‘HONDO’ HAVLICEK, A FOUNT OF BOUNDLESS ATHLETICISM
He so relentlessly put himself in the middle of the action at all times that when
John Havlicek died last April 25 after battling Parkinson’s, all who saw him play for the Celtics felt as if they had lost someone they knew.
And then there was Hall of Fame knuckleball pitcher Phil Niekro, who lost his best friend and “blood brother.” With the exception of Havlicek’s wife, Beth, nobody knew him better.
“I miss John and my little brother,” Niekro said. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about them. I’ll call Beth and see how she’s doing. The pain never goes away. Never, never, never. I had two brothers. Joe and John. And John would tell me, ‘I have two brothers. My brother Fred and you.’ That’s how close we were. There were not two friends in this country that could be as close and as good a friends as John and I were. No way. No way.”
Before they were Hondo and Knucksie, a pair of Hall of Fame athletes, they were neighbors who lived “maybe 100 yards,” from each other, across the street in the small Ohio Valley town of Lansing, near the West Virginia border. They chose sides for pickup football, basketball and baseball games in the neighborhood and for three years for the high school basketball and baseball teams.
Niekro, one year older than his best friend, didn’t play high school football until his senior year, and lasted all of one game.
“John, a great quarterback, a 6-6 quarterback, threw me a jump pass over the middle,” Niekro said. “Two linebackers hit me. I cracked a vertebrae, and I had to wear a steel brace on my back for six months. The doctor told me my sports days were over.”
The best friends even worked together at the filling station.
“If I wasn’t eating and sleeping at John’s house, John was eating and sleeping at my house,” Niekro said. “If you saw John, you saw me. If you saw me, you saw John. We were like blood brothers. My mom was
John’s second mother and
John’s mother was my
second mom.” Niekro, 80, can relate to Havlicek’s opponents, such as those who played against him in the NBA Finals and went 0-8. “The only thing I could do better than John was throw a knuckleball,” Niekro said. “That and I could catch more fish than him and I could get more rabbits and squirrels than him when we went hunting. I couldn’t keep up with him in football. I couldn’t keep up with him in basketball, and even in baseball. He was the best all-around athlete that I have ever seen or been around. Nobody better than Havlicek, in my book, as far as the complete athlete.” Niekro remembered when legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes came to the gas station and offered Havlicek a scholarship to play football for the Buckeyes. “John told him, ‘I don’t want to play football. I want to play basketball.’ If I remember right, Woody told him, ‘OK, then we’ll give you a scholarship to play basketball.’ I don’t think I missed a home game when John was playing there with Jerry Lucas, Jerry Siegried, Mel Nowell and all those guys,” Niekro said. Hall of Fame basketball coach Bob Knight was on that team. Anyone old enough to have seen Havlicek play remembers his boundless hustle that extended to every tile of parquet. Why wasn’t he tired? It was like watching Bob Gibson throwing just as hard in the ninth inning as the first. That wasn’t something Havlicek developed late in life. “He was the Miracle Man,” Niekro said. “He never ran out of energy as long as I can remember being around him, and that was most of my life. I can’t remember ever, ever, ever, him running out of energy. He was always, ‘Let’s play basketball, let’s play football, let’s play baseball, let’s do something.’ He never ran out of energy.” Havlicek’s diet wasn’t necessarily responsible for that. “John’s parents owned a grocery store right across the highway, Route 40. They had the best ground beef there was,” Niekro said. “When his parents were working John would fry the meat in a pan and those were the best hamburgers I’ve ever had in my life. We’d stop by the store when went to the creek to catch minnows and his mom would give me a Popsicle and John would walk out of the store with a tube of butter. He’d keep the wrapper on and lick the butter while I was having my Popsicle.” It didn’t slow him down. Havlicek, who played both ends of the court as relentlessly as Patrice Bergeron does the ice, was a 13-time AllStar, All-NBA first-or-second-team 11 times, a 13-time All-Defense first-or-second-team and was the MVP in one of his eight NBA championships. Johnny Most’s “Havlicek stole the ball!” call of Hondo’s interception of a Hal Greer pass intended for Chet Walker is to basketball what Russ Hodges’ “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” call of Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard ’Round the World call is to baseball. Havlicek’s leaning bank shot, penchant for delivering in the clutch, and his inexhaustible defensive style made him a fan favorite. How popular was he? Shortly after we said goodbye, Niekro called back to share one more memory. “In 1997 when I was inducted into the Hall of Fame, John and his wife, Beth, came in for it,” Niekro said. “They were sitting in the front row with my parents and when I introduced him, he got a bigger ovation than I did. I’ll always remember that.”