Alaska Employment Law

Johnny Most, a lesson in tolerance, and the old, old Boston Garden

With the resurgence of the Boston Celtics, basketball is actually kind of fun again.  I had lunch today with a fellow from my office, mid-30s, who arrived at the doorstep of his teenage years just as the Larry Bird era had peaked and was entering its decline.  His early image of the Celtics was a good image.  But that was the beginning of the end of those good Celtics images for me.  After the 1986 championship I went to City Hall Plaza in Boston (which abuts the truly ugly City Hall), along with thousands of other people, to cheer for Larry and Red Auerbach and Bill Walton.  That was the 16th and last championship, so far.  After that, Kevin McHale’s foot broke down and it all slid slowly downhill.

But really, I was luckier than my friend.  By the time I was about 12 and noticing the Celtics, they had won a handful of championships already.  It was a smaller league, and a different style of play, but those were undeniably great and talented teams.  For decades, the Celtics’ play-by-play announcer was a lunatic chain smoker named Johnny Most, who seemed to explode in apoplexy every game.   Well… strike that.  There was no “seem to” about Johnny - he regularly, dependably, exploded; there’s really no doubt about it. 

He was the first great “homer” - everything the Celtics did was good, and honest, and everything the other team did was bad, unfair, unprincipled, brutal, and unethical.  The refs were insane.  Johnny liked to make up names for players.  Most of us old fans remember McFilthy and McNasty, a/k/a Jeff Ruland and Rick Mahorn, players from tough, combative Washington Bullets teams in the early 80s.  Johnny hated them.  So, we hated them, too.  Eventually, Johnny contracted diabetes and emphysema and finished his broadcast career as a double amputee, still screeching in a horrid voice that only a Celtics fan could love.  He was over the top, but he knew how to call a basketball game.  I miss Johnny these days. 

And although the modern building the Celtics play in is called the TD Banknorth Garden, I miss the original Boston Garden, a tottering smoke-filled relic with small seats, dangerously steep stairways, and rabid fans.  It was a dirty old place, where great players, none greater than Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, jousted.  One of the first games I ever saw at the Garden featured these two great players, battling down below my balcony seat in the smoky haze.  I went with my buddy Gerry DeSantis; his dad Fausto took us.  I remember yelling, calling Chamberlain a freak.  But Gerry’s dad leaned over to me and said, he’s not a freak, don’t call him that, he’s a great basketball player.  I felt bad.  I feel bad to this day, and I can’t apologize to Wilt, because he is no longer living.  I know he didn’t hear me anyway.  But the image is frozen in my head, of these two great basketball players below me in the smoke, an epic struggle by grown men over a ball.  I miss those days.  I miss having heroes like them.