FOUR MONTHS before the season devolved unexpectedly into chaos, the extended Boston Celtics franchise gathered in a theater to celebrate yet another championship. I checked in at a small table and went inside, just a few blocks from the Brahmin church where Bob Cousy eulogized John Havlicek, and from the four-star hotel where Red Auerbach lived. I’d been immersed for months in the Boston basketball history lurking all around the city, no artifacts more wreathed in meaning than the living human beings who witnessed that history and, in a few cases, created it. Tonight’s party was a high table meeting of those witnesses and high priests. An old magic made the room crackle. Bill Russell’s daughter, Karen, looked regal in a flowing outfit, as she caught up with the Boston press corps. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown held court. Jackie MacMullan introduced me to Celtics guard Jrue Holiday. Dan Shaughnessy and his wife milled around near the bar and 1981 Finals MVP Cedric Maxwell found a little bistro table and settled into a chair. “The connection is family,” Red Auerbach’s youngest daughter, Randy, said. “It’s part of our DNA.”
The occasion this snowy Friday evening was the premiere of Bill Simmons’ HBO documentary series, “Celtics City,” which tells the history of Boston through its basketball team. Sam Cassel, who won a title as a backup guard in 2008 and another last season as an assistant coach, shook hands with different generations of players and staff.
“This is a lifestyle!” he said later. “Being a Celtic is a lifestyle!”
The 2024 Larry O’Brien Trophy, polished to a high shine, stood on a pedestal in the middle of the party. Nobody was too cool to cherish the moment. Even owner Wyc Grousbeck took a picture. The party was a celebration of last season’s glory, even as the current team tried to focus on winning a second title in a row. Tatum is the chief inheritor of this core Celtics dilemma; he must remember the glorious past but also stay focused on the future. Professional athletes like Tatum radicalize the present, looking to sculpt such a bright future that their name might live forever. But athletes who chase that dream in Boston find themselves in a tricky opportunity trap. Tradition is life-giving, yet also comes with burdens. When Bob Cousy retired, Bill Russell said his memory was now their opponent, every bit as much as the Lakers, and he meant it.
When Grousbeck bought the Celtics in 2002, he found this subculture torn apart by Rick Pitino, who’d demoted Red Auerbach as team president. One of the first things Grousbeck did was get on a private jet to fly down to D.C., where Auerbach lived, and bring him back as team president. For more than two decades, Grousbeck has managed the team with a simple philosophy: What would Red do? He shaped the team’s future, and earned two titles, by looking to the past. All that was ending this season. His father was 89 years old, a pioneer of private equity, and apparently, the family needed to unload the team, Grousbeck’s pride and joy, for estate planning purposes. Uncertainty mixed with revelry as last season’s glory transitioned to this season’s quest. You could feel the shifting sands as the first game approached. New owners would be coming in. Because of the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement, which is designed to guard against dynasties, the clock was ticking on the current team, which had been to two Finals and won one. In the foyer of the theater, Grousbeck saw an older man standing near the trophy and went to pay his respects. It was Mal Graham, a retired state judge who, in a previous life, won two titles with the Celtics. Grousbeck and Graham laughed and compared the size of their jewelry. Grousbeck’s is from 2024. Graham’s is from 1969. They touched rings like superheroes trying to join forces.
“Last back-to-back,” someone standing nearby whispered to me. That came as a surprise. The Celtics, whose mythology is rooted in the idea of a forever dynasty, have not won consecutive titles since 1969, Bill Russell’s final season. Nine different teams have repeated since the Celtics last went back-to-back 56 years ago: the Lakers, the Pistons, the Bulls (twice, with threepeats), the Rockets, the Lakers (with a threepeat), then the Lakers again with two, then the Heat and finally the Warriors. Winning multiple consecutive titles is at the core of the Celtics’ mythology, but Larry Bird and Kevin McHale tried and failed. Jo Jo White and John Havlicek tried and failed. Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce tried and failed.
The 2024-25 season was supposed to be Jayson Tatum’s turn.
ONLY TWO MEN are left.
Bob Cousy, 96, and Satch Sanders, 86, are survivors of a once-great civilization. The founding fathers of the Celtics’ culture. They aren’t the last two living teammates of Russell — two-time champion Bailey Howell, 88 years old now, lives just two hours southeast of me in Mississippi — but something much more important in Boston: the kings of the dynasty, the guys with the rings. Cousy with six. Sanders with eight. John Havlicek, Tommy Heinsohn and K.C. Jones had eight, too. (K.C. also earned two as a coach in the 1980s.) Sam Jones had 10. And, of course, Russell won 11. Their numbers hang in the rafters. Their photos hang in every old-time Boston bar. Their presence is a palpable thing in the TD Garden and around the team. Fans still wear their jerseys. They are regularly invoked. Their names are liturgy.
“Luckily, we still have Satch and Bob,” Brad Stevens, the Celtics’ president of basketball operations, told me.
“Cooz,” Randy Auerbach calls him.
“Every time Bob Cousy calls, I jump,” longtime Celtics PR man Jeff Twiss said.
“I literally tried to think what would Red do, what would Bob do, what would Bill Russell do,” Grousbeck said last year.
“I knew John Havlicek as well as I knew anybody,” said Joe Kennedy, RFK’s son and JFK’s nephew, when we talked about the Celtics for this story.
“I worked with Satch at the NBA,” Chris Havlicek said. “Mr. Cousy I’ve known since the day I was born.”
Cousy usually only leaves his house for his regular Thursday night cocktail and pizza party at his country club. “I have my two Beefeater on the rocks,” he said with a laugh.
He and Sanders talk about once a month.
“Satch is having hard times,” Cousy said with love in his voice. “His wife has been in hospice for over a month, month and a half now. Ginnie is about ready to leave us. I haven’t spoken to him now in a few weeks. I remind him not to look over his shoulder. We’re the only two freaking guys left!”
Mostly, as you can tell, they joke about death. Gallows humor. Cousy references the big basketball court in the sky. The death watch is respectfully quiet but alive. In Marcus Thompson II’s 2021 book about the NBA’s best dynasties, he smartly clocked the coming run of state funerals. “What was evident then,” he wrote, “was how the grains of sand in their hourglasses were dwindling.”
“You’re not going anyplace,” Satch told his friend last year. “You’re only 95.”
“But I’m in a wheelchair now,” Cousy said.
“Cooz, that happens.”
SATCH SANDERS MEETS me in the lobby of his retirement community, where he says he is the only Black man among 300 residents, and the only former Boston Celtic. The staff dotes on him. We pass a billiards table as he leads me to his apartment.
“My wife just died two months ago,” he says.
“I’m really sorry, sir,” I tell him.
He smiles wistfully.
“We all fall in that group,” he says, “particularly in a place like this.”
When someone dies, their photograph is hung in a room down the hall that has blue walls. There have been four new photos this week alone.
“The guys always joke about a picture in the blue room,” he says. “The women act a little more serious. We were five years here. That’s a long run. I know some people who are moving in and I’m saying to myself, how long will they last?”
He leads me down a long hall, and we take a right and keep walking until we get to his door. African masks hang on the wall. His wife said it was important for them to bring things they loved as they downsized their lives. She hung a sign that said, “Two old crabs live here.”
“Time to take that down,” he says.
He didn’t go to his wife’s funeral. He didn’t go to Bill Russell’s funeral.
“Funerals are always …” he says.
Years ago, he quit them. He’s a man who has had his life described by people he’s never met, so a eulogy doesn’t mean anything to him. He doesn’t want to hear some well-intentioned person say that his friend is in a better place or that his wife sure looked great in her open casket.
“She looked better when she was alive,” he says.
“Being alive is important,” he says.
“Being dead … is … gone.”
“It’s being gone.”
His apartment is filled with light. He raises the blinds to look out on the cottages. Gin used to always say the little houses looked like postcards in the winter when the snow dusted their gables. There’s a framed piece of the old Garden parquet floor on the wall. His wife’s medical records are on the table in a leaning tower of paperwork. Little good they do now. A red 3-pound weight and a black 5-pound weight are right by his chair.
“Just kick some pillows out of the way,” he tells me, shrugging his shoulders.
These are his craft projects. He makes pillows for people.
“Something to do, you know?” he says, laughing at himself.
I ask about the recent losses inside his basketball family.
“I don’t answer calls when people start out with, ‘Did you know? … ‘Did you know’ is always gonna be followed up with, ‘He died.'”
He sighs twice.
“Did any of the deaths really hit you differently?” I ask.
“Chamberlain,” he says quickly. “We always saw him as being so big and so strong.”
“What about Bill Russell?”
Sanders shakes his head.
“Russell was human,” he says.
AFTER SPENDING almost a year following the Celtics’ attempt to repeat as champions, I flew to Boston for what could turn out to be the last days of a once-promising year. There are seasons that build on something and seasons that hold onto something and seasons that see something slip away. This year, the Celtics lived all three at once and now the end loomed. In the last week, they’d blown three double-digit leads (20, 20 and 14) to fall behind 1-3 against the surging Knicks. In the closing minutes of the last of those losses, Jayson Tatum had gone down with a terrifying injury to his right Achilles. The season and the quest to repeat, still technically alive, felt almost like an afterthought as Boston waited on Tatum’s medical report. Sitting on the plane, I texted with Karen Russell, Bill’s daughter, who I first saw at the HBO party. We made small talk about how she loves to visit K.C. Jones’ daughter in Atlanta so they can go eat real southern soul food.
We talked about Tatum’s injury. If it was an Achilles, he’d likely miss all next season. Karen and her brother had attended a baseball game that night with family friend Lenny Wilkens and didn’t hear the news until they got home. Karen, who’s a bit of a mama hen, tried not to borrow trouble until a diagnosis was officially announced.
“I’m struggling to not be worried,” she told me.
Uncertainty hung melancholy blue over the franchise. How long would Tatum miss? Would he ever be the same? When would the sale of the team be finalized? New owners will want to shape the team. And because of the collective bargaining agreement, a clock has been ticking for a year on the current team. It’s a bit like that doomsday countdown, and when Tatum hit the floor in Madison Square Garden, the minute hand hurtled toward midnight. At the same time, with Cousy 96 and Sanders 86, the thread between the uncertain present and the glorious past has never been thinner or more endangered.
The next morning, with eight long hours until Game 5, I went to see one-fourth of an old Boston relic, saved from destruction by a Celtics season-ticket holder and successful businessman named Ted Tye. It’s the scoreboard that hung in the Garden over the final two Bill Russell titles, the last back-to-back. When the Garden was torn down, the scoreboard hung for years in a suburban mall food court, fading into the familiar background amid the greasy slices at Sbarro and value meals at Burger King. Then that mall got demolished and a foreman overseeing the wrecking balls called Tye in a panic.
“We’re about to destroy the scoreboard,” he said.
“Just stop,” Tye told him.
Tye collects old pieces of Boston memorabilia, so he got the thing taken apart and loaded on a flatbed truck and moved to an empty warehouse he controlled. It sat there for years, stripped of its vast, anachronistic electrical circuitry, a shell. Finally, he installed one side of the sign in a new building on the site of the old Boston Herald offices, where cars can see it from the adjacent raised freeway. The original lightbulbs didn’t work anymore, so Tye put in new electronic panels that show the month and date and the time: May 14, 11:29 a.m. This scoreboard, first installed in 1967, hung overhead the last time Tye ever saw his father alive. It was 1989 at a Celtics game at the Garden; watching the new HBO series, Tye saw a familiar face and paused the screen to find himself sitting with his late father directly behind Red Auerbach. The Celtics are wired into many parts of his life and like most people I encountered in the city, Tye wanted to talk about Tatum, to mourn the promise of a star and the team he led.
“That’s a tough injury,” he told me. “You don’t know if Brad Stevens is gonna break it all up now.”
THE SECOND QUARTER
ON OCT. 22, 2024, the Boston Celtics presented the players with championship rings and raised the franchise’s 18th banner. It was the first game of the season, unseasonably hot in the city. Cirrus clouds and haze smudged the blue sky. Bob Cousy arrived several hours early in a car sent by the team. The VIP guests waited in a tent in the parking lot, where the governor of Massachusetts, who wore Cousy’s No. 14 from junior high basketball to the end of her college career, told him how proud she and the state were of him. The arena filled with people. The VIP tent emptied. Cousy waited in the tunnel in a wheelchair. Celtics PR vet Jeff Twiss pushed him out when the event staffer gave him the signal. Cousy looked up at him.
“Don’t f— this up,” he said.
Former champions came out onto the court, one by one. Each was announced like a member of the royal family.
“Six-time NBA champion, No. 14, Bob Cousy!”
Twiss navigated Cousy to center court, through a long phalanx of fans and dignitaries, and Bob waved at the crowd. He’s the only living player to see both the first and the most recent Celtics banner raised. Shaughnessy wrote in the next morning’s Globe: “Cousy played with John Havlicek, who played with Cedric Maxwell, who played with Kevin McHale, who played with Rick Fox, who played with Antoine Walker, who played with Paul Pierce, who played with Avery Bradley, who played with Jaylen Brown.”
Cedric Maxwell followed Cousy, representing two of the three titles in the 1980s, then three members of the 2008 team, the most recent champions, “No. 20” Ray Allen and “No. 5” Kevin Garnett and “with the 2024 Larry O’Brien Trophy, The Truth, No. 34, Paul Pierce!”
Pierce spun the trophy around so everyone could see. KG pounded his chest and hid behind dark sunglasses. They gathered as Adam Silver presented the rings. Jaylen Brown rested his left arm on Bob Cousy’s wheelchair. Jayson Tatum stood on Cousy’s other side with an arm around Ray Allen. Silver announced that the title put the Celtics back atop the Lakers as the winningest franchise in league history, 18 to 17, which made KG clap loud enough for the sound to be picked up by Silver’s microphone.
“Eighteen banners,” Silver said, looking up, and then over at Bob, before continuing. “And of course, six of those rings belong to Bob Cousy!”
The crowd boomed COOZ, a basso profundo that might sound like boos to the uninitiated. The ceremony ended, and Twiss wheeled Cousy back beneath the arena. He slipped into a waiting car, headed home to watch the game.
The world outside the arena seemed foreign to him as the car moved through the streets. Where had the old Boston Garden been? Was it here? A block over? Cousy stared out the window, leaving behind the cheering crowd.
“I’ve had my moment in the sun,” he said.
SATCH IS TELLING a story about Cousy and the future king of England. A few years ago, Prince William and Kate came to Boston and planned to attend a Celtics game. The Celtics wanted to show these guests maximum respect. They wanted Bob Cousy to travel the 47 miles from his house to the Garden.
Cousy called Satch.
“Are you going?” he asked.
“I’m not going,” Satch said.
“Well, I’m not going either,” Cousy said.
The team intervened and leaned on Sanders.
“You’re the youngest of the two,” they said.
“So I went,” he tells me.
“Did Cooz go?”
Satch laughs.
“No, he didn’t go.”
Satch went and talked to the royals, who seemed most amazed at his size 18 shoes.
“Mah GAWD!” he says in his best British accent.
He shifts in his seat, moving slowly. I ask him what aging is like. He smiles in a way that unsettles me.
“How old are you?” he asks.
“Forty-eight,” I say. “What do you wish someone had told you at 48?”
“Just being real about this is the best you’re gonna be,” he says. “Things aren’t getting better. You are deteriorating slowly but surely. The hope is you’re gonna be around for a fair amount of time and feel pretty good, but they odds are against it. You’re probably gonna suffer with the things older people suffering with. Legs aren’t what they used to be. Sleepless nights. Friends and people dying.”
He was born in 1938.
His father was born in 1905.
“Understand that it’s a diminishing returns situation. You’re not gonna get better like fine wine. People like to use those old sayings.”
His maternal grandfather was born in 1870.
“Getting older is losing … being less than.”
His maternal great-grandfather, James, was born enslaved without a last name in 1830.
“Less than you were,” he says. “You know?”
Lots of pictures are on the wall, including one he loves with Wilt about to posterize him, in the act of posterizing him. There’s another where he’s in a Magic Johnson strut, dappled and confident, bringing the ball up court. His eyes search for teammates, Russell most likely, and Sanders has a smile on his face.
“What of that guy still exists?” I ask.
He walks over to see it. His knees pop like a bowl of Rice Krispies. A little grin crosses his face as he remembers.
“That guy,” he says with a laugh.
The photo hangs near their tall wooden elephant statues and a cat figurine that his wife loved. The first thing he notices is how happy he is in the picture. He laughs again because his dribbling was not how the team schemed their offense.
“Auerbach is probably on the side crying the blues,” he says.
In the photo, he’s got a thigh brace on, and Willie Smith is refereeing and the guy defending him looks like Wayne Hightower, he thinks.
“But anyway, I know Auerbach is wishing I’d give up the ball.”
Sanders looks back at me.
“I could handle the ball,” he insists.
Soon, he’s moving out of here and into a smaller apartment.
“It’s less expensive,” he says.
There’s a long pause.
“And, um,” he says before another pause.
“If I stay here, I’m thinking about her all the time.”
Every month, he writes a column for the community newsletter. Satch’s Corner, it’s called. They’re really funny. Writing is his main hobby now. That and making pillows and watching the Celtics on television. All his old neighbors bring their grandkids and great-grandkids to meet the only celebrity in the complex.
“You’re that basketball player,” they say, and as he tells me that, he points at the photograph hanging on the opposite wall. Nobody wants to know the 86-year-old man standing before them. They want to know the guy on the wall.
BILL RUSSELL AND K.C. Jones roomed together in college and remained close friends. Satch Sanders learned that Cousy would cuss you out in French if you missed one of his passes. Tommy Heinsohn learned that Cousy often awoke in the middle of the night from chronic nightmares. He’d shoot out of bed screaming. A few of them, including Cousy, stole matchbooks with the presidential seal while visiting the White House. Kennedy rushed to meet them when he heard his hometown team was in the building and one by one, the players said goodbye. Satch Sanders got nervous and when he reached the president, suddenly flustered, he said, “Take it easy, baby.” Kennedy roared with laughter, and the Celtics did, too, and they’d make fun of Satch for the rest of his life about it.
They played gin rummy or hearts on the back of turboprop planes, usually Russell, Heinsohn and Cousy. On a goodwill tour behind the Iron Curtain, the whole team got two Polish coaches to dress up like the secret police, complete with fake badges, and pretend to arrest Heinsohn, who fell for it completely, chain-smoking cigarettes until Cousy and Auerbach burst in laughing.
Russell once walked into the locker room wearing a cape.
“Here comes Batman!” Cousy cracked.
Few teams have been chronicled like the ’50s and ’60s Celtics. Gary Pomerantz’s book about Cousy and Russell, The Last Pass, sits atop the pyramid. There are three different memoirs Bill Russell wrote, one in 1965, one in 1979 and another in 2009. These books, and the dozens of others written about and by the guys on those teams, paint a portrait of a time and a place, and of a brotherhood that would last long after the cheering stopped. They didn’t always like each other, but they loved each other.
Their lives were impossibly intertwined.
Sam Jones put in the hours to brainwash Bill Russell’s son, Buddha, into declaring Sam his favorite basketball player. Russell loved to raise one of the Cousy girls high into the air and yell with delight, “Hey, little Cooz!” Sanders lost his contacts all the time, and one time, a game stopped as ten guys crawled around on the court to find the missing lens. Bill Russell, of course, found it.
“Here, Satch,” he said triumphantly. “Do I have to do everything on this team?”
Heinsohn stitched the team together. He’d sit with radio man Johnny Most in late-night hotel lobbies listening to Most’s stories about being a gunner on a B-24 in World War II. Everyone looked up to Heinsohn. One year, during the finals, he got into a confrontation with Wilt Chamberlain.
“Do that one more time and I’ll knock you on your ass,” Wilt growled.
Heinsohn stood his ground.
“Bring your f—– lunch,” he replied.
K.C. Jones would sing whenever he got the chance. Satch could do a great Russell impression. Russell caught a lot of grief for getting his low-slung Lamborghini stuck in the snow. One night, Cousy and Heinsohn sat at the bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with Lauren Bacall. Tall, 5’8′ in bare feet, she wore perfume that smelled like roses and blackcurrants. Bob had his gym bag with him. Lauren snatched it and pulled out a jock strap triumphantly and winged it across the bar at him. He dodged the smelly projectile and threw it back.
On the road, because of his seniority and star power, he got a big suite to himself. Hotel rooms became his entire universe. Meanwhile, Heinsohn liked to look out the hotel window and paint. Mostly watercolors. This was a team of interesting, singular men. Russell loved to read. The book that moved him most was a biography of the complex Haitian revolutionary leader Henri Christophe, who built a fort to defend Blacks from their enslavers. The fort is still there and is the rare monument in the Western Hemisphere built by a Black man. That fact, and especially that phrase, stuck with Russell. A Black man.
Cousy devoured books, too. Histories, novels, memoirs. Theodore H. White’s “The Making of the President 1960” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Harper Lee moved him tremendously. Sometimes, Heinsohn could talk Bob into coming out for a beer or two. Like Russell, Cousy was a complex, private man, with deep emotional scars from his upbringing — surrounded by poverty and violence — and he’d murmur to himself all night in French, his subconscious never at peace.
“In later years, as the pressure built up, Cousy went through the torture that only a superstar can really know,” Russell wrote. “The lot of the superstar is — lonely nights, horrible hotel rooms, and nightmares. There is the story Cousy tells about his nightmares and sleepwalking that got so bad he eventually had to tie himself to his bed. Cousy’s nightmares were so terrifying he once got out of bed stark naked and wound up dashing himself against trees as he ran from his frightening dream — and this was offseason.”
EVERYTHING ON THE court revolved around Russell. Most NBA players caught in a defensive trap yell, “Help.” Russell’s Celtics shouted “RUSS!” Every play on offense started with an entry pass to Russ. But outside the team, much of the credit went to the flashy, famous Cousy.
Reporters and fans centered Celtic victories around Cousy. Cousy’s genius. Cousy’s talent. Cousy’s leadership. For years, the press tried to bait him into saying something catty about Russell. He always refused. To much of the public, a white star in Boston was the center of the solar system and the Black star revolved around him. Reporters wrote glowingly about Cousy, crowding him in the locker room, and it hurt Russell.
He’d never forgotten in college when, after leading his team to one of two national titles, as part of a 55-game winning streak, a white player got named the Most Valuable Player in Northern California. Forty years later, you could get a rise out of him by simply saying the name Ken Sears. So he resented how Cousy was lionized, even as he knew what a great player he was.
Russell wrote: “I would get things like this: You’ve blocked fourteen shots, scored twenty-three points and grabbed thirty-one rebounds against somebody like Chamberlain and the Celtics are now one up in the Eastern finals and you come out of the dressing room door and someone says: ‘Let me shake your hand. I’ve just shaken the hand of the greatest basketball player in the world, Bob Cousy. Now, I want to shake the hand of the second greatest.'”
The first season Russell played without Cousy, the Celtics’ attendance dropped by 1,500 fans a game.
As teammates, the two men talked a lot about basketball but little else. Cousy would read the news and see everything Russell said about racism in Boston, and in America, but he wouldn’t bring it up with him.
“He went his way and I went mine,” Russell wrote.
Pomerantz wrote that Bob Cousy was simply too busy being Bob Cousy to take on the burden of Russell’s experiences with American racism. If Russell didn’t know how to have anything other than a surface-level conversation with Cousy, Cousy didn’t know how to go deep either. Both would admit later to being terribly lonely. They spent thousands of days side by side but didn’t really understand each other.
Pomerantz compared them to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
“The problem was,” he said, “they both really wanted to be Ruth.”
THE END AS a player came for Cousy in 1963. The team hosted Bob Cousy Day on St. Patrick’s Day. Or St. Cousy Day on Bob Patrick Day. You can imagine how this combination of myths landed in the Irish quarters south of the Garden. Cousy went alone to the stadium that day, through a passageway from his hotel to the Garden. As the hotel door locked behind him, he found the door to the arena locked, too, and he pounded on it for a few minutes. A member of the cleaning crew asked who was knocking so hard.
“One of the players,” Cousy said.
A stereo microphone descended on a long black cord from the rafters. A heavy wood lectern, a temporary pulpit, appeared. The Garden staff set up chairs on the court for the Cousy family, one for his wife, Missie, and one each for his mom and dad. The girls stood, and so did Bob. Owner Walter Brown gave him a sterling silver tea set and a 1963 steel gray Cadillac. Red Auerbach read a letter from John F. Kennedy in which the president argued that as long as basketball was played anywhere in the world, the way the ball moved in rhythm between teammates would serve as a memorial to Bob Cousy. Auerbach hugged him, and a fragile dam inside Cousy broke. He started to sob and buried his head in Red’s shoulder. The team’s founder and owner, Walter Brown, spoke next.
He talked about how the franchise was just five years old when Cousy arrived.
“Things always weren’t so good with the Celtics,” he said. “One year, things were so bad I couldn’t pay them their playoff money. Bob never said a word.”
Brown said that Cousy’s commitment is why there was a Boston Celtics team at all. Never forget, he seemed to be urging the fans. There was no money, and he’d already mortgaged his house and even sold some of his furniture. Cousy’s grace, and the grace of his teammates, kept them solvent. It gifted all the futures to come, from Russell to Bird to Tatum.
Cousy went last and spread his notes on the podium. His wife and two daughters joined him at center court. The girls held bouquets of flowers. Cousy battled tears before he even began. He looked up at the crowd, which sat in silence. He sniffled into the microphone.
“Mere words seem so inadequate in order to say the things,” he said, and his voice cracked and he stopped and looked down. His daughter wiped her eyes, too. It felt like a Viking funeral. The crowd applauded as Cousy fought back more tears.
“I hope you’ll bear with me,” he said.
The mayor and the governor sent gifts. Cousy thanked all of them, and then his teammates’ wives for their kindnesses to his family. His daughter handed him a tissue. He said he knew he’d miss the brotherhood that disappears the moment an athlete leaves a team. He broke down. A pregnant, emotional silence hung in the Garden.
“WE LOVE YA, COOZ!” a fan yelled.
His younger daughter wiped her eyes. His mom, in a mink stole, wiped her eyes. Bob’s voice cracked again. He finally finished. He didn’t name his teammates. He didn’t speak of Russell. He hugged his mother, then his wife, then his two girls, and blew a kiss to the crowd. The organist played the familiar first bars of “Auld Lang Syne” and the Garden went mad. The people rose through the haze of cigarette smoke, leaning over the loge decks. They frothed. It sounded like the applause kept shifting gears. No one sat down. They cheered for two minutes and six seconds.
The team gathered later at the Lenox Hotel on Boylston.
Russell stood to talk. He undid his tie.
“If Bob Cousy were this much less a man,” he said, holding his enormous hands an inch apart, “I would have resented him.”
“I didn’t want to come tonight,” he said.
He paused, and everyone leaned in. They knew Bill Russell only told the truth.
“I’m too big a man to cry,” he said.
Cousy was stunned.
“We see each other as brothers,” Russell said. “You meet a Cousy not once in a month but once in a lifetime.”
He looked over at Cousy. He felt the weight of what might have been if they’d been friends. They both did. Their wives, Missie and Rose, cried in each other’s arms.
Russell bowed his head and walked away.
Later in private, he gave Cousy a gift he’d picked out himself at a jewelry shop that opened in 1796, right across the street from Paul Revere’s silver store. It was a desk clock, with bronze hour and minute hands, and an engraving on the back: “May The Next Seventy Be As Pleasant As The Last Seven. From The Russells To The Cousys.”
Bob and Missie put the gift on a mahogany table in their dining room, where it remains today. He has sold most of his memorabilia. Rings, an autographed picture from President Kennedy, and a basketball from his 5,000th assist. Nearly everything.
“But not that clock,” Pomerantz said.
“FOUR, THREE, TWO, one,” a coach counted in practice as Jayson Tatum navigated a double team and the end of a possession, quarter or game. He misses. The coach gets the ball again, and the drill continued.
“Seven, six, five.”
Tatum was the last player on the court at the Auerbach Center. He’s trying to be the best ever, which is often the road to an unhappy life. Cousy had nightmares. Russell stared at hotel walls until he felt him going crazy. Bird is still a recluse. Tatum was nearly alone in the Auerbach Center, moving around from wing to wing, shooting jump shots, making and missing them, driving for a layup.
“Twelve, 11, 10,” the coach counted.
Tatum dribbled at the elbow, fluid, floating backwards for a fadeaway jump shot that clanged off the back of the rim. The energy that coalesced in the Garden on Bob Cousy Night still existed as disparate molecules, hungry to aggregate once more. Each one carries a strand of mitochondrial information, waiting on the summoning blast of a horn. Bob and Russ. Heinsohn. Hondo. Satch Sanders. Sam and K.C. Jones. They built the road Jayson Tatum now travels, moving along familiar way stations. First, like Cousy and Russell, he’s come to a peaceful oasis, where scales fall from his eyes and he understands what he means to a place, to a city and the people who call it home. That’s a beautiful moment in the life of every Celtic great and he’s there now.
But there’s a second, more profound truth out there for a rare few, it seems. Not so much out there as … in here. The real life’s work for any Celtics great is to try and understand what they meant to each other, and what they could have meant, to a teammate, to a rival. Traveling the road to greatness requires so much selfless focus that the traveler might only realize too late that the whole point of the journey was the people with whom he traveled. Fellow supplicants, pilgrims, following the trail of Cousy and Russ.
Tatum moved along the three-point line, shaded left at the top of the key, and he bricks it again. Driving down the right baseline, he made a fadeaway. He’s won one title and is fighting for another. Living radically in the present does damage. One day, Bob Cousy and I were talking on the phone about championship rings and about winning 11 titles in 13 years. Even now, he fixates on the ones that slipped away.
“It should have been 12,” he said.
Bill Russell, he said, injured his ankle in the 1958 Finals and they lost without him in the lineup. That was 67 years ago. And yesterday. Jayson Tatum’s sneakers echoed in the gym. He finished the drill and moved to the free-throw line. Jaylen Brown, the older guys say, is more of a student of the past. He’s the only current Celtic who’s made an effort to get to know Satch Sanders. Tatum is busy trying to be Jayson Tatum.
Swish.
Swish.
Miss.
Russell 11. Sam Jones 10. Havlicek 8. Sanders 8. Cousy 6. Bird 3. Tatum 1.
Swish. Swish. Swish. Swish. Swish. Swish. Swish. Swish.
He settled himself. Received the ball. Dribbled and felt the leather on his hand, then his fingertips. Bill Russell lived for 88 years. For 75 of them, he was not a Boston Celtic. These careers last a moment. Tatum exhaled.
Swish.
RUSSELL PLAYED SIX seasons after Cousy retired and he thought a lot in those days about tribes. He talked about them all the time. That’s how he saw the world. Small bands of people with their own customs, rules and rituals. It was his source code and his prism. Russell famously said he didn’t play for Boston, he played for the Celtics. He saw his team as a sacred gathering of people. The vehicle for exploration and the safe harbor of home. They were not sportsman entertainers. They were warrior kings. Yes, Russ was Black, and Red was Jewish, and Cousy was the son of immigrants and Ramsey was a son of the South, but they all belonged to a more powerful tribe than the ones into which they’d been born. They had all been, in fact, reborn. They were Celtics.
Bill’s father, Charles Russell, loved to pass along phrases and mantras. A tribe, he said, should be proud but never arrogant, powerful but never destructive. “You must acknowledge and accept other tribes,” he told his son, “And never say, ‘My tribe can do this, so they’re better than yours.'”
Russell struggled mentally and emotionally in those first seasons without Cousy. Medgar Evers was killed. John F. Kennedy was killed. Three civil rights workers were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Russell spent a lot of time staring at walls, right “on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” he’s said several times.
Russell called basketball “the loneliest life in the world. A world of bright lights and screaming emotion and vast amounts of money — and deep wells of loneliness. So deep. Such an abyss. You fall far into it and all your life struggle to come back up.”
Boston never truly felt like home. But the Celtics did, and the team earned him his place in the line of proud patriarchs in his family. His grandfather Jake ran the Ku Klux Klan off his land, firing a shotgun at them as they scampered away. His other grandfather spent his own money to build the first school in his area for Black children. When a gas station attendant once called his father “boy” and threatened to kill him, Charles Russell chased the man with a tire tool. As an old man, Bill Russell would recall that moment and swell with pride. His inheritance was a fierce rhetorical and spiritual armor.
Russell drove south the year after Cousy retired. He passed through the Jim Crow states with his children, taking them to visit family. His son, Jacob, named after his grandfather, kept asking to stop for food. In the boy’s usual world, his father was one of the most famous men in the country. But in the South, he was just Black. It broke something inside Russell to keep gripping the steering wheel as his son asked, “Daddy, can’t we stop? Daddy, I’m hungry.”
Season after season, he led his team to victory after victory, taking over as head coach when Auerbach stepped down. Russell was the first Black head coach in any of the four major American sports; the Celtics drafted the first Black player in NBA history and hired the first Black coach and started the first all-Black lineup.
Russell read and studied and struggled for the causes that mattered to him. Martin Luther King met with Russell as he prepared for his “I Have a Dream” speech. King invited him to sit on the stage for the speech itself but Russell said he didn’t belong and watched from the crowd. He ran a basketball camp in Mississippi in Evers’ name after the civil rights advocate was murdered. He supported John Carlos and Tommie Smith and Muhammad Ali. Playing in Boston, he said later, was a traumatic experience. People vandalized his house numerous times. His future neighbors in the suburb of Reading openly opposed his moving in. They circulated a petition. Rose Russell cried when she heard about it.
“They don’t want us here,” she said.
Not long after he’d won the third of his 11 titles, a guy walked up to Russell while he sat at a light behind the wheel of his new Lincoln. “Hey, n—–,” the man shouted. “How many crap games did it take you to win that car?”
For 13 seasons, he felt claustrophobic.
“As we got to know each other better, I think the thing that I was most curious about was how he handled all of the pressure,” his widow Jeannine Russell said. “He was carrying the weight of the whole city, his team, the black community, and his own expectations on his shoulders.”
Finally, after the 1969 season, following two straight titles, Russell retired. He drove alone in his Lamborghini to California, accelerating out over the flat expanse of the American west, going back towards home, his old one in Oakland and his new one on Mercer Island in Seattle.
Decades passed. The Celtics started dying. Red Auerbach’s daughters, who lived on opposite sides of the country, divided up the funerals: Randy would do the West Coast burials and Nancy would do the East Coast. Her father loved these men, who stayed young in the attics of his life.
“The phone would ring and he would just light up,” Randy Auerbach said.
Auerbach held weekly lunches at a Chinese restaurant in D.C., and played a lot of tennis with Sam Jones, who lived nearby. But in 2006, his health began to decline rapidly. Russell flew to D.C. to say goodbye. Red sat in his favorite chair. They talked warmly about the past.
“What happened to that sports car you had?”
Russell smiled. Red was still making fun of his Lamborghini.
“We are driving a nice, slow minivan,” Russell said.
“It’s come to that?” Auerbach said with a laugh.
Not long after, Red Auerbach died. His daughters only called two former Celtics players personally to give them the news.
Bill Russell and Bob Cousy.
THE CELTICS GOT OLD together. They retired, even Havlicek, who played until 1978, winning two titles without Russell, both during the three fiercest years of the busing crisis in Boston. They stood up in weddings for each other, Godfathers at first communions, at bar mitzvahs and children’s weddings and each other’s funerals. They all kept an eye out for each other’s children as their kids moved around the country for jobs and relationships. Once Randy Auerbach, Red’s youngest daughter, was working in a flower shop in Brookline after moving from D.C. to Boston. A middle-aged customer came in to order something and Randy noticed her pendant, made by converting one of the Celtics’ championship tie pins or cuff links given to the players and coaches. They cannot be purchased and Randy told the stranger that she had one just like it. The stranger, who smiled and gave her a huge hug, was Bob Cousy’s daughter. They hadn’t seen each other in years.
“I grew up with a lot of really tall guys in my living room,” Chris Havlicek said. “I didn’t look at any of these guys as legends when I was 7, 8, 9 years old. I looked at them as my dad’s buddies from work. The Celtics really was like a family. It was very much a family where you’d have potluck dinners. You’d go to the Boston Marathon. There’d be cookouts. No caterers. The dads were around. Mr. Cousy was around.”
Russell saw some guys, like K.C. Jones and Tommy Heinsohn, but not others. Reunions kept them rotating back through the Boston Garden, the FleetCenter, the TD Garden. K.C. Jones coached the great teams of the 1980s, so his former teammates had a reason to show up. They kept coming back to the scene of their past glories. Cousy and Satch Sanders both lived an hour away and showed up from time to time. Heinsohn coached the team and then took over broadcasting duties. John Havlicek came around a lot, too, and he made a point to mentor new arrivals, like a young Danny Ainge, taking them to meals, or to the golf course, helping people understand their new culture and how to fit into it. Heinsohn always worked to get to know players. Some like Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo and Kevin Garnett loved to know the history Heinsohn carried inside, and how to connect to it — to become part of it! — while others couldn’t be bothered, too focused on the white-hot now. Heinsohn shook his head, talking to a Boston Herald reporter about Antoine Walker, who’d looked at Tommy and said, “Who are you? What do you know?”
The old guys saw each other at charity golf tournaments, in the sunshine of L.A. or the desert heat of Las Vegas, and every Father’s Day weekend, out on Martha’s Vineyard at John Havlicek’s annual golf & fishing tournament. For over three decades, he hosted the event, private enough for everyone to be relaxed. Everybody who was anybody in the Celtics orbit came. Havlicek’s rule was that everybody had to fish. Even Cousy, who’d grumble but follow the rules.
Saturday night, the guests gathered for a big dinner. Every year, Havlicek grabbed a microphone and counted off the band and, in the diffused light of summer, sang the love ballad “Because of You” to his wife. “What he lacked in vocal talent,” Chris said, “he made up for with an incredible stage presence and a commitment to the lyrics. It was both hilarious and special.”
They knew they were kings.
Havlicek played with Cousy and came up two years shy of also playing with Bird. He retired to Florida. His grandkids called him Captain. All his children, and their children, lived within a few miles. He rarely missed a recital or a game. His grandkids loved to sit with him in his trophy room. Once, Grace Havlicek, who now plays D1 volleyball at Auburn, saw a meme online that compared Havlicek’s career achievements with Michael Jordan, with the hypothesis that Havlicek was better.
Grace asked her dad if Captain was better than Michael Jordan.
“Why don’t you go ask Captain?” he said.
She walked over and showed him her phone. He had a flip phone only. No smartphone. No e-mail address ever. He put on his glasses and studied the meme. Then he looked up at her.
“Gracey,” he said, “Michael Jordan is the best basketball player ever.”
In 2015, the fishing tournament ended. The mighty Havlicek was privately sick and slipping fast. Beth Havlicek called Bob Cousy.
“We’ve decided to tell some close friends,” she said. “It’s Parkinson’s.”
Auerbach was gone. Dennis Johnson had dropped dead after a practice with a minor league team he was coaching, dying in a Texas convention center far from the glory of the Garden. K.C. Jones suffered from Alzheimer’s and his family mostly kept him isolated. Russell called him around this time and Jones’ wife would not let him speak to K.C. That really upset Bill, who told Celtics great Dave Cowens about the exchange, “I just wanted to talk to my friend.”
Bill Sharman was gone. Willie Naulls and Frank Ramsey died in 2018. Satch Sanders moved into an assisted living facility with his wife Gin around then. They tried to make the apartment feel like their home, hanging art and bringing their doormat that said GO AWAY from their house. Inside, they hung photographs of Satch as a young man, in black and white, a joyful look on his face.
THE THIRD QUARTER
ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON in January, I met Brad Stevens at his office, two months into the Celtics’ back-to-back quest. The quest was a palpable thing in the building. Stevens is relaxed in the Auerbach Center. He told me that one of the most important parts of his job is to make the court downstairs into a sanctuary. There’s a lot of noise in Boston. The antidote to the “responsibility and pressure that comes with being a Celtic,” he has learned, is to keep the players connected to the feeling they had playing as a kid. They fight the past with the past. Stevens says being great here requires maintaining a connection to the version of yourself that first loved the game. “We have to protect that,” he said. “So when Jayson Tatum comes in here, he’s not Jayson Tatum, Superhero. He’s Deuce’s dad.”
We sat down at the end of a conference table. They’d lost the night before, blowing a comfortable lead, the team’s 11th loss of the young season. Last year’s team only lost 18 games. The weight of the title defense sat heavy. Stevens and head coach Joe Mazzulla wondered if they had to raise a banner and give out rings before the opening game. As the crowd celebrated the ritual of another championship, Brad and Joe looked at the players’ body language with anxiety. Mazzulla especially hated any acknowledgment that last year ever happened. Stevens and I talked about the team, and the season, and about the way the team’s history is part of both.
“I’ll tell you a story about that,” he said.
It was April 2019. Stevens, still the head coach, had led the Celtics to a 4-0 sweep of the Pacers. They faced Milwaukee in the second round, but before the series began, word came of Havlicek’s death at his home in Florida. The old Celtics gathered at the storied Trinity Church on Copley Square. Stevens sat in a pew and watched as one Hall of Famer after another came through the doors of the church. He can still feel the emotion rising as he remembers watching the team gather, maybe for the last time.
“All these guys limped down the aisle,” he said. “Satch Sanders. Bill Russell. Tommy Heinsohn.”
Bob Cousy hobbled to the altar to give the third of seven eulogies. He thought about that lone fan’s voice all those decades ago on St. Patrick’s Day when he said goodbye.
“We love ya, John,” he said.
Russell sat regally in the front row, hunched over and fragile, leaning on Jeannine. She’d had to help him down the center aisle. Cousy went over to see him. They shook hands.
All the greats were there. These men traded glances and nods. “The thing that jumps out was how easily they could all connect — about everything and anything — as though they hadn’t spent any time apart,” Jeannine Russell said. “That’s how well they knew each other.”
Havlicek’s death felt different somehow than the others, like more than one man had been lost. It was clear to Stevens that these men didn’t have long. They were saying goodbye to a teammate but also to a part of themselves.
“What mattered is they were in the room,” Stevens said. “His grandkids are all here and his teammates are all here and that’s what it’s all about.”
At a few different points during the service, the priest or lay reader requested the congregation to stand. Russell refused to keep his seat and struggled mightily to pull himself upright. Pride still won the day.
Chris Havlicek gave one of the eulogies, and he described to me how hard he worked on it. This was over five years ago, but still raw. His voice gave him away.
“I’m getting emotional now,” he said.
He talked about the four quarters of life.
Looking out at the crowd, at these old and towering men, Chris Havlicek cried. Something about them together, the sum greater than the parts, and knowing what effort it took. Afterwards, the family and the Celtics gathered for a reception in the basement of Trinity. Chris walked in and saw all three of his children and his sister’s four boys sitting at a table. Seven little blond kids, he said, crowded around someone, all of them locked in, which never happens with young kids. And who had their attention, making them smile on the worst day of their young lives?
Bill Russell was entertaining them with magic tricks.
“I’ll tell you the truth about it,” Chris Havlicek texted me one afternoon. “In the hum and confusion and planning of the funeral, there was a moment of innocence and connection that was authentic and heartfelt. I think both the kids and Mr. Russell felt it, and it was pure and real. It was his way of connecting with my dad and their way of connecting with their grandfather one last time.”
THE HEART AND SOUL of the Celtics community is an Excel Spreadsheet file called “Celtics Alumni List.” It’s saved on public relations man Jeff Twiss’ computer. Twiss is the last remaining Celtics employee hired by Red Auerbach. He is the one who keeps Red’s daughters, Randy and Nancy, informed about illnesses and deaths, so they can make condolence calls or write letters on behalf of their family.
The list is just what it sounds like, a roster of everyone who ever played for the team, their contact and family information, along with “associated” people, which can be anyone from Karen Russell to Red Auerbach’s urologist. Twiss carefully tends the information and whenever a player dies, he cuts and pastes them to a separate list at the bottom of the file. In the C column, it says “we remember.” Then there are names and dates of death. Years ago, all this information lived in filing cabinets full of manila folders. Jeff requested and received permission to organize it all. First, it sat in a three-ring binder, one page per player, Abdelnaby to Zeller, with names, addresses, wives’ names, children’s names, grandchildren’s names, along with any other notes. Now it’s all on the “Celtics Alumni List.”
“We’ve been the keeper of the flame,” he said.
Jo Jo White died the same year as Ramsay and Naulls. In 2020, Bob Bigelow, Jack Foley, John McCarthy and the great John Thompson died. Paul Westphal died in 2021, and the next year, Togo Palazzi, Paul Silas and Ron Watts died. A year later, Ernie Barrett, Bill Dinwiddie, Chris Ford, Brandon Hunter and Eric Montross died, and a year after that, Bill Walton died.
“We’ve had a lot of black armbands,” Twiss said. “It hit us all at once.”
Twiss orders the black bands from Cutting Edge Sports in suburban Boston and the team’s equipment managers attach them to the home and away uniforms. Fourteen different men have earned the honor of an arm band, seven between 1964 and 2017, and seven between 2018 and now. And, of course, not all Celtics deaths are created equal. Five deaths in three years rocked the franchise.
John Havlicek in 2019.
Tommy Heinsohn on Nov. 9, 2020. He was buried with Mary, who died 12 years before him. A tiny stone angel sits by the headstone.
K.C. Jones on Christmas Day, 2020, and Sam Jones on December 30, 2021. Seven months later, Bill Russell died. Red Auerbach’s daughter is the one who had to call Bill’s daughter and tell her the news.
“There are no words,” Randy said to Karen.
The White House lowered its flag to half-staff out of respect for Russell. In Boston before the next Celtics game, Jaylen Brown eulogized him to the crowd, explaining how for Black people, Russell epitomized a “type of nobility and honor.”
“I’m grateful to be able to shake his hand,” he said.
The poet laureate of Boston, Porsha Olayiwola, composed a poem for the occasion.
“Basketball, like Black life, is about the swivel.”
“The pivot.”
“The turn. The build of the risk. A balance between art and war, a measure of the body’s will, and legend has it no player hooped like Bill Russell, lord of the rings. He was a race man, a march man, a Martin Medgar Muhammad Man.”
The Garden swayed, reverent and quiet.
“We see you…
We see you…
We see you.”
“Bill Russell was a great man,” Brown said.
A video montage showed Russell and Cousy raising the 1961 banner, their fourth.
“You gotta believe that anything is possible,” Aloe Blacc sang at center court.
“The story goes,” Olayiwola intoned, “he has more rings than fingers.”
SATCH SWITCHES on the music channel.
Duke Ellington is playing “Rocks in My Bed.”
Satch turns it up. There’s a plaque on a bookshelf, tucked in low beneath the window, with a bowtie on it. He worked for the NBA for 18 years, and a photograph on the wall shows him in one of those bowties, dapper in a double-breasted suit. Ginnie looks young and glamorous on his arm.
A memory sparks.
He jumps up, as best as he can these days, and rushes into the next room, coming back with a flyer. It’s for the jazz and supper club he owned in Boston in the late ’70s and early ’80s — advertising his Big Band show.
“I had a 16-piece orchestra come in for about three weekends,” he says, “but I couldn’t get the clientele to go for it. I was trying to enforce a dress code.”
He wanted to live nearby in the Back Bay, but no Boston real estate agent would sell him a place. There was always some new excuse. This was at the height of his fame and success with the Celtics.
Elvis sings, “Viva Las Vegas.”
Barbra Streisand sings about pretty dreams.
“This woman was really special,” he says.
He flips to jazz and blues.
He flips again, and Sinatra sends him down another alley of his past. “I remember going to a concert at the Apollo and seeing Jackie Wilson and The Coasters and The Harptones,” he says.
The Spencer Davis Group erupts with energy and a heavy bass riff. In his mind, he can feel the fast break: Russell grabs a defensive board, looks immediately to Cousy for the outlet.
“This was all during the times when the other groups were trying to be like the Beatles,” he says.
The night the Beatles went on Ed Sullivan for the first time, in front of 73 million Americans, Sanders and the defending champion Celtics beat the 76ers.
Satch scored 18. Russell scored 24, Heinsohn 25 and Sam Jones 27, always lethally balanced. Havlicek added 15. That was the team’s first season without Cousy. They’d go on to repeat as champions.
There’s a collection of small statues on a low-slung bookshelf against the far wall. It’s that 1964 team. Sanders stands up and leans over to study the tiny, little painted men. He calls out the names of his friends.
“Auerbach … Sam Jones … I’m No. 16 … 6 is Russell … Then it’s Heinsohn, Havlicek and K.C. Jones.”
We sit without talking for a while, listening to the rise and fall of horns, the music of fog and smoke, of long rural distances between the well and the trough. Sumter, South Carolina and Harlem, the plantation and the crane his father swung out over the streets of Manhattan.
The music sounds like the bands who’d play across the street from the Lenox Hotel in Boston. He and Russell would get beers and talk about basketball. Russell believed the Celtics should never lose a game and his theory revolved around defensive rebounds. No second shots. Ever.
“He said if you control that, you’ll win every game,” Sanders says. “That’s how he played. He went after defensive boards. Serious boards. And chased people down on defense. Because that’s the way you win every single game.”
Benny Goodman comes on, and Satch remembers the radio in his parents’ apartment in Harlem. Only one or two stations played Black singers. Both his parents came from Sumter County. All of his great-grandparents were enslaved. His people likely came off the Thomas O. Sanders plantation, and if so, the name he carried out on that parquet court when they ruled the game of basketball in Boston, Massachusetts, came from an enslaver in South Carolina. Another long-dormant memory returns to him just then. When he was around 13, his parents drove him down to visit his grandfather, who still lived in almost the same spot where his father had been enslaved. Some cops stopped them. New York plates, Satch explains.
The troopers called his father, a proud, hard-working man, “Boy.”
Satch didn’t understand.
“Why are they calling you boy?” he asked. “You’re older than they are.”
Sanders looks at me.
“He would just sit there holding the wheel, squeezing it, maintaining control,” he says.
We sit and listen to the music. He leans back into his chair, green Sharpies and his medicine on the table to his left. He can’t remember the sound of his mother’s or his father’s voice.
“There’s nothing left of them,” he says. “Except all of me.”
THREE HOURS AFTER leaving Satch Sanders’ retirement home, I walked into the HBO premiere. The director of “Celtics City,” Lauren Stowell, welcomed the crowd to the party.
“To the Boston Celtics family, past and present,” she began, and then saw a familiar face sitting in the back.
“Hello, Jayson Tatum!” she blurted.
People cheered. The fifth episode of the HBO series, screened in Liberty Hall, told the story of the Celtics from Larry Bird’s arrival in 1979 to Len Bias’ death in 1986.
People grabbed their popcorn, maybe a drink or a glass of wine, and found a seat. These were the Bird years — the bridge from the dynasty of the past to the modern NBA. Bird has been on Tatum’s mind lately. In Philadelphia last night, he sat down with Boston Globe columnist Tara Sullivan and told her he wanted to be one of the all-time greats. The headline declared he was chasing another title and Larry Bird’s legend.
“And then, obviously, once you win a championship, it’s like, all right, you can be in those rooms with the Celtics legends,” he told Sullivan. “But it doesn’t just stop at one. You obviously have to win multiple, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
Now, he found himself sitting in this theater watching an episode centered around Bird. It’s strange to see someone see their future.
Cedric Maxwell sat behind me at a table and watched himself be traded, and then heard his former teammates laud the arrival of Bill Walton in his place as a narrative-changing roster move that gave the famous 1985-86 Celtics team their mojo. His departure fueled the greatest team in Celtics history — a message that must have stung. He’d only mumble a response afterwards when I tried to talk to him about the episode.
The episode makes clear the Celtics were talented enough to win four in a row: 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1987. Instead, they won two, and the second, in ’86, came against the Rockets and not the Lakers, the film noted with regret. I wondered, watching the episode, how much the myth of Cousy and Russell crowd out the legends who’d follow them, complicated their lives and legacies, from Bird to Tatum.
The film sees the 80s Celtics with clear eyes, clocks the greatness achieved and the greatness that slipped through their fingers. The what-might-have-been of it all. Without the flattering light of mystique, the Bird-era Celtics were essentially a better version of the Hakeem-era Rockets. They won three titles but should have won five or six and the reason, almost never spoken aloud, is that they faltered in ways that Russell never would have allowed his team to falter.
Bird wanted to be Russell — worked to be Russell — and in the end ran into one of the most difficult truths for any basketball star to accept. There is only one Russell. Michael Jordan and Bob Cousy both have six rings. Russell has 11. The Bird teams are Gods. The Russell teams are Titans. Bird, McHale, Parish, they don’t come around much. They’re in poor health, or have their own lives, or have made enough to not need to stay in Boston to monetize their local fame. But maybe, it occurred to me watching the episode, there’s another reason. Maybe they don’t come back because they can sense the unbridgeable gap between themselves and the men who came before.
“In Boston,” Bird said once, “they always talk about how many championships you won.”
HISTORY IS FOREVER sneaking up on you in Boston. Two days after the premiere, on a Saturday morning with a few hours to kill before practice started at the Auerbach Center, I bundled against the cold and went to eat a warming bowl of lobster bisque. It was 25 degrees without accounting for the ferocious wind whipping off the harbor. Brass fittings on the replica colonial ships pinged and hemp ropes creaked in their blocks. A guy with a leaf blower melted the ice around a cheerful, bright red statue of a lobster.
After eating, I went for a walk. Before long, I heard loud house music coming from somewhere in the distance. I followed the noise. It got louder and louder until the bass rattled nearby office windows. Signs all around detailed the steps of the Freedom Trail. A narrow street led to the source of the music, a Red Bull tent on the public square outside the brutalist (and much maligned) Boston City Hall, concrete and menacing, all hard edges and sharp shoulders. Workers rolled kegs into a beer garden. There was a snowboarding event scheduled for this afternoon in downtown Boston.
To the right, a statue caught my eye.
A bronze Bill Russell held a bronze basketball, eyes up and searching for a teammate down a court only he can see. Two bronze children look at him in awe. A series of marble boxes, called plinths, carry quotes and messages. Learning, he is telling the children, is a daily experience and a lifetime mission, and craftsmanship is a way into what’s best in yourself. Russell’s voice, preserved in marble and stone, gives simple one-word commands: Rebounding, Listening, Community, Friendship. I thought about Cousy sitting up in his enormous empty living room, watching basketball in his recliner, having two Beefeaters on the rocks every Thursday night. The intersection of this season’s storylines — the team is for sale and too expensive to keep together for much longer, the lifeforce that animates its history is ebbing — feels like an old knot of past, present and future.
Russell didn’t want a monument in Boston. He told the sculptor that he didn’t really want pigeons to s— on his head. The only way he’d agree is if the city made it about mentoring children. Ann Hirsch, the sculptor, flew out to Mercer Island to have lunch with Russell and his daughter Karen. She went down into his living room and unveiled a model of the monument. Russell scolded her for not having the form or the grip right for a chest pass and decided to demonstrate. They dug up a basketball. He set his daughter up a few stairs in the dining area and joked that she might want to take her glasses off. Then he launched a perfect pass. Lunch turned into nine hours. Karen’s Harvard law degree seemed to mean more to him than his 11 rings. They laughed and he told stories. He talked a lot about his grandfather in rural Louisiana. His great-grandfather, named Jeff Davis Russell according to census records, had been born enslaved, in the last months of the Civil War.
Russell told her he’d been cut from his high school basketball team, the first of a long string of fueling slights. He’d been the mascot. Bill Russell was his high school basketball team’s mascot! It seemed to Ann that Russell had a fraught relationship with his own mythology. I wondered if that’s why Russell didn’t want a statue. Once the last people who knew him are gone, he will no longer exert any agency over how he is remembered or what belief system is built around that memory.
I looked at Russell’s bronze eyes and followed his line of sight. The imaginary teammate down the imaginary court was actually the Boston City Hall itself. Russell moved as far away from Boston as an American can move in the lower 48, but he left a part of himself behind, like a rear guard. He nursed grudges, rewarded loyalties, bristled over slights, and yet remained hopeful for his former home. It’s as if the artist wanted Bill to be a moral watchdog for the city.
Before I left for practice, I stood in the cold plaza and studied Russell’s face, frozen in his prime. His bronze goatee was neatly trimmed. The Old City Hall, a beautiful French Second Empire palace, closed in 1969, the year of the last back-to-back titles and Russell’s last game.
There’s a reason he gave Cousy a clock.
THE FOURTH QUARTER
ON A SUNDAY IN FEBRUARY, the New York Knicks came to the TD Garden to play the Celtics. Walking into the arena, I immediately saw a man wearing Bill Russell’s No. 6. These games are rituals, held beneath the banners that hang like monastery tapestries. I emailed Bill Simmons about the deep nostalgia on display. “Going to games in the old Garden, we’d always go nuts when the retired guys showed up,” he wrote back. “One night it’s Jo Jo, next game Russell, next game Cousy, next game Hondo — huge ovation every time. Plus, Tommy and Red were always there. No other sports franchise had its history come to life night to night like that. And Red was like the beloved grandfather who owned a killer beach house that everyone came to visit. Then in the 90s when the team stunk; we turned into a Paulie Walnuts Remember When franchise — they’d come up with any excuse to celebrate anniversary or retire a number just so everyone could come back and we could cheer and remember when we didn’t suck. But now all those guys are gone — it’s basically Cousy and Satch and the banners.”
In the hour before tip-off, I sat on press row and read the Globe sports page. Sullivan’s interview with Tatum about Larry Bird ran down the left side and stripped across the top was a Shaughnessy column from Red Sox spring training. Down on the court, Al Horford took some pregame shots with his son, Ean, feeding him the ball. It was Ean’s birthday, and his dad’s coworkers were making him feel like a boy king. Tatum scribbled autographs as he fought his way to the tunnel, which leads to the locker room and the family day care, already swarming with children. Toddlers scrambled to hug their really tall dads in the hallway. Moms looked grateful for the help. Out in the lower bowl, fans were running and ignoring scolding ushers to try and get in the Tatum autograph scrum. A grown man got a jersey signed and held it aloft like “The Lion King.”
The Celtics dominated the Knicks in the first half.
I texted with a longtime NBA executive, a man with multiple titles, and he said that the Celtics were set up for a history-making run, if they got a little luck and threaded the needle on the league’s financial rules. He wrote: “Are they a ten-year multiple championship team? Five titles? Three other appearances?” he wrote. “We will see. Their window is wide open for a great run.”
THE GUY SITTING next to me, Jared Weiss, was a native Bostonian who covers the team for The Athletic. The Celtics beat is a grizzly tour of duty for some and a masochistic obsession for others. The older beat guys seem permanently irritated by the bloggers who are fans with pens, and there’s a younger generation of reporters who grew up at the intersection of the MIT Sloan Conference and Woj Bombs. Weiss falls into that last category. He patiently explained the new Collective Bargaining Agreement to me. It is designed to prevent dynasties, through luxury taxes and an escalating system of penalties for teams who overspend. The most aggressive deterrent is called the Second Apron, which imposes a suite of future-killing mechanisms when a team goes above what this year is the $189 million threshold. The Celtics’ current cap number is $192 million. They can either trade their future to go for multiple titles right now or else slip back below the Second Apron and rebuild for another run.
If this team does not win a title, then the rebuilding will almost certainly start. In 2013, the team traded beloved stars Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. The draft picks they got in return eventually became Tatum and Brown. The Celtics’ most fallow period occurred, many believe, because the team hung onto Bird and company too long instead of salvaging value and starting anew. Abandoning the past is what purchases the future in pro basketball. That presents a particular problem for Boston, a team rooted in its own dynastic sense of self. The league’s history is not rooted in parity. The NBA has 30 teams and has played 78 seasons.
The Lakers and Celtics have won 45 percent of those championships. Five franchises (Lakers, Celtics, Warriors, Bulls and Spurs) have won 53 titles. Ten of the 30 teams have never won a title at all. A system that discourages dynasties strips the Celtics of their inherited power, actively prevents the back-to-back (and beyond) runs that define greatness in Boston. That might be best for the business of basketball, but myth and history are sacrificed in the exchange. The modern game was built on Magic versus Bird, and Michael Jordan — and their three dynastic teams — and yet, for some reason, a great team, one that wins multiple titles and in doing so grasps immortality, has been declared the enemy of the modern game.
THE CELTICS COLLAPSED in the third quarter.
They’d led by 27 points and then lost focus, jacked up threes and the Knicks fought all the way back to four points. This time, the Celtics held. Kristaps Porzingis corralled an alley-hoop pass and dunked it on an inbounds play from the baseline to get the lead back to ten. On the next possession, the Knicks missed a dunk and Jaylen Brown grabbed the rebound and the lead was 12 again, then back to 20. The Celtics won, going 3-0 against the Knicks for the season, and the glow of another blowout win hid all the warnings about what was to come.
Down the hall, the locker room smelled like liniment. Birthday balloons floated near the ceiling; the team, which is a kind of family, had celebrated Ean Horford. There was a Kevin Garnett quote on the locker room wall about wanting to be remembered as the best teammate and enlarged newspaper pages from the past six decades. Long-dead beat writers describe Bill Russell dunking Red Auerbach in the shower after a championship — “This is it, baby!” Red screamed — and a story from 2008 about the first banner in 22 years. Mazzulla went to an interview room somewhere in the bowels of the Garden and talked in this strange monotone, obviously a highly functioning crazy person, except for the nuanced way he talked about the fault lines in a game, where and how a run starts, and ends. He said expectations can crush a man and that he doesn’t like to operate on feelings. Down the hall in the locker room, Porzingis took questions from the beat scrum. The guys around him showered and dressed. They’d been winning games easily, games that didn’t really matter in Boston, where a championship is just the starting line for the real quest.
“We know the most important part for us is coming,” Porzingis said.
FORTY-SEVEN MILES to the west, Bob Cousy lives alone. His wife of 63 years, Missie, died 11 years ago; she spent the end of her life suffering from dementia. Bob, who felt guilty about the dreams she sacrificed to help him reach his, tried to protect her from the pain and confusion of her decline. Missie loved her garden, but would forget to plant it. Bob and his daughters put in perennials for her. He made sure to ship her car south to their place in West Palm Beach so she’d think she drove. They watched General Hospital together every weekday. Twice a week, they went on movie dates. Sometimes he’d go outside, safely out of her earshot, and just scream. Then he’d come back inside and make her half a sandwich and a bowl of soup.
Bob whispered to her, cheek touching cheek, at the end. He still cries when he finds himself missing her, shuffling alone around their enormous house, using a cane and later a wheelchair. He lives in fear a lot. His panic attacks have returned. Her 1996 Mercury Sable remains in their garage. He keeps a crucifix above his bed and regularly goes to church, though he says he doesn’t really believe in God, just to feel closer to her. When he wakes up in the morning, he goes to his dresser and talks to the Mass card from her funeral.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” he says. “I love you.”
I spoke to him not long ago on the phone.
He launched into a story about the Celtics drafting the first Black player in NBA history, Chuck Cooper, in 1950.
“I roomed with Chuck that year,” he told me. “He and I bonded. We both loved slow, quiet jazz.”
They’d walk across the street from the Lenox Hotel to a club called Storyville, owned by George Wein. The promoter would bring in Erroll Garner and Cousy and Cooper would sit there in the dark. Famous men love dark rooms. They get to watch and listen instead of being seen and heard. One night on the road in North Carolina, the team hotel wouldn’t let Cooper stay with the rest of the players, so Cousy volunteered to take an all-night sleeper back to Boston, with a connection in New York. They got to the station a few hours before the midnight train and drank some beers and then both of them — “even at that age,” Cousy cracked — needed to find the bathroom. They got up and ended up standing side by side, staring at two doors for the two men’s rooms. One said “white” and the other said “colored.” Cousy flushed with shame. Neither man knew what to say.
Cousy looked around.
“Chuck, come on,” he said.
They walked out on the train platform and then walked down to the end. They stood side by side and peed off the edge.
He says that with the benefit of time, he’s most proud of being a part of the Celtics’ record on justice and civil rights. Games are just games. Winners care about more than the wins; they care how they won, and why. He’s no longer too busy being Bob Cousy to see his fellow human beings.
This started 25 years ago when he was interviewed for a documentary about Russell. He said he could have done more to “ease his pain,” and then he just completely dissolved into tears, putting his hands over his face. Not long after, Russell saw Cousy eating alone before a round of golf at some celebrity event. Russell went over to him, hugged him and sat down. He’d seen the interview. Cousy had so many things he wanted to say and couldn’t find the words. Russell told him there was nothing else Cousy could, or should, have done, and now Cousy thinks Russell was being classy, being kind, trying to help his teammate.
He read a lot. He loved “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead, “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson, Condoleezza Rice’s “Democracy” and “Angle of Repose” by Wallace Stegner. But the book that moved him the most was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me.” Cousy felt for the first time that he was to blame for the distance between himself and Russell. He should have risked more, been more outspoken. When a restaurant in Kentucky wouldn’t serve Russell, Sanders, or K.C. and Sam Jones, the Celtics’ Black players went home. Cousy played. Now he wishes he could change history and board that plane with his brothers. He failed as their captain.
What he wants most of all in his 97th year is to make amends and be forgiven.
“He wanted to go back in time,” Pomerantz said. “He wanted to march with King. He wanted to stand by Russell.”
Cousy thinks he could have stopped the worst of Boston’s treatment of Russell.
“If I were Black,” he told Pomerantz, “I would have been a bomb thrower.”
He sat for more than 50 interviews with Pomerantz for a book about his relationship with Russell. He dug through his own past and took responsibility for his failures in those interviews. He tore down the façade of his own myth by asking in public the questions he was asking of himself in private.
He wrote Russell a letter. A page and a half trying to fix sixty years of tension and missed chances. He took all the blame for their difficult relationship and told Russell that healing this wound sat at the top of the things he needed to do before he died. He said how sorry he was that Russell’s son, Buddha, had died not long before. Then he signed his name, double-checked the address with Jeff Twiss’ list, and put it in the mail, along with a copy of “Between the World and Me.”
Nearly three years later, Cousy’s phone finally rang.
“It’s Bill Russell,” the voice on the other end said.
Russell didn’t speak much.
Cousy filled the silence with chatter about their mutual friends and all the health problems they were fighting.
Finally, Bob asked Bill if he had received the letter.
Yes, Russell said he had. Then he was quiet.
Cousy listened, not sure of what to say, of whether to ask anything more. A few moments later, they said goodbye. It was their last conversation.
I asked Jeannine Russell about the letter. Had it moved Bill? Did it make a difference? Did it heal something in the end?
“I was there when he opened the letter,” she told me, acknowledging but not quite answering.
And then: “They were very complex relationships. Bill did carry a lot of the burdens of the team. Some teammates supported him and some didn’t, and that’s all I wanna say about that.”
ON MARCH 20, Wyc Grousbeck announced he’d sold his majority share in the team that animated his boyhood dreams, contingent on financing and league approval. Eleven days later, Jayson Tatum walked down the hall of the Westin hotel in Memphis. Only two weeks remained in the season. This was a complicated day for him; he grew up four hours to the north in St. Louis — there was a little towheaded kid downstairs wearing a Chaminade high hoodie, his alma mater — and he played for an AAU team based in Memphis. Twice a week, his parents would drive him the four hours south, and the four hours back north, so he’d have the best opportunity. Back in Memphis, Tatum had to purchase a lot of tickets for friends and family.
“Forty-five,” he told me.
He laughed.
I sort of involuntarily cursed in astonishment.
“Forty-five!” he said again as we sat down in an empty conference room on the second floor. He was in a good mood. The team had been on the road for 12 days and had won every game; they also got four days in the sun in Phoenix, which everyone was still buzzing about. The Celtics were 9-1 in the last ten games, just 4.5 games out of first place in the East. They were peaking at the perfect time, on an eight-game winning streak headed into that night’s match-up against the Grizzlies at the arena across the street. The hall of the second floor — totally taken over as Celtics base camp, complete with a fancy espresso machine that no doubt lives in one of those rock-n-roll road cases, which will be loaded tonight beneath the big charter jet — smelled like buffet line salmon. He has a Big Deuce tattoo in the crook of his left hand. There was a turquoise forward rug beneath his feet.
The rugs change, but the schedule and buffet never do, city fading into city into city. He seemed comfortable in the traveling circus, as Russell and Cousy were once comfortable playing cards in the back of their plane. The walls hadn’t started to close in on Tatum. There were 42 days until he’d collapse on the court at Madison Square Garden. The nightmares hadn’t come for him. He knows all about Russell and Cousy’s careers, and about Larry Bird’s career, but he’s too young to know what it took from them. What we ask from men like Tatum isn’t fair — to insist that the old lions must matter to them, even as they compete against their memories.
Russell spoke so clearly once about the toxic influence of Cousy’s ghost. Nothing about past dynasties helps future dynasties. Cousy and Russ handed a boulder to Hondo and Jo Jo, who added weight and handed it to Bird and McHale, who added weight and handed it to Pierce and KG, who added weight and handed it to Tatum and Brown. The vocabulary of sediment applies here, a basketball lithification, subsuming mighty individuals into an alluvial collective. Basic physics tells us that continuing to add to something, even if just a tiny layer at a time, will one day bring the whole monument tumbling down under its own weight. The greatest threat to the Celtics’ tradition might be the Celtics’ tradition itself.
Sitting in his hotel, Tatum told me he met Russell once.
It was at the All-Star game in 2020. Jayson saw the old legend and knew who he was and found the courage to shake his hand. (Tatum wanted to meet Ben Affleck once and chickened out.) Russell sat with his wife and his hearing wasn’t great and the two Celtics legends shook hands. The whole interaction was over before it began.
“I got to shake his hand,” Tatum said, with what felt like real respect. “He came to quite a few games while he was still alive.”
To Tatum, the gold standard remains Larry Bird. Last year at the All-Star game, Tatum had caught wind that Bird would be in the building. He went and found Celtics PR wiz Taylor Kielpinski-Rogers and told her to be ready to take a picture.
“And I remember telling her, like, yo, like I really want to meet him,” Tatum said.
Kielpinski-Rogers was sitting with us in the Westin meeting room. She laughed.
“I actually took the picture,” she told me.
“It was during layup lines right before the National Anthem,” Tatum said.
“I was, like, shaking,” she said. “I’m not even kidding.”
“And I remember she came and grabbed me,” he said, “and he was standing next to the bench. She walked me over there and I shook his hand and, you know, told him how much of an honor it was to meet him, that I was a really big fan.”
Bird greeted respect with respect. He told the younger man he was a big fan of his, too, from afar. Bird uniquely understands intimate details of Tatum’s life, even things that Tatum might not yet know himself. Bird once climbed to the top of the mountain, three times in fact, only to stand on a summit and still find himself looking up at the faces written in the clouds and on the sky. He’s lived this life. Collected the scars.
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” Bird told him.
“Being a Celtic for eight years and understanding the history of this organization and the importance of it and the players that came before me,” Tatum said, “and, you know, understanding the pinnacle.”
Then, at the ring ceremony this year, he finally met Bob Cousy.
Tatum only really knew the legend, such a large one in his place of work that for some reason, Cousy didn’t seem real, at least until they met, and even then, he interacted with the legend like a tourist passing through a museum.
“Black and white television,” Tatum said with a chuckle. “Bob Cousy.”
Tatum understands the importance of these cross-generational connections, even if he’s still too young to know why. He’s sat at the feet of Cedric Maxwell from the Bird teams, and both KG and Paul Pierce. Pierce has, in the past several years, become a real mentor to Tatum, a fellow traveler who can be there for support.
“Passing the torch or sharing that moment with us as we received our rings,” Tatum said, “that was an honor. That was a really cool moment.”
We sat in this room, about six hours before tip-off, a few hours before he’d get into the ritual of his game day routine, and he described how he’s come to think about time, how he experiences it both in the moment under the lights and in the distant future.
“I feel like the next phase,” Tatum said, “the next however many years: What do we do as a team? How much more we win or don’t win. I think all of those things are now building a case. Where do you want to be placed? I’m in the mode, or that space of my life, where what I do now is going to leave a mark or put me in the conversation.”
He understands the banners in the ceiling — and the fragile existence of Satch Sanders and Bob Cousy, and the memories they alone preserve — are a load-bearing part of why their team is so good right now. And why it might fail.
“There’s so many expectations with the Celtics,” he said. “I think it’s very beneficial from the standpoint of there is an expectation to win every year. That’s the way we prepare. That’s the mindset that we have.”
He’s in the game now. That’s all an athlete can ever want. A shot to be among the best ever. Championships will answer that question.
I walked Tatum to lunch and then headed downstairs.
All morning, the lobby had been lined with fans, most wearing Tatum jerseys. Kristaps Porzingis walked through, and a fan yelled, “Hi, Porzingis!”
Porzingis turned and waved in a corny, endearing way.
I walked out of the hotel, leaving Tatum to sort out his 45 tickets.
BACK IN BOSTON, Sam Cassell came over and sat by me on the side of an Auerbach Center court. I couldn’t even get out my first question, asking whether any of the other seven NBA teams for which he played and the other three for which he’s coached have the same sense of community as the Celtics.
“F— no!” he exclaimed.
The Auerbach Center gym hummed with the familiar soundtrack of a basketball team. Sneakers barked and squeaked with cuts and sprints, the hypnotic chaos of the bouncing leather balls on the faux parquet floor, the utilitarian chatter of transition and post-play, calling for help, calling for the ball, with that ethereal undertow of s— talking and inside joke laughter. If football practices carry a menacing energy, a basketball practice can feel like a playroom for overgrown children, or rather, adults who have managed to protect a little bit of their inner sacred child. It’s no wonder that people who taste this feeling fight for the rest of their lives to keep it and mourn its departure when it finally slips from their grasp.
That’s a big part of why Cousy cried during his retirement ceremony. Cassell’s face was full of this exact joy and longing.
He joined the juggernaut 2008 Celtics in March of that year, bringing his hustle and locker room chemistry to a team anchored by Cassell’s former teammates Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, both acquired by Boston in a 33-day burst of front office activity before the season.
Cassell got to Boston and not long after, he found himself walking down a hallway when a loud baritone voice stopped him cold.
“Hey, old man!” the voice boomed.
Cassell turned to find himself face to face with Bill Russell. In the Garden. Like encountering Jesus in the Gethsemane or Elvis in Memphis or something. This was not the first time they’d met. Cassell came into the league the year the Rockets won their first NBA title; in the victorious locker room afterwards, he got his welcome to the pros moment when he saw Hakeem Olajuwon and Kenny Smith weeping. The next year, before a game, he saw Hakeem talking to Bill F—— Russell. Sam couldn’t believe it.
“I met Mr. Russell – I call him Mr. Russell – my second year in the NBA,” he told me. “I went up and introduced myself.”
He looked up at the legend.
“Mr. Russell,” he said with an outstretched hand. “Sam Cassel.”
Bill Russell looked back at him.
“Oh s—!” he said. “I know who you are. You made the big shot last year against the Knicks.”
The look of shock and pride on Sam’s face remained in the telling.
“I was dumbfounded,” he told me. “Fast forward 13 years later, I’m a member of Celtics and I see him: ‘Hey, old man!'”
Russell delivered a message to Sam. A promise and a warning. A gift and burden.
“Understand this one thing,” Russell told him, the words and the setting, in the inner sanctum of the team, adding up to something almost mystic. “Once you are part of a championship team here in Boston, you will always be a Celtic.”
Cassell was sitting next to me, in 2025, and with the gift and the weight of time and maturity, he testified that Russell’s promise came true. The 2008 Celtics are part of the myth. Cassell came off the bench with key minutes in the Finals in ’08. Against the hated Lakers, which absolutely matters. When they won game six and the title, he too cried in the locker room, side by side with a weeping Garnett. It was his last NBA game.
“To walk through this city as a champion,” he said, “people congratulate you. People still celebrate our championship in ’08, and I was the 9th man on the team.”
He turned and pointed to the banners hanging from the towering ceiling over a mezzanine looking out over the practice courts.
“That catwalk up there,” he said. “I’ve been part of the last two. That’s a helluva honor, man.”
Garnett was Cassell’s closest friend on that team, which gave him front row seats to Garnett’s friendship with the great Russell.
“Bill,” Sam started, before catching himself.
“Mr. Russell loved Kevin’s passion for the game of basketball,” he said.
After the Celtics beat the Lakers in ’08, Garnett rushed to find Russell and hug him, whispering thank you over and over in his ear.
“I got my own,” Garnett told him.
Cassell said Russell saw a lot of himself in Garnett. Once he pulled the younger star aside and got in his face.
“YOU’RE A CELTIC!” Russell told him, a verbal finger in the chest.
Three years ago, after the recent rush of deaths in the Celtics universe, Kevin Garnett dialed Cassell.
“Kevin Garnett called me,” he said, his voice quiet. “Kevin called me.”
He stayed quiet for a second. The Celtics culture might seem immortal or, at the very least, self-perpetuating. It’s not. It’s fragile, even, scaled for and by humans.
When Red Auerbach died, the owner of his cigar shop said the only reason Hoyo de Monterrey Governors with the green wrappers were still made was because of Red. I called his old shop this past week and they’re no longer available. A fragile future waits just over the horizon. How fragile? Fragile enough to consider whether the tradition really might die with Sanders and Cousy. To at least ask the question. I arrived in this subculture with this uninterrogated assumption that the Celtics had always and would always be a dynasty or a dynasty in the making. But that’s not true, not up close. There is a single Celtics dynasty, and then a handful of very good teams who evoked that vanished world but never rebuilt it. I watched this year’s team struggle in the first round and get exposed in the second by the Knicks, a matchup that was already causing consternation when I first arrived on the scene. The team blew two 20-point leads in the first two games, losing both at home. Everyone seemed shocked.
On some deep level, people expect this team to repeat because the template has been laid down, back in the days of Cousy and Russ. One title demands another. When Tatum says the legends mean a lot to him, he’s talking about a blessing and a curse. A championship in Boston is a ritual, a tradition. Traditions are repeated or they die. Bird fell short. KG and Pierce fell short. Now Tatum is close to falling short, too. These are three historically great teams by every conceivable metric. Except one.
Within the tribe, the Celtics’ history is a candle flame which must be guarded. If it goes out, it might be out forever. The fragility in the end is as culture-defining as the myth. You can see it in the poignant reaction from more modern legends, who are responding almost like antibodies fighting a dangerous infection. The guys from 2008 are showing up more and more.
“Rondo has been back,” Cassell said.
“Paul Pierce has been back.”
“Kevin Garnett been here last year.”
“All these guys are coming back. All they are doing is what they’re supposed to do. Because they learned from the Heinsohns, the Havliceks. Those guys were ALWAYS around.”
But as the poet said, basketball is also about the pivot. The sounds of bouncing balls and squeaking sneakers were dying down, with Jayson Tatum the last guy on the court, working on end-of-possession drills. Cassell sat on the sideline, which is where he belongs now, and he imagined what it would be like to be a Celtic forever, when he’s an old man. He was born the year the Celtics last repeated. In 2038, the 30th anniversary of 2008, he’ll be nearly 70.
“We’ll come back and we’ll get the same applause that Havlicek and Cousy got,” he said.
He sounded hopeful, defiant even, a window into both his bravado and the unspoken addendum … we hope …, as he gets up to go back to work.
“They never let the older players disappear,” he said again.
He repeated himself. An incantation.
“They never let the older players disappear here,” he says again.
AFTER THE CELTICS folded against the Knicks at home in games one and two of the Eastern semi-finals, Tatum publicly took responsibility for the losses. He said he needed to show up when it mattered most. In game three, the Celtics dominated. In game four, as the Knicks erased yet another Boston double-digit lead, Tatum lived up to his promise. Like Russell and Bird before him, he took over the game. It’s as if he remembered he’d done this before, as if he remembered they had done it before, but in the end that previous success was not enough on a Monday night in a Madison Square Garden echoing with chants and cheers. A dynasty isn’t preordained; it requires showing up night after night, the score always 0-0, something to prove. With just over three minutes left, he’d scored a game-high 42 points, and as the Knicks extended a lead, Tatum was trying to carry his team back.
Then, with 3:07 left, there was a loose ball.
Tatum pivoted to grab it and collapsed in a heap. Nobody touched him — real-life randomness that puts the lie to the power of a mythic past. A tradition in the end is a grasp in the dark, a secular prayer to make the unknown darkness a little less unknown, and in the arena where titles are won and lost, where dynasties are made or destroyed, there is only the bounce of the ball, the plant of the foot. The sudden pop of an Achilles begins as a series of unnoticed micro-tears. The decay can take anywhere from six months to three years, which means that this season was perhaps over before it began.
Tatum pinwheeled in circles in pain down at the top of the key while Knicks small forward OG Anunoby scooped the ball and took off on the break. His dunk put the game out of reach. The referees stopped play. Tatum covered his face with his hands, trainers leaning over him, almost like soldiers protecting a wounded comrade with their own bodies, and it seemed like he was sobbing. Tatum grabbed his right Achilles in agony. He lifted his left leg in the air and scissor-kicked it repeatedly into the ground. Courtside Knicks fans pointed in alarm. Tatum wept and pounded his head on the court. Around the league, reporters and executives texted and called each other. Was the end of this Celtics run? With Tatum out for possibly a whole season and the CBA pressures mounting, would management be forced to break the roster apart and start over sooner rather than later? If that happened, Boston, as it had done since 1969, would have to start again.
Trainers carried Tatum off while the Knicks stood, almost at attention, and applauded. Karl-Anthony Towns looked crestfallen. The medical staff got Tatum into a wheelchair, where, as Cousy had done before the first game of the season, he sat alone in the tunnel. A friend texted him immediately, telling him how Kobe Bryant had surgery the next day after tearing his Achilles, because operating before the swelling kicked in would save three months of rehab. Tatum normally responds immediately to anything about Kobe, but on Monday night, there was silence. Two paramedics in red shirts pushed the wheelchair through a tunnel. Tatum covered his eyes and wept.
A MEL TORMÈ song comes on the stereo. “Gin hated Mel Tormè,” Satch Sanders says with a laugh.
“And you know, in the end, you know when I was watching my wife dying … I kept thinking about how we laughed and commented … she didn’t like Mel Tormè.”
He leans back.
“Here she is dying, right in front of my eyes, she’s dying. And she took that last breath about 7:40 on the 23rd.”
S— … Gin has died, he thought.
“And she had. She was in the bed next to me.”
He called the nurse, who called the funeral home. The paperwork began. Gin’s picture went up in the blue room. He didn’t attend her burial two and a half days later. The funeral directors had asked if he’d like to say anything.
“What we had was personal,” he told them. “I don’t need to talk about it.”
A bit later, Satch shows me to the door, where a sign reminds him not to forget his wallet, phone and keys. We pass a beautiful painting of a drum major, almost parallel to the ground, leading the band. Satch’s blue cane taps lightly on the floor. I feel close to him, like he’s some kind of fortune teller, showing me what my next 40 years will look like, if I’m lucky, or unlucky, enough to outlive my time. Tucked into a picture frame are ticket stubs from Celtics games.
“Where do you keep your rings?” I ask him.
“I haven’t seen a ring,” he says, trying to remember. “I probably only have one left. I think my wife sold two.”
I must look surprised. Young men talk so much about the ring. He laughs.
“It’s jewelry,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “And I don’t wear jewelry.”
I smile.
“There are other things people might value,” he says. “What does it really mean?”
THE CELTICS LEFT Tatum in New York. Brad Stevens stayed behind with him to await surgery. Back at Madison Square Garden, the locker room was silent. Nobody lingered. The team boarded the plane less than an hour after the final horn and landed back in suburban Boston just before 1:30 a.m., the ride quiet but for the clipped cockpit radio chatter between the pilots and the tower requesting Runway 29. It was a somber limp home. Late Tuesday afternoon, the Celtics officially announced what everyone already knew: Tatum had torn his Achilles and undergone surgery. Fifteen minutes after the news broke, Satch Sanders called me.
He hadn’t heard yet.
“He tore his Achilles,” I told him.
The line went quiet.
“Well,” he said finally. “That’s all for that.”
His mind went to the rest of the team. That’s what he learned playing with Cooz and Russ. Warriors fought until the end. The city of Boston mourned its lost season, but to Satch Sanders, no season is lost until the last clock hits the last zero.
“Somebody’s got to step up,” he said. “The chance is here.”
The Celtics, their season and future in doubt, beat the Knicks by 25 in Game 5.
Jaylen Brown, who’d score 26 points in all, led the team in their hour of uncertainty. Derrick White, with 34, made big shot after big shot. Payton Prichard, who soaked his feet after the game in an ice-filled mop bucket, scored 17. Luke Kornet, whose wife is apparently an excellent baker, blocked seven shots and certainly earned himself a late-night snack. He’s a folk hero in Boston for the next 48 hours. Joe Mazzulla stalked the officials when they made mistakes, the crowd and the team feeding off his intensity. The Garden howled, 114 decibels, the sound of a chainsaw or a loud rock show. The first half ended in a tie, but in the third quarter, the Celtics took control. They refused to go meekly into the off-season.
Dan Shaughnessy sat next to me as I finished this story late at night in the Boston press room, and his column was about the team showing its strength and character, in the face of all the grim news and prognostications. It was the classic Boston sports page column, rooted not in the glory of a title but in a fight against overwhelming odds. The Celtics, led by Brown’s intensity, dove for loose balls and threw down basket-shaking dunks. A guy dressed as a leprechaun ran around the court during a timeout, waving an enormous flag that said, “Different Here.” The crowd sang “Seven Nation Army,” and the Garden felt like a bullring.
Boston pushed the lead to ten, then 12, then 14. The Knicks started barking at each other in frustration. Boston pushed the lead to 20 then 22 then 25. Mazzulla looked proud; a team can’t pick its tests, just how it responds to them. Midway through the fourth quarter, at the exact moment when the game finally felt won, that’s when the team cued up its hype video.
An ominous sound poured out of the Garden’s speakers, all low end, felt more than heard at first until it registered. It was the menacing drone of a bagpipe. The crowd noise accelerated as the video began.
The screen showed one man at first: Bill Russell.
Then it showed Cousy. Then Havlicek.
Then Russell’s team moved down a black and white court on a fast break, Satch Sanders and Heinsohn and Sam Jones moving in space, lethal. Then Paul Pierce, then Tatum and Brown. Bird whipped his towel, and McHale grinned, then Pierce and KG were once again in transition, as if no time had passed at all. The Jumbotron showed a fan wearing a green Celtics sweatshirt.
He pulled the shirt up and revealed a Bill Russell T-shirt.
The crowd roared in communion.
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