He had an ongoing feud with Ted Williams, whom he called “the inventor of the automatic choke,” and he had proposed that a cab driver who once almost ran over Casey Stengel, when Stengel was managing the beleaguered Boston Braves, be given an MVP award.

But the incorrigible Egan, who loved to play the contrarian, sensed immense potential in Auerbach and his reconfigured Celtics, and went so far as to compare him to Frank Leahy, the idolized football coach of Boston College who had taken his team to victory in the Sugar Bowl. “We know now, as Syracuse, Fort Wayne and Minneapolis and the giants of the game come striding toward Boston, that a winner has been forced upon us in the person of Red Auerbach of the Celtics, and that he will do for professional basketball what Frank Leahy did for intercollegiate football,” he wrote during Auerbach’s first year. Auerbach, who called Egan “my boy,” told an acquaintance, “I’d be dead without him.” Egan also approved of the way Auerbach was restraining Cousy and integrating him into the team. “This is not a team of ballerinas and prima donnas and temperamental, selfish stars,” he wrote. “They are young and hungry and full of heart, and they play the rambunctious, enthusiastic, blood-and-thunder basketball which only the young and the hungry and only the hearty can play.”

 

Blood-and-thunder basketball. That was indeed how the game was played in those formative years of the league’s existence, when basketball shared its rowdy fan base with the hockey teams playing in many of the same arenas, and as the owners all knew, hockey fans never felt a game was complete without one good fight. Many of the NBA games were played on so-called neutral courts in smaller towns in New England or upstate New York or central Pennsylvania, where the arenas had nicknames such as The Tub of Blood. Fans shook the basket when players were shooting, the ladies stuck their hairpins into the legs of players and smacked them with handbags, and miners heated pennies with their lamps before hurling them at the losers. The home courts were just as raucous. In Fort Wayne, where the Pistons played in a small north-side gym, spectators liked to reach out and pull the leg hairs of the opposing players when they were taking the ball out of bounds. The players retaliated by “accidentally” misfiring passes that sent the ball into the faces of the offending fans.

Through the early and mid-fifties, professional basketball proved most popular in the smaller cities that did not have either baseball or football teams. The Syracuse Nationals, who averaged more than 5,000 fans a game in the early fifties, sold more tickets than any other team. The rest of the league hated playing in Syracuse, in part because of the weather; they reached the town either by train or by DC-3, and in the depths of winter the cold and ice made the trip seem both grueling and dangerous. Players feigned illness so regularly to avoid the city that the condition became known as the “Syracuse flu.” But it was not just the weather. Syracuse was a raucous, two-fisted, blue-collar town—the Carrier air-conditioning factory was one of the largest employers—and its fiercely proud inhabitants loathed the teams from the big cities. Egged on by the Nats coach, Al Cervi, who turned to the crowd and gesticulated in mock despair whenever a call went against his team, the Syracuse fans hurled candy bars, cups of soda, programs, and popcorn boxes down on the court and poured beer and spat on visiting players as they walked along the ramp into the locker room beneath the stands. Every time Bob Cousy went up that ramp, he ducked his head. One Syracuse fan, a huge, bald man known among visiting teams as the Strangler, would reach down as visiting players walked by and try to choke them. He once put a stranglehold on Philadelphia Warriors owner Eddie Gottlieb while Gottlieb was sitting on the visitors’ bench. After fending him off, Gottlieb told the Strangler, “I’ll put fifty dollars in an envelope in Philly and we’ll get rid of you.”

The Nats fans also went after officials. After one game that fans believed the Nats had lost because of officiating, an irate mob gathered outside the referees’ changing room, and the officials, Sid Borgia and Johnny Nucatola, had to flee town on a late-night train. Nucatola was beaten up by fans after working another game in Syracuse, and on yet a different occasion, Charlie Eckman, an official who knew what had happened to Nucatola and became afraid from crowd noise that he might be similarly attacked, changed into his street clothes at halftime and simply disappeared. Nucatola believed that Nats coach Al Cervi and owner Danny Biasone, who screamed abuse from the sidelines, were responsible for inciting the violence against the officials in Syracuse. Nucatola publicly declared at a New York Basketball Writers luncheon that Cervi and Biasone should be reprimanded by the commissioner and fined up to $1,000, but when he brought the matter up with Podoloff, the commissioner, ever mindful of his own job security, told Nucatola, “We have to be careful. This is a funny bunch we’re working for. One mistake and we can all be out on our ear tomorrow.”

Biasone, who was not fined or reprimanded, responded to Nucatola’s complaints by telling Podoloff to keep “those New York refs” out of Syracuse. The officials worked freelance at the time, for $45 a game, and after criticizing Biasone, Nucatola stopped receiving assignments from the NBA. It was clear that some if not all owners wanted referees susceptible to crowd intimidation. After all, a crowd that believed it could influence the referees was an involved crowd, and that was good for business. One referee was said to be so easily shaken by crowd hostility that the odds shifted four points in favor of the hometown team when he was officiating.

The odds.