The man behind Celtics, cigars
There'll never be another like Red
Red Auerbach in 1962.
It was the night of another NBA opener a year ago, at the new Boston Garden, the one known as the TD Banknorth Garden. So it wasn't Red Auerbach's Garden at North Station in Boston, wasn't really the same place or the same parquet floor where Auerbach became the greatest basketball coach who ever lived. But it was the Celtics against the Knicks on this night, and it had been such an important rivalry once in pro basketball, even if both teams had been going the wrong way for a while. So we wanted the night to be special. And it was, because the old man showed up.
I had come down the hall from the visitors' locker room to say hello to Doc Rivers, an old friend who coaches the Celtics now. And there were a lot of people in his office that night one year ago, and one of them was Red Auerbach. He had been gravely ill a few months earlier, and no one expected him to make the opener. There he was.
"Why am I here?" he said. "Because they told me I wouldn't be, that's why."
There had been a time earlier in 2005 when we had been told to expect the worst, that he was in the hospital and on his way out. But he fooled everybody again. There was already a famous story going around about how he was in his hospital bed one day, and opened his eyes, and told an old friend sitting at his bedside, to come closer.
When the friend did the old man said, "I'll decide."
Meaning he would decide when it was time to go.
It was his time yesterday. He was 89 when his heart finally gave out. So he will not make another NBA opener this year.
That means this will be the first season in NBA history that opens without Arnold (Red) Auerbach. He was there when the league opened for business in 1946 and he was a part of that league all the way until yesterday. There has never been anybody bigger than this in the history of American sports.
He won nine championships coaching the Celtics, eight of them in a row. Nobody has won more. He won 938 regular-season games and led the world in victories until Lenny Wilkens finally passed him. He was Bill Russell and Bob Cousy and Sam and K.C. Jones. He made the trade that got the Celtics Russell. He drafted Larry Bird a year ahead of everybody. There was a draft day trade that got him Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. He went from being the best coach in league history to the best executive. He built a championship team around Russell and then in the '80s, he built another one around Bird with Parish and McHale. And if Len Bias hadn't died of a drug overdose, maybe a third championship era in Boston would have been built around him. That was another trade the old man made, and all it got him with Bias was the No. 1 pick in the draft. "That's the ache that will never go away," he said to me once, sitting in the little office he kept in downtown Washington, D.C. "Not just because of what might have been for the Celtics. What might have been for the kid."
His best friend was Paul Sann, the editor of the old New York Post when I went to work there covering the Knicks in 1975. Sann called Auerbach and said to be nice to the new kid. He only did that for the next 30 years. He was not just a giant of sports then. He was a friend of the family. He was so many days and nights of basketball conversation over those years I have lost count.
One night he was talking about one of those seven-game Finals the old Celtics always used to play. He said he was alone before Game 7, and he had given every pregame speech by then, pushed every button. He said he was out of words before the only game that mattered. He walked into the locker room and told the old Celtics sixth man, Frank Ramsey, "You give the pregame speech tonight."
Ramsey thought about it for a moment, stood up, walked up to the blackboard and wrote, "We win, $10,000. We lose, $5,000." He sat back down without saying a word.
"Greatest pregame speech I ever heard," Auerbach said.
Not everybody loved him. He and Red Holzman were not always the best of friends. He was still a giant of it all. There was even the time when Auerbach had gotten disgusted with the ownership of the Celtics, and Sonny Werblin thought he had talked him into coming to New York to run the Knicks.
It was a huge story at the time, in both New York and Boston, by the time Auerbach got on the shuttle to close the deal. Maybe the story got better over the years. Who knows what really happened that day? By the time the plane landed, Auerbach was staying in Boston.
"I was a Celtic," he said.
In the 1960s, he was the coach who started five black players in Boston, not because he wanted to make some statement about racial harmony in America, but because winning the game had made him completely color blind. He would take his chances with Russell and Satch Sanders and Willie Naulls and Sam and K.C. Jones. He had been at this a long time, all the way back to when he was 49-11 with the old Washington Capitols. The only thing that ever interested him, truly, was winning the game. A year ago, there was a moment when Doc Rivers said to him in his office, "Anything I can get you?"
And the old man said, "Yeah, one more banner hanging from the ceiling."
He looked as fragile as a teacup that night. Even the familiar growl of his voice sounded as if it was coming from another room. Then he went out and sat at one end of the court and they introduced him, and the old man got one more cheer in Boston. Not his Garden. But close enough. The old man died yesterday. Finally his time. He is survived by the most famous basketball team of them all.
