His high-bridged nose and narrow face afforded him such extraordinary peripheral vision that he could sit in a chair facing a wall and see enough of the wall behind him to at least identify its color. People joked he could look due east and enjoy a sunset, that he had the 360-degree vision of an insect, that his large, bulging eyes were so big that when he fell asleep his eyelids failed to cover them. Cousy’s peripheral vision enabled him to pass the ball without seeming to look at the other player. He passed balls behind his back and over his shoulder. They came so unexpectedly his teammates sometimes missed them. In a moment of desperation in a game against Loyola, he improvised what would become the most famous of his signature moves—shifting the ball behind his back from hand to hand while dribbling. With eight seconds left and the game on the line, Cousy drove to the basket from the left side of the court, dribbling with his right hand, but the Loyola player guarding him boxed him in so tightly that he could not raise his right arm to shoot, so he spontaneously bounced the ball behind his back, caught it with his left hand, and dropped in a hook shot, which decided the game.

For all Cousy’s pyrotechnics, Auerbach’s view that he was overrated seemed to be shared by other franchises. Cousy became only the ninth pick in the draft, chosen by Auerbach’s former boss Ben Kerner of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. Cousy didn’t even know where Tri-Cities was, and he went down to Boston Garden to see Walter Brown and plead to be given a chance to play for the Celtics. Brown explained apologetically that Chuck Share filled the Celtics’ immediate requirements. “We need height,” Brown said, “and Share gives it to us. I wish we could have gotten both of you, but it wasn’t possible.”

Cousy pointed out that he had already established his popularity with the Garden fans. Brown replied that time and again the Celtics had drafted popular New England college players, including three of Cousy’s own former teammates at Holy Cross, only to have them fail to make the team or fail to draw fans once they did. Cousy asked Brown for his advice about playing for Tri-Cities. “You’re the property of another team now,” Brown said, “and it’s against regulations for me to suggest anything. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

 

Accepting the fact that he was not going to become a Celtic, Cousy signed with Kerner to play for the Blackhawks. 3* But before the season started, the Chicago Stags folded, and on October 5, 1950, the league’s commissioner, Maurice Podoloff, held a meeting of the owners at the Park-Sheraton Hotel in New York to determine the legal status of the players associated with the team. Podoloff, nicknamed Poodles Podoloff and Pumpernickel Podoloff, was a short, stout, thick-featured man, born in Russia, who had the delicate job of simultaneously representing the owners, who were his bosses, to the players and to the public and mediating the numerous and divisive differences between them. He seemed spineless and indecisive to many players and referees, and incompetent to some of the owners, but his power was hampered by his one-year contract and his lack of leverage with the owners. And despite his reputation for subservience, in the fall of 1950 he stood up to Ned Irish, the richest and the most powerful and arrogant of the owners, and made two crucial decisions that affected the course of the league for the next two decades. Before folding, the owners of the Chicago Stags had been secretly auctioning off the players—Irish being one of the most aggressive bidders—and Podoloff vetoed the results. “The secret auction was bad,” he explained later. “The Chicago people were going to a team and saying, ‘So-and-so bid so much. What is your offer?’ Teams couldn’t dare check with each other.”

Next, Podoloff decreed that valuations be placed on the Stag players, to pay off the team’s debt, and that to improve the level of the league overall, they be distributed to the teams that would benefit most from each player’s specific talents. The Blackhawks’ Ben Kerner insisted that Frankie Brian, a player on the Stags roster who was a friend of his, be allowed to join his Tri-Cities club, and Podoloff decided that if Kerner was going to acquire Brian, he would have to surrender his draft choice Bob Cousy to the pool of Stags players. Kerner agreed, and Cousy, who had been passed over by Walter Brown, was now rejected by a second owner.

At the end of the meeting in the Park-Sheraton, all the players had been disposed of except for Cousy, Andy Phillip, and Max Zaslofsky. Walter Brown wanted Zaslofsky, one of the league’s perennial all-star players. He argued that because the last-place Celtics had had the first choice in the college draft, they should also have first choice of these final three players. Ned Irish, however, demanded that Zaslofsky go to New York because he had been born in New York, had gone to St. John’s in Queens, and would help the Knicks draw Jewish fans. Eddie Gottlieb of the Philadelphia Warriors also wanted Zaslofsky, and he argued, even more creatively than Irish, that the Warriors deserved him because Gottlieb’s minority partner was Abe Saperstein, who had acquired Zaslofsky in one of the secret trades with the Stags.