Cousy’s zest for competition has undoubtedly been a large factor in his uncommon longevity in a sport where most men are superannuated at thirty, but there have been a number of other interesting factors, too. For one thing, he has been relatively lucky in escaping serious injury. While his outsize hands are the first physical feature that everyone notices, Cousy also has an exceptionally sturdy and resilient pair of legs, and they have held up miraculously. About midway through his career, he picked up his first severe Charley horse, and he has been sidelined for a couple of weeks just about every year since with this type of injury in one thigh or the other, but until this winter he managed to avoid any other leg trouble. And, except for a problem with one of his arches last year, he has had no bother with his feet and ankles, either, which is remarkable, considering the gusto with which he plays. (Cousy is doubly fortunate in being so unbrittle, because he happens to be allergic to the zinc in adhesive-tape stickum.)
Cousy’s penchant for critical self-analysis and plain hard work have also served to extend his career as a top star. Whereas most sports headliners are content to polish the special skills that have made their reputations, Cousy has continually scrutinized every aspect of his play with the aim of finding out why certain things that used to work weren’t working as well any more, and of devising some counter-measure. Once, when he was in a momentary slump, he concluded that he had been trying to take the ball in too close to the basket before either shooting or passing—a diagnosis that Auerbach confirmed—and he found that the cure was to make that decision earlier, as he hit the foul line. It was typical of Cousy that on one of his days off that winter he was discovered working out by himself in a deserted gym near his home, in Worcester, perfecting his moves as he dribbled tirelessly up and down the floor from one foul line to the other. Though he has always been a more than adequate defensive player, he has become a much more proficient one in recent years. Since it is next to impossible to defend against a jump shot, Cousy expends his major energy on trying to prevent his man from getting the ball in the first place. To this end, he deliberately overplays his man on the “ball side”—the side from which a pass would be coming. This is a very risky business—a clever pass would give his man a free route to the basket—and a technique only a player with Cousy’s quick reflexes can get away with. Three years ago, feeling he needed to add a running one-hand shot to his offensive repertoire, Cousy began to work on throwing such a shot as his right leg hit the floor. The orthodox method is to shoot off the left leg, but Cousy felt that his variation would be more difficult for the man guarding him to anticipate. His success with this unorthodox running one-hander helps to explain why, with a previous career average of making thirty-seven per cent of his shots, he has been making forty per cent of them this year.
Like all great athletes, Cousy takes an enormous, if quiet, pride in his skills and in the reputation they have earned him, and perhaps it is this, more than anything else, that has fired him to his brilliant performances week after week and year after year. The corollary has always been clear: He would never consent to linger on as a lesser player once he felt he was slipping. It was this concern about his ability to sustain his play at what was for him an acceptable level that in December, 1961, led him to give serious thought to retiring at the end of that season. Physically, he had slowed down very little. He had learned to pace himself in tough games, and, moreover, the Celtics had come up with two stalwart backcourt men, Sam Jones and K. C. Jones, who made it possible for the team to keep winning if Cousy played an average of only twenty-nine minutes a game instead of the full forty-eight minutes that he had been coming close to playing for more than a decade. It was the accumulating nervous strain he was encountering that put the idea of retirement into Cousy’s head. Previously, year after year, despite the killing N.B.A. schedule, which frequently calls for a team to play four games in four different cities in the space of five or six days, he had nearly always managed to throw off his fatigue when he went out on the court, tap some reserve of vitality, and cut loose with the wizardry that everyone had come to expect of him. In the 1961–62 season, though, he found this harder and harder, and sometimes impossible. It wasn’t the games that were wearing him down, he has said, but the constant travelling, the necessity for worrying about public relations at all hours, and the rest of what he calls “externals.” In any event, the exertion of trying to maintain a high playing pitch on a dwindling supply of nervous energy had left him drained dry, and in December he was convinced that the time had come to step down.
For Cousy, the prospect of retirement held few of the financial terrors it holds for most athletes. He has for a number of years been one of three partners in the operation of a successful summer camp for boys in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, called Camp Graylag. He is also a partner in an insurance company in Worcester. Moreover, his popularity in the Massachusetts home counties is such that his participation in other reliable business ventures is frequently sought. Consequently, as he mulled matters over last winter, his first concern was his future connection with basketball. For years, it had been generally assumed that whenever Cousy was ready to retire he would take over as the coach of the Celtics, and that Auerbach would probably be moved upstairs to the post of general manager. The more Cousy pondered such an arrangement, though, the less attractive it looked, because as a coach in the N.B.A. he would still be living hectically out of a suitcase from September to April. An almost perfect solution presented itself in late February, when he was asked by Boston College if he would be interested in coaching its team. Before accepting the offer, he felt he owed it to Walter Brown, who had long looked after his interests more in the manner of a friend than in that of an employer, to talk things over with him. Everything seemed inextricably complicated when Brown, not unnaturally, asked if it was possible for Cousy to play one more year. Then everything resolved itself neatly when Boston College agreed to hold the coaching spot open until the 1962–63 season was over. After the playoffs last winter, Cousy, with his future course mapped, began, most untypically, to relax and enjoy some of the things he had been missing. For example, when the French branch of the Gillette Safety Razor Company asked him to undertake a promotional tour in May, he agreed to accept only if the company would underwrite, as a payment for his services, the travel expenses of his wife, Missie, and their two daughters, Marie Colette and Mary Patricia, then ten and nine. The Cousys motored en famille for six weeks around France while the star of La Tournée Bob Cousy (who is of French descent and fluently bilingual) directed basketball clinics in fifteen cities. During the summer months, he made only one real trip away from Camp Graylag, dropping down to Washington, D.C., to see if he could interest John Austin, an outstanding high-school basketball star who was weighing dozens of offers, in attending Boston College. Cousy was successful in this, his one recruiting expedition thus far, even though an athletic scholarship at Boston College covers only the cost of tuition, books, and room and board, making no provision for white convertibles or such blandishments. When Cousy arrived at the Celtics’ training camp last September, he seemed sprier and more full of verve than he had been for several years. He was out to make his last season a memorable one.
This winter, I made it a point to watch the Celtics whenever they came to town, knowing that there were just so many chances left to see Cousy in action. In January, I arranged to make a short trip with the Celtics, picking them up in Cincinnati on the tenth, a Thursday, and returning with them to Boston, where they were scheduled for two games over the weekend. The game in Cincinnati was the fortieth of the eighty-game 1962–63 N.B.A. season, which had begun on October 20th and was to finish on March 17th, when the championship playoffs were to begin, and the Celtics, I knew, would be feeling the inevitable midseason weariness. On top of this, Cincinnati was the last stop on a long, enervating road trip involving nine games in fifteen days—in Syracuse on December 27th, in Cincinnati on December 28th, in St. Louis on December 29th, in San Francisco on Ja
nuary 2nd, in Los Angeles on January 4th and 5th, back in San Francisco on January 8th, in Chicago on January 9th, and back in Cincinnati again on January 10th. To make matters worse, Cousy had pulled a muscle on the inside of his right leg during the St. Louis game. He had been forced to sit out the first game in San Francisco and was able to play only briefly in the ensuing games while he waited for the injury to heal. I expected to find him in rotten spirits.
I got together with Cousy, whom I have known fairly well for some years, in the coffee shop of the Sheraton-Gibson Hotel at four in the afternoon before the Cincinnati game. A phone call I had made to his room half an hour earlier had roused him from a sound sleep, and when I apologized for this, he explained, over a bowl of vegetable soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, that he was still trying to catch up on the sleep he had lost two nights earlier. That night, the plane on which the team was travelling East from San Francisco had developed engine trouble and had not arrived in Chicago till eight in the morning, and in Chicago there had been a mixup in hotel reservations, which meant no rooms had been available for the players until noon. Cousy looked extremely tired around the eyes, but he was in a surprisingly equable mood, and I remarked on this. “I suppose the explanation is that I know I won’t have to be doing this much longer,” he answered. “In a way, though, it was a good thing this trip turned out to be so rough. The first couple of months this season, everything went so smoothly that I was wondering if I really wanted to retire. Well, I’m sure of it now. The schedule’s just too brutal and the season’s much too long. This is a game where you’ve got to put out your top effort every second. You’re head to head with your man. In the final analysis, it’s how much better you can sustain your drive, your purpose, than he can. That’s what makes a man, and a team, superior. When you’re a little under par physically, you think about that. I do at the start of each game now. I see some youngster coming out to play me who’s so fired up that the saliva is practically drooling from his mouth. I was probably like that myself when I was a kid and went out to play Bob Davies or Bob Wanzer or one of the other stars. Anyway, when I step out on the floor now, I have to key myself up consciously. I can’t wait for it to come naturally any more.”
After Cousy had finished eating, we continued our talk in the hotel room occupied by the Celtics’ trainer, Buddy Le Roux, while Cousy baked his injured right leg under an infrared diathermy lamp. “They say that experience minimizes pressures,” he said at one point, “but I haven’t found it to be so. For instance, it used to be much easier for me to relax on the road than it is now. On this particular trip, the only stop I enjoyed was Los Angeles. I’ve got the golf bug now, so I went out one day to watch the L.A. Open and had a real good time walking around with Ken Venturi. Also, I had a chance to talk to Bill Sharman. He’s coaching the basketball team at Los Angeles State College now. We’re trying to work out an arrangement for an annual game at Christmastime between Boston College and Los Angeles State—home and home, you know, alternate years.” Cousy paused for a moment, and then continued, “I really miss Sharman. We roomed together on the road for ten years, I guess it was. You didn’t have time to be bored when you were with Bill. He had everything scheduled down to the minute—when you were supposed to start eating, when you were supposed to stop eating, how long you were supposed to sleep before a game, the whole works. The only trouble was that after a while he had me eating when I didn’t feel like eating, and sleeping when I didn’t feel like sleeping. When Bill left, two years ago, I started rooming alone on the trips. Most of the time now, I just read or watch TV in my hotel room. Heinsohn says I’ve become a stodgy old man. He would, of course. If they didn’t close the coffee shop, Heinsohn would stay up all night, just as long as he had one listener left with one eye open.”
Cousy had time for a brief nap before the Celtics assembled in the lobby at six-thirty to leave by taxi for the Cincinnati Gardens. I rode out with Cousy, Heinsohn, and Auerbach. Heinsohn, a good-natured and companionable young giant, who followed Cousy from Holy Cross to the Celtics, and who also lives in Worcester, is perhaps his closest friend on the team now. What particularly struck me, however, was the warm relationship that had grown up between Cousy and Auerbach. Two men could hardly be less alike than the sensitive, disciplined star and the rambunctious coach. Cousy receives the loudest applause in the league and Auerbach the loudest boos. Quick-tempered, combative, and not averse to the spotlight, the coach is up and off the bench at least as often as any of his N.B.A. confreres, arguing flamboyantly with the referees and, on some nights, with anybody else who wants an argument. His fierce pride in the Celtics leads him into comically extravagant gestures designed to put detractors in their place, and his latest weapon in the constant psychological warfare is characteristic. Now, even when many minutes remain to be played in a game, he lights up a cigar, to let the opposing coach know that as far as he is concerned the game is over and the Celtics have won it. It should be noted, however, that, away from the court, Auerbach has mellowed into a very likable and fairly temperate man. On the ride out to the Cincinnati Gardens, he and Cousy (the one man who calls him “Arnold” and not “Red”) quietly talked over a few changes they thought might help the Celtics to get rolling again after losing four of their eight games on the road trip (although the team was still securely in first place in the Eastern Division of the N.B.A.). Then their talk switched to Sid Borgia, the league’s small and notably assertive head referee, who was to handle the game that evening. Auerbach and Borgia get along like flint and steel. Auerbach recited a long list of his grievances against the referee, whereupon Cousy, with the patience of an older brother, set out to calm him down, and apparently succeeded quite well.
The Celtics lost that evening, 130–121. Playing with immense spirit, Cousy led a Boston rally in the third period to tie the score at 98–98, but he had to leave the game shortly afterward when he pulled a muscle in his left groin. Auerbach had a grim evening. In addition to being denied the pomp of lighting his cigar, he had to suffer through a not-good performance by Borgia, a referee whose work can be singularly brilliant some evenings but on others, when he falls into what one critic has called his Alice in Wonderland style, can be merely singular. After the game, the Boston coach sought solace, as is his custom, at a Chinese restaurant (Auerbach is so hipped on Chinese food that on road trips he carries a hot plate along for warming up midnight—and sometimes breakfast—snacks of chow mein in his room). As for Cousy, immediately after the game he returned to the hotel and started to uncoil over a bottle of beer, after which he read for two hours. “It’s the old story,” he said stoically when I asked him about his new injury. “You try to favor one leg and you pull a muscle in the other. I’ll have to take it easy for three or four days now. Then I’ll be ready to go again.”
The next morning, the Celtics were scheduled to fly home by jet, leaving Cincinnati at 10:15 A.M. and making connections with a noon flight out of Pittsburgh that would take them directly to Boston, where they were scheduled to play the Syracuse Nationals that evening at eight. However, what should have been a comparatively restful day for the dull-eyed troupe of travellers proved to be an exhausting one. A low-lying fog shrouded the Cincinnati airport, and all jet flights out were cancelled. At twelve-fifteen, after Auerbach and Le Roux had done some scurrying around, the Celtics boarded a Constellation (planes of that size were able to get out) and headed for Dayton, where they succeeded in finding space on a one-thirty jet for New York. They arrived at Idlewild around three o’clock, took a motor coach to LaGuardia, got on a four-o’clock shuttle plane to Boston, and eventually reached the Boston Garden at five-thirty. There had been a moment of comic relief at the Cincinnati airport when Auerbach and Borgia had elaborately pretended not to notice each other’s presence in the waiting room, but after that it was just a matter of sitting back and hoping that the next airport would not be fogged in—“a typical day in the N.B.A.,” as Russell glumly characterized it. Cousy spent most of his time reading �
�Total Empire,” by Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., a book about Communist plans for world domination. Usually, his tastes are somewhat lighter, but during the past year he has read, among other things, “The Devil’s Advocate,” “The Tribe That Lost Its Head,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “The Making of the President.”
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