Still smokin'

But then the president of the Boston Celtics and the NBA's greatest coach softens.

"You think it's important?" he says, smiling. "Aw, all right."

Auerbach without a cigar is Russell without a rebound, Arnie without an Army, James Bond without a girl.

How important is that cigar? Cigar Aficionado magazine ranked Auerbach eighth among the greatest cigar smokers of the 20th century -- behind Winston Churchill, JFK, and Fidel Castro but ahead of Jack Nicholson, Babe Ruth, and Al Capone. And none of them ever won eight world championships in a row.

Auerbach pulls out a lighter and removes the cellophane from a new Hoyo de Monterrey. It's just past 9 a.m., and that's already cigar No. 2, but who's counting? Actually, his doctors are counting.

"Well, there's two counts," says Auerbach. "One officially and one unofficially. Officially it's supposed to be two. Unofficially it's three."

This is a man who had a quintuple bypass in 1993 and was recently in Massachusetts General Hospital for tests. The doctors don't tell him what to do, he says. "They suggest."

Auerbach stopped working out several years ago after he broke three ribs playing racquetball. Prior to that, he was a tiger on the court, making well-placed shots and running his opponent like a dog. He even beat an inexperienced Larry Bird in his prime on the tennis court.

"I finished and said, `How can you let a 68-year-old man beat you?' " says Auerbach, "and I threw the tennis racket down."

Bird demanded a rematch, according to Auerbach. "I wouldn't play him again," he says. "A month afterward he would've beat me."

He says he goes to the office every day. Today he's been in his office since 8:30, and by 9 he had talked on the phone with Danny Ainge, the Celtics' embattled director of basketball operations, whom he refuses to criticize.

"If I feel OK, I go to the club for a couple of hours," says Auerbach. "Then I come back and have dinner, watch a couple of games -- college games, pro games -- and go to bed around 1 in the morning."