Arnold Auerbach, 1917-2006

RED AUERBACH was originally brought to Boston by the desperate owner of the losingest team in a dubious league. It was chance that brought him here, or at least the seizing of a chance. And hence the locals had no idea what they were getting when that brash and belligerent basketball coach from Brooklyn first showed up in the parochial environs of Boston. It took them a long time to understand how badly they needed him -- and not just for the nine championship banners he hoisted to the rafters of the old Boston Garden.

Auerbach brought to Boston, distilled in his street wise manner, qualities that were needed as much by this region as by the teams he molded. In his time, Auerbach was what glib politicians nowadays call an agent of change.

There were two rich veins of Depression-era Americana intertwined in the coach's make up. One was the fierce credo of the outer-borough sidewalks, which held that winning is not everything, it's the only thing. The other was something a Brooklyn guy didn't talk about and too many Boston folk back then could not understand. Sociologists for a while called it belief in the American melting pot.

In Auerbach, the two strands of this deep belief system came together so naturally they appeared indistinguishable.

The logic ran like this: If winning is the proper aim of one's working life, then only a fool would allow the color barrier that still disfigured American society in the 1950s to stand in the way of assembling the players best suited to cohere as a championship team. It didn't matter if they were white or black, but they had to be team players. They couldn't worry about individual achievements or personal statistics. They had to fit together. Some were chosen for their defensive skills, some as rebounders, others for their ability to run the floor or shoot from outside. But they all had to be selfless; they had to put the Celtics first.

The logical corollary of Auerbach's insistence on the primacy of teamwork was his putting into practice the American ideal of equal opportunity. So in his first year as coach of the Celtics he drafted Chuck Cooper from Duquesne, the first black player in the National Basketball Association. Auerbach was also the first coach to send a starting team of five black players onto the court. And when he was ready to retire from coaching after the 1965-66 season, nothing could be more natural to him than his choice of Bill Russell to succeed him, in the role of a player-coach.

There will never be a way of measuring what Auerbach taught the locals about the rewards of overcoming racial prejudice. The coach who smoked all those victory cigars had no more patience for the blinding effects of bigotry than he did for a referee who allowed himself to be caught out of position and failed to see a blatant foul.