Bob Cousy

• 1. Introduction

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  Bob Cousy fell out of a tree as a teenager in Queens, New York, broke his right hand, and spent months forced to use his left. He described the accident as "a fortunate event." It made him ambidextrous. And ambidexterity, in the hands of a kid who had already been cut from his high school team twice, would eventually transform a sport.

  Cousy was born on the 9th of August, 1928, the son of poor French immigrants who rented an apartment in Astoria, Queens, for fifty dollars a month during the Great Depression. He spoke only French for the first five years of his life. He grew up playing stickball in Yorkville on Manhattan's East Side, alongside Black, Jewish, and other minority children, and those early years shaped a man who would later refuse a hotel room so that a Black teammate would not have to sleep alone.

  By the time he retired, he had won six NBA championships, appeared in thirteen consecutive All-Star games, led the league in assists for eight straight seasons, and been called "the Houdini of the Hardwood." One president wired him a message. Another gave him the nation's highest civilian honor. And a nickname earned in comparison to a magician stuck for seven decades.

  What follows is the story of how a boy who could not make his school's junior varsity team became the first great point guard in NBA history, and what that cost him, and what he gave back.

• 2. A Showboater in a Slow Game

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  When Cousy arrived at the College of the Holy Cross in 1946, basketball was, by today's standards, almost unrecognizable. No shot clock. Flat-footed set shots. Deliberate player movement. The game was static by design, and coaches preferred it that way.

  Cousy played a different game entirely. Behind-the-back dribbles, no-look passes, half-court fastbreak launches. Coach Doggie Julian accused him of being a showboater, and the accusation was not entirely unfair. But it was not the whole story either.

  Julian ran a two-team system, sending six freshmen off the bench nine and a half minutes into each game. Cousy, so dissatisfied with his playing time, went to the campus chapel to pray for more opportunities. And when he did play, he scored enough to rank third on the team despite the restricted minutes.

  That first season ended in improbable glory. Holy Cross, the last seed in an eight-team NCAA Tournament, defeated Navy, CCNY, and Oklahoma at Madison Square Garden to become the first New England college to win the national championship. When the team's train pulled into Worcester, around ten thousand fans met them at Union Station. Cousy, who scored only four points in the title game on two-for-thirteen shooting, was part of history, if a small part.

  The more substantive chapters of his college career came later. In his senior year of 1949-50, with five minutes remaining and Holy Cross trailing Loyola of Chicago at Boston Garden, the crowd began chanting "We want Cousy!" until Julian put him in. Cousy scored eleven points, including a game-winning buzzer-beater off a behind-the-back dribble. His team then won twenty-six straight games and reached a number four national ranking. He averaged 19.4 points per game and was named a consensus First Team All-American. The three-time All-American's college career ended in an opening-round loss at Madison Square Garden, but his reputation was set.

• 3. The Draft Nobody Wanted

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  The 1950 NBA draft should have been a straightforward moment for Cousy. He was the top local player, and the Boston Celtics had the first overall pick. The local press expected him to be Boston's man.

  Coach Red Auerbach chose center Charlie Share instead. His explanation was blunt: "Am I supposed to win, or please the local yokels?" One scout's report on Cousy was equally pointed: "The first time he tries that fancy Dan stuff in this league, they'll cram the ball down his throat."

  The Tri-Cities Blackhawks drafted him third overall. Cousy had been trying to establish a driving school in Worcester, Massachusetts, and had no interest in relocating to the small Midwestern towns of Moline, Rock Island, and Davenport. He demanded a salary of ten thousand dollars from Blackhawks owner Ben Kerner. Kerner offered six thousand. Cousy refused to report.

  He was then picked up by the Chicago Stags, but the Stags folded. Commissioner Maurice Podoloff declared three Stags players available for a dispersal draft: scoring leader Max Zaslofsky, Andy Phillip, and Cousy. Walter Brown, the Celtics' owner, drew Cousy's name and later admitted, "I could have fallen to the floor." He had wanted Zaslofsky. He reluctantly gave Cousy a nine-thousand-dollar salary.

  Within one season, both Brown and Auerbach had changed their minds entirely. Cousy averaged 15.6 points, 6.9 rebounds, and 4.9 assists, earned his first All-Star selection, and helped lift the Celtics to a 39-30 record. The following year, with guard Bill Sharman added to the roster, he averaged 21.7 points and 6.7 assists and made his first All-NBA First Team. The man nobody wanted had become the player the franchise needed most.

• 4. Fifty Points and Four Overtimes

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  One game from the 1953 NBA Playoffs stands as the clearest single proof of what Cousy could do under pressure. Game 2 against the Syracuse Nationals went to four overtime periods.

  Cousy played 66 minutes total. He arrived at the end of regulation with an injured leg and twenty-five points. In the first overtime, he scored six of Boston's nine points. He hit a clutch free throw in the final seconds of the second overtime, then scored all four of Boston's points to keep the Celtics alive. In the third overtime, he added eight more points, including a twenty-five-foot buzzer-beater. In the fourth, he scored nine of Boston's final twelve. The game ended 111-105. Cousy had scored fifty points and made thirty free throws in thirty-two attempts, a record that has never been broken in an NBA playoff game. The NBA later placed the performance alongside Wilt Chamberlain's hundred-point game as one of the finest individual scoring feats in league history.

  That year he had also won the first of eight consecutive assists titles, putting up 7.7 per game in an era before the shot clock, when the pace of play actively discouraged passing. The league would not introduce the shot clock until 1954.

  In the 1958-59 season, he set an NBA record with twenty-eight assists in a single game against the Minneapolis Lakers. He also set a record of nineteen assists in one half of that game, a mark that still stands. The Celtics' run to the 1959 NBA Finals ended in the first ever four-game sweep, with Cousy recording fifty-one total assists across those four games, a Finals record that has also held.

• 5. The Dynasty and Its Architect

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  Before the 1956-57 season, Red Auerbach drafted two future Hall-of-Famers: forward Tom Heinsohn and defensive center Bill Russell. The combination unlocked what Cousy's talent had always been waiting for.

  Cousy won his one NBA Most Valuable Player Award that season, averaging 20.6 points, 4.8 rebounds, and a league-leading 7.5 assists. The Celtics beat the Hawks four games to three in the 1957 NBA Finals for his first championship. From that point through 1963, Boston won six titles in seven years, with the one exception being the 1957-58 Finals, when Russell suffered a foot injury in Game 3 and the Celtics lost to the Hawks.

  Teammate Tom Heinsohn, speaking to the Boston Herald in 1983, described Cousy's role this way: "What Bill Russell was on defense, that's what Cousy was on offense, a magician. Once that ball reached his hands, the rest of us just took off, never bothering to look back. We didn't have to. He'd find us. When you got into a position to score, the ball would be there."

  Bill Sharman, who played alongside Cousy for years, placed him in even broader company: "Cousy was a lot like Magic, in that he was an innovator and his first instincts were to get you a good shot. On the fast break, he was an artist, inventing something new, he was way ahead of his time."

  Cousy's final game, Game 6 of the 1963 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, ended with him throwing the ball into the rafters. He had sprained his ankle in the fourth quarter and been helped to the bench, then returned with Boston ahead by one. He did not score again but was credited with providing an emotional lift as the Celtics held on 112-109. That series ended four games to two.

• 6. The Retirement That Wasn't

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  Cousy held his retirement ceremony on the 17th of March, 1963, in a packed Boston Garden. The event became known as the Boston Tear Party. The crowd's response overwhelmed him. His planned seven-minute farewell stretched to twenty minutes. A water worker from South Boston named Joe Dillon broke the tension by calling out "We love ya, Cooz," and the crowd erupted into cheers.

  President John F. Kennedy sent a telegram: "The game bears the indelible stamp of your rare skills and competitive daring, and it will serve as a living reminder of your long and illustrious career so long as it is played."

  Coaching followed, first at Boston College, where his record over six seasons was 114 wins and 38 losses. He was named New England Coach of the Year for 1968 and 1969, led the Eagles to three NIT appearances, and took them to the 1969 NIT Championship game and two NCAA tournaments. Then he returned to the NBA as coach of the Cincinnati Royals, a team featuring fellow Hall-of-Famer Oscar Robertson. He described taking the job plainly: "I did it for the money. I was made an offer I couldn't refuse."

  At forty-one, while coaching the Royals, he briefly returned as a player for seven games during the 1969-70 season, averaging 0.7 points per game. He resigned as coach of what had by then become the Kansas City-Omaha Kings early in the 1973-74 season, finishing with a 141-209 overall NBA coaching record.

  In a strange footnote, he was appointed Commissioner of the American Soccer League in December 1974, despite knowing nothing about the sport. He served until December 1979. Royals club owner Willie Ehrlich explained the dismissal: "After five years as commissioner, Cousy still goes around telling people he knows nothing about soccer."

• 7. Off the Court

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  In 1954, the NBA had no health benefits, no pension plan, and no minimum salary. The average player's salary was eight thousand dollars a season. Cousy organized a response. He founded the National Basketball Players Association, the first players' union among the four major North American professional sports leagues, and served as its first president until 1958.

  His anti-racist stance was personal in origin and public in expression. Growing up in Yorkville, he had played daily alongside Black, Jewish, and other minority children. When the Celtics played in the then-segregated city of Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1950, teammate Chuck Cooper, the first African-American ever drafted in NBA history, was to be denied a hotel room. Cousy refused his own room and traveled with Cooper on an overnight train instead. He later described walking into a segregated restroom with Cooper, where Cooper was barred from the clean "for whites" bathroom and directed to the shabby "for colored" facility, as one of the most shameful experiences of his life.

  He married his college sweetheart, Missie Ritterbusch, in December 1950, six months after graduating from Holy Cross. They lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, and had two daughters. Missie died on the 20th of September, 2013, after suffering from dementia for several years.

  Cousy worked as a color analyst on Celtics telecasts from the 1980s through 2008. He appeared in the 1994 basketball film Blue Chips, playing a college athletic director named Vic Roker. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump at a ceremony in the Oval Office on the 22nd of August, 2019.

  On the 22nd of December, 2025, Holy Cross announced it would rename its basketball court in his honor, with a formal dedication set for the 7th of February, 2026, during the Holy Cross game against Lehigh.

• 8. The Houdini's Legacy

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  Cousy's career statistics across 924 regular-season games with Boston total 16,960 points, 4,786 rebounds, and 6,955 assists. He was the first player in NBA history to reach the four-thousand, five-thousand, and six-thousand career assists milestones.

  Walter Brown, the owner who once dreaded drawing his name in a dispersal draft, later said: "The Celtics wouldn't be here without him. He made basketball in this town. If he had played in New York he would have been the biggest thing since Babe Ruth. I think he is anyway."

  He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1971. The same year, the Celtics retired his number fourteen jersey, the first of two numbers they would retire, hanging it in the rafters of the Garden alongside Ed Macauley's number twenty-two. His college number seventeen was hoisted to the Hart Center rafters at Holy Cross on the 16th of November, 2008, during halftime of a game against St. Joseph's.

  He was one of only four players selected to the NBA's 25th, 35th, 50th, and 75th Anniversary Teams, the others being George Mikan, Bill Russell, and Bob Pettit. Of those four, only Cousy and Pettit remain alive, with Cousy the older of the two.

  The Bob Cousy Award has been presented annually since 2004 by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame to the top men's collegiate point guard. In 2022, the NBA renamed its Eastern Conference championship trophy in his honor. A style of play later associated with Pete Maravich and Magic Johnson traces its origins, at least in part, to a boy in Queens who broke his hand falling out of a tree and decided to call it lucky.