Last Of A Breed : Earl Strom Began as an NBA Official When Players Wore Sneakers and Played in Gyms. He Leaves a League Wearing Air Jordans and Playing the Palace at Auburn Hills.

Here’s an Earl Strom story he doesn’t tell on the banquet circuit:

It’s 1987. Strom and Dick Bavetta are en route to officiate that night’s Laker-SuperSonic game in Seattle when they meet a reporter Strom knows from the old days. Strom offers him a ride. In the car, they joke about Earl’s stormy past.

“I haven’t seen your name in any headlines lately,” the reporter says.

“Nah,” says Strom, “I’ve mellowed.”

The reporter later learns that a week before, Strom and Bavetta had worked another game during which they argued in their dressing room at halftime. Strom, then 59, emphasized his point by grabbing Bavetta by the throat and choking him.

In this fat-cat era of the NBA, it’s hard to remember how it was in 1958, when Earl--Yogi to his friends--Strom came out of Pottstown, Pa., to officiate in the big carnival.

When Strom worked his final game last week and said goodby at a news conference, it served as a welcome reminder of the time before $125 sneakers and the Master Lock Defensive Player of the Year; when personality was just something you had, rather than something hawked through your agent; and when the league was more bush and maybe, if you weren’t the one being choked, more fun.

Trained by those masters of the imperial sneer, Sid Borgia, Mendy Rudolph and Norm Drucker, et. al. , the young Yogi arrived brimming with the requisite courage, but his defiance had a flip side. He had a bad habit of trading gibes with hecklers. Gregarious to a fault, he was just having fun, but sometimes he wound up going into the crowd to see who was funniest.

He had a genius for the impolitic move. He had a courtside fight with a St. Louis Hawk official. He jumped to the fledgling ABA in the 1960s, earning himself a permanent black mark with the NBA hierarchy. He worked during the ’77 officials’ strike, straining relationships with the few comrades he had in this world.

Thus isolated, he lasted only . . . 32 years. He retires as one of the most respected and popular referees in NBA history--a living, breathing dinosaur from the age of giants.

“Yeah, I think I’m the last of a dying breed,” he says, at 62 his eyes flashing behind tinted lenses.

“I honestly believe that. I’m the last of the group that was around when I came in. I’m the last of the guys who think differently than what is thought today.”

Ah, 1958.

President Eisenhower, bobby socks and NBA franchises in places such as Syracuse, N.Y., where crowds of 6,000 in the Onondaga War Memorial feasted on black-and-white striped officials, and a huge fan called the Strangler was once said to have picked up referee Charlie Eckman by the neck and dangled him off the floor.

Reporters at courtside tables often snarled at officials for calls against “their” teams. The money was meager. The officials all knew better than to quit their day jobs. Until well past mid-career, Strom worked for General Electric in Philadelphia and tried to make it into work the morning after working games in Baltimore or New York.

Only the strong survived, to be tested again the next night.

“Alex Hannum,” Strom says, naming the coach of the Nationals, Hawks, 76ers and Warriors. “He used to goad you and incite the crowd with his demonstrative actions.

“He’d jump up at Syracuse, and those people didn’t need any provocation up there. I mean, they were ready to come at you with both barrels. He’d stand up and hold his bald head in his hands, and the place would come down on you. I mean, everything in the place that wasn’t nailed down was thrown. I wouldn’t tolerate it, so I’d scream at him or throw him out.

“It got to the point that Alex used to say, ‘I’ll take Strom on the road. I don’t want him at home.’

“That started it. Some of the other coaches said that. More coaches said that. And I’d say to my boss, ‘These guys got to stop it, because some body’s got to be home. I got to have a job . I got to referee some where.”

This is part of Strom’s legend, his status as the visitors’ favorite.

But it’s only part.

“I did a lot of stupid things,” he says. “Like diving over the table to get at Irv Gack one night in Memphis. Irv was the assistant general manager of the St. Louis Hawks. They were playing the 76ers. I called a play against Richie Guerin, their player-coach, and wiped out a goal. The 76ers won the game.

“The game was being televised to Philadelphia. Matt Guokas Sr. (father of the current Orlando Magic coach) was doing the TV. The game was over, of course, the fans were irate, and I walk by the scorer’s table to go to my dressing room. Irv looks at me and says, ‘You gutless bastard!’

“I stupidly said to him, ‘Would you like to repeat that?’ He stupidly did. I leaped over the table to grab him. I would only have done it with Irv Gack, because he was a little bit heavier than I was. I wouldn’t do that to somebody who could whip me.

“The camera was on me. In Philadelphia, my wife and five children are sitting in the living room, watching this idiot jump over the table.

“With that, Wilt Chamberlain walks by. The fans were starting to come out of the stands around me. Wilt steps over the table, picks me up and says, ‘C’mon Earl, let’s get the hell out of here.’

“The camera’s still on us. Matt Guokas says, ‘It looks like Earl Strom is in some sort of trouble. But we’ll see you next week.’ And they go off the air.

“I got back to the hotel. I usually called home collect. I heard the operator say, ‘Will you accept a collect call from Memphis from Mr. Earl Strom?’ My wife says, ‘Will I? Put him on!’ I got cold-tongued for half an hour. Tremendous phone bill for getting cold-tongued. But I stopped doing stupid things. Of course, I was fined for that also.”

Strom was the Charles Barkley of the referees. He says his fines went up to the $10,000 he paid for critical remarks about then-Chicago owner Jonathan Kovler in Strom’s newspaper column. It ran in the Reading (Pa.) Eagle, and he learned another invaluable lesson, about how the wire services link up those newspapers and get you in trouble--again--with the supervisor in New York.

Strom never quite lived it all down. He was an ace referee and drew top assignments, but the coveted job of supervisor went to Darell Garretson, who stayed when Strom jumped to the ABA.

Strom stifled his natural rebellious streak only with difficulty. In retirement, he says he opposes the zone-defense rule and three officials, wants a no-foul-out rule and TV replay in key situations such as the Clipper game in which he mistakenly ruled Charles Smith’s three-point goal a two-pointer.

In general, he wants to let the players play and suggests that college-style officiating is sneaking in on inexperienced arbiters’ sneakers.

But Strom managed to hold his tongue in recent years. Several years ago, he watched his close friend, Walt Peters, an 18-season NFL linesman who’d dreamed of working the Super Bowl, dying of cancer in the psychiatric ward of Philadelphia Pennsylvania Hospital. Peters was strapped to the bed because he’d tried to commit suicide and couldn’t talk, but he wrote Strom a note.

Strom, remembering it at his farewell news conference, broke down. The note said, “I’ll never get the Super Bowl.”

Strom says he decided then and there that his work would never be all-important to him again.

Give or take an incident here and there, it hasn’t been.

One thing about Strom, he was what he was. Then, too, consider what he was up against.

Say, Red Auerbach.

“I had a pretty good rapport with Red,” Strom says. “Contrary to a lot of articles you read and contrary to a lot of pictures you saw. Red once said to me, ‘I can’t stand referees, but if I got to have a referee on the floor, I may as well have you.’ I took that as a compliment.’ ”

Of course, after the pivotal Game 4 of the 1987 Laker-Celtic NBA finals, which Magic Johnson won with his junior skyhook, Auerbach chased Strom all the way to his dressing room and not to tell him how much he respected him, either.

“He called me a few uncomplimentary names. He started cussing and telling me . . . that I was a eunuch. He wasn’t particularly happy with me. He was really screaming and yelling, and I just leaned out the door--Red doesn’t care for the name Arnold--and stuck my head out and I said, ‘Arnold, you’re showing me all the class I always knew you had.’

“Well, that really infuriated him. I heard him kicking the door a few more times.

“But I truly think the game misses the Red Auerbachs. I do. I love the man.”

Ah, maturity.

The NBA began turning down requests to interview Strom in his final season several months ago. The board of governors was opposed to a referee talking. Modern officials are supposed to be anonymous.

The NBA, while still enforcing the gag rule, made Strom available to its cable-TV partner, Turner Network Television, for a sanitized feature on his career.

And so Strom came to his last NBA finals.

There are a lot of great ways for a legend to retire. His crew’s last tough call--Danny Young’s too-late three-pointer in Game 4--was an after-the-fact committee job that was correct, but gave Portland Coach Rick Adelman something else to complain about.

“I wanted to get the ball,” Strom said, laughing. “When all the tumult occurred, I thought, ‘I better run for my life and try to buy a ball later.’

“You know what, it was ironic to be chased off the floor. There were so many years when I was chased off the floor. But it was fun.”

The Portland trainer brought him the ball. Strom joked that he wasn’t sure if he’d gotten it from the Trail Blazers or the Pistons.

That was how he went out, laughing, which wasn’t ironic, but appropriate.