It was a surprising act of faith considering that for many years Brown had thought that the idea of a professional basketball team in Boston was ludicrous.

 

Walter Brown was a big man, broad in the shoulders, ruddy in the cheeks, with a double chin and the bright blue eyes of his Irish forebears. He loved scotch, was quick to anger and quick to forgive, and could shrewdly take the measure of a man. His father, George V. Brown, had been one of the country’s original sports businessmen, attending the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 and becoming so taken with the marathon that when he returned home to Boston he organized the Boston Marathon. For more than thirty years it was George Brown who fired the starting pistol that sent the runners on their way. George Brown was also the general manager of the Boston Arena, the city’s primary indoor sports facility in the twenties, and his son Walter grew up around the place and fell in love with the sights, sounds, and raffish electricity of arena life. He played in the corridors as a child, saw the boxers and ice skaters and circus performers, inhaled the smells of sawdust and horse manure. He worked for his father taking tickets, painting seats, and writing programs. In the late twenties, the owners of Madison Square Garden in New York built the Boston Garden, but ticket sales dwindled during the Depression and in 1934 Boston’s Arena Corporation acquired it and George Brown took over its management. At the age of twenty-eight, Walter Brown was made an assistant manager of the Garden, and when his father died, in 1939, he succeeded him as general manager.

At the time, Ned Irish, manager of Madison Square Garden, had become extraordinarily wealthy booking college basketball games into his arena, but Brown resisted imitating him. The way Brown saw it, Boston was a hockey town, not a basketball town. The local public high schools had stopped playing basketball in the twenties and didn’t renew their programs until the late forties, which meant the city had little to offer in the way of local talent. When Arthur Sampson of the Boston Herald asked Brown why he didn’t promote basketball, Brown replied, “I don’t know anything about basketball, but it looks like a silly game to me. We can’t afford to put on events that nobody will look at—and nobody watches basketball in New England.”

 

But once Holy Cross became a nationally ranked team and began selling out Boston Garden when it played there, Brown recognized basketball’s potential, and he had become one of the most enthusiastic supporters of a new professional league. But now, in 1950, many investors considered the idea a folly. The same month that the directors of Garden-Arena Corporation informed Brown that the company could no longer support the Celtics, four other teams—the Denver Nuggets, the Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Redskins, the Anderson (Indiana) Packers, and the Waterloo (Iowa) Hawks—all folded.

To cover the Celtics’ ongoing losses, Brown took out a mortgage on his home and, with that and other loans, raised $200,000. Brown’s wife, Marjorie, and many of his friends thought he was making a terrible mistake. “Walter, what’s going to happen to us if it’s all lost?” she asked him one day that year. But despite his wife’s fears, Brown was willing to gamble everything he owned on the proposition that the Celtics could become commercially viable. He was motivated in part by Irish stubbornness and pride, but also by a simple love of the game and, most important, an instinctive feel—honed by the thousands of hours spent in the seats and behind the ticket window studying fans—for what brought out the crowds.

The directors of the company, aware of Brown’s limited resources and hoping to help him avoid bankruptcy, had agreed to give him the team only on the condition that he find a partner to help him sustain the business through the inevitable short-term losses. Looking for leads on possible investors, Brown drove down to Providence, Rhode Island, to see a friend named Lou Pieri, owner of the Rhode Island Auditorium. Pieri was a short, corpulent Italian American who wore double-breasted suits and parted his slicked-back hair in the middle. He had owned a basketball franchise, the Providence Steamrollers, before folding it in 1949 when it had compiled one of the worst win-loss records in the league and run up losses totaling $200,000.

Pieri surprised Brown by offering to invest $50,000 in the Celtics himself.

“Are you kidding me?” Brown asked. “You’re the last man I thought would want back in after the losses you suffered.”

“No,” Pieri said. “I’m still sold on the game.”

While Pieri believed in the future of professional basketball, he was convinced the Celtics needed to become a winning team in the next season in order to survive, and so he said he had one condition: that Brown hire Auerbach as coach. Pieri had met Auerbach a year earlier when looking for a coach for the Steamrollers. Auerbach had told Pieri that the team would have to be completely rebuilt, that it would take at least two years and that it would cost $400,000. Pieri decided instead to fold the team, but he appreciated Auerbach’s brutal candor. “Get Red Auerbach as your coach,” he told Brown, “and I’m your partner.”

 

2

 

WALTER BROWN liked a man with a direct manner, and he took to Auerbach immediately. Auerbach was blunt, candid, and forceful, had coached both the Capitols and the Blackhawks to the playoffs, and in doing so had demonstrated that he could handle veteran players and withstand the rigors of the schedule.