These developments were greeted with incredulity, skepticism, and outright resistance from some fans and sportswriters in the racially torn city of Boston, but they contributed to the Celtics’ dominance of the NBA during the 1960s. While Auerbach was responsible for them, he was motivated not by any sense of social mission—he was so apolitical that he never even bothered to vote—but instead by a simple ruthless calculation in his desire to win. Whatever it takes.

 

ARNOLD AUERBACH grew up in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section, a thriving immigrant neighborhood of Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, and Eastern European Jews who lived in wood-shingled row houses—destroyed during the thirties in the federal government’s first slum-clearing project—and worked in the sugar refineries, breweries, soda bottling plants, and kosher food factories on the East River waterfront. In Brooklyn in the twenties, just about everyone had a nickname. Auerbach’s father, Hyman, a Russian immigrant from Minsk who owned a delicatessen and later operated a dry-cleaning establishment, was known as Hymie. Arnold Auerbach had red hair, and from an early age his inevitable street moniker was Red. In addition to providing him with the nickname by which he would be known long after he turned balding and gray, the rough, noisy, exuberant streets of Brooklyn stamped themselves on his personality. The borough forced boys to become tough and fearless and scrappy, to learn to work hard but also to take chances, to play the angles, and to appreciate the value of intimidation as a survival tool.

Red and his friends hustled for nickels by cleaning the windows of the cars that stopped at Williamsburg gas stations. They strapped on roller skates and grabbed the fenders of trolley cars, which pulled them through the streets. They sneaked into the movie palaces on Atlantic Avenue to watch Gloria Swanson and Buster Keaton and into Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers. But while rooting for center fielder Dixie Walker, known throughout the borough as “Da People’s Cherce,” Red Auerbach played little baseball because neighborhoods such as Williamsburg lacked the open space for fields. The games of choice in Williamsburg were punchball, handball, stickball, and basketball. Basketball had been invented less than three decades earlier, but because it was uncomplicated and fast-paced and could be played just about anywhere, it had proved wildly popular in schools and colleges around the country. In Brooklyn it was played on the black-tar rooftops of apartment buildings by the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, and the Jews—the inner-city ethnic groups of the times. The game, the American Hebrew observed, “requires a good deal of quick thinking, lightning-like rapidity of movement, and endurance; it does not call for brutality and brute strength.”

At the Eastern District High School, Red made the varsity basketball team, and while he was neither tall, at five feet nine, nor particularly quick, he nonetheless played the game harder than anyone else—getting into fights, pushing and shoving, struggling for control of the ball—and consequently became the first boy from Eastern District High to be listed by sportswriter Lester Bromberg in the New York World-Telegram’s Schoolboy Hall of Fame. Even so, only one institution of higher learning offered Auerbach a scholarship: Seth Low Junior College, a Brooklyn branch of Columbia University so small that its 175 students did not even have their own campus. Seth Low’s classes were taught in the Brooklyn Law School, and the basketball team played in the gym of the nearby Plymouth Church.

Gordon Ridings, the basketball coach at Seth Low, had gone to college at the University of Oregon, where he played under coach Bill Reinhart, who had just been hired to be the basketball coach at George Washington University. In the winter of Auerbach’s freshman year, the George Washington team came up to New York to play Long Island University, and Ridings invited Reinhart and his players to take on tiny Seth Low in an informal scrimmage match in the Plymouth Church gym. George Washington overwhelmed Seth Low, but Auerbach played as if his team actually had a chance. In fact, his tough, aggressive but also smart moves—blocking, setting picks, using his elbows—made such an impression on Bill Reinhart that the coach, thinking Auerbach might bring some hard-edged city tactics to the simple run-and-shoot game favored by his players, offered him a scholarship to come to George Washington.

Some athletes and leaders are at an early age clearly destined for greatness. Red Auerbach at eighteen—the son of a dry cleaner, boisterous and quick with his fists but neither academically nor athletically distinguished—was not one of them. “He wasn’t much as a player,” recalled Moe Goldman, who played professional basketball in the thirties and who knew Auerbach from Eastern District High School. “He was lucky a lot of times.” Indeed, if Bill Reinhart had not, as a favor to Gordon Ridings, allowed his team to play that scrimmage match at Plymouth Church, Auerbach might well have remained in Brooklyn all his life as a high school phys ed instructor, his ambition at the time. That he eventually became one of the greatest professional coaches in mid-century America owed more than a little to that chance encounter with Reinhart. The life of Auerbach’s greatest player, Bill Russell, turned on a similarly fateful minor moment, and this gave both men a ferocious determination to fight to keep what chance had granted them—a determination that was missing in many men who, at the same point in their lives, were much more obviously talented.

 

WHILE NEVER a top-tier school, George Washington from time to time beat teams from much larger schools such as Ohio State, and in Auerbach’s senior year he was made team captain. After graduating, he married the daughter of a local pediatrician, worked for two years as a high school teacher and coach, then joined the navy during World War II. He remained stateside, at the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, and after the war, he prepared to return to his old job. A comfortable if utterly conventional and anonymous life seemed to stretch out before him. Then in the spring of 1946, Auerbach read a newspaper article about a meeting to be held in New York at the Hotel Commodore by Ned Irish, the general manager of Madison Square Garden. For a second time, chance was going to allow Auerbach an opportunity to change his life, if he had the audacity.

The Saturday Evening Post once called Ned Irish “Basketball’s Big Wheel.” Like Auerbach, Irish—the game’s first truly successful promoter—was a man alert to opportunity.