The Cooz- NBA #39 All Time
Dec 21, 2021 12:31:02 GMT -5
rgs318, A Clock Tower Purple, and 2 more like this
Post by hchoops on Dec 21, 2021 12:31:02 GMT -5
A terrific piece
NBA 75: At No. 39, Bob Cousy brought sensational to the court with his passing, dribbling
Steve Buckley 5h ago 37
Welcome to the NBA 75, The Athletic’s countdown of the 75 best players in NBA history, in honor of the league’s diamond anniversary. From Nov. 1 through Feb. 18, we’ll unveil a new player on the list every weekday except for Dec. 27-31, culminating with the man picked by a panel of The Athletic NBA staff members as the greatest of all time.
On the night of Feb. 28, 1952, the Boston Celtics traveled to Raleigh, N.C., for a neutral-site game against the Rochester Royals that was going to sell out Reynolds Coliseum — but only because the barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters also were on the bill for a showdown against an outfit called the “Oklahoma All-Stars.”
As if to underscore the pecking order of professional basketball in some places in the early 1950s, an advance man for the Globetrotters named Tom Walsh was quoted in a Kentucky newspaper as calling the opening game between the Celtics and Royals “an added attraction.”
And yet it was the Celtics who put on a really big show that night, rolling to a 91-72 victory over the Royals. With Boston leading, 16-15, about six minutes into the game, second-year point guard Bob Cousy connected on a field goal, was fouled on the play and then converted the free throw to begin a Celtics run. According to the reporter from The Associated Press on the scene, “By the time the fourth period arrived, Boston began clowning and dribbling, its lead was so great.”
Take that, Globetrotters.
But if the Boston-Rochester game is remembered at all, it’s for what happened later in the evening. This was the South. This was 1952. The hotel where the Celtics were staying turned out to be segregated, which meant there was no room in the inn for Chuck Cooper, who in 1950 became the first Black man to be selected in the NBA Draft when Boston took him with the first pick in the second round, 13th overall.
Cooper chose to take an overnight sleeper from Raleigh to New York City, where the Celtics would be playing the Knicks the next night.
Cousy, Cooper’s road roommate, chose to make the trip with him.
Not content with merely traveling together, the two men drank together as they waited for their train to arrive. There came a point, naturally, when the two men needed to pee. After encountering the “colored” and “whites” bathrooms, Cooper and Cousy participated in what Cousy would later call “a Rosa Parks moment that we couldn’t talk about.”
The two men did their peeing off the end of the platform.
Bill Russell, Red Auerbach, Richard Lapchick, Cousy, Charles Ogletree and Marian Heard attend a Black History Month forum called “Changing the Game: Contributions of African-American Athletes” in Boston in 2001. (Bill Greene / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
A largely unknown chapter in NBA history for many years, Gary M. Pomerantz deftly uses it as a jumping-off point in his book “The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End.” It’s an important book in that it provides a forum for Cousy, despite a much-deserved reputation for being a decades-ahead-of-his-time champion of race relations and civil rights, to state his belief there was so much more he could have done.
In the book, Cousy reaches out to the great Bill Russell, expressing that he could have been a better friend, could have said more, could have better understood Russell and the racism he experienced during his years in Boston. Cousy later sent Russell a copy of the book, along with a handwritten note. It took a while, but Russell eventually picked up the phone and called Cousy.
The purpose here is not to do a fresh examination of racial strife in the early NBA, but to illustrate that Cousy is a man who has never stopped evolving. He was in his late 80s when he began a series of interviews with Pomerantz, and he had just turned 92 when we chatted over the phone last year for an unrelated story that meandered to a discussion about aging.
When I reached out to him a few weeks ago for this story, what jumped out about the now 93-year-old Cooz isn’t just that his mind remains sharp, or that he can still deliver quips that are skillfully cadenced and crackle with humor, such as when he said, “My marbles, as you can hopefully discern, are still in place. For the most part.” It’s Cousy’s willingness to discuss the unforgiving aging process that proves mesmerizing.
He talks not with regret, or bitterness, or sadness, about being in his 90s. Though he’s candid about ever-creeping physical limitations — “My body is slowly going into deterioration to the point where I’m having trouble getting from Point A to Point B without falling, to be honest,” he told me — he speaks in such a way as to have you think you’re having a discussion with a much, much younger man.
Not to be trite, but there’s a lesson here. As a basketball player, Cousy remains one of the all-time greats — Hall of Famer, 13-time NBA All-Star, a member of six championship teams who averaged 18.4 points and 7.5 assists per game in his career. Not for nothing was he known as the “Houdini of the Hardwood,” the mere utterance of that nickname serving as an invitation to imagine the 6-foot-1, 175-pound point guard exhibiting all kinds of behind-the-back dribbles, fast breaks and shots from either hand.
A playmaker’s playmaker, he led the NBA in assists in eight of his 13 seasons with the Celtics. And as if that were not sufficiently impressive, consider that in five of the seasons in which he led the league in assists he was among the top 10 players in scoring. In three of those seasons he was among the top four players in scoring. Not bad for a player who wasn’t exactly at the top of the Celtics’ wish list during his four seasons at Holy Cross. Sure enough, the Celtics took a big man, 6-foot-11 center Chuck Share, with the first pick in the first-ever NBA Draft, held on April 25, 1950. With the fourth overall pick, the Tri-Cities Blackhawks selected Cousy, who, um, sorry, wasn’t much interested in moving to any of the Tri-Cities.
Sorry, Moline, Ill.
Sorry, Rock Island, Ill.
Sorry, Davenport, Iowa.
He wound up with the Chicago Stags, who folded before the season began. Only then did he land with the Celtics in a dispersal draft.
Even then, the new Celtics coach, fella by the name of Arnold “Red” Auerbach, was not sold on Cousy.
“I don’t give a darn for sentiment or names,” Auerbach told reporters. “That goes for Cousy or anybody else. A local yokel doesn’t bring more than a dozen extra fans into your building. But a winning team does and that’s what I aim to have.”
Pre-Auerbach, pre-Cousy, the 1949-50 Boston Celtics were 22-46, dead last in the NBA’s Eastern Division. The 1950-51 Celtics were 39-30 and made the playoffs, losing an opening-round best-of-three series to the Knicks.
It didn’t take long for Auerbach to understand, and appreciate, the enormity of the lucky break that landed Cousy on Causeway Street. Cousy averaged 15.6 points a game in his rookie season, 10th in the NBA, and he was fourth in assists with 4.9 per game. It wasn’t until the 1956-57 season, by which time Bill Russell had arrived, that the Celtics won their first NBA championship. Boston won five championships in the six seasons they were teammates until Cousy retired in 1963. Given what he meant to the Celtics — and, yes, given his contributions to growing a league that in its early days had teams playing neutral-site games as the undercard to the Harlem Globetrotters — Cousy is a solid No. 39 choice on The Athletic’s NBA 75.
And just as he put in the work to develop his basketball skills, beginning in New York City, and then at Holy Cross and then with the Celtics, now Cousy brings this same ethic to the aging process. Never mind being one of the top 75 NBA players of all time; he gets my vote as one of the top 75 nonagenarians of all time. He’s a “Houdini of the Senior Set,” if you will.
We had two discussions about what it’s like to live a long life, and what he’s learned along the way. He began with the obvious: “I know both my parents lived until their late 80s. That might have something to do with it, the genes, obviously.”
But, he said, “I’m sure I’ve done a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I’ve put a lot of stuff in my body over the years I shouldn’t have, but never in an addictive way. I never smoked cigarettes, but I did hang in with the cigars, thanks to my old mentor who got me in the habit with them.”
The old mentor, of course, was Red Auerbach, the longtime coach, general manager and president of the Celtics whose trademark victory cigar — he was partial to the Hoyo de Monterrey — delighted Boston fans and infuriated everybody else.
Cousy went along with the gag for about 20 years, but then, he said, “I decided it was time to quit. So I just quit and never thought again about it.”
Cousy brought up drinking, which took us back to that night in Raleigh when he and Chuck Cooper were waiting for the overnight train to New York.
“I’ve been telling a story recently about Chuck Cooper, when they wouldn’t let him stay in a hotel, and he and I told Auerbach we’d take a train out after the game,” he said. “Anyway, when I’m telling that story, we get to the station at 10 o’clock at night after the game, and I qualify this all the time by saying we didn’t have any bad habits in those days.
“We as basketball players, as athletes, we had a feeling of concern about putting anything foreign into the body, but we drank a #@*&$~!load of beer that night. We drank nonstop for two hours, and the inevitable happened, and we had to pee.”
Perfect. Cousy has used the story as part of a discussion about the indignities endured by people of color in the mid-20th century. Now he was able to use that same story to illustrate that, yeah, sure, he tied one on now and again.
“I’m not saying we were all clean livers,” he said. “We weren’t paying attention to the science. It came with being a jock. And beer drinking was not just going out on Saturday nights. After a game, we’d go out for what they called a few. And I would have a few. It wasn’t done to excess. We didn’t have bad habits.”
Cousy is putting the royal “we” into play here, of course. In basketball, as in all sports, as in all walks of life, people do have bad habits. But just as he was never the type to proclaim himself as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, nor is he the type to fly the flag of moderation as he brags about his long life. Better to just toss out some royal “we” and let it go at that.
Cousy is known to be occasionally self-deprecating about his playing career. He can be similarly self-deprecating when discussing his longevity, as when he said, “I live in a big house, and fortunately, my Florida daughter and her husband were with me during the summer, so I was sitting on my fat ass getting waited on hand and foot, and I loved it.”
As he was when he was a basketball player, “I’m still a day-to-day guy. I’ve been so damned busy my entire life. But now — now — I have a lot of time to meditate and ask what’s it all about, Alfie, what are we doing here, how much of a role did the Jesuits play in my life, and all that stuff.”
Cousy became emotional during his retirement ceremony in 1963. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
Cousy retired after the 1962-63 season, his 13th in the NBA. On the final day of the regular season — Sunday afternoon, March 17, 1963, St. Patrick’s Day — a ceremony was held before the Celtics’ game against the Syracuse Nationals.
Joined by his wife, Missie, and their daughters, Ticia and Marie, Cousy spoke with great emotion, wiping away tears. At one point, Marie stepped forward to offer her dad a hanky.
He thanked the Syracuse Nationals, noting, “Throughout the years, they’ve always personified the type of hustling, determined ball team that I admire most.” He thanked the sportswriters. He thanked Missie. He thanked his daughters, who, he said, “Thank God, as you can see, resemble their mother.” He took a moment to offer a shoutout to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, long a pet cause of his.
Near the end, a fan yelled out, “We love ya, Cooz!”
Amazingly, this “retirement” party was more than 58 years ago.
“I can get a little more philosophical about retirement these days,” he said. “But in 1963, I was busy.”
In addition to the boys’ summer camp he ran for years, Cousy moved directly from the Celtics to Boston College, where for six seasons he coached the men’s basketball team. He then coached the NBA’s Cincinnati Royals for three years and remained at the helm for two more seasons after the team relocated and became known as the Kansas City/Omaha Kings. (Yes, these are the original Rochester Royals against whom the Celtics clowned around that night in Raleigh many years ago. Today, they’re known as the Sacramento Kings.)
Cousy even came out of retirement, briefly, during the 1969-70 season, when he played in seven games for the Royals. Later, he served as commissioner of the American Soccer League. “They wanted a so-called name commissioner, and hopefully we got some attention,” Cousy explained.
He worked as a color analyst for Celtics games on television for decades. He did charity work. He did commercials. He and Missie traveled.
“About 25 years ago, we went to London for a week, and we took the Chunnel to Paris,” he said.
Cousy was born to French parents, and français was the only language spoken in the house for the first five years of his life.
“When we got to Paris,” he said, “we had a relative meet us, and she took us around for the day to see the Louvre and the things you do in Paris, the sidewalk cafes and all.
“And by the end of the day, I was talking like a Parisian again. Even now and then I’ll parle-vous with someone. And believe it or not, I’ve developed a French fan club. I get maybe two letters a month from French basketball fans, and if the occasion calls for it, I’ll write back.”
Missie Cousy died in 2013. Her husband doesn’t travel as much as he once did, and his public appearances are select. But earlier this summer, joined by Ticia and Marie, he was on hand for the unveiling of a statue in his honor outside the DCU Center in Worcester, Mass., his adopted hometown since the Holy Cross days. And, yes, Cousy’s self-deprecating humor was on display at the statue unveiling.
“Well, it looks like I’ll be guarding the DCU for many years to come,” he said. “Although, I hope you know, I was not really known for my defense.”
Yeah, right. Would that we could all play basketball the way Cousy did. Would that we could all reach his age and still possess his sense of humor, his optimism, his quest to keep growing.
About a year ago, I sent Cousy a piece written by Roger Angell of The New Yorker. Angell is perhaps better known for his elegant baseball writing, but in 2014 he took a turn at the autobiographical in authoring “This Old Man” for the magazine. He was 93 at the time. He is now 101.
“This Old Man” is funny. It’s poignant. It’s educational.
It’s “brilliant,” Cousy stated in a handwritten note that arrived at my house a week later. “Have already passed it along to a few friends. Best line was the Cronkite quote.”
Cousy was referring to the “rules for old men,” which Angell attributes to the late CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite: “I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.”
Cronkite lived to be 92. Angell is plugging away at 101, and 93-year-old Bob Cousy is still making with the wisecracks about himself. I have all three of them on my top 75 nonagenarians of all time. (With Angell, not unlike the Tom Brady types who qualify for two all-decade teams, making it on my top 75 centenarians of all time.)
Bob Cousy was named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player for the 1956-57 season, the year the Celtics won their first championship. But as he continues to evolve, and with his ceaseless pursuit of knowledge, he’s more valuable today than he ever was.
Career stats: G: 924, Pts.: 18.4, Reb.: 5.2, Ast.: 7.5, FG%: 37.5, FT%: 80.3, Win Shares: 91.1, PER: 19.8
The Athletic NBA 75 Panel points: 519 | Hollinger GOAT Points*: 209.5
Achievements: NBA MVP (’57), 12-time All-NBA, 13-time All-Star, NBA champ (’57, ’59, ’60, ’61, ’62, ’63), Assists champ (’53, ’54, ’55, ’56, ’57, ’58, ’59, ’60), Hall of Fame (’71), NBA Silver Anniversary Team (’71), NBA 35th Anniversary Team (’81), NBA at 50 (’97), NBA 75th Anniversary team (’21)
*A rating of a player’s accumulated accomplishments at the highest levels, based mostly on comparable historical factors, determined heavily but not completely by contemporary evaluations (i.e. awards and All-Star selections). Emphasis is given to the most outstanding achievements — MVP award shares, All-NBA teams, and production above
NBA 75: At No. 39, Bob Cousy brought sensational to the court with his passing, dribbling
Steve Buckley 5h ago 37
Welcome to the NBA 75, The Athletic’s countdown of the 75 best players in NBA history, in honor of the league’s diamond anniversary. From Nov. 1 through Feb. 18, we’ll unveil a new player on the list every weekday except for Dec. 27-31, culminating with the man picked by a panel of The Athletic NBA staff members as the greatest of all time.
On the night of Feb. 28, 1952, the Boston Celtics traveled to Raleigh, N.C., for a neutral-site game against the Rochester Royals that was going to sell out Reynolds Coliseum — but only because the barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters also were on the bill for a showdown against an outfit called the “Oklahoma All-Stars.”
As if to underscore the pecking order of professional basketball in some places in the early 1950s, an advance man for the Globetrotters named Tom Walsh was quoted in a Kentucky newspaper as calling the opening game between the Celtics and Royals “an added attraction.”
And yet it was the Celtics who put on a really big show that night, rolling to a 91-72 victory over the Royals. With Boston leading, 16-15, about six minutes into the game, second-year point guard Bob Cousy connected on a field goal, was fouled on the play and then converted the free throw to begin a Celtics run. According to the reporter from The Associated Press on the scene, “By the time the fourth period arrived, Boston began clowning and dribbling, its lead was so great.”
Take that, Globetrotters.
But if the Boston-Rochester game is remembered at all, it’s for what happened later in the evening. This was the South. This was 1952. The hotel where the Celtics were staying turned out to be segregated, which meant there was no room in the inn for Chuck Cooper, who in 1950 became the first Black man to be selected in the NBA Draft when Boston took him with the first pick in the second round, 13th overall.
Cooper chose to take an overnight sleeper from Raleigh to New York City, where the Celtics would be playing the Knicks the next night.
Cousy, Cooper’s road roommate, chose to make the trip with him.
Not content with merely traveling together, the two men drank together as they waited for their train to arrive. There came a point, naturally, when the two men needed to pee. After encountering the “colored” and “whites” bathrooms, Cooper and Cousy participated in what Cousy would later call “a Rosa Parks moment that we couldn’t talk about.”
The two men did their peeing off the end of the platform.
Bill Russell, Red Auerbach, Richard Lapchick, Cousy, Charles Ogletree and Marian Heard attend a Black History Month forum called “Changing the Game: Contributions of African-American Athletes” in Boston in 2001. (Bill Greene / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
A largely unknown chapter in NBA history for many years, Gary M. Pomerantz deftly uses it as a jumping-off point in his book “The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End.” It’s an important book in that it provides a forum for Cousy, despite a much-deserved reputation for being a decades-ahead-of-his-time champion of race relations and civil rights, to state his belief there was so much more he could have done.
In the book, Cousy reaches out to the great Bill Russell, expressing that he could have been a better friend, could have said more, could have better understood Russell and the racism he experienced during his years in Boston. Cousy later sent Russell a copy of the book, along with a handwritten note. It took a while, but Russell eventually picked up the phone and called Cousy.
The purpose here is not to do a fresh examination of racial strife in the early NBA, but to illustrate that Cousy is a man who has never stopped evolving. He was in his late 80s when he began a series of interviews with Pomerantz, and he had just turned 92 when we chatted over the phone last year for an unrelated story that meandered to a discussion about aging.
When I reached out to him a few weeks ago for this story, what jumped out about the now 93-year-old Cooz isn’t just that his mind remains sharp, or that he can still deliver quips that are skillfully cadenced and crackle with humor, such as when he said, “My marbles, as you can hopefully discern, are still in place. For the most part.” It’s Cousy’s willingness to discuss the unforgiving aging process that proves mesmerizing.
He talks not with regret, or bitterness, or sadness, about being in his 90s. Though he’s candid about ever-creeping physical limitations — “My body is slowly going into deterioration to the point where I’m having trouble getting from Point A to Point B without falling, to be honest,” he told me — he speaks in such a way as to have you think you’re having a discussion with a much, much younger man.
Not to be trite, but there’s a lesson here. As a basketball player, Cousy remains one of the all-time greats — Hall of Famer, 13-time NBA All-Star, a member of six championship teams who averaged 18.4 points and 7.5 assists per game in his career. Not for nothing was he known as the “Houdini of the Hardwood,” the mere utterance of that nickname serving as an invitation to imagine the 6-foot-1, 175-pound point guard exhibiting all kinds of behind-the-back dribbles, fast breaks and shots from either hand.
A playmaker’s playmaker, he led the NBA in assists in eight of his 13 seasons with the Celtics. And as if that were not sufficiently impressive, consider that in five of the seasons in which he led the league in assists he was among the top 10 players in scoring. In three of those seasons he was among the top four players in scoring. Not bad for a player who wasn’t exactly at the top of the Celtics’ wish list during his four seasons at Holy Cross. Sure enough, the Celtics took a big man, 6-foot-11 center Chuck Share, with the first pick in the first-ever NBA Draft, held on April 25, 1950. With the fourth overall pick, the Tri-Cities Blackhawks selected Cousy, who, um, sorry, wasn’t much interested in moving to any of the Tri-Cities.
Sorry, Moline, Ill.
Sorry, Rock Island, Ill.
Sorry, Davenport, Iowa.
He wound up with the Chicago Stags, who folded before the season began. Only then did he land with the Celtics in a dispersal draft.
Even then, the new Celtics coach, fella by the name of Arnold “Red” Auerbach, was not sold on Cousy.
“I don’t give a darn for sentiment or names,” Auerbach told reporters. “That goes for Cousy or anybody else. A local yokel doesn’t bring more than a dozen extra fans into your building. But a winning team does and that’s what I aim to have.”
Pre-Auerbach, pre-Cousy, the 1949-50 Boston Celtics were 22-46, dead last in the NBA’s Eastern Division. The 1950-51 Celtics were 39-30 and made the playoffs, losing an opening-round best-of-three series to the Knicks.
It didn’t take long for Auerbach to understand, and appreciate, the enormity of the lucky break that landed Cousy on Causeway Street. Cousy averaged 15.6 points a game in his rookie season, 10th in the NBA, and he was fourth in assists with 4.9 per game. It wasn’t until the 1956-57 season, by which time Bill Russell had arrived, that the Celtics won their first NBA championship. Boston won five championships in the six seasons they were teammates until Cousy retired in 1963. Given what he meant to the Celtics — and, yes, given his contributions to growing a league that in its early days had teams playing neutral-site games as the undercard to the Harlem Globetrotters — Cousy is a solid No. 39 choice on The Athletic’s NBA 75.
And just as he put in the work to develop his basketball skills, beginning in New York City, and then at Holy Cross and then with the Celtics, now Cousy brings this same ethic to the aging process. Never mind being one of the top 75 NBA players of all time; he gets my vote as one of the top 75 nonagenarians of all time. He’s a “Houdini of the Senior Set,” if you will.
We had two discussions about what it’s like to live a long life, and what he’s learned along the way. He began with the obvious: “I know both my parents lived until their late 80s. That might have something to do with it, the genes, obviously.”
But, he said, “I’m sure I’ve done a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I’ve put a lot of stuff in my body over the years I shouldn’t have, but never in an addictive way. I never smoked cigarettes, but I did hang in with the cigars, thanks to my old mentor who got me in the habit with them.”
The old mentor, of course, was Red Auerbach, the longtime coach, general manager and president of the Celtics whose trademark victory cigar — he was partial to the Hoyo de Monterrey — delighted Boston fans and infuriated everybody else.
Cousy went along with the gag for about 20 years, but then, he said, “I decided it was time to quit. So I just quit and never thought again about it.”
Cousy brought up drinking, which took us back to that night in Raleigh when he and Chuck Cooper were waiting for the overnight train to New York.
“I’ve been telling a story recently about Chuck Cooper, when they wouldn’t let him stay in a hotel, and he and I told Auerbach we’d take a train out after the game,” he said. “Anyway, when I’m telling that story, we get to the station at 10 o’clock at night after the game, and I qualify this all the time by saying we didn’t have any bad habits in those days.
“We as basketball players, as athletes, we had a feeling of concern about putting anything foreign into the body, but we drank a #@*&$~!load of beer that night. We drank nonstop for two hours, and the inevitable happened, and we had to pee.”
Perfect. Cousy has used the story as part of a discussion about the indignities endured by people of color in the mid-20th century. Now he was able to use that same story to illustrate that, yeah, sure, he tied one on now and again.
“I’m not saying we were all clean livers,” he said. “We weren’t paying attention to the science. It came with being a jock. And beer drinking was not just going out on Saturday nights. After a game, we’d go out for what they called a few. And I would have a few. It wasn’t done to excess. We didn’t have bad habits.”
Cousy is putting the royal “we” into play here, of course. In basketball, as in all sports, as in all walks of life, people do have bad habits. But just as he was never the type to proclaim himself as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, nor is he the type to fly the flag of moderation as he brags about his long life. Better to just toss out some royal “we” and let it go at that.
Cousy is known to be occasionally self-deprecating about his playing career. He can be similarly self-deprecating when discussing his longevity, as when he said, “I live in a big house, and fortunately, my Florida daughter and her husband were with me during the summer, so I was sitting on my fat ass getting waited on hand and foot, and I loved it.”
As he was when he was a basketball player, “I’m still a day-to-day guy. I’ve been so damned busy my entire life. But now — now — I have a lot of time to meditate and ask what’s it all about, Alfie, what are we doing here, how much of a role did the Jesuits play in my life, and all that stuff.”
Cousy became emotional during his retirement ceremony in 1963. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
Cousy retired after the 1962-63 season, his 13th in the NBA. On the final day of the regular season — Sunday afternoon, March 17, 1963, St. Patrick’s Day — a ceremony was held before the Celtics’ game against the Syracuse Nationals.
Joined by his wife, Missie, and their daughters, Ticia and Marie, Cousy spoke with great emotion, wiping away tears. At one point, Marie stepped forward to offer her dad a hanky.
He thanked the Syracuse Nationals, noting, “Throughout the years, they’ve always personified the type of hustling, determined ball team that I admire most.” He thanked the sportswriters. He thanked Missie. He thanked his daughters, who, he said, “Thank God, as you can see, resemble their mother.” He took a moment to offer a shoutout to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, long a pet cause of his.
Near the end, a fan yelled out, “We love ya, Cooz!”
Amazingly, this “retirement” party was more than 58 years ago.
“I can get a little more philosophical about retirement these days,” he said. “But in 1963, I was busy.”
In addition to the boys’ summer camp he ran for years, Cousy moved directly from the Celtics to Boston College, where for six seasons he coached the men’s basketball team. He then coached the NBA’s Cincinnati Royals for three years and remained at the helm for two more seasons after the team relocated and became known as the Kansas City/Omaha Kings. (Yes, these are the original Rochester Royals against whom the Celtics clowned around that night in Raleigh many years ago. Today, they’re known as the Sacramento Kings.)
Cousy even came out of retirement, briefly, during the 1969-70 season, when he played in seven games for the Royals. Later, he served as commissioner of the American Soccer League. “They wanted a so-called name commissioner, and hopefully we got some attention,” Cousy explained.
He worked as a color analyst for Celtics games on television for decades. He did charity work. He did commercials. He and Missie traveled.
“About 25 years ago, we went to London for a week, and we took the Chunnel to Paris,” he said.
Cousy was born to French parents, and français was the only language spoken in the house for the first five years of his life.
“When we got to Paris,” he said, “we had a relative meet us, and she took us around for the day to see the Louvre and the things you do in Paris, the sidewalk cafes and all.
“And by the end of the day, I was talking like a Parisian again. Even now and then I’ll parle-vous with someone. And believe it or not, I’ve developed a French fan club. I get maybe two letters a month from French basketball fans, and if the occasion calls for it, I’ll write back.”
Missie Cousy died in 2013. Her husband doesn’t travel as much as he once did, and his public appearances are select. But earlier this summer, joined by Ticia and Marie, he was on hand for the unveiling of a statue in his honor outside the DCU Center in Worcester, Mass., his adopted hometown since the Holy Cross days. And, yes, Cousy’s self-deprecating humor was on display at the statue unveiling.
“Well, it looks like I’ll be guarding the DCU for many years to come,” he said. “Although, I hope you know, I was not really known for my defense.”
Yeah, right. Would that we could all play basketball the way Cousy did. Would that we could all reach his age and still possess his sense of humor, his optimism, his quest to keep growing.
About a year ago, I sent Cousy a piece written by Roger Angell of The New Yorker. Angell is perhaps better known for his elegant baseball writing, but in 2014 he took a turn at the autobiographical in authoring “This Old Man” for the magazine. He was 93 at the time. He is now 101.
“This Old Man” is funny. It’s poignant. It’s educational.
It’s “brilliant,” Cousy stated in a handwritten note that arrived at my house a week later. “Have already passed it along to a few friends. Best line was the Cronkite quote.”
Cousy was referring to the “rules for old men,” which Angell attributes to the late CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite: “I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.”
Cronkite lived to be 92. Angell is plugging away at 101, and 93-year-old Bob Cousy is still making with the wisecracks about himself. I have all three of them on my top 75 nonagenarians of all time. (With Angell, not unlike the Tom Brady types who qualify for two all-decade teams, making it on my top 75 centenarians of all time.)
Bob Cousy was named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player for the 1956-57 season, the year the Celtics won their first championship. But as he continues to evolve, and with his ceaseless pursuit of knowledge, he’s more valuable today than he ever was.
Career stats: G: 924, Pts.: 18.4, Reb.: 5.2, Ast.: 7.5, FG%: 37.5, FT%: 80.3, Win Shares: 91.1, PER: 19.8
The Athletic NBA 75 Panel points: 519 | Hollinger GOAT Points*: 209.5
Achievements: NBA MVP (’57), 12-time All-NBA, 13-time All-Star, NBA champ (’57, ’59, ’60, ’61, ’62, ’63), Assists champ (’53, ’54, ’55, ’56, ’57, ’58, ’59, ’60), Hall of Fame (’71), NBA Silver Anniversary Team (’71), NBA 35th Anniversary Team (’81), NBA at 50 (’97), NBA 75th Anniversary team (’21)
*A rating of a player’s accumulated accomplishments at the highest levels, based mostly on comparable historical factors, determined heavily but not completely by contemporary evaluations (i.e. awards and All-Star selections). Emphasis is given to the most outstanding achievements — MVP award shares, All-NBA teams, and production above