Even though he believes he is too old at 95 to make the trek from his home in Worcester, Massachusetts to TD Garden to see the ball club he became a household name playing for in the 1950s and 1960s, Hall of Fame Boston Celtics point guard Bob Cousy remains a devoted Celtics fan.
But the so-called Houdini of the Hardwood could have had a different path in life had another name been pulled out of the hat used to determine which team owners got which players after the now-defunct Chicago Stags went under. Or if he had he simply reported to the team that drafted him out of Holy Cross.
“I wasn’t going to move my family — I’d just gotten married — and go to somewhere called Tri-Cities,” said Cousy in a recent interview with NBC Sports Boston’s Chris Forsberg. “That’s who drafted me.”
“And when they called me and said, ‘Hey, congratulations, No. 1 pick,’ I said, ‘Jesus, I was a pretty good student, what the hell is the Tri-Cities?’” said the Celtics legend.
“And that didn’t endear me to the good folk of Tri-Cities, because the Tri-Cities Bugle had me in the headlines saying, ‘Cousy says, ‘What the hell is the Tri-Cities?’”
“The other two — there were three of us in the hat (for a very low-tech dispersal draft) when they dispersed Chicago when they went bankrupt — Max Zaslofsky, won the scoring championship, and New York wanted a good Jewish player,” recalled Cousy. “Wow, they went and had a party when they got him.”
“And then Andy Phillip, he became a Hall of Famer, point guard, a good one, went second to Philly. And the only thing left in the hat, other than the band, was moi.”
And the rest, as they say, was history.
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Story originally appeared on Celtics Wire