Auerbach adds to his legacy

["Stephen Beauregard" <sb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Auerbach adds to his legacy

Eight honored at Sports Museum

By John Powers, Globe Staff, 6/13/2003

or Red Auerbach, who may need his own Smithsonian Museum wing to stash his
rings, plaques, medals, and honorary degrees, last night's lifetime
achievement award from The Sports Museum during a FleetCenter ceremony was the
latest of half a century's worth of awards. ''Red's got a statue that the
pigeons are already doing damage to,'' cracked Tom Heinsohn. ''Does he need
any more honors?''


But for the rest of last night's honorees - Heinsohn, Phil Esposito, Steve
Grogan, Luis Tiant, Mary Pratt, Don Gillis and Tim Horgan - being named a
`legacy' of the museum was a highlight of a lifetime.

''This is a huge thing for me,'' said Esposito, the former Bruin whose number
7 hangs in the rafters. ''I have a special place in my heart for this town. I
never wanted to leave here. It was the best time of my life.''

So it was, too, for their chroniclers - Gillis, the original sports anchor who
did play-by-play for all four professional teams (`I'm a lucky bugger.') and
Horgan, the lyrical Boston Herald sports columnist. ''I don't know what a
legend is,'' Horgan said, ''But it's good. I can tell you that.''

For two nostalgic hours, while their film clips and photos were flashed on the
big screen, the legacies saw the clock rolled back for decades. Here was
Heinsohn with his crewcut and his hook shot, Tiant winding up on the Fenway
mound like an elaborate 17th-century clock, and Grogan dashing and dodging on
the Foxborough turf.

''I didn't have any idea what I was doing,'' said Grogan, who was just hoping
to make the Patriots roster in 1975 - and became a mid-season starter.
''That's why I was running all the time. But I had fun.''

Mary Pratt, who lived the Title IX dream three decades before there was a law,
remembered playing softball on the concrete floor of the Boston Garden. From
there, she became a pioneer of women's professional baseball and a role model
for generations. ''Those were five happy summers,'' she said. ''But the most
important thing is the 48 years I taught school.''

For some of the honorees, like Heinsohn and Esposito, being back on Causeway
Street unleashed a flood of nostalgia. ''I first played here in 1953 with Holy
Cross,'' recalled Heinsohn. ''In those days, more people came to the Holy
Cross games here than were going to the Celtics.''

Esposito, a charter member of the Big Bad Bruins who won two Stanley Cups,
said the highlight of his career was having his number retired here. ''When
Ray Bourque took it off, I was speechless,'' he confessed.

Esposito's career didn't end here (the memory of him in a Ranger jersey still
seems a bad dream). ''But if anybody asks me for an autograph now, I always
send them a Boston picture,'' he said.

For Tiant, a Cuban emigre who finally returned to the island after more than
four decades, the Hub was his adopted home. ''You made me feel like I never
left my country,'' he said. ''You treated me with dignity, respect, and love.
You can't buy that with money.''

The man of the evening was the man who was here before all of them - Auerbach,
the 85-year-old Celtic patriarch whose MVPs now, he says, are his cardiologist
and urologist. He came here in 1950, a sharp-tongued redhead from Brooklyn in
argyle socks, built the world's most famous basketball team and never left.

''Red nurtured all of us into believing we were basketball's Cosa Nostra,''
said Heinsohn. ''The Celtics were `our thing'. We had pride of authorship.''

Auerbach has spent so much time on Causeway Street that he probably could
reconstruct the old Garden from memory. He's certainly the only man with
lifetime cigar-smoking privileges on the premises.

''I'm going home to Kansas tomorrow and I'm going to tell everybody I was at
the same event as Red Auerbach,'' Grogan said. ''I'm going to be the hero in
town.''

Thanks,

Steve
sb@maine.rr.com

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