PURPLE, GREEN CLASH MINUS REDHEAD AS . . .THE RIVALRY RESUMES : Lakers, Celtics Meet in Boston; Walton Ailing

Outside the gym at Hellenic College, practice home of the Boston Celtics, a black stretch limousine waited Thursday morning to take Robert Parish and a couple of his teammates to a picture session at a local department store.

On the court, a few Celtic reserves remained. And of course, Larry Bird, pumping away on a stationary bike in one corner of the gym.

Red Auerbach, sans cigar, gestured at the bike. “That’s how Walton got hurt, you know,” he said.

For a visitor in town for tonight’s renewal of the Celtic-Laker rivalry, that immediately raised two questions:

--Why hadn’t Auerbach torn the bike apart with his bare hands?

--And how could the Celtic president allow his franchise player anywhere near the machine of destruction?

“Because Larry’s not as dumb as Walton,” Auerbach said sardonically.

Bird looked up.

“I don’t ride it three days in a row like he did,” Bird said.

The Celtics, of course, like to make sport of Bill Walton, the good-natured foil of many a barb last season, when the Celtics timed their 16th National Basketball Assn. championship with the redhead’s first season in Kelly green.

Walton went along with the laughs and the wins, and for his trouble--not to forget contributions--was named the league’s comeback player of the year.

But no one is laughing now. Not Walton, certainly, and not the Celtics, who six weeks into a Walton-less season are wondering whether the veteran center has another comeback left in him.

The question, of course, is not a new one in Walton’s career. He has what Thomas Silva, the Celtic physician, calls a “pathological ankle.”

At the moment, ever since he apparently overdid it on the exercise bike in training camp, Walton has had inflammation on the outside of his right ankle.

Can the Celtics win without Walton?

“We survived before him and we’ll survive after him,” Auerbach said.

But Bird readily acknowledges that they won’t be the same team.

“The only way we have a great chance of winning the championship is if Robert Parish is rested and Bill Walton is healthy,” Bird said. “Everybody else will maintain, but those guys are the keys.”

Last season, Walton, 34, was abnormally healthy, playing in a career-high 80 games. But will he play again?

Bird, at least, answers in the affirmative.

“Bill will be back,” he said. “I have a lot of confidence in that.”

The rivalry lives on, but the animosity has dissipated.

Magic Johnson and Larry Bird have made a surprising discovery.

They like each other.

The respect, of course, was always there.

“I always said he might be the only guy I’d pay to see play--him and a couple of others,” Bird said of Magic the other day.

And Magic said of Bird: “He’ll do anything to win. He knows how to win.”

It has ever been that way, from the time they met in the 1979 National Collegiate Athletic Assn. final, in which Johnson’s Michigan State team defeated Bird’s Indiana State team for the title.

But as people, they never touched, until a sneaker company brought them together to shoot commercials.

Since then, Celtic-Laker games have not been quite the same. Now, Magic and Bird acknowledge the presence of the another on the court.

“It’s like, with that look,” said Johnson, giving a knowing nod to demonstrate the language in which he and Bird express appreciation for each other. “Never words, but a look. Yeaahh.”

Before, Johnson said, he preferred to look the other way.

“I think that before, the media separated us so much--Magic vs. Bird--and we as individuals created that inner rivalry, too,” Johnson said. “It’s not that we hated each other, but there was a dislike. I didn’t want him to win, and he didn’t want me to win.

That mutual dislike began to change, Johnson said, when they met for the shooting of the commercial.

“When we sat there just talking, I said, ‘Wow, after all this time I didn’t know he was like that,’ ” Johnson said.

After the Lakers had been eliminated from the playoffs by the Rockets last spring, Magic went to Houston to see the Celtics and Rockets in the finals.

“He (Bird) told me how well I had played in the series against Houston,” Johnson said. “Coming from him, that was . . . it couldn’t go no higher.”

On the court, Johnson said, nothing really has changed. “We’ll still hate each other once the ball goes up, we’ll claw and scratch at each other,” he said.

“But you know, it would have been a shame if we’d never sat down and talked, never got inside each other’s mind to find out what makes each other click.”

Johnson is uncertain whether he’ll be able to play tonight. His right knee was still swollen from his run-in with Milwaukee center Jack Sikma Wednesday.

It hurts, he said, to get injured on the eve of this game, as well as just before his Detroit homecoming Saturday.

Bird, incidentally, returned to action Wednesday night after having missed three games with a strained Achilles’ tendon and played as if he’d never been away, scoring 35 points in 30 minutes in Boston’s 108-98 win over New Jersey.

He made 15 of 25 shots, including two three-pointers.

“I was very surprised to shoot that well,” Bird said.

The rest of the Celtics? Well, Kevin McHale has scored 20 points or more in all 19 games this season, six times more than 30.

Danny Ainge missed the first eight games with a cracked vertebra, suffered when he took a knee in the back during a loose-ball scramble, but he scored a career-high 34 points last week against Denver.

Parish had 20 rebounds Wednesday, the second time he’s done that this season. And Dennis Johnson is still Dennis Johnson, one of the premier guards in the league.

The Celtic weakness, at the moment, is their bench, one reason they signed former UCLA star Darren Daye Thursday. Besides Walton, Scott Wedman is out with a sore heel and Jerry Sichting has been flu-weakened for more than two weeks.