Being from the New York area, I grew up hating the Celtics, instead rooting for those miserable Knicks. But I was always in awe of them, especially when I went away to college in the Boston area. In four years of listening to Johnny Most describe Celtic games on the radio, I never heard them lose a game fair and square. Either the other team "spent the whole night at the foul line," or the other team was literally "beating up the Celts and refs weren't doing anything about it." But I learned early on that there were certain teams and people you never wanted to bet against -- the Yankees, Notre Dame football, and Joe Louis. To which I would add the Canadiens and, of course, the Celtics.
In my college years, I would often go to the Boston Garden to see the Celtics in the playoffs, sitting up in the second balcony. In those days they still allowed smoking in the arena, and these seats were up above the smoke clouds! Got to see Cousy (I was at his last home game), Sharman, Heinsohn, the Jones boys, and, of course, Russell, the greatest clutch center the game has ever known.
How the Celtics got him was amazing. He had led the University of San Francisco to consecutive NCAA titles in the '50s (in the pre-Wooden era). Auerbach was determined to get him, but there were two teams ahead of Boston in the draft -- the St. Louis Hawks and the Rochester Royals. To get past the Hawks, Red traded his star forward and one of the most popular players on the team, Easy Ed Macauley. When you look up at the rafters at Boston Garden, the only "trivia" number hanging there is "22" -- Macauley's number. It's the only retired number for a player who never won a championship with the Celtics (although he would win one for the Hawks in '58, when Russell was hurt during the finals). And to get past the Royals, Auerbach got team owner Walter Brown (who also owned the Bruins and the Ice Capades) to promise a booking of the Ice Capades in Rochester.
Russell endured unbelievable racial discrimination and taunting from the fans in those early years whenever his team went on the road to certain cities, and none worse than in St. Louis. This was only a decade after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in MLB. But racial tolerance would come much more rapidly to basketball, which is, after all, a game that flourished in inner cities because all you needed was a pair of sneakers and no other expensive equipment. Today, basketball, more than any other sport, is a game of color.
In some ways, Russell was like another great Boston star -- Ted Williams -- who "did it his way" by his performance on the field of play. And ironically, it was Williams who used his "5 minutes in the sun" at Cooperstown, at his induction in 1960, to challenge the Hall of Fame to open its doors to the great stars of the Negro Leagues who never got the chance to play major league baseball. He never got the full credit he deserved for that. Russell, Williams, Bobby Orr, maybe John Kelley Sr., too -- they all belong up there in that Boston pantheon. Awesome memories.
