John Havlicek: A year after his passing, a reminiscence of meeting my sports idol in his final career road game
We’re now just two weeks past the one-year anniversary of the death of hall of fame Celtics great John Havlicek. If Hondo lovers and the general Celtic faithful out there are like me, the date of April 25th didn’t pass by without thinking about not only one of the most celebrated Celtics but one of the greatest basketball players of all time. In my life—and I’m sure I wouldn’t be alone in this—he was also my all-time favorite athlete. I thought writing an account of meeting him would be a nice diversionary read during this health-crisis-enforced absence from the NBA.
I grew up in central Illinois in the 1960s and ’70s. That may sound like an odd place to be a Celtics fan, around 1,100 miles from Boston, but in those days radio stations had no regulations limiting the strength of their signal and I could get WBZ Boston 1030 consistently clear. I gravitated to the Celtics for being so successful, and because I played basketball and I liked Hondo’s style of play, he became my favorite. He just went out and did his job, running opponents into the ground, and I mimicked that the best I could, which was just intramural level from high school on.
The central time zone was ideal for listening to games from the East Coast to West. I mainly recall from middle school on, around 1970-1971, becoming very engaged in the Celts. I’d listen to every game on the radio, go to the local library every weekend to catch up on box-scores through The Sporting News, and, naturally, hoped to catch a game on TV, which didn’t come with much regularity back then. Yes, Johnny Most was a “homer” radio announcer, but he told it like it was most of the time and his Celtic bias was justified when it came to bad officiating calls. I turned my room into a Bedroom Boston Garden, with homemade banners on the wall for my own rafter décor, and bought any sport magazine with Havlicek on the cover.
As I got through my high school years, Hondo was winding down his career. By that time, my love for sports and writing had transformed into the desire to be a sportswriter. When I started college in the fall of 1977 at Illinois State University, I walked into the office of the student newspaper—then called The Daily Vidette, now The Vidette—just prior to the start of classes and asked to join the sports staff. When I got toward the end of my freshman year and Havlicek had decided he was going to retire in spring 1978, I felt empowered even though I was “the rookie” on staff to ask about being able to do a story on the end of his career. I asked my editor, Cal Cheney, “What would you think if I went to Chicago Stadium for Havlicek’s last game against the Bulls and talked with him for a story?” “Sure, Rookie, go for it,” I was told.
Here’s where the story of meeting a sports hero could disintegrate, that the athlete turned out to be a jerk and the pedestal he sat on fractures and falls apart. But it doesn’t here. It’s one of the highlights of my life that my sports hero confirmed and lived up to what I imagined him to be.
More than 40 years later from that April 4, 1978, game, my memories of the interview are still vibrant. I had arranged for a press pass through Jim Durham, the Bulls’ radio announcer who had attended ISU and covered Doug Collins at the school while with WJBC radio. I made sure I did the three-hour drive with plenty of time to spare to arrive before the game to meet Havlicek. (A sad sidenote: Time would be a factor in a botched attempt to meet up with Lou Brock before a Cardinal doubleheader in St. Louis in his final season 1979; my ride left late, we got caught in traffic going over the Mississippi River, and I only got down to the dugout/clubhouse area 15 minutes before the first game. I tried to get Brock’s attention as he paced in the dugout just to tell him I was wanting to speak with him between games, but he evaded me before finally saying, “You’re a little too late, my friend.” I sulked out of there, never did go back to see him after the games, and felt like I’d had a setback in my young sports journalism career.)
At the now demolished Chicago Stadium, you gained entrance to the basement locker rooms through a trapdoor on the playing floor. The teams hadn’t started warmups when I went down to the Boston room, where I was able to approach Havlicek and explain the need for an interview. He said to get started and we stood near the locker-room doorway with him certainly being kind to a fresh college kid, six weeks shy of 19, operating out of his comfort zone. The affirmation of who Havlicek was as a person and the discipline and standards he lived by came halfway through the interview. A Boston PR man approached us and said to him that he was needed to take care of another media matter. Havlicek paused with me, looked at the man and said, perhaps sensing the PR guy considered me nonessential, “I’m doing an interview with this reporter. When I am finished with him, I’ll take care of what you need.”
As we continued and wrapped up the interview, I was speaking with him while also feeling a sense of pride that Havlicek thought enough of me to treat me as if I’d been Celtics beat writer Bob Ryan. I lingered and shadowed Hondo as he continued pregame activities, and took photos of him being interviewed for TV so there would be at least one photo to run with the story (the quality was amateur pathetic). Havlicek did not star in the game (14 points in 32 minutes), which was a Celtics 12-point loss in his final road game, but the 11,732 fans treated him well and he was presented with a Bulls jersey with his No. 17 on it.
Writing the story is a blur. I must have driven home that night, and then worked on it the next day at school because The Vidette ran it on the morning of Thursday, April 6. By then I was finding it more enjoyable to work on the Vidette and get experience than attend classes, so who knows what classes I missed on Wednesday.
After the big moment, I continued to pull for the Celtics, but the fervor can’t match that of my young adult life. No athlete has dethroned John Havlicek as top sports idol. I continued to look for news about him in retirement. After I moved to Connecticut and made road trips back to Illinois, I would see the billboard on I-70 west of the Bridgeport/Martins Ferry, Ohio, area on the Wheeling, West Virginia border that highlighted Havlicek, Phil and Joe Niekro and Bill Jobko, star athletes and native sons of the region. I have the LP and DVD recordings of the old Celtics audio from the 1950s and ’60s. I always enjoyed seeing the playback of the iconic “Havlicek stole the ball” drama. I watch the 1953 John Wayne movie “Hondo” when it comes on TV just to look for the Wayne profile, which inspired Havlicek’s pals to give him the nickname because he bore a resemblance. At Golf Digest, I got the assignment to do a swing-sequence shoot with Larry Bird, my second favorite Celtic, and he measured up to expectations, but I had previously reported on him in college when his Indiana State team would play Illinois State in basketball. And I was thankful that Jeff Twiss of the Celtics PR department was able to get an old Sporting News cover of Havlicek that I provided signed by him many years after our Chicago Stadium interview. Combined with a Bird signature on a photo of the two of us doing an interview during the photo shoot, I’ve got mementos covering my Celtic favorites.
The measure of a person’s impact on society often includes a reinforcing memory of “where you were when you heard the news” that the person had died. When I first saw the news about John Havlicek, I felt a somber urge come over me to make sure I made a memory of the moment. I needed the focus, because it was past 11 at night on April 25 that I saw the short line on espn.com’s home-page news ticker about his death. I had been scrambling that evening to prepare for an early morning flight with my family to the Quad Cities for a weekend family event and was online to do a few things on my website so my daily golf item would continue on while away. With ESPN as my home page, the news was right there to see.
I was surprised how calm I took the report, that I didn’t know whether to cry or not over a passage of my youth. I had an inclination to go around the house and tell my family members what I just saw to have them share in the moment when the sports figure who was my primary idol growing up had died. But everyone was settled in to grab some sleep and I sat there in silence, not really reacting strongly one way or another. It wasn’t something I expected to see, but not totally unexpected due to his Parkinson’s illness. I think anyone who was a Havlicek fan found it hard to believe he could ever be stopped. His entire career was built on running his opponent in the ground. The Green Running Machine was not as well known a nickname as Hondo, but it was more on the mark as a moniker for him. He was always on the move. In fact, when he retired, many media outlets used the “Hondo at the end of a long run” phrase in headlines. I recall when he retired feeling like he had one more good year in him and wishing he’d add to his legacy. But he wasn’t playing at the level he prided himself on and the Celtics were not in the hunt for a title, which if they had been might have been enough to keep him around.
What made me most melancholy after Havlicek’s passing was that it seemed like it got zero attention. I spent the next few days while in the Midwest looking for follow-up reports and could not find anything deep or beyond the news ticker basics. It hurt me that it seemed like everyone else in the media thought it was such small news; I had assumed the sports world would find this a bigger story and perspectives would have been produced.
Perhaps it’s best that it was left up to my own thoughts to reflect on and interpret Havlicek’s death in a way that was most meaningful to me. I didn’t need interpretations of what he meant to the sports world. I had my own feelings about the man, obtained through first-hand knowledge.
How an 18-year-old college freshman wrote about his sports idol Havlicek.