by William Cook
10
The Royals Continue to Struggle in the Eastern Division & Cousy is Accused of Associating with Gamblers
In Cincinnati, Oscar Robertson continued to make the Royals a formidable force. For his first five years in the NBA, The Big O had averaged 30.3 points, 10.4 rebounds, and 10.6 assists per game. He had finished in the top five for assists and points five straight years while making the All-NBA Team five straight years and winning an MVP award in 1964 when Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell were in their prime. But his brilliant career was counterbalanced by a reputation that he had acquired that he was indifferent to his coaches, had disdain for referees, and constantly criticized them. While he cold-shouldered his fans and often the media, everybody in Cincy still loved Oscar.
With the addition of Wilt Chamberlain, the Philadelphia 76ers instantly became a force in the NBA Eastern Division. In 1965–66 Philadelphia, led by Chamberlain’s league-leading 33.5 points per game and 24.6 rebounds, dethroned the Boston Celtics as perennial division champions, winning the East title by one game over the Celtics 55–25 to 54–26.
The Cincinnati Royals finished in third place with a record of 45–35 and attracted an average of 6,329 fans per game at Cincinnati Gardens which would be the second-highest season total for their years playing in Cincinnati.
The 1965–66 Royals were, of course, led again by The Big O, who averaged 30.4 points per game along with 9 rebounds and a league-leading 11.5 assists. It was the fifth time in six years that he had led the league in assists.
Jerry Lucas had another fine season, averaging 21.5 points and 19.1 rebounds per game. Happy Hairston, who the Royals selected in the 1964 draft out of NYU, also had a good season, averaging 14.1 points per game. In addition, the Royals had acquired veteran center Connie Dierking who, coming off the bench, had a solid season and being a former Cincinnati Bearcat, attracted a lot of fans.
The 1966 NBA All-Star Game, played at Cincinnati Gardens on January 11 and witnessed by a sell-out crowd of 13,625, was won handily by the East over the West, 137–94. Royals guard Adrian Smith was named MVP of the All-Star Game after coming off the bench and scoring 24 points for the East. There really wasn’t much left for Wilt Chamberlain to do for the East, although, he scored 21 points and had 9 rebounds. To the delight of the fans, the game had a distinct Cincinnati Royals flavor to it as, in addition to the play of Smith, Oscar Robertson scored 17 points, had 10 rebounds, and 8 assists, while Jerry Lucas had 10 points and 10 rebounds.
The Royals were a much better team than their record and third place finish indicated. In the Eastern Division Semi-Finals, they had a shot at dethroning the Boston Celtics in the five-game series. The Royals won two of the first three games then came up short, losing the last two games to lose the series to Boston, 3–2.
Boston then beat the Philadelphia Warriors 3 games to 2 in the Eastern Division Finals.
On April 28, 1966, Red Auerbach lit up his final victory cigar as the Celtics defeated the Lakers, 98–93, to take their seventh NBA title in a row. It was Auerbach’s ninth NBA title in 16 seasons.
Red Auerbach would now become general manager of the Celtics and five-time NBA MVP Bill Russell would become player-coach, signing a contract calling for $125,000 a year.
In the 1966 playoffs, once again Bill Russell had been an overwhelming force in leading the Celtics to the title. For 17 games Russell had played an average of 47.9 minutes per game while averaging 19.1 points, 25.2 rebounds, and 8 assists.
While both Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell were immense obstacles on the court for every NBA opponent to deal with, it was Russell who was the larger problem of the two.
Bill Russell was such a dominant player that his game-by-game performance left an indelible mark etched into the psyche of almost every player that ever played against him.
Jerry Lucas remarked, “Bill Russell was the best player I ever played against. He made you think. I used to see where he was at before I shot the ball.”1
Jack Twyman stated the thing that made Bill Russell so dominant was that if you got by Bob Cousy and Tom Heinsohn, then there was Russell standing at the basket waiting to block your shot. “No one ever dominated a sport the way Russell did with the Celtics,” said Twyman.2
During the 1960s, the Los Angeles Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics six times in the NBA Finals. The defense of Bill Russell had a lot to do with that. More than forty years after the fact, Bill Russell still haunts Jerry West. “One block by Russell still embarrasses me even now, partly because anyone, including my kids, can see it on YouTube.”3
Bill Russell would immediately become a great player-coach for the Celtics while remaining a superior floor leader. Russell’s biggest problem would be Wilt Chamberlain, the prolific scorer, and Chamberlain’s biggest problem would be Russell, the defensive wizard, and the two would continue to stage many brilliant duels over the next few years, but only once would Chamberlain’s Philadelphia 76ers beat Russell’s Boston Celtics for the NBA title and that was about to happen.
No one knew it at the time, but 1965–66 had been the high-water mark season for the Royals franchise in Cincinnati. Going forward, there would be a slow decline in the team’s performance and fan interest in professional basketball in The Queen City would begin to wane.
Prior to the 1966–67 season, the Royals traded five-time All-Star center Wayne Embry to the Boston Celtics for a future third-round draft choice and Jack Twyman retired. Both Embry and Twyman had been dissatisfied with their playing time in 1965–66.
Jack Twyman had been a six-time All-Star and played his entire 11-year NBA career with the Royals in Rochester and Cincinnati. In 1960, he and Wilt Chamberlain were the first players to average over thirty points per game in a season. Chamberlain averaged 37.6 and Twyman, 31.2. Twyman would become a color commentator for NBA games on ABC and continue to serve as the brain-injured Maurice Stokes’ legal guardian.
With the departure of Embry, coach Jack McMahon promoted Connie Dierking to starting center with draft pick 6′11″ Walt Wesley out of the University of Kansas backing him up.
The 1966–67 Royals immediately dug themselves into a hole, losing nine out of the first fourteen games. But they picked up steam at the end of the season winning seven out of the last ten games to finish in third place in the Eastern Division with a record of 39–42, a record good enough to make the playoffs. But in the Eastern Division Semi-Finals, the Philadelphia Warriors defeated the Royals 3 games to 1. It would be the last time that the Cincinnati Royals would make the playoffs.
While Oscar Robertson averaged 30.5 points per game, it would be the last season in his spectacular career that he would finish with a scoring average of over 30 points per game.
The Royals had drawn 4,755 fans per home game in the season, a 25% decline below the previous season, but their home schedule was limited. Before the season had begun, Louie Jacobs had arranged for some of the Royals’ home games to be played in other cities. Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell agreed to sponsor nine Royals home games at the Cleveland Arena. The crowds at Royals games in Cleveland were consistently among the largest in the season and the NBA took notice. In addition to Cleveland, the barnstorming Royals also played games on neutral courts in Dayton, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Memphis, Syracuse, and New York at Madison Square Garden vs. the Detroit Pistons.
On March 19, 1967, Jack McMahon resigned as coach of the Royals and was hired as coach and general manager of the expansion San Diego Rockets scheduled to join the NBA in 1967–68 along with the Seattle Supersonics.
As he stepped out the door, Jack McMahon didn’t burn any bridges and said that everyone had been nice to him in the Royals organization and let him run the team. But no doubt he had felt tremendous pressure in coaching the Royals with the constant rumors that he would be fired.
“Every year here it was the same story,” said McMahon. “Even in the first year when we set every kind of record, there were rumors I was out.” In regard to his difficulties with ve
teran players such as Jack Twyman and Wayne Embry, he remarked that being a coach is not a friendship business, “Somebody had to be the boss and make decisions. Jack [Twyman] felt he could play 40 to 45 minutes effectively at both ends and I didn’t. Everybody thinks they can play 48 minutes, and if they didn’t feel that way, they wouldn’t be a great player.”4
Prior to the 1966–67 season, the Baltimore Bullets moved to the Eastern Division as the NBA returned to Chicago for a third try and the expansion Chicago Bulls were placed in the Western Division. With ten teams now in the NBA, the playoff format was changed to include eight teams playing two semi-finals in each division, a division final with the winners, and the championship final between the two division final winners.
In the Eastern Division Semi-Finals, Philadelphia had defeated Cincinnati, and then the Boston Celtics defeated the New York Knicks who had finished in 4th place in the East and after a seven-year absence made it back to the playoffs.
In the Eastern Division Finals, Philadelphia dethroned Boston as perennial champions, knocking off the Celtics 4 games to 1, making it the first time they had not made it to the championship finals since 1957.
By 1967, NBA playoffs games were still getting bumped. The first game of the series in Philadelphia had to be moved to the Palestra because a circus had been booked in Convention Hall. Nonetheless, the 76ers went on to take a commanding 3 games to 0 lead in the series. Beating the Celtics and Bill Russell had been Wilt Chamberlain’s goal since he began to play in the NBA, and now he was just one game away.
After the Celtics finally rebounded to win game four in Boston, they returned to Philadelphia and were quickly beaten by the 76ers 140–116 and their over-zealous fans who, in the 4th period, pelted them with eggs, fruit, and coins while shouting, “Boston is dead!”
Following the game, after spending a few minutes in the Celtics locker room, Bill Russell, gracious in defeat, went to the 76ers locker room and offered his congratulations to Wilt Chamberlain.
The 76ers then defeated the San Francisco Warriors, 4 games to 1, despite a high scoring effort by Rick Barry, to take the 1967 NBA title.
In the 1966–67 collegiate season, Bob Cousy’s Boston College team was ranked number 9 in the nation by AP. This was a tough bunch of Golden Eagles that went to the Sugar Bowl Classic in New Orleans and after narrowly losing to Utah 90–88, beat Tennessee 68–61 to leave town 9–1. Leading the way for BC was senior and team captain Willie Wolters, who would finish his career at BC as the all-time leading rebounder, along with Steve Adelman, scoring 18.9 points per game, and Terry Driscoll, 13.7, both who were being set up by Billy Evans on his way to becoming BC’s all-time assists leader.
Boston College finished the regular season with a record of 19–2 and received a bid to the NCAA tournament. In the opening round, they defeated Connecticut, 48–42, and then moved on to the Eastern Regional Finals in College Park, Maryland and defeated St. Johns 63–62. But the next night Cousy attempted to have his team run against a bigger and faster North Carolina team, and BC was defeated 90–86 to finish the season with a record of 21–3. If Boston College had won, they would have reached the 1967 Final Four, along with UCLA, Dayton, and Houston, playing for the National Championship.
In 1952, Bob Cousy had bought half ownership in 500 acres of woodland called Camp Graylag in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. The property was converted into a basketball camp that Cousy continued to successfully operate until 1971.
During the summer of 1967, Cousy was at his basketball camp when he got a call from a writer from LIFE magazine by the name of Sandy Smith. He told Cousy he was doing an article on basketball and wanted to interview him. So Cousy told Smith to come on up to Graylag.
But when Smith arrived, he revealed a hidden agenda; he wasn’t there to interview Cousy about basketball, but rather his alleged associations with gamblers. Rather than show Smith the door Cousy spoke to him in generalizations of how he had always attempted to avoid gamblers. In his book, The Killer Instinct, Cousy said he told Smith that one year he and Red Auerbach had tried a mock gambling exercise attempting to pick the winner of each game on the NBA schedule. As it turned out, they were wrong much more than right and if they had actually been placing bets, they would have lost their shirts.
On September 8, 1967, LIFE was on the newsstands with the article that Smith had contributed to: “The Mob—Part 2, $7 Billion from Illegal Bets and a Blight on Sports.” Cousy nearly had a nervous breakdown when he saw it! The article accused him of having close friendships with an organized crime figure and a gambler.
The article stated that on January 8, 1966, the FBI had arrested Gilbert Beckley of Miami, and on that day, he had handled bets of $250,000 and made a profit of $129,000. Beckley had kept a black book, and when police began to peruse it, they found next to a telephone number the word “Skiball,” the nickname for Francesco Scibelli, a Genovese Crime Family member that ran a gambling syndicate in Springfield, Massachusetts. Scribbled next to “Skiball” was the name of Bob Cousy.
LIFE stated that when Cousy had been interviewed he denied knowing Beckley, but admitted that Scibelli was a friend whom he met through an even closer friend, Andrew Pradella. It was further stated in the article that Pradella was Scibelli’s partner in bookmaking, and the two were known in gambling circles in the northeast to always have very good information—earning their name in gambling circles as the “Scholar Group.”
It was alleged by LIFE that Cousy admitted that he knew the two were gamblers. He often talked to them about both professional and college basketball teams and their chances of winning. The article quoted Cousy as saying, “I’d be having dinner with Pradella when Scibelli would come over. They [Pradella and Scibelli] got together each night to balance the books or something.” But he never considered that the two were using what he told them to fix betting lines and make smart bets on their own. “I thought they figured the betting line with mathematics. But it doesn’t surprise me. I’m pretty cynical. I think most people who approach me want to use me in some way.”5
The article even went as far to state that Pradella had invited Cousy to a banquet in Hartford that turned out to be a gangster conclave and that was being watched closely by the police.
In his book, Cousy states that he never told Sandy Smith that the mob was at the banquet that he described as a gangster conclave. According to Cousy, the event had been for a retired fighter who had been active in youth work in Hartford. He stated, “I had sat at the head table with two well-known ‘gangsters’, Willie Pep [former featherweight champion] and the late Rocky Marciano [retired heavyweight champion].”6 Later, Howard Cosell told Cousy that he, too, had been invited to the banquet.
Lastly, Cousy was quoted in the article as saying the whole thing was hypocritical, “I don’t see why I should stop seeing my friends just because they are gamblers. What should I tell Andy when he calls and asks about a team? That I won’t talk to him about that?”7
Bob Cousy wasn’t the only athlete mentioned in the LIFE article. It was also mentioned that Boston (New England) Patriots quarterback Babe Parilli and other members of the team frequented a store called Arthur’s Farm in Revere, Massachusetts, allegedly visited by mafia types. Later, Bob Cousy’s name would surface as also having frequented Arthur’s Farm in a U.S. House Committee hearing.
More on that allegation would come to light through the testimony of Joseph Barboza (AKA Joe Baron) on May 24, 1972, in front of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Crime. Barboza was a former member of the Patriarca mob in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. As a result of a mob hit on one of his friends, Barboza broke with the mob and testified against racketeers.
During the House hearings, Associate Counsel Chris Nolde inquired of Barboza what Arthur’s Farm was. Barboza stated that it was a meeting place for Mafia types and an outlet for stolen merchandise. “It was a vegetable store. Primarily a vegetable store,” stated Barboza. “He also had clothes in there that were hot clothes.” The
n, Nolde asked what kind of people went there. Barboza replied, “Henry Tameleo [New England Mafia underboss] hung out a lot when he wasn’t at the Ebb Tide and conducted a lot of business in there with a lot of racket guys he would meet in there. I was there one time when Bob Cousy from the Celtics came in, and Babe Parilli came in, and Gene Conley [Boston/Milwaukee Braves, Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Red Sox pitcher, and Boston Celtics player], and went in back of the vegetable store, in the clothes section.”8 According to Barboza, half the Boston Patriots team frequented the place.
The LIFE article had devastated Cousy. He wasn’t naïve. He had been playing professional basketball when the college point-shaving scandals broke in the early 1950s and when Jack Molinas of the Ft. Wayne Pistons was banned by the NBA for consorting with gamblers. He knew a gambler when he saw one. It boggles the mind that he could be so totally unaware of the company he was keeping.
Dave Anderson, a long-time sports columnist for the New York Times and a Holy Cross graduate, class of 1951, was a friend of Cousy’s. According to Anderson,
Off the court, Bob always had a sense of who he is and where he is. Late in his Celtics career, I remember visiting him in the old Paramount Hotel in midtown Manhattan before a game against the Knicks. He had a sore leg that was limiting his playing time, and as we walked to the Garden that evening, several men huddled in Eighth Avenue doorways recognized him and asked, “How you feeling, Cooz?” or “You gonna play, Cooz?” He never even looked at them, much less answered them.
“Don’t you say hello to your fans?” I asked.
“They’re not fans,” he said. “They’re bettors.”
The Cooz wasn’t about to tip street-corner bettors to how his leg felt, good or bad.9
Against the advice of friends, who told him to ignore the LIFE article, Cousy immediately called a press conference in hopes of setting the record straight.
On September 8, Cousy held an emotional, tear-filled, seventy-minute news conference. Sobbing at times, Cousy said he had met Andrew Pradella when his son attended his summer basketball camp from 1954 to 1964. He and Pradella had played golf together, and he had no evidence he was a gambler. Cousy said that Pradella never tried to capitalize on their friendship in any way. Still, he acknowledged that he had been told four years ago by Edward McNamara, Boston Police Commissioner, that an investigation of gambling in Massachusetts was underway. He was told Pradella was involved in the investigation. “I suppose I’m guilty of indiscretion,” Cousy admitted. “But I’m not guilty of anything else. If you’re guilty of something or have something to hide, you’re evasive, and I don’t sneak around.”10