The Ed Macauley Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Tuesday, November 1st,
2005
You led Saint Louis University to the NIT championship on March 18, 1948,
this at a time when the NIT was the premiere tournament in college
basketball. Please take me back to that championship run – what memories do
you have of those big wins over Bowling Green, Western Kentucky and New York
University, and what was it like to be recognized as the tournament MVP?
Ed
Hickey had been hired as the head coach – the president of the university
fired Flannigan even though he had a great record, because they had gotten
into an argument and couldn’t' see eye-to-eye. Hickey came in from
Creighton and we just took off…we had great backcourt men…Danny Miller and
Bobby Schmidt. Danny flew 35 missions over Germany during the war, and
Bobby was in the Marines. D.C. Wilcutt was one of the forwards – he fought
in the Philippines against the Japanese. Hank Raymonds, who later coached
Marquette, was on the ball club. We had a good mix. I started scoring. We
didn't the Missouri Valley title – we lost to Oklahoma A&M again – but we
only lost three or four games that year. We were invited to the National
Invitation Tournament up in New York, and at that time it was considered the
premiere tournament. If you paired the teams who played in the NIT
tournament against those in the NCAA tournament, the NIT probably had the
better teams. At that time the NCAA was picking conference winners, and
some of those conferences down south didn't play very well. Some of the
guys on those teams were just football players trying to stay in shape
[laughs].
We went to the NIT tournament and won it. We became the darlings of New York City, because we used the fast break, and we really got down the floor in a hurry. I was still skinny, but I could score. We won our first game against Bowling Green. They had Charlie Share, a big 7'0" center who went on to play several seasons in the NBA. We won our next game against Western Kentucky – I didn't have many points in that one, but the team played brilliantly. We faced Dolph Schayes and Ray Lumpp in the final game against New York University. Both were great, great players. We were the underdogs and the fan favorites heading in, because NYU was playing at home and had won 19 straight games heading into the final. But we weren't intimidated. We had beaten Holy Cross and their star, Bob Cousy, and we had beaten Yale. I played probably the best game of my life up to that point. I had 24 points – we won fairly handily, with Schayes playing against me – and I was named the Most Valuable Player in the tournament. The City of St. Louis just went wild [laughs]. We didn't get home for three days, because we didn't fly – we rode trains back then. We stopped at Niagara Falls for a day or two. When we got home at Union Station there were 15,000 people there waiting for us. It was a very special moment, because everyone on the team was from St. Louis.
You were a First Team All-American selection in 1949, as well as the
Associated Press Player-of-the-Year.
Yes.
Both were great honors, and it was nice to be recognized in that way. We
started off undefeated and went down to the Sugar Bowl, where they had a
basketball tournament two days before the football game. Four teams were
involved – Holy Cross with Cousy, Kentucky with Beard, Groza and all the
guys, Tulane, and St. Louis. We beat Holy Cross, and Kentucky beat Tulane.
We beat Kentucky by two-or-three points in the finals. Groza and I had fair
games. The next week the very first Associated Press basketball poll was
published. They had been doing football polls for quite a while, but they
hadn't had a basketball poll up until that point. St. Louis University was
ranked number one in the country in that first poll, and we were able to
hold the top spot the second week, too. And then we played Oklahoma A&M,
and we lost to them again [laughs]. Oklahoma A&M took the top spot,
Kentucky came in at number two, and we were number three in the country.
It was great for the city and the school. The people in St. Louis didn't even know what it meant [laughs]. They couldn't imagine a college team from St. Louis being ranked number one in the nation. The fans were just phenomenal. They'd never seen anything like this in the city as far as the colleges were concerned. There was just a great following by the fans at that time. We had great backing. We had to move out of our gymnasium and go down to a public building, Kiel Auditorium, and played against our real rivals – Notre Dame. We had played Notre Dame them all four years, and the first two years we had lost all four game. My third year we beat them. We went back up there my fourth year, the fans were just rabid, and we crushed them [laughs]. I had a great night that night. As I walked off the court with three or four minutes to go, the Notre Dame fans gave me a standing ovation. Someone at the school told me that that had never happened before [laughs].
So we went back to the NIT, but we lost in the first game to Charlie Share and Bowling Green. They had an Olympic tryout that year, and we were asked as a team to come back to play it. There were four teams – a service team, the winners of the NCAA and NIT tournaments, and an industrial league team – but two of our guys, D.C. Wilcutt and Danny Miller, were getting married that summer, and they couldn't go. So we decided as a team not to go back for the tryouts. It would have been an honor to represent my country, and it would have been a great experience, because in those days the United States always won the gold in Olympic basketball.
In 1949,
you were the territorial selection of the NBA's St. Louis Bombers. Please
tell me a little about your time spent in a Bombers uniform.
I
would have to say that that's the worst team I ever played on [laughs]. We
had a lot of nice guys, but they liked women and they liked booze, and every
once in a while basketball would get into the mix. So we didn't do very
well. I had a good year – I think I finished fifth or sixth in scoring in
the NBA that season.
Interestingly, St. Louis University was very popular at Madison Square Garden when I played, and Ned Irish [Basketball Director of Madison Square Garden] was a friend of our coach, Ed Hickey. When the Bombers folded, Ned tried to buy the team to get me [laughs]. He'd seen me play a lot in New York, but the league put a stop to that very quickly. So the ballplayers went into a pool, and the other teams got to pick them. I was picked by Boston, so I went up there.
You
arrived in Boston the same season as two other Boston Celtic immortals – Red
Auerbach and Bob Cousy. Please share your insight into each of these men;
what made each of them so special?
That
same year, Cousy had graduated from Holy Cross. Red Auerbach didn't want
Cousy. He didn't draft him and he followed that up by making the now-famous
'local yokel' comment in the press. Later that year a couple of other teams
folded. They had another drawing in New York, Auerbach had the last pick,
and Cousy was the last player left. Max Zaslofsky came from Chicago, and
Andy Phillip came from Chicago – they ended up going to New York and
Philadelphia, respectively. So that's how Cousy and I wound up in Boston
together. We had no idea that we’d ever be there – we'd played against each
other in college, and we admired each other.
The Boston Celtics really weren't that special those first six years that I was there. Cousy was phenomenal, and I was very good. We were on the All-NBA team, and I was the Most Valuable Player of the first NBA All-Star Game. And then [Bill] Sharman arrived. But we didn't have enough ballplayers. And when I say that, I'm not criticizing the people that were there. The other teams had better overall teams that we had. Syracuse had Dolph Schayes, Freddie Scolari and Paul Seymour. New York had Dick McGuire, Harry Gallatin and Ernie Vandeweghe, and we always had a tough time with them. We would finish second or third in the league, and go into the playoffs and usually get knocked out right away. I think we got out of the first round once. So when I say our ballplayers weren't good enough, I'm not knocking them at all, because they were as good as they could be. From top to bottom, we just didn't have the talent that the other teams had. We didn't win anything for the six years that I was there.