The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball

by John Taylor

  Auerbach’s methods produced results. In their first year, the Capitols ran up a seventeen-game winning streak and had a record of 49–11, a winning percentage that would remain a record for twenty years. But, in what would come to be another signature Auerbach statistic, the Capitols also led the league in defense, becoming the team with the fewest points allowed. Auerbach produced two more winning seasons with the Capitols, ending up in the playoffs each year and making it to the finals in the third, where his team lost to the Minneapolis Lakers in six games.

  Nonetheless, the Washington Capitols were barely afloat financially, and in the three years since its inception, the entire league had been floundering. Four teams lasted only one season. None of the owners wanted to spend money on those that survived. Many early games were played on wooden floorboards laid over hockey ice; puddles formed on the court and the shivering players sitting on the bench wrapped themselves in blankets. Attendance was sparse. The audiences that did show up, accustomed to wrestling and boxing and hockey, expected some blood with their sport, and the early players, many of them brawling World War II veterans, were happy to comply. In one 1949 game between New York and the new Baltimore franchise, one hundred personal fouls were called and three bloody fistfights broke out on the court. In 1949, the National Basketball League collapsed altogether, and its five surviving franchises linked up with the BAA, which then changed its name to the National Basketball Association.

  That same summer, Auerbach asked Mike Uline for a three-year contract. Some of the players, unhappy with Auerbach’s hard style, had tried to persuade Uline to get rid of him, and Auerbach felt a three-year contract would establish his absolute authority. But Uline, afraid that his money-losing team might not last three years (and indeed it didn’t), refused, and Auerbach quit. After a brief hiatus as an assistant coach at Duke University, Auerbach was hired by Ben Kerner, the owner of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. “I’ll give these customers a real show if you’ll pay the fines,” Auerbach told Kerner upon his arrival.

  He also completely rebuilt the Blackhawks, making more than two dozen trades. By the end of the season only three of the original players remained, but the Blackhawks made it into the playoffs. Kerner had publicly promised Auerbach complete autonomy at the beginning of the season, but then in the spring, over Auerbach’s objections, he traded John Mahnken, who’d played for Auerbach on the Caps, for Boston forward Gene Englund. Auerbach felt there was no point in being a coach unless he had total independence. Without it, he thought, his job would consist primarily of toadying up to the owner. There were coaches like that in the league, coaches who spent most of their time trying to placate the owner and anticipating his desires, but Auerbach had no interest in becoming one of them. When the season was over—the Blackhawks lost to the Anderson Packers in the playoffs—Auerbach told Kerner he was quitting. He had no immediate prospects. He had failed to get along with the two professional owners he’d worked for. But he had established a reputation as a coach who could win, and he was thinking he might return to college basketball, where he would at least enjoy the independence that had eluded him in the pros. And then, for the third time in his life, a critical opportunity presented itself.

  THE BOSTON CELTICS had not made it into the playoffs that year. They had in fact finished in last place in the Eastern Division, and their coach, Alvin “Doggie” Julian, felt discouraged. Julian had a reputation as one of the best basketball coaches in the country, but that reputation had been made on the college level, when he won an NCAA title during his tenure at Holy Cross College. He had never been able to adjust his tactics to the aggressive pivot style of play that predominated in pro ball, and the NBA’s grueling travel left him exhausted. Though he had one more year left on his contract with the Celtics, Dartmouth College had approached him about becoming its basketball coach, and he was inclined to accept. At the Celtics’ breakup dinner on March 17, 1950, he turned to Walter Brown, the team’s owner. “Walter, I think you better get yourself a new coach,” he said. “Somebody else could probably do a better job, because I know I have made quite a few mistakes this year.”

  “Doggie, I’ll repeat here what I’ve said so many times before,” replied Brown, who was unaware that Julian was in discussions with Dartmouth. “As long as I have anything to do with the Celtics, you’re going to be the coach.”

  But after thinking it through over the weekend, Julian told Brown the following Monday that he was quitting. The news dismayed and irritated Brown, who felt that a man he trusted had abandoned him, and now, with the college draft only a month away, he had to scramble around to find yet another coach. Brown’s real passion being hockey, he didn’t follow basketball closely, and had little idea of who might replace Julian. But he had the natural salesman’s gift for seeing the promotional potential even in adversity. After Julian’s departure was announced, he told Howie McHugh, the public relations man for the Celtics, to call some of the local sports reporters and invite them down to the Garden for a meeting. Brown wanted advice on whom he should hire to replace Julian. He also wanted a photographer present to record the event and provide a publicity boost in the wake of the dispiriting announcement of Julian’s departure. McHugh called ten men: the Patriot-Ledger’s Roger Barry; Sam Brogna of the Record; Jack Conway, Jr., of the Boston-American; Joe Kelley of the Associated Press; Joe Looney of the Herald; and the radio reporters Leo Egan, Jack Malloy, Red Marston, Les Smith, and Dinny Whitmarsh.

  It was, even by the standards of the time, a surprising invitation. Joe Looney, the Herald’s dapper basketball reporter, considered it practically unprecedented. But no one regarded it as a conflict of interest. Sportswriters had a much more openly collaborative attitude toward owners then. Both the reporters and the owners understood that they were in the business of manufacturing excitement for fans. Owners, eager for coverage of teams, often paid for the travel expenses of reporters and provided other favors that in a later day would be regarded as outrageously unethical. The reporters, for their part, naturally favored the hometown franchises and some actually moonlighted for the teams they covered. At the time, it was seen as simple reciprocity.

  Brown told the reporters the session needed to be off the record since they would be discussing coaches still under contract to other teams. He then explained that he could not afford another losing season. The Celtics had now gone through two coaches in four years. Julian’s predecessor, John “Honey” Russell, had also been a college coach, at Seton Hall. Both Julian and Russell had been unable to duplicate their college success on the professional level, and Brown had no intention of making that mistake yet again. College coaches were ruled out. Nor could he afford to hire an untested coach who, like Julian, might prove not to have the stomach for the job. He needed to hire a coach with an established track record in the pros.

  Some of the reporters suggested Art Spector, a Celtics player who’d been with the team since its formation four years earlier. But the problem with Spector was that, while he was a respected player, he had no coaching experience. Other reporters proposed Buddy Jeannette, a former coach of the Baltimore Bullets known for his colorful character. Roger Barry of the Patriot-Ledger suggested Red Auerbach. From his seat at the press table of the Garden, Barry was right next to the visitors’ bench, and he’d had a good opportunity to watch Auerbach in action when the Washington Capitols had come to Boston. During one game Barry had covered, the Capitols had come back from a twenty-point deficit to win. The other reporters recalled similar experiences watching Auerbach’s teams. The one thing about them, the reporters agreed, was that they never gave up.

  The photograph of the meeting, captioned “Walter Brown and his Ten-Man Advisory Committee,” appeared in the Herald the following day. But before Brown could determine whether or not he should try to pursue Auerbach or look for another coach, an even more critical problem cropped up, one that threatened the very survival of the Celtics. The team was owned by the Garden-Arena Corporation, which Brown managed but did
not control. The corporation’s directors had supported the decision to start the team four years ago, but in 1948, after two years of losses totaling $250,000, they had threatened to fold the team unless Brown could produce a “gimmick.” The gimmick Brown had produced had been Doggie Julian, whose Holy Cross teams had sold out the Garden several times. Now, with Julian gone and the Garden’s four-year losses reaching $460,000, the directors felt they could not keep throwing good money after bad. They had voted to fold the Celtics. Although the Celtics had not had a single winning season in their four-year existence, Brown was convinced the team would ultimately prove a financial success if it could only begin to win, and he decided to buy it himself from the Garden. It was a surprising act of faith considering that for many years Brown had thought that the idea of a professional basketball team in Boston was ludicrous.

  Walter Brown was a big man, broad in the shoulders, ruddy in the cheeks, with a double chin and the bright blue eyes of his Irish forebears. He loved scotch, was quick to anger and quick to forgive, and could shrewdly take the measure of a man. His father, George V. Brown, had been one of the country’s original sports businessmen, attending the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 and becoming so taken with the marathon that when he returned home to Boston he organized the Boston Marathon. For more than thirty years it was George Brown who fired the starting pistol that sent the runners on their way. George Brown was also the general manager of the Boston Arena, the city’s primary indoor sports facility in the twenties, and his son Walter grew up around the place and fell in love with the sights, sounds, and raffish electricity of arena life. He played in the corridors as a child, saw the boxers and ice skaters and circus performers, inhaled the smells of sawdust and horse manure. He worked for his father taking tickets, painting seats, and writing programs. In the late twenties, the owners of Madison Square Garden in New York built the Boston Garden, but ticket sales dwindled during the Depression and in 1934 Boston’s Arena Corporation acquired it and George Brown took over its management. At the age of twenty-eight, Walter Brown was made an assistant manager of the Garden, and when his father died, in 1939, he succeeded him as general manager.

  At the time, Ned Irish, manager of Madison Square Garden, had become extraordinarily wealthy booking college basketball games into his arena, but Brown resisted imitating him. The way Brown saw it, Boston was a hockey town, not a basketball town. The local public high schools had stopped playing basketball in the twenties and didn’t renew their programs until the late forties, which meant the city had little to offer in the way of local talent. When Arthur Sampson of the Boston Herald asked Brown why he didn’t promote basketball, Brown replied, “I don’t know anything about basketball, but it looks like a silly game to me. We can’t afford to put on events that nobody will look at—and nobody watches basketball in New England.”

  But once Holy Cross became a nationally ranked team and began selling out Boston Garden when it played there, Brown recognized basketball’s potential, and he had become one of the most enthusiastic supporters of a new professional league. But now, in 1950, many investors considered the idea a folly. The same month that the directors of Garden-Arena Corporation informed Brown that the company could no longer support the Celtics, four other teams—the Denver Nuggets, the Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Redskins, the Anderson (Indiana) Packers, and the Waterloo (Iowa) Hawks—all folded.

  To cover the Celtics’ ongoing losses, Brown took out a mortgage on his home and, with that and other loans, raised $200,000. Brown’s wife, Marjorie, and many of his friends thought he was making a terrible mistake. “Walter, what’s going to happen to us if it’s all lost?” she asked him one day that year. But despite his wife’s fears, Brown was willing to gamble everything he owned on the proposition that the Celtics could become commercially viable. He was motivated in part by Irish stubbornness and pride, but also by a simple love of the game and, most important, an instinctive feel—honed by the thousands of hours spent in the seats and behind the ticket window studying fans—for what brought out the crowds.

  The directors of the company, aware of Brown’s limited resources and hoping to help him avoid bankruptcy, had agreed to give him the team only on the condition that he find a partner to help him sustain the business through the inevitable short-term losses. Looking for leads on possible investors, Brown drove down to Providence, Rhode Island, to see a friend named Lou Pieri, owner of the Rhode Island Auditorium. Pieri was a short, corpulent Italian American who wore double-breasted suits and parted his slicked-back hair in the middle. He had owned a basketball franchise, the Providence Steamrollers, before folding it in 1949 when it had compiled one of the worst win-loss records in the league and run up losses totaling $200,000.

  Pieri surprised Brown by offering to invest $50,000 in the Celtics himself.

  “Are you kidding me?” Brown asked. “You’re the last man I thought would want back in after the losses you suffered.”

  “No,” Pieri said. “I’m still sold on the game.”

  While Pieri believed in the future of professional basketball, he was convinced the Celtics needed to become a winning team in the next season in order to survive, and so he said he had one condition: that Brown hire Auerbach as coach. Pieri had met Auerbach a year earlier when looking for a coach for the Steamrollers. Auerbach had told Pieri that the team would have to be completely rebuilt, that it would take at least two years and that it would cost $400,000. Pieri decided instead to fold the team, but he appreciated Auerbach’s brutal candor. “Get Red Auerbach as your coach,” he told Brown, “and I’m your partner.”

  2

  WALTER BROWN liked a man with a direct manner, and he took to Auerbach immediately. Auerbach was blunt, candid, and forceful, had coached both the Capitols and the Blackhawks to the playoffs, and in doing so had demonstrated that he could handle veteran players and withstand the rigors of the schedule. Brown saw no reason even to interview anyone else. Auerbach was as happy as Brown. He’d be living in a big East Coast city rather than a small prairie town, and he’d be much closer to his family. Most important, Brown, who professed his own ignorance of basketball, guaranteed him complete autonomy, and Brown was a man known for keeping his word.

  As he’d done with Capitols owner Mike Uline, Auerbach asked for a three-year contract. Brown, like Uline, told Auerbach that this was out of the question. The team might fold in a year if it continued to lose money at its current rate. The most Brown said he could offer was $10,000 to coach the team for one year. “All I can promise you is you’ll be treated fairly and I’ll back you all the way,” Brown said. “If we’re still in business next year, we can talk about raises then. That’s the picture. What do you say?” Auerbach agreed to Brown’s terms, and the two shook hands. “How the hell can you say no to a man like that?” Auerbach would ask later.

  Even before Auerbach’s hiring was officially announced, he had to oversee Boston’s picks in the 1950 college draft. Since the conventional wisdom among the pro teams was that the way to build a local following was to recruit the top local college players, most fans and sportswriters in New England assumed Auerbach would draft Bob Cousy, the region’s most promising eligible player. For the past four years, Cousy had played for Holy Cross in Worcester, thirty-five miles from Boston. The team had made it into the NCAA national tournament three times in those four years, winning the championship in 1947, largely due to Cousy’s talents.

  Walter Brown also assumed that the Celtics should draft Cousy, but Auerbach disagreed with the notion that the best way to draw fans was to feature local favorites. After all, he pointed out to Brown, the Celtics had been recruiting hometown heroes for the last five years—Saul Mariaschin and Wyndol Gray from Harvard, Ed Leede from Dartmouth—and none of them had boosted attendance. Also, Auerbach had watched Cousy in action, in a game between the college all-stars and the Globetrotters, and he was unimpressed. “Walter, I’ve seen this kid play,” Auerbach told Brown. “His defense stinks. On offense, he
wants to be the star and tries to show off by always attempting to make the spectacular play.”

  But the most important consideration in Auerbach’s mind was that Cousy, for all his prestidigitatious ballhandling, stood at only six feet one. The Minnesota Lakers were dominating the NBA because of George Mikan, their six-eleven center. Auerbach felt he had to begin rebuilding the Celtics by finding a similar big man, and Brown finally agreed. The college draft was held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, and in the first round, Auerbach passed over Cousy and selected Charlie Share, a six-eleven center from Bowling Green. Another draft pick made by Auerbach and Brown that day was even more controversial. Auerbach was looking for a shooter and rebounder to complement Share at center. He thought he had found one in Charles Cooper, a six-five graduate of Duquesne who’d helped his team make it to the semifinals of the National Invitational Tournament. But Cooper was black. While Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson had integrated major-league baseball three years earlier, in 1947, the NBA remained all white. Plenty of talented black basketball players existed, but until now they had been confined to playing for all-black exhibition teams such as the Harlem Globetrotters and the Harlem Rens.