Collision Course

by William Cook

  At the NBA All-Star Game in January 1955, Cousy went to NBA President Maurice Podoloff with a list of concerns that included payment of back salaries to the members of the defunct Baltimore Bullets, establishment of a twenty-game limit on exhibition games, after which the players should share in the profits, abolition of the $15 “whispering fine”** which referees could impose on a player during a game, payment of $25 expenses for public appearances other than radio, television or certain charitable functions, establishment of an impartial board of arbitration to settle player-owner disputes, moving expenses for traded players, payment of player salaries in ten installments rather than twelve to provide more money to players cut during the season, and an increase in meal money from $5 a day to $7 a day.

  There was some accord reached as Podoloff agreed to the payment of two weeks’ salary to six players who had played for the Baltimore Bullets before the franchise folded, agreed to a meeting with the player representatives within two weeks over their concerns, and the raise in meal money.

  While the modest raise in meal money only came to about $200 a year, the players felt like they had won a substantial victory.

  But Podoloff and the team owners continued to delay meeting with the players until Bob Cousy met with AFL-CIO officials over possible union affiliation in January of 1957. At that point, the league agreed to bargain in good faith with the players union following the season. In April, the NBA Board of Governors formally recognized the NBPA and agreed to their terms.

  Cousy continued to be the union president until 1958 when he became frustrated with players ignoring their $10 annual union dues. Boston Celtics teammate Tom Heinsohn replaced him.

  The 1964 All-Star Game, played at Boston Garden, almost didn’t happen. The NBA’s nine owners and its president, Maurice Podoloff, had been, for the most part, once again ignoring the players union and its president, Tom Heinsohn.

  When Walter Kennedy became NBA president, Tom Heinsohn, president, and vice president Lenny Wilkens of the NBA Players Association (NBPA) had attempted to tell him what the players wanted but were ignored. The players wanted a pension plan, athletic trainers on every team, and a ban on playing Sunday afternoon games after playing on Saturday nights. In 1964, the NBA was nothing like it is today. The minimum salary was $8,000 and most players had off-season jobs to make ends meet.

  There had been a major snowstorm in the northeast prior to the All-Star Game date that made all transportation between New York and Boston nearly impossible, so players were arriving any way they could to get to Boston. The three Cincinnati Royals players selected to play in the game, Oscar Robertson, Wayne Embry, and Jerry Lucas, were diverted from Cincinnati to Minneapolis where they caught a plane for Washington then took a train to Boston.

  As the players trickled into Boston Garden, Tom Heinsohn was there with a paper for them to sign stating that they would support a strike. There had been a Board of Governors meeting that day and no one would talk to Heinsohn and the player representatives that were on hand.

  So Heinsohn, the son of a labor leader, took matters into his own hands with the All-Star team. “We relayed what we wanted to do and they all signed the paper that they would support this thing,” said Heinsohn. “We went down and talked to the commissioner [president] about 5 o’clock and told him that because they hadn’t met us, we were not going to play unless they met our demands.”7

  Game time was still a few hours away, and suddenly everyone wondered what was going to happen, including ABC that was supposed to televise the game nationally for the first time.

  Things were getting heated, too! Bob Short, the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, burst into the trainer’s room and began screaming at Jerry West and Elgin Baker that if they didn’t play in the game, he would personally see that they didn’t play again.

  Red Auerbach, who was the East team coach, caught up with Tom Heinsohn in the hall and told him “he was the biggest heel in sports.”8

  The players, most concerned about their livelihood, took a vote. The count was 11–9 in favor of playing. They voted again and the vote was reversed; now it was 11–9 against playing.

  Tom Heinsohn had put his great relationship with Celtics owner Walter Brown on the line to push the union’s agenda and was not about to back down.

  Someone had to blink—as it turned out, it was Walter Kennedy. He assured the players that by summer he would come up with an acceptable pension plan. The players knew that Kennedy was negotiating a new TV contract and began to consider what effect a strike might have on those negotiations. The players had won.

  Oscar Robertson would replace Tom Heinsohn as president of the NBPA in 1966 and spearhead a drive that would eliminate the reserve clause in the NBA.

  In the end, 13,464 fans braved the weather to pack Boston Garden and the game was delayed only 15 minutes. The East beat the West, 111–107, in front of a national audience of millions, showcasing its biggest stars.

  Oscar Robertson led the East scoring with 26 points and 8 assists. Bill Russell had 21 rebounds. Rookie Jerry Lucas had 11 points and 8 rebounds.

  Ageless Bob Pettit led the West with 19 points and 17 rebounds. Wilt Chamberlain had 19 points and 20 rebounds. Jerry West had 17 points and 5 assists.

  On the night of February 29 in Philadelphia, Jerry Lucas showed the NBA and anybody who doubted him just how good he really was. In a 117 to 114 victory by the Royals over the Warriors, Oscar Robertson was the leading scorer with 43 points while Jerry Lucas scored 28 points and pulled down 40 rebounds.

  Lucas’ 40 rebounds in a game broke the club record of 38 set by Maurice Stokes vs. Syracuse on January 14, 1956. Jerry Lucas’ second-best rebound effort would come on November 20, 1965, when he grabbed 37 rebounds vs. the Detroit Pistons.

  Jerry Lucas’ 40 rebounds put him in some very elite company in the NBA records book. Throughout the 2017–18 season, only four players have ever had 40 or more rebounds in an NBA game. “Wilt the Stilt” Chamberlain pulled down 40 or more rebounds in a game fifteen times in his career. Chamberlain’s best effort was 55 rebounds vs. the Boston Celtics on November 24, 1960. Bill Russell had 40 or more rebounds in eight games, his best being 51 rebounds against the Syracuse Nationals on February 5, 1960. The last player to do it was Nate Thurmond who had 42 rebounds vs. the Detroit Pistons on November 9, 1965.

  Since 1978, the highest rebound total in an NBA game is 37 by Moses Malone vs. the New Orleans Jazz on February 29, 1979. The great Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s best effort was 34 rebounds vs. Detroit on December 14, 1975.

  The 1963–64 Cincinnati Royals finished with a record of 55–25, four games behind the Eastern Division champion, the Boston Celtics, who finished at 59–21. But unlike the previous season, with Robertson and Lucas in the lineup, the Royals made every game with the Celtics a battle as the two teams split the season series at 5–5.

  Oscar Robertson had a remarkable season just missing a triple-double year with averages of 31.4 points per game, 9.9 rebounds, and 11.0 assists and was named MVP.

  Jerry Lucas also had a great year averaging 17.7 points per game, 17.4 rebounds, and 2.6 assists and was named Rookie of the Year.

  In Buffalo, Louie Jacobs was all smiles; his Royals had averaged 6,909 paid admissions per home game at Cincinnati Gardens. It was the highest home attendance figure in the history of the Royals franchise.

  In the 1963–64 Eastern Division Semi-Finals, the Royals defeated the Philadelphia 76ers 3 games to 2 in a very close series. Each team won all their home games. Cincinnati had a slight edge in the series by having three home games.

  The series with the 76ers had been stressful and closely played, and now the Royals were confronted with taking on a rested Boston Celtics team in the Eastern Division Finals. There was no repeat of the exciting series that the two teams had played the year before as the Celtics defeated the Royals 4 games to 1.

  It has long been speculated that the loss of reserve forward Bob Boozer was a huge contributing factor to the Royals loss t
o the Celtics. With the addition of Jerry Lucas, Royals coach Jack McMahon determined that Boozer was expendable and at mid-season traded him to the New York Knicks. With limited bench strength in the playoffs, the Royals were handicapped.

  But a larger contributing problem was the Royals lack of offense. The Cincinnati Royals had finished first in offense during the season, averaging 98.9 points per game, but the Boston Celtics did a magnificent job in containing the Royals, holding them to 93.2 points per game while allowing them to score above 100 points in just one game.

  The Boston Celtics then went on to defeat Wilt Chamberlain and the San Francisco Warriors for the 1963–64 NBA championship. For the Boston Celtics, it was their sixth straight NBA championship since 1959.

  Oscar Robertson had been slow in acknowledging the contributions of Jerry Lucas in the Royals lineup in 1963–64. He even went so far in his biography, The Big O—My Life, My Times, My Game, to point out that the year before, without Lucas, the Royals had taken the Celtics to a deciding seventh game because they were a better-balanced squad. According to Wayne Embry, Oscar Robertson wasn’t close to Jerry Lucas and wanted the Royals to draft George Wilson, a 6′8″ forward who had just graduated from the University of Cincinnati and had played on the Bearcats 1962 national championship team and the 1963 runner-up team.

  George Wilson was drafted by the Cincinnati Royals in 1964 as a territorial draft pick. Prior to joining the Royals, Wilson was a member of the 1964 United States Olympic Team that won the Gold Medal in basketball at the games held in Tokyo, Japan.***

  On Labor Day, September 7, 1964, Celtics majority owner Walter Brown was vacationing with his family at his summer home in Hyannis, Massachusetts when he suffered a heart attack and died shortly after. Brown was 59 years old. At his funeral, Brown’s wife, Marjorie, gave Red Auerbach his St. Christopher Medal. Auerbach would keep the medal in his pocket during all the Celtics games in the coming season.

  At the All-Star break on January 10, 1965, the Royals had a record of 24–13, but once again were having trouble beating Boston with a mid-season record of 0–5 against the Celtics. The Royals would finish 2–7 against the Celtics.

  Then, a further obstacle was put in the Royals’ way at the All-Star Game break when Wilt Chamberlain returned to Philadelphia and the Eastern Division. The San Francisco Warriors were in dire straits financially and needed to reduce costs and get a cash infusion, so they traded Chamberlain to the Philadelphia 76ers for three players, Paul Neumann, Connie Dierking, and Lee Shaffer (who retired rather than report) and $150,000 in cash. Chamberlain, now combined on the 76ers with future Hall of Famer Hal Greer, would form a considerable offensive force.

  The Royals finished in 1964–65 with a record of 48–32 and were promptly dispatched in the Eastern Division Semi-Finals by Wilt Chamberlain and the Philadelphia 76ers, 3 games to 1.

  In the 1965 NBA Finals, it was the same old song—the Boston Celtics defeated the Los Angeles Lakers 4 games to 1 to win their seventh title in a row and eighth in the past nine years.

  Following the finals, Marjorie Brown and minority owner Lou Pieri sold the Boston Celtics to Marvin Kratter and National Equities for $3 million. Walter Brown had bequeathed 11.6 percent of the Celtics’ stock to Red Auerbach, and when the team was sold, he made nearly $350,000. National Equities would own the Celtics from 1965 to 1968, then sell the team to the Ballantine Brewery.

  In Chestnut Hill, Bob Cousy had just finished his second year as head coach of the Boston College Golden Eagles. At a farewell dinner for the seniors on his 1963–64 squad that went 10–11, he told the team that he was resolved that as long he was coach, Boston College would never again lose two games in a season to Holy Cross and that they would never again lose more games than they won.

  In practices, Cousy set his plan in motion to improve the Golden Eagles. On offense, they worked on developing a fast break. On defense, he made the team be more aggressive by working on close man-to-man patterns and special pressure defenses to harass poor ball handlers.

  With John Austin again leading the Golden Eagles in scoring with an average of 26.9 points per game and sophomore center Willie Wolters coming up with rebounds, Bob Cousy achieved all the goals he had set for his team in 1964–65. The team was greatly improved over the one Cousy had inherited the year before and finished with a record of 21–7. Furthermore, Boston College beat Holy Cross twice, 95–94 and 111–89, and just for good measure, the Golden Eagles thumped Boston University, 90–85, and Harvard, 83–72, to make them king-of-the-hill in Beantown college round-ball. In recognition of their record, Boston College received an invitation to the 1965 NIT where they lost in the first round 97–114 to St. Johns, the eventual tournament winner.

  Prior to the 1965–66 season, Red Auerbach informed Cousy that he intended to retire as Boston Celtics coach at the end of the year and wanted to know if he was interested in replacing him. Although the Celtics job would pay three or four times what he was making at Boston College, Cousy turned it down. The Rodgers Center, which held about 3,000 people, was now packed for every BC home game. Despite the rigors of recruiting, Cousy was happy where he was and looking forward to the coming season.

  Cousy’s 1965–66 Golden Eagles finished with 21–5 record. It was John Austin’s senior year, and he averaged 27.1 points per game.

  Boston College was again selected to play in the NIT at Madison Square Garden. In the first round, BC defeated Louisville, led by All-American center Wes Unseld, 96–90, in three overtimes. The game entered the first OT in a very dramatic fashion. Guard Ed Hockenbury, the Golden Eagles captain, drove the lane and took a hook-shot with one second remaining. The ball seemed to hang on the rim forever then, as the buzzer sounded, fell through to tie the game.

  Advancing to the quarterfinals, BC lost a hard-fought game to Villanova 85–86.

  While John Austin finished his career at Boston College as the school’s all-time scoring leader, his legacy was larger in that his achievements paved the way for Bob Cousy and future BC coaches to begin recruiting talented players for the school.

  Unfortunately, John Austin’s professional basketball career was a short one, just two years. Drafted in the fourth round in 1966 by the Boston Celtics, Austin played in 1966–67 for Baltimore in the NBA, then the following year, he was a member of the New Jersey Americans in the ABA.

  While Bob Cousy was steadily increasing the competitiveness of the Golden Eagles, he was quickly becoming dismayed with the rigors of college recruiting. In the nearly twenty years since he had left Holy Cross, college basketball had started to become big business. He felt as if he had to kiss the feet of 18-year-old players to encourage them to come to Boston College.

  Cousy said he was talking to a recruiter from a school in the Southwest who filled him in on what they did to get a recruit to commit to the school. “We send them across the border into Mexico to shack up for a few days. Every one of those kids signs on the dotted line when he gets back.”9

  The NCAA Tournament, the billion-dollar television extravaganza now known as “March Madness,” was only a few years away from becoming an integral part of American sports culture, and in its wake was the supplanting of academic integrity in college sports.

  While by the middle 1960s cash, clothes, cars, rides in jets, jobs for parents, and sometimes sex were becoming common recruiting tools on lots of campuses, Bob Cousy kept his distance from such practices. Cousy knew that he had some tough barriers to get over in recruiting. Boston College had strict and somewhat difficult entrance requirements, and the school did not accept junior college transfers. When a recruit came to Chestnut Hill, Cousy had dinner with him, then had another player show him around the campus, perhaps arrange a meeting with a dean or professor in the recruit’s field of interest, then wind up the campus visit by attending a movie or hockey game.

  Cousy decided to sell recruits on the school by emphasizing the quality of education they would receive, and he rarely spoke with a potential recruit that he was
n’t sure was serious about coming to Boston College. He began to put an emphasis on recruiting locally, using his experience in the game and the chance for recruits to have their parents and friends see them play as primary selling points.

  Cousy still made the occasional recruiting trip to Pennsylvania, Maryland, or back home to New York, but he began to recruit some very talented players from a 100-mile radius or less around Chestnut Hill. They included Billy Evans, a 6′0″ guard from New Haven, Connecticut; Terry Driscoll, a 6′7″ forward from Winthrop, Massachusetts; Steve Adelman, a 6′6″ forward from Worcester Academy; and Jim Kissane, a 6′7″ forward from Hyde Park, New York. All of these players would be instrumental in making Boston College the premier college basketball team in New England during the late 1960s.

  ———

  * The McClellan Committee, AKA the United Sates Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, was created on November 30, 1957, and dissolved on March 31, 1960. Robert F. Kennedy was Chief Counsel of the Committee until he resigned on September 11, 1959, to assist his brother Senator John F. Kennedy in his presidential campaign.

  ** A whispering fine meant that referees had the authority to leverage an in-game fine for criticism of a ref or their call.

  *** Following the 1965 season, the NBA discontinued the territorial draft pick and began a using a coin-flip method of allowing last place teams in each division to select a quality draft pick. The coin flip system would remain in effect until 1985 when a lottery system was introduced.