During those teenage years, stressful as they were, if I had been asked who I would like to change places with, maybe it would have been Governor Frank G. Clement, young, dynamic, a handsome and glib orator. Then again, maybe it would have been Gene Kelly. Or a young preacher we knew, who could quote scriptures by the bushel and whom the young ladies, and their mamas, all went ga-ga over. Or maybe the football captain who married my favorite cheerleader. No, I’m sure if I had been asked who I wanted to change places with, it would have been Bob Cousy.

Cousy was successful. He was famous. He was serious and responsible. He was well-off (I assumed). He was happy, content with his life ( I assumed). Most important, he was a point guard: the #1 point guard in the nation, defining the position. Along with Coach Red Auerbach, he was remaking the Boston Celtics. In fact, they were remaking professional basketball. We didn’t have television yet, so I had to catch his moves on newsreels, on the radio, in newspapers and magazines, in my imagination. And what moves they were: his no-look passing, behind-the-back dribbling, brash ball handling (of a sort our coach would have said no to), his fakes, his drawing fouls and making the free throws, and of course his long-range shots, one-hand shots, and all those assists, leading in the NBA for eight years.

In my wildest dreams, I imitated those moves in our cracker-box gym, playing point guard for the Bulldogs, leading the team from our little rural high school to another Duck River Conference championship, then on to the state, leading a college team to a national tournament—well, in the NAIA maybe. Even in my wildest dreams, I could not imagine my 5’8”, 130-pound frame making it into the pros. But a Cousy I would have dearly liked to be.

A few years went by. A few Celtic championships. Then in the 1960s, Cousy would have had to slide over, making a place beside himself on the pedestal of people I would trade places with for one Pistol Pete Maravich. Then we all would have to make room for Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, and a whole new era in pro basketball, and several more Celtic championships. But, for me, nobody could ever replace Bob Cousy.

Then a couple of years ago (I’m aging and retired by now, admiring Coach Phil Jackson and Shaq Oneal), a little green paperback jumps off a shelf at a bookstore. Cousy, it says. That’s it. It’s Bill Reynolds’ articulate and sensitive biography of Bob Cousy (Pocket Star Books, c2005). For me it’s a page turner, as engaging as a John Irving novel, suspenseful even though I usually can remember what’s going to happen next. Maybe it’s not as fatalistic as some of Irving’s novels, but it’s not simply a paean to a triumphant superstar either. Sure Cousy was famous and successful, serious and responsible, defining the position of point guard. But, as it turns out, he wasn’t always that well-off, and he was not always that content with his life. There were tensions, worries, disappointments. So I’m glad I lived my life and he lived his. I wouldn’t have changed places with him after all, but I’m glad to know him now, as a man as well as a Celtic.

Reynolds tells us the whole story, with all its dark shadows. He begins in an introductory chapter with Cousy’s retirement, at age 34. “For years he had nightmares,” Reynolds reports, eventually requiring medical treatment for anxiety attacks. “I always have been afraid that I would not be good enough,” Cousy said later. Early on, Reynolds recounts the records, the awards, the championships, the exploits of “Mr. Basketball.” He summarizes it all: “Cousy was often called the Babe Ruth of Basketball.” But he doesn’t wait long (p. 5) to let us in on the darker shadows:

“As he had grown older as a player, he also had come to resent the time he spent on the road. He hated the travel. He hated hotel rooms. He hated the endless waiting for the game to start. He hated his opponents. He hated the way he had to psych himself up for games, secluding himself, turning inward, eventually finding some dark place where he hated everything, including himself. He hated how depleted he felt when they were over, how completely drained. He hated the lifestyle of professional basketball. Most of all, he hated the time he spent away from his wife and their two young daughters. He had come to know that anything he missed could never be recaptured, that things you fail to do can never be made up.”

What Reynolds does so well in his book is to weave together the two stories: the achievements—all those headlines—with the daily grind—that inner man, the boy within, a boy who was cut from his high-school team and played only a year and a half before graduating, who went to Holy Cross, which didn’t even have it own gymnasium, who was part of the freshman platoon of a team that (incredibly!) won the NCAA championship in 1947. You have to read the book to relive his career. The glow of his stardom shines even brighter against the background of his life: growing up in a Boston tenement complex, the only son of recent French immigrants to the US, his disappointments and determination as an adolescent, a bitter personality clash with his college coach, the precarious early days of the NBA, tensions with Red Auerbach, rivalries with opponents—and with teammates, financial worries, working what amounted to overtime, doing camps to make ends meet, some temper tantrums along the way and some crying jags, and amidst all that, marriage and fatherhood. And fans who wouldn’t forget, shouting “Cooz! Cooz!”

Survival. “That had been the lesson he had taken with him from the ghetto of his childhood, the one that had shaped both him and the generation to which he belonged . . . .”

“We love ya, Cooz.” ( )