NBA ALL-STAR GAME : Jordan’s Dunks and Bird’s Shots Top Fellow Stars

Michael Jordan and Larry Bird were the National Basketball Assn.’s beauty pageant winners here Saturday, Jordan with his high-altitude strolling and Bird with his high-stakes shooting.

“I feel bad about this,” Bird said with a mischievous grin after successfully defending his long-distance shootout title by beating the Dallas Mavericks’ Detlef Schrempf in the final round.

“Can you imagine Detlef had one shot, a $12,500 shot, and missed it?” said Bird, who also slyly made a “choke” sign behind the back of his Boston Celtic teammate, Danny Ainge, before taking his seat at a post-contest press conference.

With characteristic I-can-walk-on-water confidence, Bird made his first eight shots of the final round, then became a winner when Schrempf rimmed his last shot from the corner.

Jordan, meanwhile, won the slam-dunk competition with walk-on-air styling that he says is as spontaneous as Bird’s shooting is synchronized.

With the Lakers’ Magic Johnson and Dallas’ Mark Aguirre standing beneath the basket support, slapping hands in celebration, Jordan had two perfect scores of “50” from the five judges--one in the semifinals, another in the finals--in beating the Portland Trail Blazers’ Jerome Kersey, the other finalist in a field of eight, 146-140.

On the first perfect dunk, Jordan ran nearly the length of the court before launching himself from just inside the free-throw line, right arm fully extended above his head for a tomahawk dunk--much like the dunk seen in his shoe commercials.

The other came when the Chicago Bull star started his approach from the left sideline at midcourt, cut across the lane along the baseline, put the ball between his legs, hung in the air longer than a falling leaf and windmilled the ball through the basket.

“That was probably the best dunk I’ve ever seen,” said the Seattle SuperSonics’ Terence Stansbury, a slam-dunk also-ran despite two perfect scores in the early rounds. “He just took off and floated in the air, shifted the ball through his legs, stuck out his tongue--it was fantastic. It was much better on the replay, because you really couldn’t appreciate it the first time around.” Jordan said he watched the replay, too, “because I didn’t know what I was doing until I got up there.”

The one dunk he worked on beforehand, Jordan said, is the one that he missed.

“It just shows I can’t practice them and do ‘em,” Jordan said.

“I just have little engines in these shoes--that’s why I sell so many of them.”

Then, looking out to the crowd of earthbound media, he added: “(We) all just have a talent all you guys would love to have. Somehow, we got it, and we like it that way.”

Bird feels the same way about his shooting, although he nearly was eliminated in the first round after finishing in a three-way tie for the fourth and final spot for the semifinal round.

He won the tiebreaker against Seattle’s Dale Ellis and the Milwaukee Bucks’ Craig Hodges, then recorded the best round in the semifinals, in which Michael Cooper of the Lakers and Ainge were eliminated.

“When I first went out to shoot I was so relaxed I surprised myself,” said Cooper, who recorded the second-best score of the opening round. Cooper’s Laker teammate, Byron Scott, had the lowest score of the round and was eliminated.

“But in the second round, I started thinking about where I was at and what I was doing, and I tightened up a little bit.

“I started pressing, and that turned into struggling, and struggling turned into defeat.”

Cooper still finished fourth, which was worth $2,500.

It was becoming clear, however, that Bird was merely warming up.

He lost the coin flip to determine who would go first in the final round--he did--but kept the coin, sticking it in his sock.

Then he took a position in the right corner--there were racks of five balls at five different stations around the three-point arc--and slapped hands with teammate Kevin McHale, who was sitting behind him.

“It’s hard to shoot with Kevin McHale breathing down your neck,” Bird said. “He was saying, ‘Go on, No problem, you’ve got it won,’ but I’m the guy who has got to shoot it.”

Then he knocked down eight straight, three fewer than the 11 in a row he had used to blow away Hodges last year in Dallas but impressive nonetheless.

“Some guy sitting behind me--he probably was from Seattle or Dallas--said, ‘You’re going to choke,’ ” Bird said. “Right there, I knew I wasn’t going to miss from that rack.”

Schrempf, who leads the league in three-point percentage at 53.8%, started slowly, making just 2 of his first 11 shots, but made a run of five straight, then hit three in a row from the corner before missing his last attempt.

And what was Schrempf thinking when Bird hit his first eight?

“I tried not to look,” Schrempf said.

Ainge didn’t have to.

“I think Larry thought he’d win no matter who showed up,” he said.