COMMENTARY : Bird Feels No Pain for Pistons

The Celtics won, and he had a big hand in it, as usual. But this time, there were no high-fives from Larry Bird, no inspirational butt whacks, no fist-pumping fury. No diving for loose balls. No animation. Things have changed for the worse since Game 5 Sunday, and not just his new haircut.

You know Bird’s intense, cold-blooded “I’m Gonna Get You, Sucka” game face? A Game 2 no-show. In its place was a vaguely pathetic and totally unLarry-like “Can I Survive This Day?” expression.

There is not much chance the Celtics can survive this best-of-seven series. After Tuesday’s Birdless Game 1 debacle, they reported to work Thursday faced with the grim prospect of going down 0-2 on their home court, before heading to the Motor City, where they have had even less success than the Japanese automakers. The Celtics are 0-9 at the Palace since the Detroit Pistons moved there three years ago.

Clearly, Game 2 was a must-win that called for Bird’s “High Noon” face. Instead, he looked like a man who’d just gotten off a very long and bumpy flight.

He looked, if you can believe it, even paler than usual. When Bird reported to the dressing room two hours before game-time, he barely managed a curt hello to his favorite visitors. His teammates didn’t even approach him.

In Game 1, of course, Bird wasn’t even around to be approacheda. His back hurt so much that even he, the ultimate gamer, stayed home. Game 5’s superman was now the invisible man. A very bad sign.

“He must really be hurt,” Dennis Rodman said at the time, “to miss a big game like this.”

When Bird misses a game, the Celtics miss so much. He has missed six playoff games in his career, and they have lost them all.

The Celtics did not lose Thursday. They evened the series with a 109-103 victory. Bird missed his first three shots -- the second a horrendous airball -- but finished with 16 points (7 of 15 from the field), eight rebounds and five assists.

“I haven’t practiced in three days,” Bird said afterward. “I’ve hardly practiced the last month. I’m not expecting to hit my shot. It’s a guess every time it goes up there.”

But there was no guessing about what Bird’s mere presence would provide. Bird breathed life into the Celtics offense as surely as if he had laid his teammates out on the parquet and administered mouth-to-mouth.

In Game 1, the Celtics passed the ball as if it were a medicine ball. With Bird in the lineup, the ball moved.

With Bird back, and playing his illegal one-man zone defense under the basket, the Celtics held their own on the boards. With Bird back, every Celtic got more elbow room on offense. With Bird back, the Pistons didn’t have the luxury, as they did in the second half of Game 1, of assigning defensive player extraordinaire Rodman to shut down Reggie Lewis. Rodman guarded Bird in the second half, and with 2 minutes, 34 seconds left, Rodman fouled out.

How bad was Bird hurting? He never got up off the bench -- or the floor in front of the bench -- to pump up his teammates at a timeout. When Kevin Gamble and Robert Parish came out of the game after a quality first-quarter stint, Bird, lying on his stomach to rest his back, acknowledged them by tapping them on their sneaker.

By Bird standards, he was also only mildly active on the court. Despite playing 42 minutes, he attempted only two free throws, a figure for faint-hearted perimeter players, and incredibly unLarry-like. Bird rarely attempted to drive to the basket. Clearly, he didn’t want to mix it up.

“I thought he was sensational,” said Pistons’ Coach Chuck Daly. “I don’t think he’s hurt at all.”

Daly, as you might have guessed, is quite a kidder. Until he was asked what Bird gave the Celtics that they lacked in Game 1.

“He handles the ball, he’s the point guard,” Daly said. “He either scores or dishes it off. That’s the key play of the game.”

Some might argue that the key play of the game was that Isiah Thomas didn’t play because of a sprained foot suffered with about six minutes left in Game 1. The Pistons could afford to let their superstar rest. Unlike the Celtics, they were not desperate men.

More than 45 minutes after the final buzzer, Bird, showered and dressed, pinched through the forest of minicams and notebooks that had staked out the table in the middle of the Celtics dressing room. That is where Bird gives his increasingly brief comments on the state of the Celtics.

He always sits on the table. Always. Not this time. This time, Bird stood.

Someone suggested that from the way he looked on the court, he must have been in considerable pain, even by his standards.

“I don’t want to get into that,” he said. “We played. We won. That’s all that matters.”

A TV interviewer started to ask about his back. Bird cut him off.

“My back is fine,” Bird said.

Usually, Bird injects humor into an interview, especially after a victory. Thursday, the only time he smiled was when someone asked him about the wayward pigeon that flew into the Garden and twice landed on the court in the third quarter, halting play and causing Joe Kleine to yell to his teammates, “Cover your heads.”

“The first thing that came to my mind was Dave Winfield (who killed a wayward seagull with a thrown ball),” Bird said. “I wanted to reach out there and grab it and pull its neck off, but I didn’t want to get any grief.”

In essence, that’s what the Pistons would have done to the Celtics by winning Games 1 and 2. But even in his condition, even as he faced certain off-season surgery, Larry Bird wouldn’t let them.

The pigeon is a bird. But this Bird is no pigeon.