Tommy Heinsohn would have been successful in just about anything he tried.
He was a successful basketball player for the Boston Celtics, a championship-winning coach, and announcer who stood out both on the national stage and locally, an artist, and an insurance salesman.
I’d say that’s pretty diversified, and speaks to his ability to pour himself into whatever he did, and leave nothing out there in the process.
What defined Heinsohn, who died Tuesday at the age of 86, was his passion. Not just about basketball, but about everything. He was the definition of “all in.”
That’s why he came across as a madman so often. As a basketball player, you didn’t want to get in his way when he was driving to the basket, but at the same time you didn’t want to just step back and let him launch that laser from 30 feet out either. He wasn’t called “Tommy Gun,” or, even better, “Ack Ack” for nothing.
You didn’t want to be a referee in a game coached by Heinsohn. He was murder on referees, and did not hold back when it came to complaining to them, or about them. One of the signature Miller Lite commercials involved Heinsohn and referee Mendy Rudolph, where one said “tastes great” while the other screamed “less filling.” Finally, Rudolph screamed: “That’s it, Heinsohn, you’re out of the bar.”
Rudolph T’d up Heinsohn often during their respective heydays.
Heinsohn was every bit a “Celtic” as Bob Cousy, Bill Russell, John Havlicek, or any of the other legends. He came onto the team in 1956, and was on its first championship team. And save for 1958, when Russell was hurt, he and the Celtics won every year until he retired in 1965 due to a foot injury.
When Russell finally decided he’d had enough, after the 1969 season, Heinsohn picked up the pieces of a badly broken team and, within five years, it was back on top. He was a proponent of up-tempo basketball, and with Dave Cowens and Paul Silas spearheading the fast break with rebounding and superb outlet passes, it became an art form. Sometimes, the ball never touched the floor en route to the hoop.
It was Heinsohn the announcer, however, that most people know now. And in the booth, he was as unhinged as he was as a player or coach. It’s easy to say it was all an act, because some of it was. But a lot of it was real. Heinsohn loved basketball, and, more important, loved the Celtics.
And he had a certain type of player in mind, too. While he — along with everybody — appreciated guys like Larry Bird and Paul Pierce, he also liked guys like Silas, Marcus Smart, Brian Scalabrine, and Walter McCarty. Especially McCarty. Whenever he did anything on the court — anything at all — Heinsohn would roar, “I. Love. Walter.”
He was volatile in everything. Once, in 1975, when I was still in college but covering sports for United Press International on co-op at Northeastern, I was sent to a Celtics practice before a playoff game against the Washington Bullets (blech, Wizards!). Some intrepid reporter asked Heinsohn whether he bought into comments that the Celtics were choking because they were losing (and ultimately lost) the series.
Heinsohn lit into the reporter like a rocket. You could almost see his blood pressure go up, as his voice got louder. When he finished, he looked at the guy as he enunciated an elongated “Choking. Myyyyyy a***!”
This was a 6-foot-7-inch guy standing up and looking down on us. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was pretty nervous. I looked at Paul Westphal, who was on the team at the time, and who was sitting at his locker minding his own business. He began to snicker. Apparently he’d experienced this before and lived through it.
But Heinsohn was insightful too. During the 1984 NBA finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, the Celtics got blown out of the old L.A. Forum in the third game of the series. That’s the game where Larry Bird said the Celtics played like sissies.
The next day, during media availability, the Celtics did not make themselves available. Amid all the grousing about it, Heinsohn said “that is what ‘Celtics Pride’ is all about. They are banding together.”
Did they ever. In Game 4, Kevin McHale clothes-lined Kurt Rambis, Gerald Henderson stole the ball, and the Celtics won in overtime. They went on to win the title in seven games.
There isn’t a single aspect of the Celtics’ glory days that did not involve Tommy Heinsohn in some capacity. He was among the very deepest of the ties that bound this franchise through the early 1990s, when it all started coming apart. And with Red Auerbach dead, and Russell very retired, it was Heinsohn who stuck with them, and wore the face of the franchise, when the Kevin Garnett Celtics won in 2008. The man always had fun, even when he was a madman, and it was even more fun to cover him, and watch him.
The word “legend” is often misused. Not here.
Steve Krause can be reached at [email protected].
