The M.L. Carr Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012
Let’s talk
about your time in Detroit. You played for
a certain excitable head coach named Dick
Vitale.
Dick Vitale was a very animated coach. He came to the Pistons after coaching the University of Detroit. It was his first pro coaching opportunity. For anyone who’s seen him as an announcer, he was the same way as a coach. He was so intense. The one thing I’ll always remember him for – and thank him for – is that he let me play the third most minutes in the NBA during my free agent year, and that gave me the opportunity to become one of those high-paid athletes.
A year later you
join the Celtics. Things weren’t exactly
rosy in Boston at the point in time.
For me, coming in that year was great because they were in a rebuilding mode and were coming off a lot of turmoil. Dave Cowens was making a real effort to be a part of that. Tiny Archibald was coming back from an off year. Gerald Henderson and Cedric Maxwell were also a part of that team, and we had a this young kid coming to the team from French Lick that was supposed to be a pretty good player [laughs].
So Red had a good nucleus to build around, and he quickly made the decision to get rid of the players who were causing all of the problems. Red was willing to sacrifice talent but he wasn’t going to sacrifice character, so as he put the team back together we ended up having a very good year. We didn’t win it, but that put us back on the track toward being a championship caliber team. The other good thing about season was that it gave me a chance to play with my mentor, Pete Maravich. It was an unbelievable thrill to be on the same team with him.
Let’s talk ’81
Eastern Conference Finals. The Celtics were
down 3-1 to the heavily favored 76ers. What
happened?
Well, Red put it in perspective for us and told us it was a great opportunity. He told us not to look at it being down 3-1, that we needed to approach it a game at a time. It’s a cliché, but it was exactly what we were up against. They had to beat us one more time. So Red just kept reinforcing that fact. He just kept saying, ‘Don’t let them beat you.’
I remember being in Game 5 of that series, and getting a rebound and getting fouled by Dr. J. And I’m going to the line and the Sixers call timeout to ice me, and Cedric Maxwell comes over and says, ‘Don’t worry about these foul shots - you make them both and we keep playing. You miss and we get to go on summer vacation.’
It was an incredible comeback, that’s the reality of it, and we knew that once we beat the Sixers that it was pretty much anticlimactic. We knew we were going to beat the Houston Rockets in the NBA Finals.
There wasn’t any
doubt?
We, as a team, knew we were going to win. We’d gone through such an incredible battle with the Sixers that there wasn’t a doubt in the world. Beating the Rockets was a foregone conclusion. We knew there was no way we’d come up short. Talent-wise, we felt we were the superior team, and we had such a will to win after losing to the Sixers the year before and then coming back to beat them to reach the Finals. We knew we were going to take care of business.
What was it like to
finally win that championship?
As a Celtics fan growing up I was well aware of the ‘Celtic Mystique’ and what all of those championship banners were all about. And like I said, when we beat the Sixers we knew we were going to win a championship and get to put our own banner up in the rafters of the old Boston Garden.
It was so special for me, because of everything I’d been through – being cut, having to play in Israel, everything leading up to me putting on a Celtics uniform. And then to finally win that championship, there’s nothing in the world like that feeling. It overcomes you.
I remember coming back from Houston and landing at the airport, and all of the people that were there to greet us. I’d never in my life experienced anything like that. People were going crazy. And I remember the parade, going through the city with all of the people there, and to me it just felt like it was more than just basketball. I guess it was because we’d just carved out our own place among all of those other great Celtic teams.
I’m a history major. You go back three years prior to us winning that championship, and it was the height of busing in Boston. There were so many negative connotations around that. I vividly remember seeing the young black men being poked with the American flag, and that was resonating with me as I traveled through the city as a hero. I remember being amazed at how I was being treated, when just three years earlier Boston had given itself such a black eye with that incident. The people were cheering us and celebrating our achievement, honoring us as champions, and I just wished we could have bottled that up and applied it to more than just the Celtics. I wished it could have been used to transform the thinking of an entire region. Obviously Boston has come around and it’s one of the greatest cities in the world right now, but it went through some dark days to get here, and I think the Celtics played a part in that.
That 1981 NBA
Championship proved to be short-lived, as
the Celtics were swept out of the playoffs
the very next year by the Milwaukee Bucks.
What happened?
We lost to the Bucks in four, but to be honest, any team in the playoffs that year could have beat us in four games. What happened? To be quite frank: We came to the conclusion, as a team, that it was time for our coach to go. I make no bones about that. Bill Fitch was a very good coach, but he was also very strict, and he couldn’t loosen up the reins after we became more of a veteran team. He still wanted to control everything, and he wanted to beat you down over everything, and it eventually wore thin with the team. And I’ll be honest with you – if we were properly motivated, there was no way in the world we would have lost for games to the Milwaukee Bucks that year. No way. But we did lose four in a row because there was some internal stuff going on. If you remember, the next year we won a championship.
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