The Harold Furash Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan | Wednesday, March 30th 2005
You have been following the Boston Celtics for many
years. Please take me back to the early days – how did
you become such a fan, and what are some of the memories
that still stand out from those first few seasons?
HAROLD FURASH
I was brought up in Roxbury, and the only basketball
being played at that time was in the YMHA League on
Saturdays. I became a fan because of those games,
although I didn’t play a lot of basketball myself. It
was the time of the Great Depression, and there wasn’t a
lot of money available for sports leagues and
sports-related programs. I returned from the service in
1945, and in the fall of that year Walter Brown was
putting together the Boston Celtics. I read where he
had signed a player named Vick Segal, a semi-pro player
out of Davenport, Iowa. Segal was a spectacular guard,
and one of the first Celtics signed. Well, I’d heard
about Segal and was excited to see him play. I went to
the very first practice ever held by the Boston Celtics
just to get a look at Segal in action, but he didn’t
show – Walter Brown had offered him $50 per game, and it
didn’t take Segal long to find out that Brown was paying
some of the other players more. Brown stood firm on his
contract. He was an honest and fair businessman who
believed in honoring an agreement. So he refused to
budge, only saying “We have a deal”. Segal left and
never came back.
The NBA didn’t get started until the following year,
1946 – I was one of the Boston Celtics’ first season
ticket holders – and fans today have no idea how hard it
struggled to turn a profit. Trust me, the league was
next to nothing in those days. Walter Brown hired Honey
Russell as his first head coach, getting him from Seton
Hall, and Russell coached the team for two seasons
before being replaced by Alvin “Doggie” Julian. Julian
had won both the NCAA and the NIT at Holy Cross, had
coached Bob Cousy there, and was thought to be the
perfect man to turn things around.
I was coaching the New England Paraplegic Veteran's
Association basketball team during the 1953-54 season,
and I had refereed some of the paraplegic games prior to
that,
so I thought there might be an
opportunity for me to referee some of the Celtics’
scrimmages. I contacted Doggie, gave him my
credentials and asked him if I could ref during
practice. So I met Doggie that way, and that’s how I
started working with the team. By the end of his second
season I’d gotten to know the players quite well.
Doggie resigned after coaching the team for two seasons
– he returned to the college game as head coach at
Dartmouth – and Walter Brown hired Red Auerbach as his
replacement in 1950.
I’ll never forget showing up and
meeting him for the first time – he was a suspicious
individual by nature, very streetwise, and didn’t really
trust anyone until he got to know them first.
Fortunately for me, I knew Sonny Hertzberg. Sonny played two seasons for the Celtics and Red trusted him.
So Red let me continue refereeing the Celtics
scrimmages, which was something that I did up until the
end of Bill Russell’s career in 1969.
I became very close to the players through the years.
Bob Brannum was like family to me – his son’s middle
name is “Harold”. Bill Russell lived near me at one
point in his career, and his oldest son, Will Jr., is my
godson. There were so many relationships built up over
time. Those are the things that really stand out for
me.
The great Johnny Most began broadcasting Celtics games
in 1953. Prior to that, Mr. Most worked alongside Marty
Glickman in New York. Please tell me about Johnny Most,
and your unique method of catching his Celtics
broadcasts from the Big Apple.
HAROLD FURASH
Back then the Boston Celtics’ front office consisted of
four people: Walter Brown, Red Auerbach, Howie McHugh
and Bill Mokray. McHugh played hockey for Brown at one
point – people forget that Brown was a hockey man long
before he owned the Celtics – and because of that
relationship, McHugh ended up being hired as the public
relations arm of the team. Mokray was hired as the
basketball director. Those were the four in the front
office at the time – as hard as it might be to believe
today, that was it. I was chummy with McHugh, so when
I learned that the team was looking for a radio
broadcaster, I quickly brought up Most’s name for the
job. Glickman also called Red and plugged Most, and it
wasn’t long after his call that Johnny Most was
broadcasting games for the Celtics.
Johnny and I became very good friends over the years. I
frequently traveled with the team, and I joined him at
the microphone on
many occasions. I would sit with Johnny while he
called the games, and during breaks in the action he
would often interview me. Once, he did something that
announcers never, ever do – he gave up the microphone
and had me call the game while he stepped aside to take
care of something [laughs]. I was with Johnny during
Bill Russell’s first game at Madison Square Garden, and
also shared a seat with him at just about every stadium
at the time – from War Memorial and those games against
the Syracuse Nationals, to Convention Hall in
Philadelphia.
My wife was a big basketball fan, too. Early on, there
wasn’t any radio coverage of the Celtics when they were
on the road. The same with Holy Cross. So when either
Holy Cross or the Celtics played in New York, we would
drive to one of the three hills in the Corey Hill
section of Brookline, and from there we could pick up
the reception from Madison Square Garden. So that was
our little trick [laughs].
Originally a hockey man, team founder Walter Brown
overcame many obstacles in helping both the Boston
Celtics and the NBA find an audience. What made it so
hard for professional basketball to gain a foothold in
Boston, and what were some of the things that really
propelled the team to popularity?
HAROLD FURASH
Two words: Bob Cousy. Cousy is the reason the fans
flocked to see the Boston Celtics, pure and simple, and
he is also the reason the team was able to survive in
those early years. To put it into the proper context,
Walter Brown was the president of the Boston
Garden-Arena Corporation and the owner of the Boston Celtics, and
both businesses were losing money. The Celtics were
struggling to win games. The Garden was struggling to
put fans in the seats, and it was having a hard time
filling its schedule. From the start of the 1946-47
season until 1949-50, paid attendance at Celtics games
was anywhere from four thousand on the low end to eight
thousand on the high end. Red hadn't been hired yet.
Cousy hadn't joined the team. And Boston, at that time,
was a college town when it came to selling sports.
Harvard and Boston College football were big draws.
Holy Cross was the hot basketball ticket. There was a
big interest in hockey. It was almost endless, because
there are 64 colleges in-and-around Boston, and then
there were all of the professional teams on top of
that: The Red Sox drew well; the Boston Braves were
also in town – they had been playing baseball since 1876
– before leaving for a new home in Milwaukee in 1953;
and the Boston Redskins were playing professional
football. I used to watch them as a kid , and around
1935 I remember them having a pretty good team. They
got into the playoffs that year, but owner Preston
Marshall moved the team to Washington and drafted Sammy
Baugh. Who knows what would have happened if Baugh had
been on the team a few years earlier. The team may have
never moved. Regardless, the sports market was crowded
even with the Redskins in Washington.
And at
the time, there just wasn't a great interest in
basketball. The YMHA and the West End House were the
only two places in the city playing organized ball of
any kind. New York teams would come to town to play
doubleheaders against both of these teams, but
basketball just didn't have the same participation as
baseball, football and hockey.
The
sportswriters were the other problem Walter Brown faced
when it came promoting the Boston Celtics. All of the
sportswriters in town knew baseball front and
backwards. And even if they didn't it was an easy sport
to cover; they could just pull out a book on statistics
and recite anything from batting averages to on-base
percentages. It was also a slower-paced game, which
made it easier for the broadcasters to call. And,
bottom line, the writers didn't have to sell baseball.
It was already an established sport.
When
Cousy graduated from Holy Cross, he'd already
established a reputation as a showman who could dazzle
the crowd. He was a very big attraction – Holy Cross
routinely put more fans in the Boston Garden than the
Celtics did at the time – and his addition to Walter
Brown's team meant an additional 7,000 fans per game.
Red came in at the same time, even though he initially
didn't want Cousy on the roster. It was the perfect
mix, because Red was way ahead of his time in many
respects – he drafted Frank Ramsey as a junior eligible
in 1953, which he later did when drafting Larry Bird.
He also took Cliff Hagen in that same draft. Hagan
later became the instrumental piece in the Bill Russell
trade. That's when the Celtics really started to become
a part of the sports system in the city. But without
Bob Cousy, the rest may not have been possible.
The fabled Boston Garden is no longer in existence, but
its memories will last for generations to come. What
made the Garden such a special place, and do you have a
favorite Boston Garden moment?
HAROLD FURASH
I'll
answer the last part of your question first. There are
so many memories and great moments that it's hard to
pick a favorite, but it would have to be the Game 7,
double-overtime win over the
St. Louis Hawks for the 1957 NBA Championship. It was
the team's first title. It came after all of those
years of struggling. And it was the first. Havlicek's
steal was a famous moment, and every championship had
its special place, but I'd still have to go with the win
over the Hawks.
The Boston Garden and I were made for each other. They
used to have doubleheaders in the Garden, and I used to
referee almost all of the preliminary games. It was
just a very special place. We had box seat season
tickets – they were front row for hockey, and six rows
back for basketball – and all of the players wives sat
in the rows directly in front of us. Bill Russell was
friendly with singer Johnny Mathis, and [Russell's wife]
Rose would bring Johnny to the games with her.
The Garden was almost identical in design to Madison
Square Garden, which could hold 18,000, but fire laws
restricted the capacity at Boston Garden to 13,909.
That didn’t stop them from putting up to 17,000 people
in the building for an exceptional attraction or a big
game. Those are great memories as well. What else? I
was also in-and-out of the locker room through the
Russell Era, the Heinsohn-Cowens 70s, and during the
early 80s when K.C. Jones coached the teams. Being able
to talk to the players and coaches, those were really a
special part of going to the Boston Garden.
Celtic great Bill Russell was no
stranger to racial prejudice and stereotypes. He once
said: “What's more important than who's going to be the
first black sports manager is who's going to be the
first black sports editor of the New York Times.”
Please tell me about the civil rights landscape that
Russell faced as a Boston rookie in 1957.
HAROLD FURASH
It’s hard to describe this country in the middle of the
Cold War. Blacks were forced to sit in the back of the
bus, eat in the back of the restaurant, whatever. It
was just brutal. Even the big cities like Washington
were segregated.
That’s a very good quote by Russell, by the way. He is
a very complicated man, and I think a lot of that
complexity comes from the discrimination that he faced
as an African-American. He has a reputation for being
difficult, but I think you should walk in his shoes
before you judge him so quickly. Remember, Bill Russell
played professional basketball in Boston, at a time when
the city was not known as the most racially tolerant
place to be. He carried himself with a lot of pride,
and rightfully so; I think he wanted to be recognized as
a person first and not solely as a black athlete. He
knew that his fame and stature gave him a different
level of treatment compared to ordinary African
Americans of the day, and I think this bothered him. If
he weren’t a famous basketball player, then he would
have been sitting in the back of the bus, or in the back
of the restaurant, or whatever. I think these were some
of the things that made him appear – to the average
white fan, at least – as an angry person. He is just an
incredible person.
Celtic greats Bob Cousy and Tom Heinsohn were collegiate
stars at Holy Cross, at a time when Holy Cross
basketball was arguably more popular than Boston’s NBA
counterparts. How much did it help having Cousy and
Heinsohn playing for the Celtics?
HAROLD FURASH
It
was an incredible benefit. I've already talked about
Cousy, and everyone is aware of his special place in the
history of the NBA and the Boston Celtics. But as far
as measuring Tommy's impact on the team, it's important
to remember that Tommy happened along at an awkward
time. If he hadn't played when the Celtics had such
great players as [Bill] Sharman, Cousy, Russell and Sam
Jones on the roster, well then I think Tommy would have
gone down as one of the greatest forwards in league
history. And it's important to remember that it was a
different era – back then, the game was geared toward
the shooting guard and not the small forward. Tommy
doesn't get enough credit for his contributions to those
championship teams.
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