COMMENTARY : He Was a Crass Act to the End : NBA: Laimbeer threw many an elbow and made many an enemy in 14 seasons--and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Bill Laimbeer calls it quits after 14 seasons, four All-Star game appearances and two NBA titles. What is there to say but:

What kept you?

They’re dancing in Chicago, down in New Orleans, up in New York City. They’re dancing in the streets.

Let’s face it, it’s hard to dredge up a warm, fuzzy feeling about this guy. He was a menace on the floor and a grump off it.

He embodied some of the worst things in basketball. If the game was ever to emerge from the swamp, it had to legislate his kind of thuggery out of existence and did. He was a guy only a teammate or a blood relative could love.

But admire? That’s something else.

He was wholly admirable. He made no apology for what he was and he never backed down, not if it was the sainted Larry Bird in the hallowed Boston Garden, where Laimbeer dragged him to the floor with a memorable hack in the ’87 Eastern Conference finals.

Laimbeer’s fellow players hated him, but he couldn’t have cared less. He had no friends on other teams nor did he want any. He said he only congratulated one, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. There was no man in the universe he had less in common with, but he went up to Abdul-Jabbar during his farewell tour in 1989 because he admired him for lasting so long.

NBA players were mostly poor and came from the inner city. Laimbeer was a rich kid from Palos Verdes whose father was a big wheel with Owens-Illinois. Someone once asked, after he started making big money, how it felt to make more than his dad. He said he didn’t.

“When I first met him, he acted exactly like a rich kid from the suburbs,” said teammate Isiah Thomas. “He knew how to eat lobster and go to the beach. He doesn’t think as white any more.”

Actually, Laimbeer gave off Rush Limbaugh vibes to the end, working in George Bush’s presidential campaigns. But he and Thomas, one of the poorest children of the inner city, became best friends, if forever-quarreling ones.

Before this season, Laimbeer broke one of Thomas’ ribs with a hard screen in practice. Thomas played the first two weeks with his ribs taped, until Laimbeer dropped him again with another hard pick in another practice. This time, Thomas ran after him, punched him in the back of the head, broke his shooting hand and has been sidelined since. Congratulations poured over Thomas from every corner of the NBA.

That kind of stuff never bothered Laimbeer, but the thought of his hometown fans turning on him did. He had to be talked out of quitting after the Thomas incident, returning only when convinced that if he left that way, that was how he would be remembered.

He received a mixed reception the next night when he came off the bench in the Auburn Palace. He then proceeded to score 25 points and the crowd went nuts.

He hadn’t been a full-time starter in two seasons, but nice-guy Coach Don Chaney put him back in as a power forward. Laimbeer had two more big games, writing himself an ending he could be proud of.

He was his own guy. He wasn’t a phony trying to pretend he was a nice guy for a sneaker endorsement.

If there was something missing in his game--basketball, perhaps?--he was a force. In the Pistons’ second championship in 1990, he drew so many charges on the Portland Trail Blazers that former coach Richie Adubato of the Dallas Mavericks made a highlight film of it and showed it to his team.

This is where Laimbeer is supposed to turn out to be a really nice guy under it all but let’s face it, he isn’t.

James Edwards, the Laker center, knew him as the kind of opponent you’d like to hit with a 2 x 4.

Then he played with him on those championship Piston teams.

“Basically, he’s Bill Laimbeer,” said Edwards. “The same things he does to opposing players, he does to his teammates.

“Some players let players get away with things. He’d say, ‘We’re not going to have that.’ He could get under your skin.”

So he couldn’t really say Laimbeer was actually a great guy?

“That would be too nice for him,” said Edwards, laughing. “He wouldn’t want that.”

He was Bill Laimbeer to the end, even as a used-up, 36-year-old sub on a bad team. In his last go-round, he laid out his little buddy twice and clotheslined the dreaded Karl Malone, earning a $5,000 fine and a one-game suspension.

Said Laimbeer, repentant as ever: “His fat head got in the way.”

Farewell, sweet Billy. We’ll never forget you, no matter how hard we try.