Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  All these super-stars—and other such outstanding players as Bob Pettit, of the St. Louis Hawks, and Dolph Schayes, of the Syracuse Nationals—have consistently helped to create interest in the professional game, but the one man most responsible for keeping the crowds coming and the N.B.A. in business has been Cousy. No player in the history of basketball has been nearly as talented, and, at least since the Second World War, perhaps no performer in any sport has provided as many minutes of pleasure and excitement. During the last decade, the followers of basketball have grown thoroughly accustomed to a steady drumbeat from the provinces proclaiming this or that college star “another Cousy,” but so far not one has fitted that description, and chances are none ever will.

  This winter, there has been a deeper awareness than usual of Cousy’s unique genius. Now, at thirty-four, in his thirteenth year as a professional and his seventh year as the Celtics’ captain, he has announced that the current season will be his last. There is no likelihood of his staging a Sarah Bernhardt type of farewell, annually announcing his departure and as regularly returning to action, for he has contracted to coach the Boston College team next year and is already starting the transition from a nomadic life to a more normal one. In terms of the N.B.A.’s general health, Cousy will be taking his leave at a fortunate time. For one thing, Russell, Baylor, Chamberlain, and Robertson (Cousy’s heir apparent) will still be around. For another, President Podoloff is due to hang up his sneakers at the end of the current season, and it is to be hoped that the owner-governors will presently be devising means of giving their organization the major-league class it has thus far sedulously managed to avoid. At the same time, it is hard to imagine the N.B.A., or basketball, without Cousy, so long has he been the commanding figure: a bravura individual star who was first and foremost a team man; a person of modest nature whose flair and fire nevertheless made him a majestic showman—the one athlete who treated you to something new and unexpected each time you saw him play; oddly enough, not only the league’s top drawing card but its most constructive critic and the founder of the N.B.A. players’ union; all in all, an unusual sports hero, who grew with his fame and, even at closest range, was always a man to admire.

  In view of the fact that Cousy has come to be the personification of professional basketball, it is interesting to recall what a minuscule splash he made when he entered the N.B.A., in 1950. As a player for Holy Cross, he had been a nearly unanimous choice for All-American—he was especially renowned for his deceptive ball-handling—and it was taken for granted that the Boston Celtics, who had territorial rights to him, would grab him as soon as he graduated. The Celtics, it turned out, were rather apathetic about Cousy. What they needed most at the time, they felt, was a big, rugged rebound specialist, so they chose to acquire instead Charley Share, a six-foot-eleven center from Bowling Green, Ohio. (Share proved to be only a journeyman player.) Cousy landed with the Tri-Cities Hawks, a team representing Davenport, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, but the Hawks’ management thought so little of his potential that they promptly traded him to the Chicago Stags. When the Stags folded before the start of the season, arrangements were made to distribute their players among the other teams in the league, but an impasse occurred. The Celtics, the Warriors, and the New York Knickerbockers all wanted Max Zaslofsky, the Stags’ high-scoring forward. There was also a disagreement over who should get Andy Phillip, an established backcourt star, and who should get Cousy, so it was decided that the fairest solution was to let the owners of these three teams draw from a hat three slips of paper, bearing the names of Zaslofsky, Phillip, and Cousy. Walter Brown, the owner of the Celtics, to his disappointment, pulled out not Zaslofsky but Cousy. (Zaslofsky went to the Knickerbockers, for whom he played a few seasons of mediocre ball. Phillip went to the Warriors, and in 1956, at the tail end of his career, joined Cousy on the Celtics.) The stubborn reluctance of the Celtics to acquire the player who was to revive them financially, lead them to five championships between 1957 and 1962, and become the most popular athlete in New England since John L. Sullivan is a classic example of how mistaken people can be in estimating talent, and I imagine it will become, if it hasn’t already, a stock item in the cheer-up talks that coaches deliver to dejected young men they are cutting from their squads.

  Cousy didn’t really come into his own until midway through his second season with the Celtics. During his first year, he averaged a creditable fifteen points a game, which made him the ninth-highest scorer in the league, but his all-round play was substantially less impressive than these figures might indicate. The usual explanation given nowadays is that he was simply too fast for his teammates—that his unexpected passes often ricocheted off their heads, chests, and arms—but there was more to it than that. The Celtics, an only ordinary team in those days, were attempting during Cousy’s first year to adjust to a new style of play ordained by a new coach, Arnold (Red) Auerbach, and the result was that while they did some things well, a good part of the time they played rather inchoate basketball. In many games, Cousy appeared to be fretful and unhappy. He seldom got the ball when he wanted it, and when he did get it his frustration often made him try to force openings that didn’t exist. One major change instituted by Auerbach the following year had the effect of unleashing Cousy; this was a new emphasis on a fast-break offense, with Cousy as the lead man. Now the moment the ball came into the Celtics’ possession under their own basket it was passed up to Cousy, and he and as many teammates as possible tore down the court—the idea, of course, being that the speed of this counterattack would catch most of the men on the other team napping at the far end, and so the attackers would have to out-maneuver only one or two defenders and could sail in for a quick, closeup basket. There was nothing particularly novel about this—the fast break had been a standard part of basketball since the mid-nineteen-thirties, when the West Coast college teams introduced it—except that Cousy made it work with a speed and fluency no one had ever dreamed were possible. The moment he received the outlet pass and turned his head downcourt, he was able to take in, in a twinkling, the placement of every player in front of him and to build his play accordingly. Moreover, he accelerated at a furious clip. In three or four fast strides, he was past midcourt and was flashing in on the foul circle, forcing the defending players to commit themselves one way or the other. When they did so, and regardless of how they did so, Cousy could almost invariably spot an uncovered teammate in that instant and feed him an outlandishly deft pass that led him in for an easy layup shot. The amazing thing was that quite often the free man turned out to be a teammate who had got started late and trailed the play down the floor, and Cousy’s aptitude for detecting the trailer’s presence without looking gave the impression that he had not only exceptional peripheral vision but eyes in the back of his head. What he actually had was the ability, at the moment before he turned downcourt, to photograph the disposition of the players who would be following the play behind him, and once he had that in the back of his head, his rarefied basketball instinct enabled him to guess accurately just where and when a late-breaking teammate, whose habits he knew, would be catching up with the action.

  Cousy’s success in sparking the fast break affected his entire play. In the more static and cramped, conventional situation in which the offensive team, guarded man for man, tries to maneuver for an opening that will ultimately set up a good close-in shot, Cousy, having become the Celtics’ acknowledged playmaker, began to direct their attack with a confidence that kept on enlarging until it bordered on audacity. By improving his outside shooting and by learning to utilize his teammates’ pick-offs—stationary blocks—more adroitly, he made it necessary for the opposing defensive man to guard him very closely, and when his man did this, Cousy would drive around him with a burst of fantastic ambidextrous dribbling. The second he had daylight—and this was the heart of his skill—he could, with that wide-angle visual photography of his, pick out some Celtic who at that instant had got a step or half-step edge
on his defensive man, and whistle the ball to him through the intervening mass of players. As his teammates—particularly Ed Macauley, a slim center with an excellent assortment of moves, and Bill Sharman, a superb jump-shooter—came to know better what they could expect from him, Cousy began embellishing his passing with all kinds of inventive variations: blind passes hooked over his shoulder, bounce passes slapped quickly in the midst of a dribble, little backward flips he dropped behind him with one hand as he went up into the air and faked a shot with the other, and the behind-the-back pass—and its baroque relative the twice-around-the-back pass, which he could execute while he was suspended in midair after driving in for an apparent layup shot and drawing the defense over to block it. These razzle-dazzle improvisations became Cousy’s trademark, since no one else (with the possible exception of Dick McGuire, of the Knickerbockers, on some of his best nights) could approach either his imagination or his dexterity. Near the end of a game whose outcome was already clearly decided, Cousy occasionally trotted out a little of this special material simply because he knew that the customers had come to see it, but the true beauty of his basketball was that, with these minor exceptions, he used his fancy stuff only when it served a sound functional purpose. Plain or fancy, he could arouse his team and get it to play as a unit—the rarest and most valuable of all basketball gifts. For years, whenever he was taken out of a game for a breather the Celtics on the court became just five other guys, and in tight games he would be rushed back into action almost before he had had a chance to climb into his sweat jacket. In the same, somewhat inexplicable way that the average skier surmounts his usual frailties when he follows an expert instructor down a slope, basketball players become better basketball players when Cousy is on the court. This has been demonstrated time and again in the annual East-West All-Star Game, and it is also apparent at very much lower levels of competition. A couple of years ago, Cousy and Auerbach made a tour, under State Department auspices, through Europe and North Africa and the Middle East—areas that are becoming more and more basketball-conscious. Recently, Auerbach recollected, “In each town we hit, Cooz would put on a clinic for the kids and coaches. After that, a couple of the local teams would play each other. Most of the time, the two teams would be very evenly matched. Then Cooz would go in and play with one team for a few minutes and it would draw way ahead. He didn’t try to do much, but his moves are contagious. The kids would sense what he wanted them to do, and all of a sudden they’d begin making the right moves themselves and playing pretty good ball. Then he’d shift over to the other team and they’d immediately start moving like a clock. Same identical thing wherever we went.”

  Under Cousy’s direction, the Celtics’ offense became the most elegant in basketball, but they did not become the league champions until Bill Russell joined them, late in 1956, and gave them the solid big man they had always lacked. Russell’s most signal contribution, of course, was his great defensive skill, most notably his rebounding ability, but he also bolstered the offense in a way no one had anticipated—by making the team’s fearsome fast break even faster. Ordinarily, when a man as mountainous as Russell comes down with a rebound off the backboard in his defensive zone, play stops momentarily while he unwinds himself and peers around to discover where everyone has gone. Russell is different. He has such superlative timing and balance that he has no sooner plucked a rebound out of the scramble than he is spinning around—often while still airborne—and firing it like a baseball to Cousy, whom he looks for to be breaking down the left side of the court. Nothing throws an opposing team off stride more surely than giving up a series of quick, easy baskets. When it became apparent, as it soon did, that Russell could almost always be counted on to snare the defensive rebound, the Celtics were frequently able to achieve this demoralizing effect on their opponents by adding a new wrinkle to their fast break: As soon as it looked as if the other team would be taking a shot at the Celtics’ basket, a Celtic forward—Tommy Heinsohn or Frank Ramsey, say—would start to steal as unobtrusively as possible down the floor toward the opponents’ basket. In one interesting variation on this play, which the Celtics sometimes use when a member of the opposing team is at the foul line for a single shot, Ramsey ignores his usual defensive assignment—which is to step in front of the shooter and cut off a rebound or a pass back—and heads for the far end of the court even before the ball leaves the shooter’s hands. On the occasions when everything goes as calculated, what takes place next, with explosive speed, is one of the most astonishing sights in basketball. Zip goes Russell’s pass out of the rebound to Cousy. Zip goes Cousy’s long, arching lead pass to Ramsey, who is racing for the basket ahead of the recovering defense. Zip goes Ramsey’s layup. Even if the opposing player makes his foul shot, the play works almost as well. Then Russell simply grabs the ball in his left hand as it comes through the basket, wheels beyond the end line, and, in the same motion, wings his pass to Cousy. The play is characteristic of the daring, open-throttle style of the Celtics under Cousy’s leadership, which provides a sanguine reminder that basketball can be a most exciting game, and not, as it so often is, merely a blurry amalgam of tall men milling under a basket while the rest of the cast lob jump shots from all over the premises.

  For eight straight seasons, Cousy led the N.B.A. in “assists”—passes that directly set up baskets—and year after year he was a prolific scorer, finishing second in the league in this department one season and third in three others. I will let the statistics go at this, for there is a great deal that they don’t reveal, such as Cousy’s quite astounding ability to rise to the occasion and perform his most spectacular deeds when they count the most. Walter Brown, who is today perhaps the most devoted admirer of the man he originally thought he was stuck with, credits one heroic performance by Cousy with changing Boston overnight from a lukewarm basketball town into a rabid one. The occasion was a marathon battle with the Syracuse Nationals in the winter of 1953. Cousy had tied the score, 77–77, with a foul shot in the closing seconds of the regulation game time. In the first five-minute overtime period, which ended at 86–86, he scored six of Boston’s nine points. After a second overtime, it was 90–90, but in the third overtime Syracuse jumped off into a sizable lead and was out in front by five points when, with only thirteen seconds remaining, Cousy, who had been fouled in the act of shooting, sank both the goal and the foul shot, and then, in the best Merriwell tradition, tied the game up once again by sinking a desperation heave from midcourt just as the buzzer sounded. Boston finally won out in the fourth overtime, in which it held Syracuse to six points while scoring twelve, nine of them by Cousy. All in all, he accounted for fifty points that evening, on ten goals and thirty successful foul shots in thirty-two attempts. I did not see that particular game, and, to be candid, when I read about it I remained unconvinced that even a Cousy could not have been contained better if given special attention in special circumstances. I learned better the following winter, when I saw him retrieve a seemingly irreparably lost game with the Knickerbockers by acrobatically intercepting two passes in the last thirty seconds. Those two last-ditch efforts tied the game, and the Celtics went on to win it in the first overtime period, when Cousy put on an almost unbelievable exhibition of dribbling. Since there was no twenty-four-second rule in those days, once Boston had moved out in front Cousy killed the clock for over three minutes, dribbling out of one pocket after another as two (and sometimes three) opponents tried to tie him up and make him get rid of the ball, whirling like a runaway top through the whole New York team, in fact, until time finally ran out. I feel compelled to cite one other example of a Cousy finish, for I regard it as the most sensational single play I have ever seen in basketball. It came in the final four seconds of a game with St. Louis some five or six years ago. The Celtics, trailing by one point, had the ball out of bounds at midcourt after having called for a time-out. Awaiting the referee’s whistle that would signal the resumption of play, Cousy stood just outside the sideline, prepared to pass the ba
ll. During a game, his intensity is masked, for the most part, by a rather expressionless stare, and at this particular moment he seemed, if anything, a shade more detached than usual—as abstracted as a man riding an escalator. The whistle blew and before anyone could appreciate what had taken place the Celtics had scored and won the game. With the ball cradled between his right palm and wrist, Cousy, twisting into the half-overarm, half-sidearm motion with which a jai-alai player releases the pelota from his cesta, had snapped the ball, as if it were a pelota, through a forest of players and into the upstretched hands of Heinsohn, who had cut across from the left to leap into the air just in front of the basket. Heinsohn had simply turned and dropped the ball in.