BOSTON — I miss Jack Nicholson’s bare bottom.
Will somebody please turn up the heat on the NBA Finals?
If these Celtics and Lakers grow any chummier, they will start holding hands during free throws to sing “Kumbaya.”
This is not a rivalry. It’s a basketball lovefest.
Where is Nicholson dropping his pants and mooning the crowd in Boston? Where is Kevin McHale of the Celtics clotheslining L.A.’s Kurt Rambis with a cheap shot? Where is the stench of Red Auerbach’s obnoxious victory cigar?
Where’s the hate?
“I don’t think there’s the same hate factor . . . I think we’ve evolved a lot in that regard,” Los Angeles coach Phil Jackson said Saturday, describing why the league’s marquee teams now treat each other with so such mutual respect the NBA Finals are in desperate need of a bad-blood transfusion.
Anybody else miss the time when the Celtics would invite their enemies from the West Coast to the championship round, let the dank, rat-infested arena on Causeway Street bake to a toasty 97 degrees, then rudely give the Lakers a dressing room about the size of a prison cell?
“Those were locker rooms? I thought they were storage closets,” said L.A. legend Kareem Abdul- Jabbar, who swears that winning the NBA title on Boston’s home floor in 1985 is one of his most cherished sports achievements.
Back in the day, when Magic and Bird ruled the game, the parquet floor in the old Boston Garden was littered with dribble-killing dead spots and real men wore hot pants to play hoops, you could not mention the Lakers and Celtics in the same sentence without putting “bitter” in front of the word “rivals.”
“I miss the Forum in Los Angeles and the old Garden in Boston, because those were basketball arenas, nothing else. There were no luxury boxes or video on jumbo screens. And everybody came to the games thinking only one thing: Cheer for the home team and boo the opponents,” 38-year-old Boston guard Sam Cassell said.
Recalling the hard, dirty foul by McHale that knocked him silly and turned the momentum in the 1984 championship series, Rambis remains irked nearly a generation later.
“It was really something in basketball that you just don’t do,” Rambis said. “In some ways, it was the physical act of a coward.”
Now, for crying out loud, when injured Boston hero Paul Pierce limped past defeated L.A. star Kobe Bryant in the hallway after Game 1 of the current best-of-seven series, there could not have been more genuine sympathy between them if they exchanged Hallmark cards.
With clinical detachment, Boston coach Doc Rivers and his counterpart on the L.A. bench can diagnose why the Lakers and Celtics are all proper business and no down-and- dirty battle. Free agency ended the unwavering pledge of allegiance to a team’s logo. Professionals who grew up playing ball together in AAU summer competition have become too much like brothers to go to war on the court. An explosion of media outlets has fractured the nation’s rooting interests.
“When I was a kid I thought the only three teams that were on TV were the Lakers, Sixers and Celtics,” Rivers said.
Sure, spectators in the plush, new, sterile Garden can still make the joint jump with loud chants demanding the home team to beat L.A. “I could feel the pain in my ears,” testified NBA super fan Jim Goldstein, who you have probably caught glimpses on TV for decades, while he has sat courtside at the Finals, always sporting a wide- brimmed hat and often wearing what appear to be $2,000 lizard-skin pants.
But has the money gotten too big in the NBA for any millionaire athlete to treat winning and losing as life and death?
Worse, have the fans of Beantown, one of the great sports cities in America, gone soft?
“I’ve heard stories in the past of (the Lakers) coming here and not getting room service and stuff like that,” Bryant said. “My room service is cool. You know, I got the nice apple pie with the ice cream on top, a la mode. I didn’t even ask for the ice cream, but they hooked me up.
“I’ve heard horror stories from the past in the ’80s when the guys came here. It’s not like that. There’s a healthy competition, and they obviously want to win, the city wants to win, but it’s not like, ‘I hate your guts.’ ”
The problem with today’s NBA is not too little skill or too many tattoos.
But we need to see a return of real passion.
Back in the day, the Celtics did not want to beat L.A., they needed to win a championship so badly we could all taste it.
It’s time to restore the bitterness to this rivalry.
We’re not asking for much. A single Kevin Garnett elbow to the chest of Lakers guard Derek Fisher might do it. A fist pump from Bryant after sinking a jumper at the buzzer could get the thing started. Give us something, anything to shout about.
“Jack Nicholson hasn’t weighed in on this series,” Jackson said, “and we have to wait for him to spice up the crowd.”
Our basketball nation turns its lonely eyes to you, Mr. Nicholson.
Shoot the moon.
It’s not really Lakers-Celtics until the bad blood flows.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
