chairs since his basketball days at BYU. He was the College Player of the Year in 1981, and the Celtics made him their No. 1 draft choice.

Drafting Ainge was somewhat of a gamble for the Celtics, because he already had a job playing major league baseball with the Toronto Blue Jays.

But then two things happened. One was a .187 batting average. The other was intensified interest by Celtic General Manager Red Auerbach, now the team’s president. What followed was a lengthy and sometimes bitter court fight between the Blue Jays, who wanted to keep their third baseman, and the Celtics, who wanted to acquire a guard.

Auerbach won, but not before the Celtics were forced to shell out $500,000 to buy out Ainge’s baseball contract from the Blue Jays.

Not until two other things happened did Ainge blossom as an NBA player. Coach Bill Fitch, who limited Ainge’s playing time, left the Celtics to take over the Rockets. Then the starting Celtic guard, Gerald Henderson, was traded to the Seattle SuperSonics.

Meanwhile, Ainge’s development as a villain advanced, pushed along by what happened in the 1983 playoffs, when the Celtics were in a series against the Atlanta Hawks.

What occurred is one of the most legendary of all basketball fights. It seems so natural now to know that Ainge was involved.

The incident began when Ainge, who is 6-5, tackled Hawk center Tree Rollins, who is 7-0, at mid-court. One of Tree’s limbs, his elbow, caught Ainge in the jaw, so Ainge reacted by jumping on Rollins.

To that point, it was a typical on-court disagreement, but it became much more during the scuffle. As a national television audience watched, Rollins bit the middle finger of Ainge’s right hand nearly to the bone.

The cost to Ainge was five stitches, $1,750 in fines and his reputation as Mr. Mormon.

Ainge still has a scar on his finger, which he showed a reporter.

“I still hear about that fight,” said Ainge, who then told a story about a time last season when the Celtics arrived at Los Angeles International Airport.

A man pointed out each of the Celtics to his wife. The conversation went something like this:

There’s Larry Bird, one of the greatest players of all time. That’s Robert Parish, the center. There’s Dennis Johnson, one of the best defensive players in the league. And there’s Danny Ainge. He’s the meanest guy in the NBA. He once bit a man’s ear off.

Ainge laughed and said that many people get the biter and the bitee mixed up.

“Everywhere I go, people think I’m the dirty little guy who bit Tree Rollins,” he said.

Ainge was even booed in high school for his all-out style of play, but he really came into his own at BYU. The Cougars were 80-36 in the Ainge years, during which he scored a conference record 2,467 points, all the while showing an uncanny ability to upset and infuriate.

Ainge might have saved his best stuff for when BYU played against Utah teams. He once got into a shouting match with Utah Coach Jerry Pimm and also with Utah players Tom Chambers and Pace Mannion.

During a BYU game against Utah State in Logan, Ainge almost incited a riot when he tackled center Leo Cunningham to prevent a layup that might have won the game.

Cunningham missed both free throws, and BYU went on to win.

Perhaps the turning point in Ainge’s career as a criminal element came in the Celtics’ next playoff series after the Tree Incident--the 1983 Eastern Conference semifinal against Milwaukee Bucks.

Milwaukee Coach Don Nelson called Ainge “a cheap-shot artist,” and that’s all it took to cement Ainge’s reputation as a bad guy. Nelson later wrote a letter to Ainge and apologized, but the damage had already been done.

To this day, Celtic Coach K.C. Jones remains angry about Nelson’s comments.

“I can understand trying to get an edge in a series, to try and get an advantage, which is what he (Nelson) was doing,” Jones said, “but you can’t do it at the expense of somebody’s reputation. You don’t ever hear that about players like (Detroit center Bill) Laimbeer.

“When I was playing, I was very stoic,” Jones said. “I was mean and determined and sneaky. I pestered people, and they didn’t like that. Danny has that same troubled-brow look. He’s all over the place. He’s a lot of me.

“In my opinion, all he’s done is just play hard.”

Ainge played hard enough that the Celtics signed him before the season to a six-year contract worth more than $4 million. That will buy a lot of milk and cookies.

But whatever the image of Danny Ainge, he remains so straight that you could use him for a ruler.

“He’s too America, too Mormon, too Apple Pie,” former teammate Cedric Maxwell once told Sports Illustrated.

He seems too normal. Ainge and his wife, Michelle, have 3.0 kids, 2.0 cars and a nice house in Wellesley, Mass.

Ainge said that children Ashlee, 6, Austin, 4, and Tanner, 2, take their Daddy as he is.

“They’d rather watch ‘He-Man’ on TV than see me play basketball,” he said.

“What matters to me is the people who really do know me and what they think,” he said. “The fans, I don’t really care about. They’re booing because of the way I play, not because of the kind of person I am. They have no idea. I just keep it in that perspective.”

Someone asked Ainge if he had seen “Cobra,” the Sylvester Stallone movie.

Ainge wrinkled up his face in a quizzical expression.

“Why?” he asked. “Did someone get bitten in it?”