Cooz's Biggest Loss

Time waits for no man.  Sincere regrets.


http://www.providencejournal.com/sports/celtics/content/20130925-bill-reynolds-celtics-great-bob-cousy-suffers-his-greatest-loss.ece



WORCESTER, Mass. — The casket was in the Blessed Sacrament Church covered in white cloth.

It was the funeral service for Bob Cousy’s wife, Missie, one more reminder that time stands still for no one, not even for one of the most storied players in basketball’s long history.

Cousy, now 85, sat in the front row with his two daughters.

In back of him were former Celtic teammates John Havlicek and Jo Jo White. Also attending was Tommy Heinsohn, the same Tommy Heinsohn that used to ride from Worcester to Boston with Cousy way back in 1957, when Heinsohn was just a rookie. Back when Cousy was the most celebrated basketball player in the world, and the Celtics were on their way to winning their first NBA title.

“I knew Missie forever,” Heinsohn had said minutes earlier on the sidewalk outside the church.

Cousy knew her even longer than that.

He first met her while he was a freshman at Holy Cross, home for the holidays in St. Alban’s, Queens. He had met her at a party, asked her if she could write him because he was lonely at school.

I had gotten to know her about a dozen years ago when I was writing a book on Cousy. Every Tuesday, I would sit in the sun room of his Tudor home near Assumption College for a couple of hours, asking him questions about his life. It was the same house he always had lived in, even through his career with the Celtics, one of the reasons being that living in Worcester gave him an excuse not to have to make a lot of public appearances in Boston.

There was no mystery to this.

For all his fame, Cousy always has been the most private of people, as if he always carried the psychological scars of growing up an only child in a loveless home, with a slight speech impediment to boot.

His wife was the opposite, and in many ways served as his alter-ego.

They had married shortly after he graduated from Holy Cross, back when no one could have imagined the amazing basketball life he was going to have.

How amazing?

You have to be of a certain age to remember it, because he was done as a player 50 years ago. Nor are any of the greats of the past served well by grainy old newsreels of some bygone era.

But he had been profiled in The New Yorker, in addition to countless sports magazines, and by the time he was honored in the Boston Garden in March of 1963, he was the most famous basketball player on the planet, a name everyone knew.

He was called the “Babe Ruth of Basketball,” the most charismatic player of his era. And in the ’50s, before Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, he was the biggest name in the game, the first to throw no-look passes, dribble behind his back and do many of the things that later would become an integral part of the game. For years afterward he remained the prototype for every flashy guard that came along.

“In the history of my life I’ve never seen anything like this tribute to any athlete,” Red Auerbach said about Cousy being honored in the Garden that Sunday afternoon in 1963. “You talk about Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams. This was second to none.”
Much of that has been forgotten now, of course. Time is the ultimate enemy.

It was Missie Cousy who spent much of her wedding night in the Boston Garden, courtesy of a late-night scheduling change, her and the wedding party watching her new husband out on the Garden floor as the organist played “Here Comes the Bride.”

She was the one who essentially raised their two daughters, because that’s what you do when your husband is a professional athlete, then a coach, then a broadcaster, all things that so often send you on the road.

And she was the one who ran the house, the one who had to deal with their daughters when boys were afraid to call the house, because how can you call Bob Cousy’s house?

And it was Missie Cousy who helped her husband — if not exactly develop a social conscience, for he always had been very sensitive to his black teammates — see the larger world, the one outside the arena.

Maybe most of all, she was the one who gave him emotional balance in a world that dotes on famous athletes.
And for the last few years, while she suffered from health problems, he had all but become her caretaker, as if payback for all the years his career had ruled the family, the final scenes in a long-running love story.

And there he was Tuesday morning in Blessed Sacrament in this old city he first came to in the fall of 1946 and never really left. There was one of the greatest basketball players in the game’s history following his wife’s casket up the aisle of the church, the anguish all over his face, followed by three of his Celtics teammates from back when the amazing Celtics’ story was just beginning.



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