As the night winds down and the TV cameras and most of the A-list athletes and C-list celebrities have left, Paul Pierce makes his way out of the VIP room, its crimson walls covered with flat screens playing an endless loop of his late-night talk-show appearances. The hip-hop on this November night is still thumping at Kings, in the Back Bay, which is either supposed to be a bowling alley dressed up as a nightclub or a nightclub dressed up as a bowling alley. But for the first time during his charity bowl, Pierce has managed to break free from the coterie of female handlers and event planners who've been covering him better than Kobe or LeBron ever did, all the while furiously thumbing on their BlackBerries with the urgency of National Security Council staffers arranging a crisis briefing.
The Survivor: Paul Pierce
BOSTONIAN OF THE YEAR: 2008
Wearing a black, military-style commando shirt that accentuates his career-best physique, Pierce is heading back to the lanes when he spots a tall white-haired gentleman carrying a bowling bag the same shade of tan as his slacks and walking alone toward the exit. Pierce pivots and heads over to the ruddy-faced man.
Wrapping his arm around him, Pierce smiles and says in his raspy voice, "Thank you so much for coming, Mr. Havlicek."
John Havlicek's eyes light up behind his boxy glasses. He sets down his bowling bag and returns the hug.
It's a small moment. But it's more telling than the hug they had shared a few weeks earlier. On October 28, over the cheers of a packed Garden crowd, Havlicek handed over the NBA championship trophy to Pierce before the Boston Celtics' 17th world-title banner was raised to the rafters. That moment was genuine, too, of course. No one without a SAG card can cry as uncontrollably as Pierce did during the banner-raising ceremony without it being genuine. But that exchange was also impossibly portentous and public. Havlicek, an undisputed legend who helped secure eight of those 17 banners, was officially welcoming Pierce into the club.
In contrast, this moment in the bowling alley was quiet and, as far as they knew, unrecorded for posterity. After his 10 long, mostly lean years as the face of the franchise, when all those banners looked down on him, a burden more than a benefit, Pierce was telling Havlicek how honored he was to have been granted admission.
"I respect our greats. I admire them," Pierce tells me later. "Now I'm part of that."