With the war ending, Uline was one of eight men who got together and decided to form a professional basketball league. Again, for Uline, the basketball team was little more than a way to keep taking in revenue as often as possible. The brand new Basketball Association of American would have teams in New York, Boston, Toronto, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Providence, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Washington. The teams would be stocked with players coming out of college and the armed services. They would play a sixty game regular season schedule.
In the summer of 1946 Red went to see Mike Uline. "You need a coach," he told him. "I can coach and I know enough guys to get a team put together quickly that will be good right away."
Uline was impressed with Red's self confidence. He had seen him coach the Redskins, so he knew that he could coach professional athletes. What's more, he didn't have a clue who he would hire if he didn't hire the confident twenty eight year old just out of the navy who was offering his services. He agreed to pay him $5,000 and told him to go put together a team.
"I figured why not take a shot?" Red said. "I liked coaching and I thought I might have a chance to do it well. I didn't know what would happen with the league, but I figured worst case scenario it would be a learning experience."
What's more, the $5,000 Uline was offering was almost twice the @2.900 he would have made had he gone back to coaching and teaching that year.
Even so, most of Red's friends thought he was crazy. Professional basketball? What the hell was that? He had worked to get his master's degree in education so he could coach a professional basketball team? What was he going to do in two years when the league folded?
"I told him he was nuts," said Hymie, who was back from Europe by then and enrolled at George Washington. "Here he had a chance to make a respectable career teaching and coaching high school, and he wanted to waste his time on something that wasn't going to get him anywhere. Of course he didn't listen to me. He didn't listen to anyone."
One person who didn't think Red was nuts was Zang. "He was going to be good at whatever he did," Zang said. "The funny thing about Red is, as confident as he always seemed, he never understood how smart he was. He talks about me having talent. His talent has always been with people, knowing people, understanding people. I knew he'd do a good job coaching. I just didn't know if the league would succeed or not. Of course nobody knew."
Red wasn't really concerned at that point about the future of the league. He was interested only in the present, which meant putting together a team. "I did it for about three hundred bucks in phone calls," he said. "I started by calling guys I knew from the navy like Bob Feerick and John Norlander. They told me about guys they had played with, and I called some guys I had played with and against in college. Feerick brought Fat Freddie Scolari with him. He had signed a baseball contract with St Louis, but he had a vision problem in his left eye. He was afraid that as a right handed hitter he might not pick up an inside pitch and could get hurt. So he decided to play basketball. The one guy I really wanted that I didn't think I could get was Bones McKinney. He was six eight, could run, shoot. But someone told me he had already signed a contract with Chicago. I thought I'd lost him."
I figured I'd call him anyway just to make sure. He said to me, "I haven't actually signed with them yet, but I'd taking a train out there next week and I'm going to sign then." I said, "Train? You're taking a train from North Carolina? He said he didn't like to fly. He said he was going to take a train to Washington, lay over there for a couple of hours, long enough to get something to eat or something, then take an overnight train to Chicago.
"I had an idea I said, "I'll meet you at Union Station and buy you dinner." He agreed. I met him there, took him out for dinner, and I said, "How much they gonna pay you?" He said six thousand seven hundred fifty. I told him I'd pay him six thousand seven hundred fifty and, being on the East Coast, he'd be closer to home and wouldn't have to fly nearly as much since most of the teams were in the East. He took the deal and never went to Chicago.
McKinney became one of the better players in the league, and he and Red struck up a lifelong friendship that would benefit both men after McKinney retired from playing and became the coach at Wake Forest.
In their first year, the Caps were living proof that Red had an eye for talent. They were 49-11, the best record in the league. At home they were 28-2 and played to sellout or near sellout crowds in Uline Arena. The home court record was indeed a reflection of how good the team was, but it was also, according to Red, due to a unique home court advantage.
Rats.
"You would not believe how many rats there were in Uline Arena." Red said. "I mean big ones. When the teams would walk out from the dressing room, if you stood in the runway leading to the court and looked to your right or left under the stands you would see these big green eyes just staring at you from the dark. I mean hundreds of them. See, the arena was right next to Union Station, so it attracted a lot fo them from over there. Plus, they'd smell the popcorn and all the food and come running. We were like a rat magnet over there. Our guys got used to it, but the visiting teams would say, "What the hell is that?" And we'd tell them not to worry, usually they stayed under the stands all night, that no more than a dozen or so might get out during the game. There were guys who were really scared by the time they hit the court.
"Finally, we decided something had to be done. So we went out and bought the biggest, meanest cat we could find. Named it 'Old Bones' after McKinney, because it was long, quick, and tough. We'd come in for a game and there would be the cat all beat up from fighting with the rats. I mean, it was cut up. He got a lot of 'em, but he didn't get all of them."
Old Bones, as it turned out, wasn't the only one working to decrease the rat population. "One morning I came in early because we were going to practice in the arena. I'm walking in the door and I see these guys walking out carrying shotguns. I recognized them because they worked in the building. I said, "What the hell is going on here?" So they told me that they all liked to come in early in the morning, turn the lights on, flush the rats out from under the stands, and shoot 'em for sport. Who knows how many they got? But even with all that, we still had all you could want under the stands every night we ever played there."
For of the eleven teams advanced to the playoffs that season and the Caps had to play Chicago in the opening round in a best of three series. They were swept in two games, another of those long ago defeats that still angers Red. That series also proved to be the beginning of a long and testy relationship between Red and many referees."

Delonte West, a guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers, was driving a three-wheeled motorcycle north on Interstate 95 near Route 214 in the Largo area when he cut off a Prince George's County police officer, authorities said. The officer pulled him over, and West told the officer that he was carrying a handgun in his waistband.

That prompted the officer to call for backup, and investigators found that West was actually carrying three guns: a Beretta 9mm in his waistband, a Ruger .357 strapped to his leg and a shotgun in a guitar case slung over his back, said Maj. Andy Ellis, a spokesman for the Prince George's County Police Department.

West, who is 26 and lives in Brandywine, was arrested and charged with speeding and two counts of carrying a handgun, Ellis said. He was released today on personal recognizance, according to Ellis and online court records.

"He's been here several weeks working out," Rivers said prior to teeing off at the team's Shamrock Foundation Golf Tournament at Nashawtuc Country Club. "He's fine. He's good. We're just going to let him run. He's never eased into anything in his life. I don't think he'll do it in this one."

“He’s happy, he’s talking more, which I didn’t think was possible,” Rivers said following the USI Shamrock Classic at the Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord. “He’s got his quickness back and he just looks normal again.”

Talking more?

Over the last 14 years, Garnett has developed a reputation as one of the most vocal players in the league. This offseason his words have a different message.

Garnett has been joining his teammates at the Sports Authority Training Center in Waltham as they prepare for training camp. Even though the Celtics forward, who is coming off season-ending knee surgery, has not been cleared for contact drills, he has found his own way to participate during workouts.

“His presence has been felt. He has been talking more, but you don’t know when he starts playing, maybe he’ll talk less,” Brian Scalabrine said with a laugh. “But he has been leading us in a very instructional kind of way. Before he was like that, but now, like he pulled me aside the other day. He was like, ‘You know, you have to play the game within the game. If you’re trying to get something done later, you want to set it up with something early.’

“And it helps. I went out there and I did it, and it worked right away. He’s a really intelligent guy.”

Allen said Kevin Garnett was in attendance for the workouts, and indicated he thought Garnett just about ready to come off the pick-up game DL after offseason knee surgery.

“Kevin looks strong,” Allen said. “He’s been working and shooting. People have been asking me that all summer. Only he can tell you how he feels and how his body is responding.”

Training camp may still be more than a week away, but Ray Allen is already finding ways to win with prized offseason free agent pickup Rasheed Wallace.

Allen said earlier today at the team’s Shamrock Foundation Golf Tournament that many players have been practicing informally at HealthPoint for the past couple of weeks and that Wallace has been a key to his success in ruling the pickup games.

On my team, I just had guys who were really moving the ball. Rasheed was one of those guys on my team and Rasheed was … one game he must have hit every shot.

“I would come off a pick-and-roll and throw it right back to him. You’ve got to help on me and Rasheed is wide open. So he just knocked them down. He’s backpeddling down the floor saying: ‘Somebody better get out on me! I’m hot.’

“It was great because, as competitive as we all are, you see that when we work and we play.”

“Marquis, that’s the guy no one talks about,’’ Rivers said. “I’m really looking forward to coaching him. I didn’t like coaching against him; I thought he was very difficult to match up to. He can play 2 or 3 and he has the ability to handle the ball. We’ll use him at point forward.

“Defensively is where I like him. I thought last year, without having Posey, we didn’t have that other guy that could guard guys off the bench, and that put a lot of stress on Ray and Paul. And this year, we’ll have another guy to defend.

“He’s going to replace [Posey] as far as minutes, but they are totally different. Both of them are very tough-minded, which is good. Posey was a guy who spread the floor more, Marquis will be a guy with the ball in his hands more and making decisions.

It was important to get everyone back. We thought at the end of the year we had to add to the team and I thought we did that. But we didn’t want to lose anyone, and we didn’t. We basically ended up with the team we had last year, with more, better players. I just like our team this year.

Zang enrolled at Roosevelt High School, which was where Red was teaching and coaching at the time. Since Zang was living with Red, the big brother made sure the little brother made it to school - on time- every day.
Red quickly made an impression at Roosevelt. Gym class was generally looked upon with disdain by most students at the high school. They didn't like getting out of their clothes, getting sweaty, taking a shower, and then putting their clothes back on to go to class, all in less than an hour. So many of them - most - would show up with notes from home saying they had a sore throat, a cold, a back problem - anything to be excused from gym class.
"I had one class with fifty kids in it and forty of them had notes excusing them," Red said. "There was nothing I could do. If they had a note, they had a note.
"One day, though, before class started, I sat all the sick kids on a bleacher and I said, "Hey, when you guys are at home, which do you take, a bath or a shower?" Just about all of them put they hands up and said they took a shower. I said, "Good, fine. So if you aren't too sick to take a shower at home, you aren't too sick to take a shower here. With ten minutes left in class, I want you all to take your clothes off and take a shower."
"Within a week, I had exactly one kid still sitting out. [Apparently he was sick.] They all figured if they had to shower anyway, they might as well get dressed for class."

After basic training, Red was sent to the navy base in Norfolk, Virginia. He had been promoted to chief petty officer by then - promotions come quickly during wartime - and, thanks to his coaching background, he was put in charge of all recreational activities on the base. There were a lot of professional athletes in the service during the war, and Red became friends with a number of them, including Phil Rizzuto, the New York Yankees star shortstop. Rizzuto was at Norfolk only because the base commander had refused to allow him to go to physical training school. Red had been stationed at Great Lakes Naval Base initially, had gone to physical training school, and had been sent to Norfolk.
"What happened was, once you went to training school, you got promoted to chief," he said. "And you were always sent someplace else. The base commander wanted Rizzuto for the baseball team there, so he didn't let him go to training school. So he got stuck staying there and never got promoted from being a seaman. It really wasn't fair."
Fair or not, Red and Rizzuto struck up a friendship. They played ball together- basketball - and Red enjoyed his sense of humor and competitiveness on the basketball court even though he was barely five foot seven. Later, Rizzuto introduced him to another young sailor, a kid from St. Louis named Lawrence Peter Berra, Yogi to his friends. At the time Berra was a minor leager in the Yankee system. "Rizzuto tried to look out for him because they were both Italian," Red said.
Norfolk was filled with professional athletes and former college athletes. Bob Feerick and John Norlander, both college basketball stars were there. So were baseball players Charlie Wagner and Jack White. Clyde McCullough, the Chicago Cubs catcher, was there too. The basketball games played on the base were fierce, of a high quality and competitive.
Because he had been living in Washington, Red was familiar with the black barnstorming teams that had sprung up during the 1930's. Many of them came to Washington to play the DC based Lichtman Bears (the owner's name was Lichtman). The Bears were a force in basketball, a team that almost never lost. They played most of their home games on Sunday afternoons in a place called Turners Arena, which was in Northwest Washington, at 14th and W Streets.
Sunday was usually an off day around the base. Red came up with the idea of putting together a group of athletes and making the three hour drive to Washington to challenge the Bears. He made a call to Mr Lichtman, explained who he was and what kind of team he could bring, and was offered $300 to bring his group to Washington.
"I got five guys and me," he said, "Clyde McCullough was my chauffeur. I told the guys I was taking two shares of the three hundred bucks because I had set up the game and I was coaching the team in addition to playing. They said fine. We get up there and the place was packed. They were a phenomenon. They'd won like one hundred games in a row.
"This was back when a lot of games were played in three periods, fifteen minutes each. First thing I did was I went out and checked the baskets. One had a slightly looser rim, so I said we would shoot on it in the first and third periods. There were exactly six white faces in the building - us. As the game went on and it was close, you could feel the crowd pulling for us. We were the underdogs. No one expected us to beat them. But we won. They hadn't seen guys as good as Feerick and Norlander in a long time.
"Immediately they challenged us to a return game. I told them I couldn't guarantee when we could come back, but we would. We ended up going back there twice more - beat em once, then they beat us. It was good basketball, a lot of fun. And it was the first time I'd actually coached adults. that was a good experience for me."

There were, I was pleased to see, five familiar faces: Red, Morgan Wootten, who sat on Red's left; Jack Kvancz, who sat next to Morgan; and Tom Penders and Joe McKeown, the men's and women's basketball coaches at GW, respectively. I remembered Jack telling me that Red always invited the GW basketball people to come to lunch when they were free.
The chair on the other side of Red was empty. "Here, kid, sit down," Red said indicating the chair. The man sitting to the right of the chair was small, wearing thick glasses and a Celtics baseball cap.
"Zang Auerbach," he said, putting out his hand. "Hard to believe a good looking guy like me is Red's brother, huh?"
I was introduced to the rest of the table, but none of the names registered. There were two guys dressed in dark suits who looked like they had been cast as Secret Service agents in a movie. Their names were Pete Dowling and Bob Campbell. It was only later that I would learn that they were Secret Service agents. Most of the others were older men, in their seventies and eighties. One, whose name I heard to be Hymie began screaming at me soon after I sat down.
"Look at that notebook," he said when I took one out. "He brought a goddamn notebook. As if this sonofabith" - he pointed at Red- "has anything to say worth hearing. Most unbelievable thing I've ever seen. Son, if this is the best you can come up with to write about, your career must really be going badly."
I looked at Red to see his reaction to all this. He was cracking up. "Don't mind Hymie," he said. "He's still recovering from his war wounds."
I looked at the man again. He appeared to be almost as old as Red. "Which war?" I asked.
"World War Two," Red said.
"Which war?" Hymie roared. "The Civil War. Which War? Seriously now, someone pays you to be a reporter?"
On the other side of me, Zang was yelling at Hymie. "I told you to behave yourself today. Why do you insist on ruining lunch every week?"
"Shut up," you old geezer." Hymie responded.
The next ninety minutes were as entertaining as the first five had been. While waiting for the food to arrive, everyone chatted about topics of the day, from Monica Lewinsky to Rick Pitino. Larry Bird's name came up. He was doing very good work as coach of the Indiana Pacers.
Morgan turned to Red. "What was a better move by you - Bird or the McHale-Parish trade?"
Red smiled, "McHale-Parish," he said, referring to the 1980 deal in which he acquired future Hall of Famers Kevin McHale and Robert Parish in return for less than immortal Joe Barry Carroll. "Anyone tells you they knew Bird would be as good as he turned out- including me - is a liar.
I started writing furiously. Hymie glared. Red talked at length about Bird and Mchale and Parish. "But the Russell deal was number one," Morgan said doing my job for me.
"Oh yeah," Red said. "You know how I got Russell, don't you?" he said to me.
Before I could answer, Zang elbowed me. "Whatever you do," he said softly, "don't tell him that you know."
I knew something about it, knew that it involved a trade with the St Louis Hawks for Russell's draft rights in 1956.
"You traded two great players for him, right?" I said, not wanting to appear ignorant despite Zang's warning.
"Yeah, but that was the easy part," he said. "I gave St. Louis Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan to move up to number two in the draft. But Rochester still had the number one pick."
"So how'd you get them not to take Russell?"
Red smiled. I had set him up perfectly.
"The Ice-Capades," he said.
"The Ice-Capades?"
"Sure. Walter Brown [the owner of the Celtics] was president of the Ice-Capades. I had him call Les Harrison, the owner in Rochester, and tell them he'd send the Ice-Capades up there for a week if they didn't draft Russell."
"So you got Russell for the Ice-Capades?"
"You got it."
Never in my life have I written an easier column than that one, or a more enjoyable one.

The Celtics were a family, but it was a family bent on winning. Oddly enough, I think I shared more of my appreciation for championship basketball with my opponents, especially with those who were good enough themselves to elevate their games. Throughout my career I spent a lot of time off the court with Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, and Oscar Robertson. We never talked much about basketball, which in itself was a relief, and we had nothing to prove to each other, which helped us relax. We never became intimate friends, but I always enjoyed being with them because they made the game so much fun for me. I felt we shared a special kind of camaraderie, like professional soldiers. We were in the same business, had the same kinds of problems, and didn't have to be on guard around each other.
Wilt Chamberlain and I carried on a friendship the entire time we played basketball together, even though the newspapers portrayed us as mortal enemies. There's a certain amount of show business in professional basketball, and the two of us were a promoter's dream. The sportswriters flogged their feverish imaginations and came up with headlines like "Big Goliath vs Little Goliath" or "The Good Guy vs The Bad Guy," and devoted hundreds of columns to the question of whether Russell was better than Chamberlain or vice versa. You'd have thought we were heavyweight boxers going at each other, because our respective teams were largely ignored. Offhand, I can't think of any two players in a team sport who have been cast as antagonists and as personifications of various theories more than Wilt and I were. Almost any argument people wanted to have could be carried on in the Russell vs Chamberlain debate, and almost any virtue and sin was imagined to be at stake. If we weren't a metaphor for something, we were at least a symbol of it.
As long as we were playing, I thought Wilt and I were amazingly successful in ignoring this. We used to dismiss the controversy by laughing that it was only making both of us a lot of money. We each tried to dismiss the talk in our personal relationship, and a few people supported us in doing so. Eddie Gottlieb, the owner of the Philadelphia Warriors, used to remind Wilt that it was all hype; at least that's what Wilt would tell me. I believed this about Gottlieb, for whenever the Celtics played in Philadelphia he would scream to the newspapers in advance that I was a criminal goaltender, getting away with murder and that I had to be stopped. When we arrived in Philadelphia I'd see these headlines, and in the game itself he'd scream at the referees so violently that he had to be restrained. I always thought he was even more of a firecracker than Red until one night when he came into our locker room before a game, took me aside and said, "I assume you're not paying any attention to all that stuff about goal tending. It just helps to keep our seats filled and our flock growing." He was warm and humorous, and then he went out to the arena and in a few minutes was screaming about goal tending again like a mad man.
Wilt was by far the toughest center I ever played against. He was awesome, and no matter what anyone says about his lack of team play, his teams always wound up in the playoffs staring at us. He always outscored me by huge margins - by twenty or thirty points in a game - so I could never hope to compete with him in any scoring duels any more than I could make twenty footers from outside. I couldn't allow myself to get suckered into a game within the game. I had to do whatever it took to help us win. One year Wilt averaged an incredible fifty points a game, when I was averaging sixteen or seventeen. In that same year his team averaged one hundred and twelve points a game and the Celtics one hundred and ten, so I figured if I could knock points off his average, we should win most of those games. That's what happened.
As the Celtic championships began piling up, Wilt took offense at those who enjoyed labeling him a loser. They said he couldn't win the big one, as though there were some flaw or stumbling block in his character that prevented him from winning key games. This seemed to me nonsense; I think you keep winning games until you play a better team. It's that simple. I prefer to think that the Celtics were winners - champions, in fact - ans that Wilt's teams were consistently the best ones we had to defeat.
In 1967, Wilt and the Philadelphia 76ers beat us, because they were better. They almost ran us off the court, and I got an instant taste of the loser syndrome. Though the Celtics had run off an unprecedented string of eight consecutive championships before 1967, the fans in Boston hooted me that summer in the streets. "What happened to you guys last year?" "All washed up, eh?" "I knew it couldn't last. You guys don't have it any more." I had to blink my eyes. Never had I felt happier that long ago I'd trained myself to discount the cheers and the boos. During that winning steak I could easily have gotten an appetite for cheers. At last I understood why Wilt had been hinting that the loser label had begun to bother him. To be bombarded with such abuse for years is enough to nettle anybody. To Wilt's credit, it never seriously damaged our respect for each other while we were playing.