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In contrast, Boston's other usual starting forward, Cedric Maxwell, is a connoisseur of leisure. At the moment he is caring for a bad knee. During the off-season Maxwell finds it restful to steer his long car to a construction site and watch other men sweat. While he has an undeniable flair for grand occasions on the court, and was the play-off MVP of 1981, now and then in the ordinary going he throttles down for an evening as if idling at a building project. This mildly annoys most of the other players, but it galls Bird, whose farm-bred ethic makes no allowance for sidewalk superintendents.
"My goal in life when I was younger: get out of school, work construction --be a construction guy--pour concrete. I never worried about what I would do, because I always knew I could do something. I put up hay all my life. In school the only thing I thought about was basketball, but I went to class and did my homework. I felt sorry for the players who didn't, and I tried to talk to them, because I knew they were going to have a tough life. And sooner or later it's the same thing on the basketball court. The guy who won't do his schoolwork misses the free throw at the end. In high school we used to shoot fouls at 6:30 in the morning before class, but one of my best friends never showed up. In the regional finals our senior year, he missed three one-and- ones in a row, and we lost in overtime. I never said nothing to him. I just looked at him, and he knew."
The season before last, after the royal Celtics suffered the first four- game sweep in their play-off history, against the Milwaukee Bucks, distinguished First Substitute Kevin McHale puffed out his ostrich breast in the locker room and declared for the average player, "I can walk out of here with my head held high." But Bird spoke for himself, bitterly: "I'm gonna go back home this summer and work harder on basketball than I ever did before." Last year Boston achieved its 15th world championship, and Bird was the MVP of the tournament as well as the season. In the final seven-game play- off, the Lakers won the first in Boston and appeared to have taken the second --with 15 sec. left, Los Angeles held both the lead and the ball--only to blink and lose in overtime. Following a 33-point Laker romp in game 3, Bird referred to the Celtics as sissies, and in the singular episode of the fourth game, McHale ran over Los Angeles Forward Kurt Rambis. The series changed.