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

by John Taylor

  Still, the inevitability of an integrated league had been obvious ever since 1948, when Don Barksdale had become the first black to play on the American Olympic team. Auerbach did not think of himself as a social pioneer—he was simply looking for a rebounding forward. But he was certainly willing to make a breach in the league’s segregated roster if it would give his team an edge, and so, at the meeting in the Biltmore, when it came time to announce the Celtics’ second-round pick, Walter Brown said, “Boston takes Charles Cooper of Duquesne.”

  It was a momentous occasion. There had been no official discussions among the owners about integrating the NBA, and the development seemed certain to have repercussions. Eddie Gottlieb, the owner of the Philadelphia Warriors, leaned over to Sid Hartman, who worked in the front office of the Lakers, and said, “Abe’s gonna go crazy.” Abe was Abe Saperstein, the owner of the Harlem Globetrotters. The Trotters at the time were a much larger draw than any of the NBA teams; they played in many of the same arenas, with the Trotters often leading the bill in a doubleheader that featured two NBA teams in the second half. Saperstein had a proprietary interest in black basketball players and a virtual monopoly on them as well. And while he had been a powerful supporter of the NBA, he was afraid that if the league started recruiting black players, his talent pool might dry up, and NBA teams with black players might undercut fan interest in the Globetrotters.

  The franchise owners, for their part, worried that if Saperstein felt the NBA was competing against him, he might boycott their arenas, and they made more money selling tickets for the Trotters than they did for their own money-losing teams. And whatever their private feelings about race, the owners had to contend with the fact that most basketball fans were the same blue-collar white males who showed up to watch hockey games, and as a whole, this was not a demographic that in 1950 had embraced a mixing of the races. For the owners, the operant phrase was, “It’s a white dollar.” They were uncertain whether the arrival of black players would enliven and strengthen the game or send an already tottering sport into collapse, and at least some of them did not want to find out.

  “Do you realize Mr. Cooper is a Negro?” one of the owners asked Brown.

  “I don’t care if he’s plaid!” Brown said. “All I know is this kid can play basketball and we want him on the team.”

  The owners called a recess but quickly realized that the league had no technical grounds to prevent Brown from drafting Cooper. They reconvened and there was no more dissent. In fact, once Brown had broken the color barrier, other owners were quick to follow. The Washington Capitols picked Earl Lloyd of Washington State in the draft’s ninth round, and later in the summer the Knickerbockers lured Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton from the Harlem Globetrotters. 2* Abe Saperstein was in fact enraged and threatened Brown with a boycott of Boston Garden, but Brown did not back down. The day after Cooper learned he had been drafted by the Celtics, he sent Brown a telegram. “Thank you for offering me a chance in pro basketball. I hope I’ll never give you cause to regret it.”

  A WEEK AFTER the draft, on April 27, 1950, Walter Brown hosted a luncheon at the Hotel Lenox to officially introduce Auerbach to the Boston press corps. One reporter observed that, despite Auerbach’s nickname, his “hair is now somewhat sparse and dark brown after his harrowing experiences as a pro coach.” Auerbach was barraged with questions about his decision to draft Charlie Share instead of Bob Cousy. He tried to explain that what would fill seats in the Garden was a winning team and that, as far as he was concerned, Bob Cousy had not demonstrated a talent that would help the Celtics win. And then, in comments that displayed to the reporters the new coach’s boisterously confrontational manner, Auerbach said, “I don’t give a damn for sentiment or names. That goes for Cousy and everybody else. The only thing that counts with me is ability, and Cousy still hasn’t proven to me that he’s got that ability. I’m not interested in drafting someone just because he happens to be a local yokel.” Auerbach turned to Walter Brown, who was standing next to him. “Am I supposed to win or am I supposed to please these guys?” he asked.

  “Just win,” Brown said.

  The sportswriters were outraged. SENTIMENT OUT—AUERBACH was the headline in the next day’s Herald. Cousy himself was stunned and humiliated. He’d expected, even assumed, he’d be drafted by the Celtics. After all, he was not just a talented local player but a genuine star, the leader of an NCAA championship team. And he was a proven draw at the Garden. When he was taken out of games, the Boston fans would chant his name—Couseee! Couseee!—until his coach sent him back in.

  Raised in a tenement in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, Cousy was the son of a taxi driver who’d immigrated from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. While only six-one and incredibly skinny, he had long arms, big hands, quick feet, and even quicker eyes. His high-bridged nose and narrow face afforded him such extraordinary peripheral vision that he could sit in a chair facing a wall and see enough of the wall behind him to at least identify its color. People joked he could look due east and enjoy a sunset, that he had the 360-degree vision of an insect, that his large, bulging eyes were so big that when he fell asleep his eyelids failed to cover them. Cousy’s peripheral vision enabled him to pass the ball without seeming to look at the other player. He passed balls behind his back and over his shoulder. They came so unexpectedly his teammates sometimes missed them. In a moment of desperation in a game against Loyola, he improvised what would become the most famous of his signature moves—shifting the ball behind his back from hand to hand while dribbling. With eight seconds left and the game on the line, Cousy drove to the basket from the left side of the court, dribbling with his right hand, but the Loyola player guarding him boxed him in so tightly that he could not raise his right arm to shoot, so he spontaneously bounced the ball behind his back, caught it with his left hand, and dropped in a hook shot, which decided the game.

  For all Cousy’s pyrotechnics, Auerbach’s view that he was overrated seemed to be shared by other franchises. Cousy became only the ninth pick in the draft, chosen by Auerbach’s former boss Ben Kerner of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. Cousy didn’t even know where Tri-Cities was, and he went down to Boston Garden to see Walter Brown and plead to be given a chance to play for the Celtics. Brown explained apologetically that Chuck Share filled the Celtics’ immediate requirements. “We need height,” Brown said, “and Share gives it to us. I wish we could have gotten both of you, but it wasn’t possible.”

  Cousy pointed out that he had already established his popularity with the Garden fans. Brown replied that time and again the Celtics had drafted popular New England college players, including three of Cousy’s own former teammates at Holy Cross, only to have them fail to make the team or fail to draw fans once they did. Cousy asked Brown for his advice about playing for Tri-Cities. “You’re the property of another team now,” Brown said, “and it’s against regulations for me to suggest anything. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

  Accepting the fact that he was not going to become a Celtic, Cousy signed with Kerner to play for the Blackhawks. 3* But before the season started, the Chicago Stags folded, and on October 5, 1950, the league’s commissioner, Maurice Podoloff, held a meeting of the owners at the Park-Sheraton Hotel in New York to determine the legal status of the players associated with the team. Podoloff, nicknamed Poodles Podoloff and Pumpernickel Podoloff, was a short, stout, thick-featured man, born in Russia, who had the delicate job of simultaneously representing the owners, who were his bosses, to the players and to the public and mediating the numerous and divisive differences between them. He seemed spineless and indecisive to many players and referees, and incompetent to some of the owners, but his power was hampered by his one-year contract and his lack of leverage with the owners. And despite his reputation for subservience, in the fall of 1950 he stood up to Ned Irish, the richest and the most powerful and arrogant of the owners, and made two crucial decisions that affected the course of the league for the next two decades. Be
fore folding, the owners of the Chicago Stags had been secretly auctioning off the players—Irish being one of the most aggressive bidders—and Podoloff vetoed the results. “The secret auction was bad,” he explained later. “The Chicago people were going to a team and saying, ‘So-and-so bid so much. What is your offer?’ Teams couldn’t dare check with each other.”

  Next, Podoloff decreed that valuations be placed on the Stag players, to pay off the team’s debt, and that to improve the level of the league overall, they be distributed to the teams that would benefit most from each player’s specific talents. The Blackhawks’ Ben Kerner insisted that Frankie Brian, a player on the Stags roster who was a friend of his, be allowed to join his Tri-Cities club, and Podoloff decided that if Kerner was going to acquire Brian, he would have to surrender his draft choice Bob Cousy to the pool of Stags players. Kerner agreed, and Cousy, who had been passed over by Walter Brown, was now rejected by a second owner.

  At the end of the meeting in the Park-Sheraton, all the players had been disposed of except for Cousy, Andy Phillip, and Max Zaslofsky. Walter Brown wanted Zaslofsky, one of the league’s perennial all-star players. He argued that because the last-place Celtics had had the first choice in the college draft, they should also have first choice of these final three players. Ned Irish, however, demanded that Zaslofsky go to New York because he had been born in New York, had gone to St. John’s in Queens, and would help the Knicks draw Jewish fans. Eddie Gottlieb of the Philadelphia Warriors also wanted Zaslofsky, and he argued, even more creatively than Irish, that the Warriors deserved him because Gottlieb’s minority partner was Abe Saperstein, who had acquired Zaslofsky in one of the secret trades with the Stags. None of the three men would relinquish their claims on Zaslofsky, and finally Podoloff lost his patience. “I’m sick and tired of all this,” he said. “There’s three of you and three players, all backcourt men, so I’m going to put the names in a hat and whoever you draw, that’s who you got.”

  Podoloff wrote the names of the three players on three pieces of paper and placed the folded slips in the fedora of Danny Biasone, owner of the Syracuse Nationals. Walter Brown felt he had been euchred out of Zaslofsky, but even so, ever courteous, he offered Irish the chance to draw first, then he instantly regretted it, since he realized he had just given Irish the best odds of acquiring Zaslofsky. Irish picked out a slip, opened it, and gave a triumphant shout. He had in fact selected Zaslofsky. Andy Phillip, the second team member from the Stags, was an excellent and experienced playmaker, but when Brown, picking second, reached into the fedora, he drew the name of Bob Cousy, the untried rookie. As he read Cousy’s name, he did not feel that this was somehow meant to be, that the crowd-pleasing local boy with the dazzling moves had all along been destined to play for the Celtics. To the contrary, what he felt was that he and his last-place team had once again gotten the dirty end of the stick. 4*

  Cousy, staying with his parents on Long Island, was unaware of the meeting at the Park-Sheraton in New York, unaware even that Ben Kerner had traded him into the pool of Stags players, and he expected any day to hear from Kerner summoning him to the Blackhawks training camp in Illinois. Instead, after midnight, he received a call from Walter Brown, who told him to report to the Celtics office in Boston. Cousy, who was jubilant, drove up to Massachusetts the following day to talk to Auerbach. Like Walter Brown, Auerbach was disappointed that the Celtics had been stuck with Cousy. It also irritated Auerbach that the sportswriters and fans had tried to foist Cousy on him, and he wanted it made clear to all concerned that, despite his local-hero status, Cousy was going to have to prove himself. “To me, he’s just another rookie who has to show me that he can play professionally,” he told a reporter that morning.

  The article appeared in that afternoon’s newspapers. Cousy read the quote before his meeting with Auerbach, and its cold tone made him acutely aware of just how serious were the coach’s reservations about him. Buster Sheary, Cousy’s last coach at Holy Cross, had been an inspirational leader, but Red Auerbach, Cousy could tell as soon as they met, had absolutely no interest in inspiring people. He was hard and practical, with a direct, penetrating gaze—a man who assumed you probably weren’t going to like him and didn’t care. Auerbach told Cousy that his one disadvantage was his size. If he made the team, he’d be one of the six shortest men in the entire league. He was too small to play up front, Auerbach said; he would have to try for a position in the backcourt. “I hope you make this team,” Auerbach said. “If you can, I’ll be glad to have you. If you can’t, don’t blame me. A little guy always has two strikes on him in this business. It’s a big man’s game.”

  AUERBACH HAD rented a two-room corner suite on the ninth floor of the Hotel Lenox, on Boylston Street near the Boston Public Library. The suite, which had a refrigerator and a hot plate but no stove, was a spartan place, but since he had few friends and no interests outside of basketball, it suited him perfectly. Just as he had done with the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, Auerbach set about rebuilding the Celtics. He dropped Tony Lavelli, the legendary Yale player who scored only nine points a game but who performed on his accordion for the crowds at halftime. He then cut two local favorites, the Holy Cross stars George Kaftan and Joe Mullaney. By the time training camp was over, he’d decided to keep Cousy. Auerbach had been hard on the kid, but he took orders without sulking and he was now trying to make sure that the man who received his pass at least knew it was coming.

  Eventually, Auerbach traded away all but two players—Ed Leede and Sonny Hertzberg—from the team that had played the previous season under Doggie Julian. As he engaged in his trades, Auerbach always kept in his mind the image of a unified, cohesive team. He was interested in a player only to the extent that the man could demonstrably perform a specific function within the team. Boston picked up a number of players from the five franchises that had folded at the end of the previous season. The most promising was Ed Macauley, who had been with St. Louis and who was considered a better center in the league than anyone except Minneapolis’s George Mikan. Macauley played both center and forward, and at six feet eight, he was tall enough for Auerbach to designate him as the team’s big man, which meant Auerbach no longer needed Chuck Share, the center he had opted to draft over Bob Cousy. So Auerbach traded the rights to Share to Fort Wayne in exchange for Bob Harris, the rights to Bill Sharman, and approximately $10,000, which Auerbach used to buy Bob Brannum from Sheboygan.

  Both Harris and Brannum were big, bruising, sharp-elbowed players. Brannum, with fewer skills than Harris but more brute strength, became the team’s enforcer, and the two of them together with Macauley formed the Celtics frontcourt. Sharman, who had played for the Washington Capitols and then was assigned to Fort Wayne when that team folded, was a gamble for Auerbach. A baseball player as well as a topflight shooting guard, Sharman was still playing on the Brooklyn Dodgers and had yet to decide whether he wanted to pursue basketball or baseball. If he had chosen to go with baseball, Auerbach would have traded away something for nothing. But he thought it was worth the risk. Sharman, a great natural athlete from central California, seemed more of a basketball player than a baseball player in his size and agility, and Auerbach sensed he had the potential to become one of the best shooters in the league. When Sharman did join the team the following year, he and Cousy formed one of the greatest backcourt combinations in league history, Cousy moving the ball around the floor with his startling maneuvers, spinning, twisting, creating opportunities, and Sharman the meticulous perfectionist, methodically lofting his shot from twenty feet out.

  At the outset of that first season, Auerbach decided to allow sportswriters to attend the team’s practice sessions. Any additional coverage he could generate would only help the team, and in the process he might be able to educate some of the sportswriters, whom he considered woefully uninformed about basketball, on the finer points of the game. Jack McCarthy of the Boston Herald attended one of the early sessions. Auerbach held up his hands in front of the reporter’s face and
wriggled his fingers. “This is what makes a basketball player, see?” he said. “Hands. You’ve got to have the touch. Max Zaslofsky has it. And so does Macauley. That’s what makes Ed so good.”

  The Boston sportswriters of the day, who worked for six different papers that were engaged in unending circulation wars, were narrow-minded and sensationalistic and extremely competitive. But the men Ted Williams sardonically referred to as “the knights of the keyboard” were also sentimental in a particularly Irish way. They believed in loyalty, they loved the lost cause and the heroic gesture, and Auerbach struck many of them as singularly unromantic. They felt he had insulted the Boston fans by his lack of enthusiasm for Bob Cousy. And when, at weekly basketball lunches hosted by Walter Brown, Auerbach belittled the very notion of sportsmanship as a lot of crap and bragged of urging players to bend rules and fake injuries if that would help them win, it seemed an appalling violation of the ideals of honor and nobility that had always been a central justification for athletics.