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I spend the next three nights like a
college student prepping for finals.
There is a great deal that I know about Auerbach,
but there is also much more to be learned.
Auerbach doesn’t suffer fools.
He is a direct man with a keen memory, and he
still has the street smarts honed during those early
years on the streets of Brooklyn.
Many journalists have fallen on their swords in
front of Auerbach, either by asking questions that he
views as asinine or by getting their facts wrong.
Born on September 20th, 1917,
Auerbach learned the
value of money at a very early age.
As a young child he collected tips by washing
the
windows of New York City taxicabs lined up at the
neighborhood gas station.
His father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who ran
a clothes-cleaning business in the Williamsburg
neighborhood of Brooklyn, and a teenaged Auerbach often
pressed suits from early morning until late at night.
He was always hustling, always putting things
into business terms.
These skills would later serve him well with the
Celtics, where for many years – until the Age of the
Sports Agent turned basketball into big business –
Auerbach negotiated contracts directly with his players.
A famous example of this is the first contract
signed by Frank Ramsey, the Kentucky Wildcat legend who
would later have his number retired by the Celtics.
Recalls Ramsey: “I remember it well. I was in Boston with a group of
college all-stars. We were playing the Harlem
Globetrotters at Fenway Park. Red stops me in the
Red Sox dugout and begins talking contract, and thirty
minutes later we’d come to an agreement.”
Of the four Auerbach siblings, Red was the
athlete in the family.
With no football or baseball fields in his
neighborhood, young Arnold quickly gravitated to sports
such as basketball and handball.
At Eastern District High School, he honed his
game and eventually earned second team All-Brooklyn as a
senior.
Auerbach’s
past is a collage of famous
and influential people.
Even back then, at seventeen, a dispute with a
local band led to a lifelong friendship with comedian
Alan King. The
band was Auerbach’s idea, part of a ball game and
dance day organized to raise money for basketball
uniforms. King
was a band member at the time, and was due his share of
the money – TWO DOLLARS – after the band’s
performance. A
dispute ensued and, after a vote, Auerbach informed the
band that they would not be paid.
The matter was finally resolved, and King and his
band mates received payment in full – all fourteen
dollars worth. King
and Auerbach have laughed about this story many times
through the years.
Auerbach’s father wanted him to run the
dry cleaning business, but Red wanted college.
He graduated from high school in 1935 and
enrolled in Seth Low Junior College, which was a feeder
school for Columbia University.
It was here that Auerbach crossed paths with
Isaac Asimov, who would later find fame as a sci-fi
writer.
Seth Low closed its doors after
Auerbach’s freshmen year, but not before George
Washington University basketball coach Bill Reinhart had
seen Seth Low’s combustible point guard in action.
Impressed, Reinhart offered Auerbach a
scholarship to play basketball at GW.
Reinhart was key to shaping the young
Auerbach’s approach to coaching.
He was an innovator, a man clearly ahead of his
time. In
1936, the game revolved around the two-handed set shot.
There was no shot clock.
It was a plodding game of chess in which teams
might hold the ball for minutes at a time as they probed
for an opportunity to score.
Reinhart’s approach flew in the face of this
philosophy. He
preached an up-tempo brand of basketball, employing a
running game that was truly unique for its time.
An aggressive player of average height,
Auerbach worked hard to improve his game in all areas.
He was the team’s leading scorer his senior
year. He
also paid close attention to his coach and mentor, and
would later use Reinhart’s fast break to great
advantage with the Boston Celtics.
Following
graduation, Auerbach set out to earn his master’s
degree in education. Above all else he wanted to
teach – and to coach. Those were his passions.
He accepted a coaching position at St. Albans School
while completing work on his masters degree in
education. From there it was on to Theodore
Roosevelt High School and yet another encounter with a
future person of influence. This time it was
future Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.
Auerbach was impressed with Kuhn’s size and coaxed the
student into trying out for the basketball team.
Kuhn was so terrible that Auerbach cut him a few weeks
later.
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