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By: Michael D. McClellan | “Before Elvis, there was nothing,” observes John Lennon, this in reference to all those popular singers who croon so statically and politely in front of rigid dance bands in the style of Perry Como. But Elvis is different; he grows up in Memphis, drawn to the blues and hooked on the black artists of the day, so when he takes the stage and pumps his legs, everything changes. Pop music is suddenly freed from its well-mannered straitjacket, opening the door for future artists. Elvis’s appearance transforms the music industry from something relatively benign to something inherently dangerous, injecting it with color, lacing it with sexuality, and unleashing the torrent of emotion.

NBA basketball is on a parallel track with pre-Elvis pop in the early 1950s, the game played below the rim, set shots all the rage. It’s a nearly all-white league, played in front of nearly all-while crowds in mostly dank, smoke-filled gyms. The product on the court is medieval by today’s standards. Bruisers clog the lanes, while coaches, in the absence of a shot clock, often resort to stall tactics in order to protect a lead. Gamblers hang around the action like flies, giving the game an unsavory feel, which is fine for the hardcore fans who shout obscenities from the cheap seats and cheer loudest when the pushing and shoving escalates into fistfights.

Bob Cousy comes along and changes all of that.

Drafted third overall in 1950 by the Tri-Cities Blackhawks before landing in Boston when his name is literally drawn out of a hat, Cousy immediately brings sizzle and showmanship to the pro game. He’s a hoops equivalent of Elvis whose arrival on the scene polarizes everyone who pays to watch him play. There is no middle ground when it comes to Bob Cousy: You are either a hater, dismissing him as a shameless self-promoter with a showboater’s flair, or you see him as a ball-handling magician whose game jolts the drab world of 1950s professional basketball with brilliant splashes of color.

Today, the criticism leveled at Cousy during those early years is downright laughable. It’s also ironic, given that Cousy not only became one of the league’s biggest stars, but remains in the conversation as one of the greatest point guards to ever dribble a basketball. More importantly, he serves as a gateway through which a generation of celebrity athletes will ultimately flow. Consider the lineage: Without Cousy, one could argue that there could have been no “Pistol” Pete Maravich, no Magic Johnson, no Steph Curry.

Bob Cousy had to happen.

And with each wraparound pass, with each behind-the-back dribble, Cousy pushes the game out of the Dark Ages and toward the global, multi-billion dollar business it is today.

~  ~  ~

The prevailing mythos—that Bob Cousy saved a league teetering on extinction—is dandy fine, but there’s more to the story than grandiose hyperbole and overused narratives. The story doesn’t begin at Holy Cross, where he wins a national championship and is named a consensus All American, or with the Boston Celtics, where he wins six NBA titles and helps spark the game’s first basketball dynasty. It begins instead in a tenement block on East 83rd Street in Manhattan, a full year before the stock market crash that plunges the United States headlong into the Great Depression.

“We lived in Yorkville, which is located on the East End of Manhattan,” Cousy says. “It’s farther east than Hell’s Kitchen, and back then it was the kind of place where the roaches were big enough to carry away small children [laughs]. My father drove a cab for a living. My family was poor, but we felt normal because everybody else was in the same boat. I didn’t realize how difficult our situation actually was, which was the case with most of the children growing up on the East End during that era. We hung out on the streets, played stickball, and did all of the same things as other kids of the day. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures. There were African American families, Jewish families, you name it. For the most part we all got along, because we all faced the same economic situation.”

Cousy is twelve when the family moves to Queens, renting a small house on 112th Avenue that seems a world away from the gritty East End.

“It was a great move in more ways than one, because it led me to the game that changed my life,” Cousy says. “I was thirteen when I really started to play basketball, which was kind of old even way back then. But once I started playing, I was hooked. Except for the occasional stickball games in the neighborhood, and I found myself spending more and more time at O’Connell Playground, or over at P.S. 36’s schoolyard.”

It’s at O’Connell that Cousy meets Morty Arkin, the playground director who shows him the fundamentals. Cousy is introverted at the time, rail thin, and smallish for his age. He soaks up Arkin’s advice and works hard to execute the various drills.

“Morty worked with the kids who came around the playground and showed an interest in basketball,” Cousy says. “I was just another skinny kid hanging around the courts. He couldn’t have seen much potential in me, but I think he could tell how much I liked to play and how determined I was to improve.”

Cousy tries out as a ninth grader, but he’s cut on the first day without hardly a look. Cousy is devastated when he doesn’t make the team.

“Maybe it was a case of youthful overconfidence, or just plain ignorance” he says, “but I was getting better, and I wanted a chance to show what I could do. There were so many other kids trying out—bigger, stronger, older, and more experienced. Looking back now I didn’t have a realistic chance of making the team, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that at the time.”

Getting cut seems like the end of the world, until a friend introduces Cousy to a local league sponsored by the Long Island Press. It isn’t high school hoops, but it’s competitive basketball, and it allows him to test his skills against better players in actual game situations.

Cousy tries out again as a sophomore and is cut once more. The Press League again provides a landing net. In a twist, Lew Grummond, Andrew Jackson’s head coach who also runs the rec league program, happens to be working the same night that Cousy is on the court. He’s immediately struck by the skinny kid’s ball handle.

“When I was thirteen, I fell from a tree and broke my right arm, which forced me to become ambidextrous,” Cousy says. “Grummond was impressed with the way I could dribble with both hands, and after the game he asked me if I wanted to try out for junior varsity. I looked at the opportunity as my big break. I took it very seriously.”

Cousy plays the rest of the season with the JV. He heads into his junior year as a favorite to start for the varsity, but a failing grade forces him to sit out the first semester. He scores 28 points in his return. The performance is hyped in the Long Island Press sports section.

“Being written up wasn’t anything that I dwelled on,” Cousy says. “I was just happy to be on the team. I got up the next day and went to school like everyone else.”

Andrew Jackson goes on to win the highly competitive Queens division, a feat it duplicates during Cousy’s senior year. In just a year and a half, the slick ball handler goes from relative obscurity to the most talked-about basketball phenom in New York. He puts up 28 points in his final game, securing the city’s coveted scoring championship.

“I was coming into my own by that point,” he says. “I was playing the game confidently, and for the first time it really sank in—basketball was going to be my path to a college education. There were moments when I thought college was out of reach—we weren’t rich—but by my senior season I knew the dream was going to come true.”

~  ~  ~

Bob Cousy has options.

Turns out he doesn’t have as many as one might think.

A generation of aspiring basketball players lace up their Chuck Taylors and pretend to be the Celtics’ incomparable All-Star, whose pedal-to-the-metal style fuels Boston’s vaunted fast-break, and whose no-look, behind-the-back passes rescue the NBA from life support. Ferraris should corner like Cousy. And yet, coming out of high school, Cousy doesn’t find himself buried under an avalanche of recruiting letters. He lacks the Bunyonesque size of the Minneapolis Lakers’ George Mikan, and he doesn’t go on scoring binges like the NBA’s other star of the day, Dolph Schayes. He’s just another averaged-sized point guard looking to play college ball.

Boston College offers a full scholarship, but Cousy balks at the thought of commuting to a college with no dorms. Holy Cross, on the other hand, has student housing. Cousy also sees a chance to contribute right away.

“Doggie [Julian] didn’t know anything about me, but Ken Haggerty, the co-captain of the 1947 team, had played at my high school. Haggerty said to Julian, ‘Dog, there’s a hot-shot guard at my old high school, and I think he’d be a great fit on the team. You should offer him a scholarship.’ You have to remember, it was much different in the 1940s. There was no ESPN. There was no film to study. A lot of times players were recruited word-of-mouth. It was very nepotistic in that respect. That’s how I ended up getting the letter from Doggie.”

Julian wastes little time putting Holy Cross on the basketball map. Holy Cross winning the NCAAs during Cousy’s freshman season is a seminal moment in terms of generating basketball interest in New England. The Crusaders play some of its home games at the Boston Garden, which helps generate buzz, and sellouts become the norm by Cousy’s senior season.

“Worcester is only forty miles from Boston,” he says. “Before we arrived on the scene, sports fans in New England followed the Red Sox and the Bruins. Holy Cross winning the championship changed that. Basketball wasn’t even played in some high schools at the time. It became extremely popular in New England after we won.”

That first year at Holy Cross is a mixed bag for Cousy, who expects to be a major part of the rotation. Instead, he’s relegated to the second unit, entering games to give the starters a few minutes rest before heading back to the bench. Still, it’s hard to argue with Julian’s methods; the Crusaders start slowly, going 4–3 over its first seven games, but win twenty consecutive games to enter the tournament on a roll.

The Crusaders are one of eight teams invited to the 1947 NCAA Tournament. Suddenly, Cousy is playing for a championship in his own backyard.

“We had a bunch of New York and New Jersey kids on the roster,” he says, “so getting a chance to play at Madison Square Garden was a really big deal.”

Holy Cross beats Navy, CCNY, and Oklahoma to win the championship—the title game played in front of 18,445 fans in a smoky haze. The Crusaders are the toast of New England, but by then Cousy and Julian barely speak. Rumors spread from bars to barbershops that Julian is annoyed with Cousy’s propensity to showboat, something Cousy does not dispute. The frayed relationship spills over to his sophomore year, and Cousy briefly considers transferring to St. John’s. The coach at the time, Joe Lapchick, convinces the talented guard to stick it out. An uneasy truce with Julian lasts until Cousy arrives late to practice two days before a game against Loyola.

“There was an emotional exchange between player and coach. It wasn’t a big deal,” Cousy says. “It was more newspaper talk than anything else.” Julian buries Cousy on the bench when the game starts, but relents with five minutes remaining and Loyola up by seven, the chants finally winning out.

WE WANT COUSY! WE WANT COUSY!

The sophomore responds by hitting six of seven shots in the Crusaders’ comeback win. Just like that, the “Wizard of Worcester” is born.

“Transferring to St. John’s was the best decision I never made,” says Cousy, who finishes his career as a consensus first-team All-American. “There were times when I questioned my decision, but I’m glad I stayed at Holy Cross. I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

~  ~  ~

Now, about that hat.

How does Bob Cousy go from being a potential number one selection in the 1950 NBA Draft to being the short straw drawn by a team whose coach doesn’t want him in the first place? Cousy should never have landed in Boston. Hired to fix the woeful Celtics—owners of the worst record in the league the year before—Auerbach makes it clear he’s on the prowl for size, not sleight of hand.

“We need a big man,” Auerbach growls, dismissing a reporter’s question about the prospect of seeing Cousy in Celtic green. “Little men are a dime a dozen. I’m supposed to win, not go after local yokels.”

Auerbach drafts 6-foot-11 Chuck Share of Bowling Green, and Cousy is selected by the Tri-Cities Blackhawks two picks later. While Blackhawks owner Bob Kerner wants Cousy to be the face of his franchise, Cousy has no interest in playing for Tri-Cities. He feels he can make more money starting a driving school in Worcester. After negotiations break down, Kerner trades Cousy’s rights to the Chicago Stags.

“I had just gotten married,” Cousy says. “Frank Oftring, a good friend and teammate at Holy Cross, partnered with me to open up a gas station in Worcester. The problem was, we didn’t know much about fixing cars, so we started a driving school instead. That summer we had three cars going around the clock, and I wasn’t giving a pro basketball career much thought. Then somebody calls me and says, ‘Congratulations, you’re the number one pick of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks.’ My response was something like, ‘I was a pretty good student, but I must have been sound asleep in geography class. What the hell is a Tri-Cities Blackhawk?’

“I met with Mr. Kerner, but he wasn’t able to meet the give me the $10,000 salary I needed, so I flew home and continued teaching ladies to drive. It wasn’t long before I learned that I’d been traded to the Chicago Stags.

“That’s where the hat comes in,” Cousy continues. “The Stags folded almost immediately after I was traded, so the players were dispersed. There were three guys left—Andy Phillip, Max Zaslofsky, and myself—and there were three teams that hadn’t picked yet. Walter went to New York where they were drawing the names, and Arnold said to him, ‘I don’t care what you do, just bring home anyone but Cousy.’ As luck would have it, Philadelphia pulled Andy’s name out of the hat first, and then New York drew Max. My name was the only one left.

“Well, I went to Boston and met with Walter. I remember sitting in the men’s room because there were people in his office. He said, ‘What do you need, Cooz?’ I said, ‘Mr. Brown, I need $10,000.’ And he said, ‘I can’t do that. How about nine?’ And I said, ‘Fine.’ That was the negotiation, no agent, no holdout, just a brief conversation between player and owner.”

~  ~  ~

The franchise is worth north of a billion dollars today, but the Boston Celtics in the early days are barely able to pay the bills, emerging from the NBA’s primordial ooze only after the arrival of Bob Cousy. They play their games in the cavernous Boston Garden, its signature parquet floor made from leftover scraps of wood due to the shortage caused by World War II. Cousy’s arrival in Boston sells tickets, but many wonder how he’ll coalesce with his fiery new head coach.

“I read the papers like everyone else,” Cousy says, “but there were no hard feelings. Arnold did what anyone in that position would do—he drafted Charlie Share, who had the size that the Celtics needed underneath the basket.”

With Cousy running the show and Auerbach calling the shots, the Celtics post their first winning season in franchise history. There’s an immediate spike in ticket sales, boosting the balance sheet.
“There were a lot of lean years even after I became a Celtic,” continues Cousy, who plays in the NBA All-Star Game as a rookie. “I remember players accepting those IOUs instead of the agreed upon playoff shares, but we had a very strong relationship with Walter Brown. He’d invested his life savings in the Boston Celtics, so a little sacrifice on our part was no big deal.

“There was a time when Walter approached me and Ed Macauley about the team’s financial situation. He said that he was going to take out another mortgage on his house to get the Celtics through a rough patch, and that things were going to ease up in the fall. Guys were getting good wages, so there wasn’t a lot of negative discussion about the IOUs. It was more of a hardship on Walter than it was on us.”

Even with Cousy’s charisma at the box office, the Celtics continue to struggle financially. Auerbach helps Brown keep a close eye on the bottom line.

“Arnold could be a bit of a pain in the ass,” Cousy says with a laugh. “There were times when four of us would jump in a cab together and if you had a rookie in the group, you’d try to get him to ride with you. All of us would pile out the minute the cab got to the hotel. We’d pop the trunk, grab our bags, and sprint away like banshees, leaving the poor rookie to pay for the taxi. It was better to stick it to the rookie because Arnold was such a pain in the tail when it came to expenses.”

Eventually, the Celtics start flying to away games. “The Douglas DC-3s were the safest planes made at the time, so we didn’t have any near-death experiences,” Cousy says, laughing. “We’d take the trainer’s money playing gin rummy, but he was too sick from the turbulence to care.”

Another big difference between then and now: Teams today play a small number of exhibition games in state-of-the-art facilities, while teams in the 1950s often went on preseason barnstorming tours, playing the same team night after night.

“It was barnstorming in the purest sense of the word,” Cousy recalls. “Back then every small town had a gym, and if it seated more than 2,000, then we’d be interested in playing in it. We’d travel with the same team and play them every night. When you play 17 games against the same team, by the end of the trip you could always count on short tempers and fights breaking out. It was a requirement of the times.”

Despite the grind, Cousy did find time to have fun at his coach’s expense.

“We called him ‘Mario Andretti’ because he drove so damned fast. On one occasion a bunch of us piled into a car and left for a game in Bangor. Nature called, so we pulled over, and in the distance we could see Arnold’s car approaching in a cloud of dust. We told him we’d ran out of gas. We gave him a few minutes, and then raced by the one-pump station where he’d gone to get gas. You should have seen the expression on his face.”

~  ~  ~

Cousy’s game—and his popularity—continues to grow throughout the 1950s. By the 1952–53 season he’s a First-Team All-NBA selection and firmly in control of the Celtics’ fast break. He flips passes from every angle imaginable en route to the first of eight consecutive assist titles, a remarkable feat in the pre-shot clock era. Cooz is the biggest star in the league. The Elvis of the basketball court has arrived.

While Cousy’s playmaking eventually transforms the NBA, wholesale change doesn’t happen overnight. There are still plenty of hatchet men in the league, and fights are still commonplace.

“There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse,” Cousy remembers. “That seemed to be the case with most of the teams based in the smaller towns—the fans were more rabid, and they literally wanted to kill the opposition. The New York State Police had to be called because there were problems in every damned game that we played.”

The Celtics are flawed but improving. Auerbach’s fast break attack scores points and win games during the regular season, but the team continues to struggle on the defensive end, a weakness that routinely leads to playoff disappointment. All of that changes prior to the 1956–57 regular season, when Auerbach trades Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan for the draft rights to draft Bill Russell.

“As much as we liked Ed, we weren’t going to lose a lot of sleep over that trade,” he says. “Before Russell, we were a decent offensive team, but we couldn’t play championship-caliber defense. Bringing in players like Jim Loscutoff and Tom Heinsohn helped a hell of a lot, but we would have been lucky to win one championship without Russell. He was the most dominant defensive player in the history of the game. It didn’t take us long to figure out what we had.”

With Russell triggering the fast break and Cousy pushing the tempo, the Celtics blitz their way through the regular season. Cousy’s magical season includes being named the NBA All-Star Game MVP. He also wins the league’s MVP award. Boston, in its first trip to the NBA Finals, defeats Bob Pettit and the St. Louis Hawks, winning Game 7 in double overtime.

“The MVP award was very satisfying in terms of personal accomplishments, but the championship was by far the most significant,” Cousy says proudly. “I’d endured six years of frustration, so I think winning it all meant a little more to me than most of the others on the team.”

In 1958, the Hawks and Celtics again meet in the NBA Finals. Boston is heavily favored to repeat, but Russell rolls his ankle in Game 2 and isn’t the same player. The Hawks take the series, giving Macauley his first and only championship. The Celtics respond by winning the next eight titles. It’s part of an unprecedented run of 11 titles in 13 seasons.

“I retired following the 1963 season, which was our fifth consecutive championship, and sixth overall at the time,” Cousy says. “Being part of that team was a truly unique situation.”

Indeed. The Celtics are the first team to draft an African American player, the first to start five black players in an NBA game, and the first to have an African American head coach. Cousy vividly remembers the time when, early in his career, the Celtics were scheduled to play a game in Raleigh, North Carolina. When Chuck Cooper is denied a hotel room on the basis of his color, Cousy’s response was immediate.

“We got out of town,” he says emphatically. “Cooper was my road roommate, but on this trip he was going to be forced to sleep in another hotel and eat in a different restaurant, just because of his color. He didn’t feel comfortable with that, so Arnold let him take the train out of town that night. I asked if I could go with him so he wasn’t alone. Arnold didn’t have a problem with that. That was part of Arnold’s genius.”

~  ~  ~

Bob Cousy isn’t known for his stats, although he could certainly put them up. On February 27, 1959, he sets an NBA record by dishing out 28 assists against the Minneapolis Lakers. Two months later he records 19 dimes against the same Lakers during the NBA Finals.

“The first game was a meaningless Sunday afternoon contest,” he says. “We ran up and down the court and set records. It was a lot different in the playoffs because a championship was at stake and both teams were playing their best basketball. Accumulating 19 assists in the Finals meant a whole lot more to me than the 28 that I put up a couple of months earlier.”

Cousy retires following the 1963 season, walking away with six titles, 13 All-Star Game appearances, 10 consecutive All-NBA First Team selections, two NBA All-Star Game MVP awards, and one NBA MVP award. Not a bad haul for a shy, skinny kid from the East End ghetto.

“I was very fortunate,” he says quietly. “I had a lot of help along the way, a lot of lucky breaks. I got to play with some of the greatest players of my era, and one of the greatest of all-time, in Bill Russell. I played for Arnold. I played for the best owner in the world. And I think I retired at the right time. Physically, I could still play at a high level. Psychologically, I was spent. The toll of trying to be the best and stay at the top eventually wore me down. I was ready to spend time with my family and make up for a lot of time that I missed because I was traveling with the team.”

On March 17, 1963, Cousy stands in front of a microphone on the Boston Garden parquet and says goodbye. The sellout crowd, which cheered so loudly for him over his thirteen year career, watches their hero read from a handwritten note, weeping softly in between the sentences.

And then, when nothing would come, four words ring out: “We love ya, Cooz!”

The crowd erupts. Bob Cousy’s career fades to black that day, but by then his work is done. The drab, cash-strapped NBA is no more, pushed closer to the mainstream by his improvisational brilliance.

“Bob Cousy was a baller,” says Grammy-winning rapper and NBA fan Big Daddy Kane. “Tiny Archibald made his name at Rucker Park, but Cousy would have matched Tiny break-for-break, no-look for no-look. Cousy owned the NBA. He would have owned The Ruck.”