Sport: Masters of Their Own Game

Anyone even casually aware of professional hockey and basketball knows Wayne Gretzky and Larry Bird as shades of no one else, except maybe each other: two unexpectedly alike and amazingly unlikely straw-haired farm boys who are not only reigning at the top of their games but raising the ceilings of their sports. Confounding normal description, confusing standard measurement, Gretzky is not the slickest skater or hardest shooter, just as Bird is not the swiftest runner or highest jumper. One is frankly too frail for the business, the other simply too agile for his size.

Though neither is highly educated, in the study of their games they were prodigies as children, and are intellectuals now. By some similar force of instinct and understanding–maybe Chess Grand Master Bobby Fischer would know about this–they see and play the game several moves ahead of the moment, comprehending not only where everything is but also where everything will be. Shown a photograph of a nondescript instant on the ice, Gretzky can replace the unpictured performers here and there about the periphery and usually recall what became of them the next second. Glancing at the basketball photo in the morning paper, Bird’s automatic thought, essentially a reflex, is to note approximately what time the photographer had to snap his picture to make the deadline.

Their eminence in current terms is obvious, since they are the incumbent Most Valuable Players of the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association, and their teams, the Edmonton Oilers and the Boston Celtics, are each the sport’s defending champion. But increasingly Gretzky and Bird are referred to as the best hockey and basketball players of all time. Both resist the idea. “It’s silly to argue that,” Gretzky says. “In my mind Gordie Howe is the best player who ever played hockey and the best man who ever played sports. Then others say Bobby Orr was better than Howe. There’ll never be another Howe. There’ll never be another Orr. But there’ll be another kid to compare them to.”

Gretzky was a six-year-old on a team for ten-year-olds, and at eleven made Howe’s acquaintance. The great man inquired gently, “Do you practice your shots, son?” “Yes, sir, I do,” he replied. “Your backhand too?” “Yes, sir.” “Good. Make sure you keep practicing that backhand.” Of all the remarkable entries in Gretzky’s log–most goals by far in a season (92), most assists by far (125), most points (212), most records (35 in the N.H.L. alone)–the least told is the most telling. The first goal he ever scored in Junior B league play, the first he scored in Junior A, the first in the World Hockey Association and the first in the N.H.L.–all were on backhand shots.

Growing up, Bird was not much aware of the N.B.A., either at seven or 17. He never thought to watch Elgin Baylor perform his legerdemain for the Los Angeles Lakers. When Bird joined the Celtics at 22, six years ago, he knew nothing of Boston Coach Bill Fitch, who had toiled in the league for nine seasons. So no sentimental memory inhibits Bird’s self-assessment, just a typically restrained presumption that “people probably tend to forget how good players really were. I’m definitely one of the top ones today, but calling anyone the best ever is too harsh a statement. I put myself in the same category with John Havlicek, someone who works for everything he gets.” Not that either MVP denies his ability. “This game is all confidence,” Bird says, “and, you know, sometimes it’s scary. When I’m at my best, I can do just about anything I want, and no one can stop me. I feel like I’m in total control of everything.” The signal for this is when, after shooting, he loops fully around and recoils down the court in triumph before the ball has even reached the basket. “I already know it’s all net.” His joy is regenerating. “I’ll be tired, worn down from travel, or just sad and moody–I consider myself a moody person. But then the ball will go up, and all of a sudden I’m up too. It’s wild.” Gretzky, reaching that bracing elevation, can actually feel a shift in temperature. “When the play isn’t so great, my hands are cold and my feet are freezing. But when it’s really good, I can’t get enough cold, it’s so hot. And then I don’t hear anything except the sound of the puck and the stick.”

Bird accepts this, his richest statistical season, as the introduction to his prime, “because 28 just sounds about right.” That suits Gretzky, who at 24 would fervently like four more years of incline, but he wonders. “When Guy Lafleur retired this season, and I saw he had played only 14 years, I thought, ‘Hey, I’ve played seven already.’ Maybe I am halfway through.” The first time he and Lafleur ever faced off, it seemed the puck would never drop, and under the tension of the wait, below the clamor of the crowd, he heard Lafleur murmur, “How’s it going, Gretz?” Without planning to, Gretzky found himself saying the same thing this year to Star Rookie Mario Lemieux. “How’s it going, Mario?”

They never seem to stop going long enough to think about it. From autumn to spring, they crisscross the ice and the court, and the country.

The Celtics are on the road. Of all the caravans in sports, basketball’s is the most intimate. Because of their numbers, baseball and football teams are obliged to travel on chartered planes, and customarily fill out the cabins with supernumeraries. But a basketball troupe consists of ten or twelve players, a coach or two, a writer or three, a radio broadcaster and a combination trainer-traveling secretary. They wait with everyone else for undependable commercial departures. Every team’s traditional safeguard against a severe fine for missing a game is always to take the first flight out in the morning. So the players are up at 7 each day, bleary vaudevillians pursuing one-night stands.

To Bird, “this part here is all baloney,” and he actually counts down the stops. “Just five more games in Dallas.” He smacks his lips, calculating one visit a year for the balance of his contract. Dallas’ charms have been especially elusive, but few of the league cities warm him. “The same towns over and over. You know where you’re going, but you forget where you’re coming from. I’ve seen a lot of places, but I’ve still never been any place as good as Indiana.”

Like globe trotting, grammar has no firm hold on Bird. His manner is countrified enough to give people a comfortable misimpression of his intelligence and sophistication. Either guilelessly or gleefully he contributes to his image. “I read a couple of books this summer, shows you how bored I was,” he twangs self-consciously in response to the stares of teammates who have observed him reading Arthur Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times, and could not be more stunned if he were wearing a necktie. Particularly by N.B.A. standards, it is a paperback of Tolstoyan heft. “This will probably take me three years,” Bird moans. Not one for justifying himself much, he explains the selection by mentioning a couple of movies and leaves out the truth that a basic grounding in the Kennedys is a prerequisite for conversation in Boston.

In moderation, he does not mind the public inconvenience attending his celebrity, at least not as much as he used to. It would be nice, however, if he could be left in peace to watch a baseball game at Fenway Park. “Everybody wants to be a part of something. I understand that now,” he says. “In college I didn’t, but I’m getting better. Some days I want to be around people, but other days I just don’t.” Seeking privacy, he folds himself up like a lawn chair–haunches, levers and various other right angles–into a tiny airport telephone nook, and picks up Schlesinger on page 85.

Any topic attracting Bird’s research inevitably prompts a fascination aboard the hotel jitneys that deliver the Celtics players to airport or gym. As the Kennedy round table inexorably revolves to sex lives, Bird muses, “Who was that blond actress Kennedy supposedly dated?” This brings smiles. How could anyone know of Marilyn Monroe and not know her name? Another time, when the subject is popular music, Bird puzzles, “Who’s Bruce Springsteen?” Dan Shaughnessy, the thoughtful young basketball writer for the Boston Globe, answers softly, “Larry, he’s the you of rock ‘n’ roll.” Bird laughs wearily. “Where have I been?”

Playing basketball. “I know I missed a lot, but I’m making $2 million a year, and I’m seeing and learning a lot of things, and I wouldn’t be doing none of it without basketball. I know a person has to expand, but I’m sort of in college here, and I’m getting smarter.” Consequently, he checked out a Springsteen concert and came away an unusual fan. “I’m still not into loud music, but you should see how hard that guy works for four hours. By the time it’s about through, you’re sick of him, but he still wants to go more. Whew, it wore me out. He’s great.” Leave it to Bird to admire a man for his perspiration.

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.

That familiar Bill Russell sampler, “He improves every man on the court,” has been restitched on Bird, who positions himself so nimbly and is such an innovative passer it scarcely registers that at nearly 6 ft. 10 in., he may be slightly taller than Russell. Neither fame nor finances have compromised Bird’s relationship with teammates, because the others not only profit from but are infatuated with his game, especially its essential principle that the most deserving party gets the pass. A 14-ft. jump shooter stationed 17 ft. from the hoop might as well be standing in Oshkosh. Other players on the frantic run may glimpse jersey colors, but Bird always sees people in profile, frailties included. “From a certain spot Kevin will score every time, but from another point right around there he’s sure to walk or foul. If I’m pressured into giving him the ball in the wrong place, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Don’t shoot, Kevin, pass it out.’ ” As McHale scored a Celtic-record 56 points last week, Bird personally arranged the final nine, with deft assists that included a court-long pass for the lay-up that broke the old regular season mark of 53–Bird’s.

He plays a forward position but is closer than either the Lakers’ Magic Johnson or Detroit’s Isiah Thomas to the ancient point guards, who were considerably less gifted than the moderns but infinitely more mindful of quirks and clocks and subtler vagaries. In the simplest expression for his game, Bird always seems to do the right thing. “I’ve had good coaching everywhere,” he says gratefully–two coaches at each high school, college and professional stop. The first in each case was a stiff fundamentalist, the second “always like K.C. Jones, who tells me, ‘You know how to do this, you know how to do that. Go do it.’ ” Bird values both types, but his special affection for Celtics Coach Jones is evident. “He’s a competitor, that’s the thing. K.C. takes it personal.”

If an impression exists that Bird wins every game on a final-buzzer shot, it traces to two consecutive episodes in January, primarily one basket against Portland to complete a 48-point performance. Range is of no concern to Bird –from beyond the three-point distance of 23 ft. 9 in., he makes nearly half of his shots–so his system for clearing air space at any time is just to step back one yard, ample compensation for even the springiest defenders. His right hand–the one he shoots with, not the one he writes with–is gnarled from a 1979 softball accident that required him to alter his release. Crooking his elbow, he launches the basketball suddenly yet daintily on a lofty arc from off his shoulder. Against Portland, the ball rose out of an odd corner angle and fell after time was exhausted in what seemed to be frozen frames. + “Everyone was quiet in the arena,” Jones recalls the hush. “You could see the ball spinning in the air.” So far, that seems the only really distinct point in the interminable season.

The Oilers are at home. Temporarily down to a solitary goaltender, awaiting a replacement from the minor leagues, they have recruited an Edmonton policeman, Floyd Whitney, for a practice session. “You’re the target today, eh?” one of the stubbly giants greets Whitney reassuringly, as the Stanley Cup champions slide sleepily onto their indoor pond. Despite a proliferation of Europeans, hockey players still tend to be white, toothless Canadians from small, picturesque places, who skated to grammar school on iced-over footpaths until diverted during high school to the big city, where they enjoy drinking beer and occasionally throwing each other through plate glass windows.

Once slicing along at practice, the Oilers are awakened in every way. Though the lively pace of the scrimmage seems only slightly less dangerous than a regular game, helmets have been discarded, and the blush of exhilaration shows on all of their faces but glows on Gretzky’s. Inoffensively, he laughs aloud at the successful plays, and drops his long jaw and howls at the blunders, drawing happy curses all around. Wimp does not fairly describe his 5-ft. 11- in., 170-lb. appearance in this bulky company, but it comes to mind. Almost every shot Gretzky takes, Officer Whitney snares in his first-baseman’s mitt, an astonishment that the goalie explains later with a chagrined smile: “I didn’t even see some of them. He was aiming for my glove.”

Near the end of the session, Gretzky slips into a corner and vanishes. Concentrating on Finnish-born Right-Winger Jari Kurri, the Oilers’ and the league’s second leading scorer, Whitney half-steps out of the mouth of the goal to minimize Kurri’s angle, and just then a puck plunks off his back into the net. Whitney says, “If you take your eye off Gretzky, he’ll bank it off your skate, your back, your helmet, your wife. I could hang a nickel in the net, and he’d hit it every time.” As majestic as the sight of Orr full bore used to be, at least he appeared out of somewhere.

Exactly in the manner of the Celtics, the Oilers came through a humiliating four-game sweeping two seasons ago by the four-time champion New York Islanders. Gretzky, who, Coach Glen Sather says, “scores goals nobody else even dreams about,” scored none in the series, and his dreams were disturbed – for a summer. The first goal he finally got in the five-game rematch last year was a backhander. “I enjoy hockey even more now that I can say I’m a champion,” he says. “To be champion changes everything, just the way you feel about coming to the rink. Many a time I’ve stared and stared at the Stanley Cup.”

He expresses more than just respect, a fondness for Mike Bossy, Bryan Trottier and especially Denis Potvin of the crumbling Islander dynasty. Mimicking strikeout Pitchers Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan, Bossy and Gretzky pass the three-goal hat-trick record to and fro. But Gretzky is most conscious of the defenseman Potvin, and not only because Potvin is one of those formidable superstructures whose presence on any side of the ice sends the pacifists to the other. Two years ago, in a slip that irritated New York fans, Gretzky referred to the Montreal Canadiens as hockey’s greatest team when he meant its most storied organization. No Canadian misunderstood, as Potvin was gracious enough to explain on television, winning Gretzky’s gratitude.

Gretzky is glad for the home stand, not because he objects to the road –“It’s one of the most fun parts of the game”–but because he is the sports world’s most overwrought flyer since Broadcaster John Madden. “What may stop him is that flying,” says his father Walter, from whom he inherited the queasy sensation. On Canadian airlines, Gretzky is brought to the cockpit for soothing by the pilots. It is hard to express what a towering figure he is north of the 49th parallel. His $21 million hockey contract extending to the end of the millennium constitutes about a third of his earnings after adding cereals, pillowcases and Barbie-size Wayne dolls. All the same, he tolerates the attention without strain and enjoys pointing out that Saskatoon and Flin Flon are not exactly New York and Chicago. At times the arenas he visits will supply him a private exit (“I get nervous. I don’t like crowds”), but generally he courts inconvenience. “If I walk into a room and don’t hear anyone say, ‘There’s Gretzky,’ it just doesn’t feel right.” After practice, shuttling teammates require his signature on posters and sticks for causes of their own. “But there’s already a signature printed on it,” he complains. “Yeah, but that’s a phony, just like you. Sign it, you little jerk.” They laugh brightly.

Only the newest players behold him with open awe. “The first time I stood on the ice beside Marcel Dionne, I was 18. I can remember exactly how excited I was. I’ve seen that same look in younger eyes.” For perspective, he has several devices, but his most effective helper is the small, bespectacled clubhouse boy, Joey Moss, who has Down’s syndrome. “I grew up around it,” Gretzky says. “My dad’s sister is mentally retarded. I love Joey, I love to shake his hand.”

Books, he dislikes. But soap operas are his passion, particularly The Young and the Restless, on which he played a small role two summers ago. During an annual trip, Gretzky also enjoys low-rolling in Las Vegas. The casino swallows him for days. Otherwise, hockey has been absorbing. “I don’t have a whole lot of time for anything else. I play the game.” He likens the N.H.L. to a university, and calls hockey the study of geometry. “People talk about skating, puck handling and shooting, but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions. Basically my whole game is angles.”

The clubhouse feels like his den. “It’s great to be the captain of a great team,” he says, another distinction he shares with Bird, although the Celtics’ captain dislikes the pregame socializing and the community arguments only captains are permitted to wage with the referees. “It’s true,” Gretzky agrees, “the fans think you’re arguing for yourself all the time, but it’s great. Here, Kevin Lowe, Mark Messier and Paul Coffey take charge too. It’s fun to be champions.”

Sawing the ends off his long sticks, fashioning a collage of tape and talcum, Gretzky remains after the others to tinker and think. “If anyone wants Neil Diamond tickets,” someone advises the room with a shout, “call Dorothy.” Gretzky looks up in puzzlement. “Who’s Neil Diamond?”

“Hick from French Lick” is an easy description of Bird and his hometown, but unfair on a couple of counts. If the spa waters have calmed since the days when Franklin Roosevelt and Al Capone journeyed to southern Indiana for a sulfurous cure, French Lick continues to be a resort community of considerable grace. The leading citizen is identified on a circular standard, larger than a Gulf sign, marking LARRY BIRD BLVD. Every street’s a boulevard in old French Lick. The location of the Bird residence is given away by a full blacktopped court, complete with two glass backboards, reclining in a grassy glen just a good stretch of the leg from a sunny country house.

Georgia Bird, a calico woman, has managed to raise five sons and a daughter, as her famous boy explains, “cooking in restaurants and such,” having been something of a kitchen legend herself. Her husband Joe had a tragic thirst and killed himself in 1975 about a year after their divorce. From a dwarf named Shorty, the late proprietor of Shorty’s pool hall, the boys first learned that their father had been a terrific basketball player and might have gone places had he not left school around the eighth grade to begin a life of work. Relating this memory, Larry’s brother Mark, 31, conveys an understanding affection for the man who was at times the best finisher at the Kimball Piano & Organ Co. A shorter and fleshier version of Larry, Mark shares the features right down to the yellow mustache.

The youngest brother Eddie, the current flash of Springs Valley High, resembles him too. “The same mannerisms, the same temper–no, temperament,” says Coach Gary Holland, whose first year at Springs Valley was Larry’s last. “I was getting on Eddie the other day, and he was so upset he decided to put one in left-handed from the right side of the basket. We all just shook our heads.” Last month, when the N.B.A. All-Stars were weekending in Indianapolis, Bird returned to the Springs Valley gymnasium, where his mural looks down like a chapel Madonna. He recollects, “I hadn’t seen Eddie play since sixth grade,” and they were both moved. “He had his best game of the year. When people are saying your brother is the greatest ever, how does an 18-year-old stand up to that?”

Larry was just 17 when he went off to Indiana University, 50 miles away. He lasted 24 days. A common and logical assumption is that he was terrorized by the undisciplined disciplinarian Bobby Knight, a coach who orders haircuts while throwing furniture. In fact, it was a roommate’s brimming closet wardrobe that daunted Bird, an embarrassment of clothing. “I was a homesick kid who was lost and broke,” he says. “If I knew then what I know now, I’d have run right back. Coach Knight and me wouldn’t have had no trouble. He’d have loved my game.”

A year with the city cutting grass, coating benches, striping streets and riding the famed garbage truck gave him confidence to start over at Indiana State, where the Celtics’ crafty president Red Auerbach drafted him as an eligible junior. “Red’s kind of like the daddy who was never there for Larry,” his mother says. “He thinks that Red is just it.” Auerbach sounds like a father: “If Larry ever did something bad, I wouldn’t fine him. I’d just not let him play for a couple a games. That would be the worst thing you could do to him.”

Georgia Bird is tingling over a surprise telephone call from the Detroit Pistons’ Kelly Tripucka, an old Notre Damer who happened to hear he was her second favorite player. “My sister was for Purdue, I was for Kelly,” she says, a delightful illustration of basketball’s hold on Hoosiers. It is not unlike the spell hockey has over Canadians. “Here he called me. I couldn’t hardly get over it. That’s my hero. You meet so many nice people through Larry, and then when you go to see them it’s almost like they’re one of your own. Who’s that nice-looking boy from Boston? He plays quarterback.” (How could she know of Doug Flutie and not know his name?)

“All my kids have been good, but to have a superstar, really. Well, I usually don’t brag on him.” Though she once said, “He always played as though he had to be perfect. A lot of people say that’s how it turned out.”

From the age of ten in the frozen village of Brantford, Ont., an hour’s drive out of Toronto, Gretzky was given no choice in the matter of perfection. The facts of life were revealed to him in the family car returning from an unexpected loss at nearby Brampton, where the arena was so swollen it could not have accommodated three more curious onlookers if a star had risen in the East. The object of this attention stood 4 ft. 4 in. and weighed 70 lbs. Wayne’s father addressed him good-humoredly, which is still Walter Gretzky’s style, but there was an ingredient of sorrow that has not left his voice completely yet. “You can’t be like everybody else any more,” he told the great little Gretzky. “You can’t be normal. For you there can never, ever be a bad game again. Every game now, everyone will expect a miracle.”

Their home is the cheery one with the apple-red goals on the backyard rink, which Walter first installed by the spray of a garden hose when Wayne was four –two years into his hockey career. A telephone technician, Walter played five seasons of amateur hockey, and Phyllis came to the games. “My mother and father are tremendous family people,” Gretzky says. “They dedicated their whole lives to their kids: moral support, financial support, whether for hockey, baseball or piano.” There are five children, one girl, and it tells something of the father that he steps over a bundle of Wayne’s milestone sticks to begin the paneled-basement tour by showing off Daughter Kim’s high school track medals.

At 14, Wayne left home to compete against young men in Toronto. “I didn’t leave to play hockey really. I wasn’t enjoying the atmosphere in Brantford, the peer pressure. It was so difficult for me just to go to school, such a big thing to knock off Gretzky. I had been a lot of places by the time I was 14, everywhere basically. Lying in bed the first night in Toronto, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Three days later it came to me, ‘Oh, no, what am I doing here?’ I was homesick for a year.” His most vivid snapshot of childhood longing is a mental picture of five fishing poles tied to the car. “If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t go.”

Gretzky’s formal education ended short of twelve full grades in, of all places, Indiana, where he was a 17-year-old Carmel High School student and, for eight games, a professional hockey player for the fading Indianapolis Racers. They ended up selling him to Edmonton. “I can tell you that high school basketball is a lot bigger than pro hockey in Indiana.” Two of his brothers–Keith, 18, and Brent, 13–appear to be following him. “They say Keith will be drafted in the first round this year. He handles the comparisons pretty well, better than I would. Brent’s quite good, and he loves the attention. He’s the first to tell people he is my brother.”

Of course, new wunderkinds with different last names have been toddling out steadily for years, and Gretzky is sadly conscious of them. “It’s too bad they get compared. Thankfully, my family always played that down. The funny thing is, it’s most often the mother and father who are disappointed if he doesn’t make it. The kid is usually relieved.” Brent, the world-champion kid, pledges unobnoxiously, “Wayne doesn’t know it, but I’m going to be better than he is.” Phyllis Gretzky will be pleased if Brent just keeps his mouthpiece in. The only four teeth Wayne has lost were chopped off when he was ten, “in the last minute of the game,” she well recalls, “after all that orthodontia, all those nights wearing the retainer.” Braces on a young hockey player must be the definition of positive thinking.

Literally an unflappable woman, Phyllis is cooking dinner while a yellow canary swoops freely overhead, a balm for Brent in the wake of a recently deceased cat named Morris. Gazing at the window, she sighs, “It’s going to be awfully quiet when all of a sudden there’s no hockey in the backyard.”

The Edmonton Oilers and the Boston Celtics have each won 45 to 50 games and lost around 15. In addition, the Oilers have tied seven. This puts Edmonton in utter charge of its division, though goalie injuries have intruded recently. While the Celtics are also in first place, as usual they are resigned to teeter-tottering into April with the Philadelphia 76ers, their Eastern archrivals. A startling November fistfight between the 76ers’ Julius (“Dr. J”) Erving and Bird, who sometimes taunts his victims, mortified both men thoroughly but summarized the rivalry rather well. “People who have to fight tooth and nail can’t go out and eat together,” Bird explains. “Take Magic Johnson. They say I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me, but I just don’t believe that. We’re all so competitive. Dr. J and I will miss each other some day, probably look over our shoulder and wonder where we’ve gone.” Erving simply says, “Bird is the consummate player, the best in the game today.”

Fresh from a nine-game tear of 30-point games, Bird is averaging 28 points and 6.5 assists, but he is unmoved by numbers. In one game, when statisticians realize he is a stolen ball from double figures in points, rebounds, assists and steals, Bird declines the invitation to re-enter a lopsided victory. Winning the 1984 foul-shooting title (88.8%) purely delighted him, since Springs Valley’s dawn shooter still regards free throws as a measure of honesty. But maybe rebounds gratify him most of all. “Rebounding,” he says, “is an art, a talent, a hustle play.”

Gretzky understands that breaking his own scoring record, securing his fifth consecutive point title and assuring his sixth straight MVP distinction have lost some shock value. But this never means any less to him. “Every time I break a record I’m excited, even if it’s my own. I want to crack the 212 this year (he is on a 214 pace), and some season before long somebody’s going to get 100 goals. I’d like it to be me.” Phil Esposito’s 76 goals with the Boston Bruins served as the standard for eleven years, until Gretzky beat that by 16. “It takes guts,” says Esposito, now retired, “to recognize you have that much talent and to dedicate yourself to it.”

At the same time, the prosperity of the Oilers’ Jari Kurri on the Gretzky line is significant. Sixty points (combined goals and assists) behind Gretzky but trying to shade him in goals, the right-winger has become the first European to score over 60 in an N.H.L. season. “We’re instinctive,” says Kurri of their partnership. Gretzky grins, “If someone else has a better opportunity, give it to him.” Every angle of this geometry makes him rejoice.

Gretzky fairly boasts that he “never touches a stick” in the off-season, but does not account for the solid summer he spent rounding up the children of Brantford to practice breakaways on lone goalies in an indoor ice rink, using tennis balls. “I’m still not that good on breakaways, but I’m four times better than I used to be.” The truth is, shinny games tempt him. Meanwhile Bird is embarrassed to admit, “Last summer I caught myself shooting around for five hours. I thought, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ It’s like I get this guilty feeling that I’m not playing enough, that someone is playing more.” Dr. J? Magic? “Some kid in the sixth grade.”

Bird and Gretzky are each involved in a long-standing relationship with one woman. Gretzky’s sweetheart Vickie Moss is a cabaret singer. Joey, the Oilers’ clubhouse boy, is her younger brother. From a momentary marriage to a cheerleader, Bird has a seven-year-old daughter he sees in the summertime. His companion is a Kelly Girl secretary named Dinah Mattingly. Neither man is extravagant, though Gretzky likes to dress. No longer fazed by clothes, Bird plucked his MVP trophy in shirtsleeves from a crowd of tuxedoes. Both are adept at trading in the Ferraris and Trans Ams they are frequently awarded, or handing them down to brothers.

As long as men beat sticks against the ice, not to mention each other, Gretzky will be remembered. Bird’s legacy should also be durable, though he attaches little importance to history: “As far as that goes, it’s enough for me that the flags are flying in Boston Garden.” Neither expected to possess his sport for long or forever. “When I finish,” says Gretzky, “I’ll walk away from it totally, be my own person, my own businessman.” This plan amuses Gretzky’s friend Howe, who lingered 32 pro seasons and is a Hartford Whalers’ executive now. The way Bird looks at it, “When it’s all over with, I’ll just go off and be glad. At the end of every season, when you get up the next morning, you think: ‘Hey, no bus to take today, no plane to catch tomorrow.’ It’s the greatest feeling next to the championship.” One gentle concern: he wonders if French Lick or even Terre Haute will ever suit him again as a place to live, now that he’s seen Paree.

They do not know each other, but they do. Hockey has become a small study to Bird, like the Kennedys, and for a similar reason. “The Bruins own our building,” he says, and Gretzky has been his focus. “He’s got to be the greatest athlete who just about ever lived.” For his part, Gretzky says, “I don’t know a whole lot about basketball, but Bird is the one I watch.” One skating without the puck, the other running without the ball, they are a diverting sight even away from the play, practically a game of their own. Maybe they are playing the same game.