DHL Dan CCLXXIV - Driving Ms. Russell

This looks like an interesting column:

Bill Russell’s daughter had never met Bob Cousy. Until now.

WORCESTER — It’s Sunday morning in mid-October and Worcester is looking unusually colorful and picturesque.

I am driving Karen Kenyatta Russell to Bob Cousy’s home because we’re new social media friends, and she texted that she was going to be in town for the Celtics’ season opener, mentioning, “I am going to try to see Mr. Cousy.”

So, I am driving Ms. Russell to meet Mr. Cousy.

Russell and Cousy are New England sports royalty. Bill Russell and Bob Cousy were pillars of the greatest dynasty in American professional sports, built by Red Auerbach.

Karen Russell is the 63-year-old daughter of Bill Russell, who died three years ago at the age of 88, 53 years after winning his 11th championship in his 13th and final season with the Boston Celtics.

Bob Cousy is the 97-year-old last survivor of the first Celtics championship, won in 1956-57, which happens to be the year Russell brought his talents to Boston.

Cousy and Russell are NBA Hall of Famers, NBA MVPs (Russell five times!), Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, have their own statues, and won six championships together before Cousy retired in 1963, one year after Karen Russell was born.

DHL Dan CCLXIV - Happy Birthday, Cooz!

In this week's Picked Up Pieces, column, Shank celebrates Bob Cousy's 97th birthday:

Celtics legend Bob Cousy talks turning 97, the Green without Jayson Tatum, Caitlin Clark and the WNBA, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wondering if I can see downtown Providence if I stand on the head of Tom Brady’s statue at Gillette . . .

⋅ Bob Cousy turned 97 Saturday.

That doesn’t stop him from hanging out with his longtime friends for dinner, cocktails, and conversation every Thursday night in Worcester.

“We’ve been doing it for over 30 years,” says Cousy. “We solve all the problems of the world. And I’m not even the oldest member. Two weeks ago, we had a cake for my accountant, who’s two weeks older than I am.”

Cooz’s Thursday ritual includes a shrimp cocktail, a cup of chowder, and a couple of Beefeaters on the rocks with a twist.

“Occasionally, I’ll stray and have a third, but my daughter, Ticia, she keeps an eye on me from the next table.”

Major Embarrassment

Celtics legend Bob Cousy is not too happy with US Basketball coach Steve Kerr:

Bob Cousy speaks out about Steve Kerr not playing Jayson Tatum: ‘This is an embarrassment’

Celtics legend Bob Cousy turned 96 Friday and had a lot to say about US Olympic men’s basketball coach Steve Kerr not playing Jayson Tatum in Thursday’s critical 95-91 semifinal victory over Serbia in Paris.

“This isn’t just a snub,” Cousy said from his Worcester home Friday morning. “This is an embarrassment for that poor kid all over the [expletive] world. The Olympics have gotten that big. Everyone’s going to think that there’s something wrong this this kid.”

Thursday’s benching vs. Serbia — a game in which the US trailed by as many as 17 points — marked the second time Kerr has chosen not to play Tatum for a single minute in the Olympics. The US plays France Saturday in the gold-medal game.

“Somebody from Boston should stand up for this kid,” Cousy said. “In my judgment, this is going out of your way to embarrass one of your players.

Make that two players, as Tyrese Haliburton got fucked over as well.

Celtics Wrapup - II

Shank's been banging out the columns over the past week or so, with images of victory cigars after the Boston Celtics take a 2-0 series lead, and The Cooz wants another banner in the rafters, presumably so all of The Cooz's banners have some company!

DHL Dan CLXXIII - The Cooz On The Celtics

Every couple of months Shank rings up Boston Celtics legend Bob Cousy and gets his take on the current Celtics. Here he is talking about the Marcus Smart trade, and some other stuff:

Getting Bob Cousy’s take on a busy week for the Celtics, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while thinking about Marcus Smart’s place in Celtics history …

▪ Smart played 581 regular-season games in his nine seasons in the Boston backcourt. Other than Don Chaney, every Celtics guard who played more games than Smart has his number hanging over the parquet floor.

One of the above is 94-year-old Bob Cousy, who won six championships and was the NBA’s MVP in 1956-57. I reached out to the Cooz after Smart was dealt to the Grizzlies in a midnight deal late Wednesday.

Like just about every Celtics fan, Cousy has mixed feelings about Smart.

“I liked Smart,” said Mr. Basketball. “I didn’t like some of the things he did. He thought he was a point guard when he was not. His mind was more to create opportunities for himself. In my judgment, point guards have to come across midcourt thinking, ‘How am I going to set one of the other guys up?’ That was never his thing.

It bears repeating - less Shank, more Cooz = better column!

Stoic

With the passig of K.C. Jones earlier in the week, Shank talks to another Boston Celtics legend about mortality.

Bob Cousy stoically deals with the toughest of losses — his old teammates

They seemed to be immortal, those Celtics of my childhood, forever running the parquet floor, earning easy baskets and hard-fought championships. Bill Russell would snatch a rebound, kick it out to Tommy Heinsohn on the wing, and Tommy would find Sam Jones at the other end for a breakaway layup.

The Celtics of 1963 were in the middle of a run of eight consecutive championships, 11 in 13 seasons.

It was a team that featured nine Hall of Fame players, plus a Hall of Fame coach (Red Auerbach) and a Hall of Fame owner (Walter Brown). John Havlicek was a rookie and Bob Cousy was retiring — like DiMaggio passing the Yankee torch to Mantle in 1951.

The reality, of course, is that our Garden Gods do not live forever, and we’ve been losing them at an alarming rate the last couple of years. Frank Ramsey (86) died in 2018, Havlicek (79) in 2019, and last week we lost K.C. Jones (88), one month after Heinsohn died at the age of 86.

“It’s depressing,” the 92-year-old Cousy said from his home in Worcester this week. “They’re starting to fall by the wayside. I’m starting to look over my shoulder the way Satchel Paige used to say — don’t look back, they might be gaining on you.

The rest of it is worth reading.

Bob Cousy On The (Not Gonna Happen) 2020 NBA Season

Shank talks to the great Boston Celtics guard, who weighs in on the unlikelihood of something resembling a basketball season:

He will be 92 next month. He has his daughter and son-in-law living with him at his home in Worcester and like the rest of us, he’s been watching TV, and staying alive.

Bob Cousy came back from his annual Florida winter stay in early May and, as ever, he’s on top of the news. Cousy’s not confident the NBA will be able to carry out its plan to resume games in the Orlando bubble next month and crown a 2020 champion in October.

“My guess is that nothing is going to happen,” Cousy said over the phone Monday. “I think everything is going to shut down. They’re going to continue having cases pop up where it’s going to be simply not viable to hold a season. I hope I’m wrong. What the hell do I know? I’m sitting here in Worcester.”

I'm so disgusted with this overreaction, I'm one of a fair number who will severely intake further sports viewing; complete league-wide shutdowns that, in certain sports, did not even happen during World War II.

When Sports And Politics Collide, Bob Cousy Edition

Leave it to Shank to turn Bob Cousy's White House visit (where he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom) into a political editorial:

In the last few years, Cousy has urged everyone he knows to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,’’ which is a letter from the author to his teenage son about feelings and realities associated with being black in the United States.

This being the Boston Globe, there's an Elizabeth Warren ad right below that paragraph.

After graciously accepting his medal, Cousy stood at a podium in front of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and delivered a five-minute speech. The Celtics legend thanked everyone profusely, including the Holy Cross Jesuits for installing his moral compass, then concluded his remarks with, “This is special because it is being presented by the most extraordinary president in my lifetime.”
…
The seemingly reverential remark infuriated some Cousy loyalists, including former Worcester Telegram columnist John Gearan, who fired off a mass e-mail, writing (in part), “My lifelong hero, Bob Cousy, has fallen from his pedestal and crashed into smithereens.”

Not so fast, everybody. The statement by Cousy was carefully crafted. Look up the word “extraordinary’’ in the dictionary. In my Google search, it comes up as “1. Very unusual or remarkable.’’

There you go. Would anyone disagree that President Trump is “very unusual”?

It was a perfectly gracious and ambiguous remark. Everybody heard what they wanted to hear.

Well, this guy's heard enough from Shank for the weekend.

No Heavy Lifting Required

A week in the city hosting the Super Bowl can make it difficult to come up with interesting themes to write about. We have already witnessed Shank overusing the Tomato Can insult a few times this week (like that's a shocker) and now he trots out the overused 'Mount Rushmore of Boston sports' theme one more time, just to make sure that horse is dead, dead, dead!

MINNEAPOLIS — The statues have spoken. The best of our best Boston athletes have voted. And a couple of them are willing to cede the gold medal platform of Boston sports to Tom Brady.

“Tommy will go down as the greatest athlete in Boston history,’’ Bobby Orr said this week. “There is no argument.’’

There is always an argument when it comes to rating sports stars, of course. In addition to Orr, we reached out to Larry Bird, Carl Yastrzemski, and Bob Cousy. Larry and Cooz allowed that Brady might be the top dog while Yaz joined Orr in conceding that Brady is The One.

There's one very curious omission here, isn't there?

Here in the Hub of the Universe, we think we’ve witnessed the best player ever in each of America’s four major sports. Boston’s Jock Rushmore — usually identified as Orr in hockey, Brady in football, Bill Russell in basketball, and Ted Williams in baseball — easily beats that of any other city in America.

Provincial Shank - where have you been?

Williams died in 2002, and the ever-reclusive Russell, now 83, was unavailable for comment (proof of John Updike’s reminder that gods do not answer letters). But Orr, Bird, Yastrzemski, and Cousy, all cast in bronze, were open to the suggestion that Brady might be the best of Boston’s best.

“Boston’s had a lot of great ones,’’ said Yaz, MVP of the American League in 1967. “Larry, Ted, Russell, Bobby Orr, don’t forget Big Papi.

I'm sure Shank wants no part of Big Papi.

In case you're wondering, heeeere's Larry!

Bird, who was MVP of the NBA three times from 1984-86, submitted, “I have played with and against some of the greatest clutch players in sports, and Tom is right up there with them.”

Go read the rest of it if you're interested in this sort of thing, but Shank does this column enough times during a year that just removes the interest in it for me, and probably a good number of other readers as well.

Shank On The Other Isiah Thomas

Celtics point guard Isiah Thomas recently scored 50 points in a game, so Shank suddenly has a need to pay some pro forma attention to the team. He talks to Celtics legend Bob Cousy about Isiah Thomas, and the result is a pretty good column.

There was a time when the Celtics’ best player was the smallest player on the floor. He scored 50 points in a single game. He was MVP of the NBA. He was Mr. Basketball. He basically invented the point guard position, his first Celtics column of the year.

Now he is 88 years old and he spends the winter in Florida and he hardly every misses a Celtics game on television.

Bob Cousy has seen all of the Celtics’ great guards. He played with Bill Sharman, Sam Jones, and John Havlicek. He coached Nate Archibald when Tiny became the only player in NBA history to lead the league in scoring (34.0) and assists (11.4) in the same season (1972-73 Kansas City-Omaha Kings). Cooz was a color commentator here when the Celtics had Dennis Johnson and later Paul Pierce.

Cousy is sold on Isaiah Thomas.