The Last Pass by Gary M. Pomerantz

Author:Gary M. Pomerantz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

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Walter Brown got the last word. He presented Cousy with a 1963 steel-gray Cadillac, though he apologized that he couldn’t rip apart the Garden and drive the car onto the court since his Bruins had a game in about six hours. Brown admitted to a sinking feeling.

“I’m the guy that didn’t want Bob Cousy,” he said. “What a genius!”

The crowd erupted with laughter. Cousy appreciated Brown, not only for his self-deprecating humor and essential decency but for his unwavering commitment to professional basketball. Brown had suffered a heart attack three years earlier, and in eighteen months he would suffer another, this one fatal, at fifty-nine. His funeral procession would stretch for a mile. The Globe’s Arthur Siegel would praise Brown’s racial fairness, writing, “His Celtics are living exponents of the theory that all men are created equal.” Brown’s widow, Marjorie, would loan Auerbach the good-luck piece her husband had always carried—his St. Christopher’s medal—in advance of the 1965 NBA Finals, and the coach kept it in his pocket as his Celtics won their seventh consecutive championship, and eighth in nine years.

Now, looking out at a sellout, Walter Brown said, “Things always weren’t so good with the Celtics.” He reminded the crowd that once he needed to wait nearly a year to pay his players their postseason money: “Bob never said a word, neither did Ed Macauley, Bob Brannum or Bill Sharman or Chuck Cooper, all those great guys that we’ve had.” Brown did not sugarcoat the Celtics’ past. “They permitted the club by this action to exist. It was the greatest tribute ever paid to me, the greatest I ever hope to have paid to me. Bob, for that I’d like to thank you and the boys you represent,” he said.

Brown turned from the lectern and faced Cousy. “For thirteen years you’ve been the Boston Celtics, and, boy, they have a lot to live up to. You certainly have done an awful lot for the National Basketball Association because, like Babe Ruth after the [Black Sox] mess in 1919, you came along in 1950 and we’ve been on the upbeat ever since.”

As he built toward his conclusion, Brown said, “You’ve got a wonderful father and mother.”

Sitting beside their son, Joe and Juliette Cousy listened impassively. Their marriage of nearly four decades was a French-American daily drama in which Joe knew his role. When a decision needed to be made, Joe would say, “If you’ll see my wife, she’ll tell you.” In a few years Joe would take his most decisive action since boarding the Mauretania: He would announce to Juliette that he was going out for a loaf of bread, and when he left, he didn’t come back, at least not for several years.

His daughter, Blanche, from his first marriage, had moved to New York, and Joe wanted to live with her. Blanche, recently divorced, had told Cooz of her eclectic past with the French underground during the war, as a champion bicyclist, and working at a hotel in Nice.

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