Auerbach had been hard on the kid, but he took orders without sulking and he was now trying to make sure that the man who received his pass at least knew it was coming.

Eventually, Auerbach traded away all but two players—Ed Leede and Sonny Hertzberg—from the team that had played the previous season under Doggie Julian. As he engaged in his trades, Auerbach always kept in his mind the image of a unified, cohesive team. He was interested in a player only to the extent that the man could demonstrably perform a specific function within the team. Boston picked up a number of players from the five franchises that had folded at the end of the previous season. The most promising was Ed Macauley, who had been with St. Louis and who was considered a better center in the league than anyone except Minneapolis’s George Mikan. Macauley played both center and forward, and at six feet eight, he was tall enough for Auerbach to designate him as the team’s big man, which meant Auerbach no longer needed Chuck Share, the center he had opted to draft over Bob Cousy. So Auerbach traded the rights to Share to Fort Wayne in exchange for Bob Harris, the rights to Bill Sharman, and approximately $10,000, which Auerbach used to buy Bob Brannum from Sheboygan.

Both Harris and Brannum were big, bruising, sharp-elbowed players. Brannum, with fewer skills than Harris but more brute strength, became the team’s enforcer, and the two of them together with Macauley formed the Celtics frontcourt. Sharman, who had played for the Washington Capitols and then was assigned to Fort Wayne when that team folded, was a gamble for Auerbach. A baseball player as well as a topflight shooting guard, Sharman was still playing on the Brooklyn Dodgers and had yet to decide whether he wanted to pursue basketball or baseball. If he had chosen to go with baseball, Auerbach would have traded away something for nothing. But he thought it was worth the risk. Sharman, a great natural athlete from central California, seemed more of a basketball player than a baseball player in his size and agility, and Auerbach sensed he had the potential to become one of the best shooters in the league. When Sharman did join the team the following year, he and Cousy formed one of the greatest backcourt combinations in league history, Cousy moving the ball around the floor with his startling maneuvers, spinning, twisting, creating opportunities, and Sharman the meticulous perfectionist, methodically lofting his shot from twenty feet out.

 

At the outset of that first season, Auerbach decided to allow sportswriters to attend the team’s practice sessions. Any additional coverage he could generate would only help the team, and in the process he might be able to educate some of the sportswriters, whom he considered woefully uninformed about basketball, on the finer points of the game. Jack McCarthy of the Boston Herald attended one of the early sessions. Auerbach held up his hands in front of the reporter’s face and wriggled his fingers. “This is what makes a basketball player, see?” he said. “Hands. You’ve got to have the touch. Max Zaslofsky has it. And so does Macauley. That’s what makes Ed so good.”

The Boston sportswriters of the day, who worked for six different papers that were engaged in unending circulation wars, were narrow-minded and sensationalistic and extremely competitive. But the men Ted Williams sardonically referred to as “the knights of the keyboard” were also sentimental in a particularly Irish way. They believed in loyalty, they loved the lost cause and the heroic gesture, and Auerbach struck many of them as singularly unromantic. They felt he had insulted the Boston fans by his lack of enthusiasm for Bob Cousy. And when, at weekly basketball lunches hosted by Walter Brown, Auerbach belittled the very notion of sportsmanship as a lot of crap and bragged of urging players to bend rules and fake injuries if that would help them win, it seemed an appalling violation of the ideals of honor and nobility that had always been a central justification for athletics.

Auerbach did find an ally, surprisingly enough, in “Colonel” Dave Egan, the sports columnist for the Boston Record. The Record was a Hearst tabloid, with a formula that relied heavily on scandal and sports, but it had a circulation of 500,000, and throughout New England, people bought it faithfully every day just to read the Colonel—though he never satisfactorily established what it was he’d been colonel of. A graduate of Harvard Law School, but also a hopeless alcoholic with a foul temper, Egan was the most talented, opinionated, and derisive sportswriter in the city.