Auerbach worthy of recognition
At an interfaith brotherhood breakfast back in the heyday of the great Celtics dynasty, Red Sox GM Dick O’Connell addressed the gathering.
“Here we are, talking about how, on the great battlefields of war, kids fought side by side with no regard for the other fellow’s race or religion,” he said. “Well, that’s fine. But may I suggest that the best example of what we’re talking about can be found right down the street. There you’ll find a team of blacks and whites, Protestants and Catholics, who are coached by a Jew, and they’ve been champions for a long, long time.”
He referred of course to the late Red Auerbach, whose loathing of bigotry had its boyhood roots in Brooklyn, where he learned how his father Hyman, a Russian Jew from Minsk, had been placed on a ship bound for America at the age of 13 by tearful parents who were desperate to protect him from the anti-Semitism sweeping over Europe.
You can believe this: Red became a patriot long before he became a coach.
But when he became a coach he brought with him deeply-held beliefs, one of which was that stats and race meant nothing at contract time.
“The only thing I’ll ask,” he told his players, “is what did you do to make us a better team?”
His much ballyhooed naming of Bill Russell as the first black head coach in American pro sports?
It had nothing to do with making a social statement.
“I just figured, who could get more out of Russell the player than Russell the coach?” he explained.
Russell was just as placid about it. Someone asked, “Bill, do you think this represents progress?” With his famous deadpan glare he replied, “It’ll be progress when a black man gets a job like this and no one mentions his color.”
What a glorious chapter of Boston history those two authored together. What an enduring example they set. What a powerful lesson they taught.
But now Tito Jackson, caring more for headlines than history, has kicked up a ruckus by insisting Auerbach was an inappropriate choice to be saluted in Black History Month.
To hear Tito tell it, no white person has a claim to that history.
That sounds an awful lot like racial stereotyping here.
Whites have no laudable role in black history?
How about the 110,000 Union soldiers who perished in the Civil War? Were they not needed? That would be like running for mayor and saying you’re not interested in white votes.
No, here’s what’s real, Tito: If Red Auerbach ran this city the way he ran the Celtics, we’d be a lot better off today. All of us! And not just in February — but all year long.