Brown saw no reason even to interview anyone else. Auerbach was as happy as Brown. He’d be living in a big East Coast city rather than a small prairie town, and he’d be much closer to his family. Most important, Brown, who professed his own ignorance of basketball, guaranteed him complete autonomy, and Brown was a man known for keeping his word.

As he’d done with Capitols owner Mike Uline, Auerbach asked for a three-year contract. Brown, like Uline, told Auerbach that this was out of the question. The team might fold in a year if it continued to lose money at its current rate. The most Brown said he could offer was $10,000 to coach the team for one year. “All I can promise you is you’ll be treated fairly and I’ll back you all the way,” Brown said. “If we’re still in business next year, we can talk about raises then. That’s the picture. What do you say?” Auerbach agreed to Brown’s terms, and the two shook hands. “How the hell can you say no to a man like that?” Auerbach would ask later.

 

Even before Auerbach’s hiring was officially announced, he had to oversee Boston’s picks in the 1950 college draft. Since the conventional wisdom among the pro teams was that the way to build a local following was to recruit the top local college players, most fans and sportswriters in New England assumed Auerbach would draft Bob Cousy, the region’s most promising eligible player. For the past four years, Cousy had played for Holy Cross in Worcester, thirty-five miles from Boston. The team had made it into the NCAA national tournament three times in those four years, winning the championship in 1947, largely due to Cousy’s talents.

Walter Brown also assumed that the Celtics should draft Cousy, but Auerbach disagreed with the notion that the best way to draw fans was to feature local favorites. After all, he pointed out to Brown, the Celtics had been recruiting hometown heroes for the last five years—Saul Mariaschin and Wyndol Gray from Harvard, Ed Leede from Dartmouth—and none of them had boosted attendance. Also, Auerbach had watched Cousy in action, in a game between the college all-stars and the Globetrotters, and he was unimpressed. “Walter, I’ve seen this kid play,” Auerbach told Brown. “His defense stinks. On offense, he wants to be the star and tries to show off by always attempting to make the spectacular play.”

But the most important consideration in Auerbach’s mind was that Cousy, for all his prestidigitatious ballhandling, stood at only six feet one. The Minnesota Lakers were dominating the NBA because of George Mikan, their six-eleven center. Auerbach felt he had to begin rebuilding the Celtics by finding a similar big man, and Brown finally agreed. The college draft was held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, and in the first round, Auerbach passed over Cousy and selected Charlie Share, a six-eleven center from Bowling Green. Another draft pick made by Auerbach and Brown that day was even more controversial. Auerbach was looking for a shooter and rebounder to complement Share at center. He thought he had found one in Charles Cooper, a six-five graduate of Duquesne who’d helped his team make it to the semifinals of the National Invitational Tournament. But Cooper was black. While Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson had integrated major-league baseball three years earlier, in 1947, the NBA remained all white. Plenty of talented black basketball players existed, but until now they had been confined to playing for all-black exhibition teams such as the Harlem Globetrotters and the Harlem Rens.

Still, the inevitability of an integrated league had been obvious ever since 1948, when Don Barksdale had become the first black to play on the American Olympic team. Auerbach did not think of himself as a social pioneer—he was simply looking for a rebounding forward.