The Fire Still Burns Within Auerbach : Basketball: In his 41st season, the semi-retired architect of the Boston Celtics longs for NBA championship No. 17.

It is a beautiful day in the nation’s capital, but Arnold Jacob Auerbach can’t smell the cherry blossoms because he is wreathed in cigar smoke. He is sitting in a black Saab convertible at the curb outside his 18th Street office. Just sitting there, sweating the clock.

At precisely 9:30, when parking there becomes legal, Auerbach eases out of his car and shuffles to the parking meter. He slides in eight quarters.

“You gotta watch it,” he says. “I’ve seen a guy get ticketed at 9:29, but I’m OK now. Only two bucks for two hours. Good deal. Man, those parking garages ...”

Those parking garages will soak you four, five bucks. He waves his cigar, a monster of a Hoyo de Monterrey, with disgust.

He shuffles past three construction workers sipping coffee on the sidewalk. “Hey,” one says. “is that Red Auerbach?”

The shuffle turns into a stride. The back gets straighter. The cigar is whirling. And suddenly 73-year-old Arnold has become the legend: Red, arguably the most successful man in the history of professional sports.

Auerbach is in his 41st season with the Boston Celtics. His 938 victories as a coach are an NBA record. And in his years as coach and then team general manager and president, the team has won an unprecedented 16 NBA championships, including eight in a row -- records unlikely ever to be equalled.

And now, with the Celtics beginning the league playoffs Friday against the Indiana Pacers, he’s hungry for another title, and will be satisfied with nothing less.

As he always says, “A good loser is a loser.”

He’s in semi-retirement now, and this year’s aging team probably represents the last chance for a team he put together to win title No. 17.

Larry Bird, whom he shrewdly drafted a year early in 1978, is 34 and sidelined with a throbbing back. Kevin McHale and Robert Parish, who came to Boston in one of the most one-sided deals in league history, are 33 and 37, respectively.

They’re still his boys, his team. The Celtics still get Red out of bed in the morning. It’s just a little later than it used to be.

Being a legend is hard work as you grow old. When he turned 70, Auerbach

said: “As soon as you say retirement,you’re looked on as some poor bum waiting to die.” Some days, he’d just as soon stay home and watch “Jeopardy.” Some days, two hours of playing Red is all he can manage. But it’s not something he can give up.

“That’s why I come to this office every day when I’m down here,” he says. “When you sit home, all you think about are ailments. You talk to people your own age and all they talk about are health problems. Who’s had a heart attack? Did you hear who died? When you’re busy, it’s a different ballgame.”

Critics say his abilities are not what they once were. They point to some recent miscalculations about player talent.

“Ah, what the hell,” he says. “I can see what I could always see -- I just don’t see as much.”

These days, in the wake of a few major surgeries, Auerbach spends more time in Washington, where he lives with Dorothy, his wife of 50 years. He sits in his private office for a few hours each morning. He takes a steam and then has lunch with his buddies at the Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Md.

He finds time to get his granddaughter’s car fixed. Time, after a series of five dogs, to get close to one: C.P. (Celtic Pride). Yeah, it’s a boxer. Could you see Red with a poodle?

Dorothy Auerbach says they stay home mostly because its so comfortable.. “When you reach a certain age you don’t have to prove anything.”

Maybe.

See, Auerbach won’t drop entirely out of the loop. He still manages to get to more than half of the Celtics home games at Boston Garden. Dave Gavitt, the Celtics’ senior executive vice president who now runs the team, consults with him almost every day. Auerbach recently spent his annual week watching all-star games in Portsmouth, Va., and Orlando, Fla., appraising the best college talent.

“No one,” Gavitt says, “expects him at age 73 -- though he’s bright and still with it -- to be as up to date on every nook and cranny as he was. But he’s a great sounding board.”

The job began to wear on Auerbach in the mid-1970s when his values and sense of loyalty collided with the “Me” generation, the advent of long-term contracts and the burgeoning presence of drugs.

Besides, all the general managers he had fleeced of star players in one-sided trades over the years wouldn’t deal with him anymore.

“It became frustrating,” Auerbach says.

Gradually Jan Volk, who started out as a gofer in Auerbach’s summer rookie camps, assumed more and more of Auerbach’s day-to-day duties with the Celtics. In 1984, Volk was named general manager, leaving Auerbach to deal with the loftier matters of player personnel, the essence of a team.

In 1986, expecting to add a great young player to an aging team, Auerbach selected University of Maryland forward Len Bias in the annual college draft. Bias never played in the Celtics uniform.

If the Celtics had done their homework, they might have discovered that Bias associated with drug dealers. But they didn’t, and Bias’ death from a cocaine overdose stunned the franchise and may well have cost it another championship or two.

Auerbach still finds it hard to talk about.

In 1989, Auerbach overruled others in the organization who wanted to draft guard Tim Hardaway. Instead, he chose Brigham Young forward Michael Smith. Today, Hardaway is an all-star. Smith, who might have been a star in the plodding NBA of the 1950s, proved too slow for today’s game and warms the bench.

Even before the folly of the Smith selection was dawning on the organization, Celtics Vice Chairman Alan Cohen urged Auerbach to hire a successor. Gavitt, a longtime protege who had modeled his Providence College teams on the Celtics, was Auerbach’s choice. Gavitt was hired last May and has the final authority in all basketball decisions.

The phone rings in Auerbach’s office. It’s Gavitt. Auerbach pauses to get into his Red act and bellows, “Dave who?”

“Sure,” Red says into the phone. “Yelling at them isn’t going to change it.”

The cigar blazes. He continues for another five minutes, doing most of the talking. He hangs up the phone and suddenly he is Arnold again, the act over. He yawns openly, without apology.

Former player Tom “Satch” Sanders says: “He’s never changed. Oh, he’s older and calmer, but if you’re talking about the man, he’s never changed.”

Building winners so quickly always involved a little larceny. In a tortuous series of trades in 1979, he dumped a player he didn’t want and ended up with Robert Parish and Kevin McHale, two players likely headed to the Hall of Fame.

It was Harry Mangurian, then the owner of the team, who pushed Auerbach to add Danny Ainge to that team. Ainge, a great college player, had been passed over by other teams because he was under contract to play baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays. But Auerbach picked him, convinced him to switch sports, and then negotiated a deal to free him from the Blue Jays.

Sure, Ainge was Mangurian’s idea; but Auerbach is happy to take the credit.

“See, I was a pioneer on a lot of things, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t steal,” Red says, teeth showing. “If somebody had something good and I liked it, then I would do it.”

Appropriate it, actually. “If he took your idea, it was his idea,” says one member of the Celtics front office.

During the decades that Auerbach kept rebuilding the Celtics, the ownership of the team kept changing. Many basketball people say the only statistic that approaches his 16 championships is that Auerbach has survived 14 different ownership groups.

“That,” Volk says, “is amazing. It was because of him that the team was able to maintain the continuity of winning with all those changes going on. With the strength of his will he did it.”

The secret was learning to give in once in a while.

“You have to adjust to what’s going on,” Auerbach says. “I had to be prepared to change a little bit.”

But just a little. When Auerbach starts talking about what’s wrong with the game today, he sounds like the 73-year-old grandfather he is.

“Ahhhh,” he says, rocking back in his leather office chair, “look at all the assistants, all the video people. There’s eight guys doing what I was doing all alone.”

And look at those college coaches today, he says. “They’re up 20 points with 2 minutes left and they are giving all these signals. Why? Because they are on television.”

The old man’s wisdom still sometimes trickles down to the Celtics’ play on the court.

A few years ago, for example, McHale missed a flight to an away game. Coach K.C. Jones wondered how much he should fine McHale. Nothing, said Red.

“How many planes has he missed?” Auerbach asked. “None, right? He probably got stuck in the tunnel. Have you talked to him? Tell him to forget it.”

Auerbach smiles. “See, K.C.’s happy, McHale’s happy. And he busted his ass the next game. That’s the thing, see. He thinks he owes you one.”

The way he talks about the old days now, it sounds like he owes them one too, all those players over all those years.

Sure, Magic Johnson of the Lakers just broke the record for assists. But if they had kept track of assists in Cousy’s day, he says, his voice trailing off. And if they had kept an accurate count of rebounds in the 1950s and ‘60s, Bill Russell would be the all-time leader.

Auerbach is still a world-class grudge holder. He will never acknowledge the greatness of Wilt Chamberlain because he was a rival of Russell.

Even now, he has not forgiven Boston for taking so long to appreciate his Celtics, never forgiven all those times that Russell and Cousy played to 5,000 empty seats.

“It took awhile to sell the game in Boston,” he says. “And then, finally, the sellouts started coming.”

In 1985, the city of Boston erected a statue of Auerbach at Faneuil Hall Marketplace. It is an appropriately imperious study in bronze.

“Boston realized what had been accomplished,” Auerbach says. “Finally, they put up the damn statue.”