The Bob Brannum Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Wednesday, April 7th, 2004
Your first three NBA seasons were spent with the
Sheboygan Redskins and, briefly, Fort Wayne. Please
tell me about this period in your career.
I was drafted by St. Louis and Sheboygan after my junior
year at Michigan State. Back then the class had to
graduate to be eligible, so I had to wait. It was
tough. My wife was expecting our second child, I was
getting $110 per month from the government, and I had a
mountain of doctor bills to pay. I ended up signing
with Sheboygan. That first year we were a really bad
team – there were a couple of decent basketball players
on the roster, but we started a 5’-10” guard and a 6’-2”
forward. These guys really weren’t basketball players,
but that’s all we had.
Sheboygan was a member of the NBL – the National Basketball League – and I remember traveling all over the place. There were always exhibitions to play. Anything to promote the league. We’d pile in DeSotos and Suburbans, six of us in a car, and we’d head off to play those damned exhibitions. We did that for two years. During my second season the NBL and the BAA merged to form the NBA. The new league kicked out all of the little teams, the ones that weren’t profitable, and kept the few that made money. Sheboygan was gone. Fort Wayne played its games in a high school gym, but the team later moved to Detroit and became the Pistons. The league also absorbed Syracuse and Rochester.
That last season we must have played Waterloo ten times. I led the league in scoring and became something of a fair-haired boy to the franchises being absorbed into the NBA. I averaged 20 points per game and ended up on the Fort Wayne roster.
You became a Boston Celtic on October 14th,
1950, when Red Auerbach sent the draft rights to Charlie
Share to Fort Wayne. Bill Sharman was also a part of
the deal and joined you in Boston. Please tell me about
Bill Sharman, and what it was like to play with him.
It was just like playing with any other player. I
wasn’t in awe. He was a great foul shooter, probably
the best ever, and he wasn’t afraid to mix it up on the
court. People remember me for being a brawler, but
Sharman would take a swing with the best of them. He
protected himself. He took a swing at Jerry West during
his rookie year, and West wasn’t the same player the
rest of the game. West went from making everything in
sight to hardly taking a shot at all.
Mr. Sharman was a scratch golfer, and you were once the
golf pro at Barre Country Club in Vermont. You were
also the longtime golf coach at Brandeis University.
Did the two of you ever tee it up, and if so, who
usually came out on top of those battles?
Bill wasn’t a scratch golfer! He couldn’t hit the ball,
and when he did it was with that sideways swing of his
and you never knew where the ball was going. He got
that swing from playing baseball, which was the other
sport he excelled in. Bill was always trying to hit the
golf ball like he was trying to hit a baseball, so I
didn’t have much trouble with him whenever we played
[laughs]. His son was the scratch golfer in the family
– he could really play.
I started out taking lessons at Yale Country Club, and later on I started teaching. I’m not saying that I was a great golfer, because you can teach people the proper way to swing a golf club without being great. I was giving lessons for $2.50 and $3.00 an hour, and when I wasn’t teaching I was going to Boston University in the evenings to earn my college degree. I needed five credit hours, which I got, and then I received my diploma from Michigan State University. All of that, in one way or another, had something to do with me coaching golf at Brandeis.
Celtic legend Bob Cousy had this to say about you: “Bob
Brannum was my body guard on the court. Teams learned
pretty quickly not to pick on the 5’-11” skinny kid from
Holy Cross.” Please tell me about Mr. Cousy, and your
relationship with him both on and off the court.
I was a rough type of player. I just played, and I
played hard. Cousy wasn’t going to pick many fights, so
I just made sure that no one picked a fight with him.
The word ‘great’ is overused – just look at some of the
players they call ‘great’ today – but Cousy was a great
basketball player. He was also unselfish. He’d give
you the ball every time down the court, unless you
missed, and then he wouldn’t give it to you for a week
[laughs].
As a person Cousy is the best. He’s been right there during my recent surgeries, coming up from his home in Florida, even though there have been times when I didn’t know who he was. You can’t ask for much more than that.
