And in This Corner, From Palos Verdes. . .

PONTIAC, Mich. —  There he is, over there--the guy in the red bathrobe. It probably says “Battlin’ Bill” on the back. Or “Kid Laimbeer.” He probably borrowed it off some boxer. On second thought, he probably took it from some boxer. Knocked the guy out when he wasn’t looking and took his robe.

So, he plays basketball for Detroit, eh? Tough town, Detroit. Kid has to be able to take care of himself there. This Bill Laimbeer must be one bad dude, huh? Must have grown up in the ghetto, rumbling with street gangs using zip guns and rusty pipes, right? No wonder he turned out to be the meanest, dirtiest son of a buck in pro basketball.

Makes sense. Poor kid has it tough, bad upbringing, broken home, broken windows, face full of scars, knuckles busted, permanent sneer, takes no lip from nobody. Grows up to be 6 feet 11 inches tall and pays his way through college by stuffing a basketball into a basket. Sure thing. It’s an old story.

Except it’s not a true story. This Bill Laimbeer, sitting here in the crimson terry-cloth robe, the guy who just knocked Larry Bird on his can and got kicked out of an NBA playoff game for his trouble, this guy isn’t some banged-up Motor City mean-street dude. This guy comes directly from the strife-ridden streets of . . . Palos Verdes?

It’s true. He grew up on Easy Street, not Mean Street. He doesn’t even look tough. He looks like he drinks tea. He looks like the toughest day he ever spent in his life was when his butler called in sick. The only sort of athlete he looks like is one who goes to Harvard and uses oars.

Isiah Thomas, survivor of Chicago’s dangerous West Side, absolutely loves Bill Laimbeer. What he loves most is that they have absolutely nothing in common. “He didn’t even see anybody black until he went to college,” Thomas teases.

One day they were on an airplane together. Laimbeer looked out the window and suddenly jabbed Thomas, saying: “Look. There’s one like the one my dad just bought, only a little smaller.”

“Mine, too,” Isiah said.

Uh huh. The only plane Isiah’s dad ever had was one he made by folding a piece of paper.

At a glance, Bill Laimbeer is the least likely suspect for Most Hated Player in America you could ever imagine. You could picture some misanthropic sucker with bloodshot eyes and a scratchy goatee, or some punky redheaded kid with freckles and a chip on his shoulder. You could picture a Maurice Lucas, with his face of rock, or a Danny Ainge, with his little-pest look. But Bill Laimbeer? He’s about as tough-looking as a cardigan sweater.

So, how come this is the guy who is making everybody in the NBA crazy? How come a fan in Atlanta hurls a cup of beer in his face, and opposing centers from coast to coast have taken swings at his nose, and coaches can’t stop talking about his phony backward falls to gain the sympathies of referees, or his vicious bushwhacking of superstars like Dominique Wilkins and Bird when a simple tug on their arms would do?

How come Laimbeer’s reputation as a dirty player is spreading to the point that, should the Pistons somehow manage to meet the Lakers in the finals, people will expect the Detroit center to spray-paint Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s goggles and stomp on his toes?

Well, it’s like this. Bill Laimbeer only looks like a marshmallow man. What made him tough was realizing that while he could shoot well enough to play basketball, he couldn’t run or jump worth a damn, and the only way he was ever going to be able to hold his own underneath an NBA basket was to bump, grind, scrap, claw, kick, scratch, bite, paw, poke and pummel the guy standing next to him.

As a result, he has become one of the game’s really fine position rebounders, has become an adequate scorer as a center, and has given Detroit enough dimension at that position that there really is a possibility, albeit a slim one, that the Pistons could take a professional basketball championship for the first time since the franchise left Fort Wayne, Ind.

Laimbeer is what others in the league think of as a wise guy. They think he gets by on too little and gets away with too much. “I wouldn’t call him a cheap-shot artist,” Boston Coach K.C. Jones said Saturday, after Laimbeer’s decking of Bird got both players kicked out of a Piston-Celtic playoff game, “but I would have never done the sort of thing he did today if I had played for a million years.”

They already were moaning and groaning about the guy back in Boston, where Celtic broadcaster and booster Johnny Most was saying: “He’s a phony. He hurts people. I don’t like him.” When Wilkins got up off the floor in Atlanta, he started swinging at Laimbeer as if Don King had put up the purse. And Bird not only punched him Saturday, he threw the basketball at him.

Bird joked later that he was only throwing it to the referee.

“Yeahhh,” said Laimbeer, not believing a word of it. “I think he’s a little better passer than that.”

Jones had just got finished showing the Celtics a film of Laimbeer decking Wilkins in the Atlanta series, as a way of warning them about the guy. “He’s going to hurt somebody bad, end somebody’s career someday,” Jones said.

But Laimbeer thinks everybody is overreacting, and thinks everybody is pointing fingers at him because of his bad rep. “Yeah, my reputation, that’s the problem,” he said, laughing. “It’s everybody talking about me that’s the problem. So stop talking about me.”

A minute later, though, when someone observed off-handedly how rough this Detroit-Boston series has become, Laimbeer said: “Oh, this is nothing. You should have seen last week’s. Atlanta was a lot worse than this. A lot worse.”

He said it with a smile.

All he intends to do is do what he does best: Be a banger. Be rough. Be tough. His theory is this: “I realized early I was not going to be an all-time great player. So, I do what I have to do to survive. I jostle people. Like when a guy is going to his favorite spot, I step in his way. I bump him. I don’t let him get there. I bump, bump, bump.

“I laugh at my reputation as a tough guy, though. I never fight. I walk away from it. I may have some altercations, but they’re never real fights. People don’t like that style? So what? As long as people in Detroit appreciate me, what do I care about Boston or Atlanta or Milwaukee?”

Laimbeer has gotten into it with Boston Celtics, including Bird, before this. They do not like him, and he knows it. He also knows better than to stand toe to toe. He has nothing to gain from that. He is too smart to get hurt in a fight.

So, he backs off. Which makes him look like he doesn’t want any part of it. And, he denies everything. Responsibility, blame, you name it. He didn’t throw Bird down, he said. He grabbed him to break his own fall. “If I had wanted to throw him down, he would have gone down and I wouldn’t. I fell on top of him. It was just an accident.”

Funny, the guy in the red robe doesn’t sound tough. Doesn’t look tough. Doesn’t even really act tough.

He had better watch out.

Someday, somebody is going to find out once and for all if Bill Laimbeer really is tough. He’s going to foul the wrong guy one of these days and wake up the next morning with a steak on his eye and a basketball down his throat.