The Party’s Over : After So Many Memorable Games on Boston Garden’s Parquet Floor, Lakers Play Their Final One Tonight

After tonight, only the memories will remain, so many of them bad, so many of them of both the coldest and hottest days in Laker history.

OK, the rats, too.

No more telephone booth that passes as the visitors’ locker room. No more exposed bolts holding down the parquet floor that fits together like a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing. No more jungle-like heat--or arctic cold. No more smell.

Parting is such sweet sorrow.

“Will I miss the Boston Garden?” says Kurt Rambis, a longtime Laker player and now a special assistant coach. “I’ll miss it like I’d miss my bald spot.”

After tonight, barring an unlikely matchup in the NBA finals, the Lakers will be finished with the venerable, nostalgic, decrepit, antiquated, historic, archaic relic of a building that piggy-backs the North Station, where, as Chick Hearn likes to say, going through the wrong door will put you on a train instead of in the hot dog line.

In the fall, the Celtics will be playing next door in a new building called the Shawmut Center, named after the bank that footed a portion of the bill. Those who have been saying for years--decades?--that Boston Garden was on its last legs are finally right.

The Lakers are 44-94 at the Garden heading into tonight’s curtain call--34-72 in regular-season meetings that date to 1948-49 and 10-22 in the playoffs. It’s not only the record, though. So many of the Lakers’ memorable moments, have transpired here.

The Garden is where they took so many hits en route to losing eight consecutive final series to the Celtics. Where they finally broke through, in 1985, in what was probably the greatest moment in Laker history, especially because the clinching Game 6 victory was scored here. Where Frank Selvy missed his shot in the closing seconds. Where Magic Johnson made his junior skyhook.

It’s where they threw away the likely victory in Game 2 in 1984, when Gerald Henderson intercepted James Worthy’s cross-court pass to Byron Scott with about 15 seconds left and turned it into the tying layup and an eventual overtime victory. Where Elgin Baylor scored 61 points in the 1962 finals and, upon being removed late in the game by Coach Fred Schaus, got a standing ovation from the Boston fans, which remains one of Hearn’s great memories. Where the Memorial Day Massacre took place.

It’s “Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!” It’s Pat Riley demanding that the clean-up crew leave the building during practice and perplexed Garden security director Joe L’Italien responding, “Maybe he thought they had VCRs in their brooms.” It’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wearing an oxygen mask on the bench on the day the Garden was a mega-greenhouse.

It’s fans rushing the court before the end of the game to celebrate the finals triumph in 1966, knocking Bill Russell to the floor and orange juice containers from the Boston bench onto the court. It’s the leprechauns and the dead spots in the floor.

It’s Bill Sharman, a star with the Celtics in the ‘50s and ‘60s and later a coach and executive with the Lakers: “We had those teams when I played, we won all the time. You walked out there and you just felt like you were going to win.

“I think it has to have something that makes you play a little harder when the games got close. You say, ‘We’re not supposed to lose, we’re supposed to win,’ and I think that it just picks you up or something. I can remember so many close games in the playoffs that we won that maybe we shouldn’t have.”

It’s Jack Nicholson sitting in the stands: “I remember a guy in there, after we lost the ballgame when Boston stole the inbounds pass. Now the series is over, and I’m standing up there taking my lumps from the crowd. Here’s what I remember:

“There were two guys down there, stripped to the waist, yelling at me like maniacs. And they had a bag of flour in each hand, pretending it was an illicit substance and pounding it over their heads like this (he waves his arms wildly). I thought, ‘Well, those guys had a great afternoon’s entertainment.’ ”

It’s Hearn: “When I first went to Boston Garden back in Elgin Baylor’s and Jerry West’s first years in the league, the locker room was, oh, about as big as the top of a table-tennis table. I believe there were two shower heads to take care of everybody.

“There was very poor drainage, and if a guy took off his tennis shoe after the game and put it down, it would float. The whole situation as we think of it today is absolutely bizarre.”

The Lakers and Boston Garden will forever be linked. After tonight, it will only be by the memories.

*

“It might be rigged,” is one thought that goes through your mind when you go into Boston Garden.

--Jack Nicholson

*

No one is sure what the near future holds for the Garden. The Celtics figure it will stay up at least a year or 18 months after the Shawmut Center opens, in case they or the hockey Bruins need somewhere to practice when scheduling conflicts arise. That might be difficult in the Celtics’ case, though, since the parquet floor, supposedly a refurbished parquet floor, will be moved to the new building.

Then the rats really will rule the old joint. Red Auerbach’s stogies, the leprechauns, the retired jersey numbers and, of course, the banners representing the titles will have made the move, just so people can still crane their necks and recall what success is all about.

“Looking up and seeing all those hockey championships,” Rambis says, smiling.

Del Harris will see them for the first time as a Laker. He has been here for one of the greatest of all possible moments in the NBA--a final series in the Garden, with Houston in 1981--and also with Milwaukee. It was here, as a Rocket, that he spent his first regular-season night as a pro head coach.

“It was Larry Bird’s first game,” he said. “Here I am, in 1979, a little guy from Indiana, in Boston Garden. And Larry Bird, another guy from Indiana, playing his first game.

“I never will forget it. They announced the starting lineups. They announced us and then they announced the Boston team, and the last guy to be introduced, of course, was Larry.

“Just as they introduced Larry, down at the basket across from their bench, some guy opened a sack or a cage and a white dove flew out of that thing and went right up to the top of the building. I suppose that son of a gun is still there. Maybe he fell out when Larry retired, I don’t know.”

Probably not. Probably got a green dye job and converted to the religion that is the Boston Celtics. If not, it would be impossible to coexist with the leprechauns.

The surroundings are a large part of the uniqueness of the Garden. Russell and Cousy and Havlicek and Bird provided the titles, not the atmosphere.

Part of that was gravel-voiced play-by-play guy Johnny Most, who regarded the Lakers as nothing short of mortal enemies. He once said Rambis should have been kicked out of the league for being a dirty player and called the point guard Cry-Baby Johnson. Part of it was the Third World locker room. Part of it was the rabid yet knowledgeable fans.

“The ’85 Memorial Day Massacre,” said Michael Cooper, a former player and now an assistant Laker coach. “The game where they really lit (us) up and took us over the hill (148-114 in Game 1 of the finals). That game, everyone was hitting (for Boston). Scott Wedman went four for four on threes.

“It was a very down game (for the Lakers), but in a sense it was a lifting game because after that we made our adjustments and came back and eventually won the series. I’ll always remember that particular game because it seemed like all the mystiques of Boston Garden happened that day, when they say the little leprechaun sits in the basket and he knocks your shot away, then down at the end with the Celtics he grabs theirs and throws them in. Scott Wedman took three shots that I know shouldn’t have gone in, and somehow they went in.”

That was an all-too-common theme for the Lakers at the Garden. Then again, Murphy, who had a law named after him, was Irish.

“I guess my best memory was when the Lakers beat the Celtics back there in the ‘80s,” Jerry West said. “And obviously I have a lot of worse memories, never being able to win against those people during my playing days. Those are the things you most carry with you from a player. I haven’t been in that building since I’ve played.”

*

“I’ll never forget how hot it was that one year in that one playoff game. I’ll never forget how many times the fire alarm went off in the hotel that night. Somebody said they saw Auerbach running hee-hee-hee’ing out of the hotel. I’ll never forget taking a shower with 12 guys and only two shower heads. I’ll never forget all the dead spots, the floor that didn’t piece together accurately, the big ol’ holes that were in the floor in each corner to hold the floor down because those big bolts were in it, how great it looks on television and how actually bad the floor is in real life. “

--Kurt Rambis

“There’s no telling what they’re liable to find under that floor. We lost a rookie in one of those cracks my first year. I don’t know whatever happened to the guy. “

--Del Harris

“I believe it was the first place that I ever saw a parquet floor. It was in bad shape then, and that was 1960. “

--Chick Hearn

The Lakers learned to be prepared for the worst in the Garden, especially during the Riley years.

Trainer Gary Vitti was so tuned in that when he went to a Raider game on a hot afternoon in the fall, he noticed portable air conditioners on the sidelines and wrote down the phone number on the side of the machines, figuring they would be perfect for Boston and the finals.

Vitti was right. June came, the Lakers were in Boston for the 1984 finals, and it was like a sweatbox in the building for Game 2.

Vitti ignored Garden personnel who said the building couldn’t handle an electrical surge of that magnitude, turned the coolers on and made the visitors’ locker room a refreshing oasis. Did it help in the long run? Let’s just say the best play of the day was made by the trainer.

*

“You can smell winning. You can smell history in there.”

--Vlade Divac

“It smells like trash. It’s a dump, you know? The place is a dump. But as much as it is a dump, that whole thing really gets you up for the game. It’s supposed to be in their favor, but the fact is, when you go in there, you’re unmistakably in Boston Garden so you know you’re playing the Celtics and you know you better come and you better come big. So that whole thing is sort of a wake-up call.”

--Gary Vitti

*

Some Lakers, believe it or not, will actually miss the place.

“I remember the locker rooms in there,” said West, who has endured a lot of pain on the parquet. “If you weren’t careful, you’d burn yourself on the steam pipes. Then it would be freezing cold another time.

“But there was a charm about the place, I don’t think there’s any question about that. I guess it’s very much like an old baseball park--Fenway Park or Wrigley Field. Places like that have a great charm about themselves. I think when you move into a new building, you’re not going to have that charm for a long time.”

Would it help if they moved the rats?