Jewish Jocks: The Life of Red Auerbach

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/10/jewish_jocks_the_life_of_boston_celtics_legend_red_auerbach.html




The Coach Who Never Paid Retail


Red Auerbach (1917–2006), from Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame



By Steven Pinker|Posted
Friday, Oct. 26, 2012, at 8:00 AM ET


































Red Auerbach (Left) in 2000. Over the course of four decades,
Auerbach outsmarted the rest of the league in drafting, trading, and
signing players.

Photograph by John Mottern/AFP/Getty Images.

















This piece comes from Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy, and published this week by Twelve.












Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility
are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is
familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in
business.












And in the history of sports, there was none shrewder than Arnold
“Red” Auerbach, mastermind of the Boston Celtics when they won 16 NBA
championships between 1957 and 1986. Auerbach grew up in Brooklyn, the
son of an immigrant from Minsk who owned a delicatessen and a dry
cleaning store. He won a basketball scholarship to George Washington
University, but soon found his calling as a coach, working in high
schools, the wartime Navy, and, for a few summers, a Catskills resort
(where he coached a waiter named Wilt Chamberlain). In the late 1940s he
was named coach of the Washington Capitols and then the Tri-Cities
Blackhawks before taking over the Celtics bench in 1950. He became the
team’s general manager in 1966 and its president in 1984, holdingthat
position until his death in 2006.














Auerbach’s remarkable success as a coach—938 wins overall, and nine
championships in one 10-year period—came in equal parts from personality
and ingenuity. He was warm but demanding toward his players,
belligerent toward the referees, and sometimes obnoxious toward
opponents, particularly in his habit of celebrating an impending victory
before the game was over by lighting up a cigar. He is credited with
several innovations that changed the game forever; each exploiting a
blind spot in the adversary. While high scorers fill the seats and
please the crowd, Auerbach forced his Celtics to concentrate on defense
and team play. (The team had no scorer in the league’s top 10 during its
reign as perennial champions.) Other teams started the game with their
five best players; Auerbach kept one of his on the bench as the “sixth
man,” who came in at the first substitution and made hay against tired
or second-string opponents. He also perfected the fast break, in which a
rebound or inbounds pass sent a pack of teammates blitzing down the
court past backpedaling defenders.












But Auerbach’s greatest impact came off the court. Jerry Seinfeld
once observed that in team sports, fans are essentially rooting for
clothing: “You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to
beat the clothes from another city.” A dynasty therefore depends not on
the prowess of the bodies that fill those clothes at any one time,
since they churn through team rosters so quickly, but on the cleverness
of the mind that repeatedly puts them there. Over the course of four
decades, Auerbach outsmarted the rest of the league in drafting,
trading, and signing players.












I took special pleasure from watching Auerbach outdeal his
competitors, not just as a Celtics fan but as a fellow member of an
extended family of small businessmen. I am not the descendant of a long
line of rabbis (as an improbably large proportion of Jews claim to be)
but of makers or sellers of gloves, neckties, auto parts, and women’s
garments; I grew up with the belief that God made the Jews as a light
unto the nations and made the Gentiles because someone had to buy
retail. I fondly recall the relish with which my uncles and grandfather
would retell accounts of getting the better of some slow-witted supplier
fair and square. As Canadians they were fans of hockey, not basketball,
but they surely would have appreciated the genius with which Auerbach
bested other managers.












Among the future greats he picked in the draft after every other team
had overlooked them were K. C. Jones, John Havlicek, Sam Jones, Don
Chaney, Don Nelson, and Dave Cowens. Other bargains came in young
players who were clearly destined for stardom but whom other managers
had assumed were undraftable: Jo Jo White because he had been
conscripted into the Army (Auerbach got him into the Marine Reserves),
Danny Ainge because he was under contract to the Toronto Blue Jays
baseball team (Auerbach somehow freed him), and, most momentously, Larry
Bird, because he was still a junior (Auerbach bided his time and
offered Bird a record-setting contract a year later).





















But it was Auerbach’s trades that became the stuff of legend. Over
and over he exchanged has-beens, head cases, and who-the-hells for
future Hall of Famers and good team players who would lead the Celtics
to strings of NBA championships. In 1956 he swapped Ed Macauley and the
rights to Cliff Hagen to St. Louis for the draft pick that would become
Bill Russell. He traded Charlie Share for Bill Sharman, Charlie Scott
for Paul Silas, and Mel Counts for Bailey Howell. Best of all was a pair
of deals in which Auerbach sent Bob McAdoo (whom he would happily have
given away) to Detroit for M. L. Carr and two draft choices, which a
year later he traded to Golden State for Robert Parish and a pick that
would become Kevin McHale. (Golden State coveted Boston’s higher pick
because they had their hearts set on Joe Barry Carroll, a center who
went nowhere.) At other times, Auerbach convinced various general
managers to trade him Dennis Johnson for Rick Robey, Bill Walton for
Cedric Maxwell, and Quinn Buckner for Dave Cowens—who had been retired
for two years. Goyishe kop!












Acumen in wheeling and dealing is, to be sure, a touchy subject. On
top of the contempt with which the literary intelligentsia treats the
world of commerce, there is the obvious fear that any such association
could only reinforce ugly stereotypes and vicious conspiracy theories.
Yet to ignore Jews’ success in the art of the deal would be to deny what
made them historically distinctive. Jews are not so much the people of
the book as the classic middleman minority—retailers and moneylenders
who are not tied to the land or a guild, who instead cultivated
mobility, occupational flexibility, family ties, cultural
distinctiveness, and human capital, including numeracy, literacy, and
intuitive psychology. This profile of skills may help explain the Jews’
longevity as a diaspora people, their financial and professional success
in many parts of the world, and even, according to a controversial
theory, their high intelligence. It also explains the other common fate
of middleman minorities—resentment, oppression, expulsion, and
occasionally genocide by economically ignorant majorities who see
middlemen not as essential contributors to general prosperity but as
parasites and exploiters.












Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any
self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit
of diaspora Judaism. Great thinkers of the Enlightenment, including
Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, and the framers of the American
Constitution, extolled commerce as a force for peace, because an
infrastructure of trade makes it cheaper to buy things than to plunder
them and makes other people more valuable alive than dead. Today’s
political scientists have analyzed large datasets and shown that the
Enlightenment exponents of the theory of gentle commerce were correct:
countries that are open to the world economy have fewer wars and
genocides.












The humanitarian benefits of voluntary deal-making bring us to
another signature virtue of Red Auerbach. Auerbach famously drafted the
first African-American player back in 1950, years before the civil
rights movement took off. In 1964 he sent the first all-African-American
starting lineup onto the court. And in 1966, he named Bill Russell as
his successor, making his longtime star center the first
African-American coach in American professional sports. Auerbach allowed
Russell to coach and play at the same time because he thought that
Russell, still in his prime, could not be properly coached by anyone
else. It was a sign of the intense respect in which the two men held
each other, perhaps the deepest between coach and player in the history
of professional sports.












Auerbach’s progressive attitudes on race were emphatically not a
reflex of political correctness. (When Russell contemplated leaving the
NBA for a career in Hollywood, Auerbach teased him, “Russ, how many
roles do you think there are for a six-foot-nine schvartze?”) Nor was it
affirmative action: In the 1980s he assembled a championship team that
defied the league’s racial statistics by having Bird, McHale, and Ainge
in the starting five and Walton as the sixth man. Auerbach’s
color-blindness surely came in part from principle and integrity, but it
just as surely derived from one of the great virtues of the commercial
spirit. Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for
business.






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