“Yes, Havlicek stole the ball. But that’s only one of the many exciting moments in the Celtic history.”
— Johnny Most, opening narration, “Havlicek Stole the Ball,” released by Fleetwood Records in 1967.
When the coronavirus went global, live sporting events went dark.
In a pinch, then, we resorted to watching old games.
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Press the right sequence of buttons on your remote or laptop and you’d be whisked back in time to the last play of Super Bowl XXXVI (“Kick is on the way, and … it … is … good! It’s good! It’s good!”— Gil Santos), or the last out of the 2004 World Series (“Ground ball, stabbed by Foulke, he has it . . .” — Joe Castiglione).
If hockey’s your thing, you could dial up Dave Goucher closing out Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final: “Get the duck boaters ready! Get the duck boats ready! After 39 long years the Cup is coming back home!”
Or you could conjure Sean Grande, delivering the Celtics to the winners’ circle in Game 6 of the 2008 NBA Finals: “Twenty-two years, but the game’s original monarchy has regained the throne. The Celtics swarm the floor …”
Thank God for the old games. We’ve needed these diversions, and the television people have answered the call. To offer just one example: NBC Sports Boston has re-aired 57 “Classic Celtics” games during the pandemic.
But there was a time, and in the grand scheme it wasn’t that long ago, when sports fans had only two resources if they wanted to revisit their favorite teams, favorite games, favorite seasons. One of those resources was the tried-and-true newspaper clipping, which offered a colorful account of that special game even if over time the pages turned yellow and brittle.
The other resource — and this was a product of the 1960s that had its run and then faded away when the VCR and cable television burst upon the scene — was the celebratory 33 rpm phonograph album that chronicled the highlights of a special season. Aging followers of the 1967 Red Sox can still recite the wonderfully kitschy poetry of “The Impossible Dream,” beginning with the late, great Ken Coleman telling us, “This is really a love story, an affair twixt a town and a team.”
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But the short-lived era of the keepsake sports phonograph album actually began earlier in 1967 with the release of “Havlicek Stole the Ball: Exciting Highlights of Celtic Championship Play-offs 1956-57 to 1965-66.” And for that, as well as “The Impossible Dream” and dozens of other similarly-themed record albums of that era, sports fans owe a debt of gratitude to two men — the late Johnny Most, the legendary radio voice of the Celtics from 1953 until 1990, and a recording studio owner named Vincent Giarusso, who turns 90 on July 15.
Yes, Most said, “Havlicek stole the ball,” all right, after which he and Giarusso made sure we’d never forget it.
And to think all this began sometime in 1966 during a chance meeting at a cocktail party in Swampscott. Most, though born and raised in New York City, was already a Boston sports heavyweight. Giarusso was the owner of Fleetwood Records, a smallish company operating out of a former supermarket in Revere. Founded in 1958 by Giarusso and Ray Samora, Fleetwood was decidedly niche: It was in the business of recording drum-and-bugle music.
“Meeting Johnny Most was one of those once-in-a-million things,” said Giarusso. “We had mutual friends, and that’s how we wound up at the same cocktail party. I knew who he was, of course, but he didn’t know me.”
The two men began kibitzing over drinks, one thing leading to another, and at some point they began talking about producing a phonograph album of Celtics highlights.
At the time, the Celtics were so much more than the only winning team in town. They were a dynasty: Led by Bill Russell and co-starring John Havlicek, Sam Jones and K.C. Jones — and with Bob Cousy having retired only a few years earlier — they had won eight straight NBA championships.
The Red Sox were American League cellar-dwellers back then, playing to empty houses at rundown Fenway Park. The Patriots were members of the upstart American Football League, whose merger with the powerful NFL was still a few years distant. As for the Bruins, they were about to unleash a heralded teenager named Bobby Orr — and the universe would soon take notice. But they were not yet the Big, Bad Bruins.
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In the Celtics, Vincent Giarusso saw opportunity.
In the proposed record album, so, too, did Johnny Most.
“Johnny was excited about it,” Giarusso said, “but he told me we couldn’t move ahead until we ran it by Red Auerbach.”
A sit-down was arranged with Auerbach, the coach and general manager of the Celtics famous for assembling talent-laden rosters and lighting up victory cigars, both of which irked opposing teams to no end.
The meeting was fruitful but brief.
“He told us, ‘I don’t think you can make any money on it, but sure, go ahead,’” Giarusso said. “And that’s how it started.”
Giarusso next struck a deal with WHDH-AM, which owned the Celtics radio rights, to use whatever play-by-play calls from Most that hadn’t already been destroyed.
The album was released in 1967, which initially turned out to be not-so-great timing considering the Celtics were knocked out of the Eastern Conference finals by the 76ers, ending their long championship run. But Most used the brief playoff run to provide free advertising for the album via in-game drop-ins until officials from WHDH smartened up and got on the phone with Fleetwood to suggest it might be a good idea if they bought some commercial time.
“Yeah, we were called to the carpet on that one,” said Giarusso. “Johnny was giving the album a lot of attention on the air.”
But the title itself — “Havlicek Stole the Ball” — was its own marketing campaign in that it invoked memories of Most’s stirring call of Havlicek’s deflection of Hal Greer’s inbounds pass in the closing seconds of Game 7 of the 1964-65 Eastern Conference finals at the Garden. It was a great play by Havlicek — it clinched a 110-109 victory over the Sixers, after which the Celts rolled the Lakers in the NBA Finals — but Most’s description of what happened remains the greatest call in Boston sports history.
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MORE: The 20 greatest broadcast calls in Boston sports history
Fleetwood also got involved in a sales campaign that seems quaint by today’s standards. Wayne Terminello, now 69 and the owner of what has become Fleetwood Media Productions, was a teenager working part-time for the company in 1967 when he was assigned to transport copies of the album to local First National supermarkets where Most and Havlicek were making appearances.
“The stores would put posters in the windows that they were coming and then set up a table out front when they arrived,” said Terminello. “I had been working for Vince since I was in junior high school, and here I am, sitting with Johnny Most and John Havlicek as they signed albums. When they needed more albums I got them out of the trunk and put them on the table. I had the best job in the world. All my friends were jealous.”
Despite the Celtics’ springtime playoff exodus, 1967 turned out to be a history-making year in Boston sports. The Red Sox stunned the baseball world by winning the team’s first pennant since 1946, inspiring a television special, produced by WHDH-TV. It turned out to be so popular that the tightened-up script was sent over to Fleetwood, and, with narration provided by Ken Coleman, the TV special was transformed into the iconic “Impossible Dream” record album. (For the television special Coleman had shared the narrating duties with WHDH sportscaster Don Gillis.)
“The ’67 ‘Impossible Dream’ album sold well over 100,000 copies,” said Giarusso. “Parents were getting it for their kids for Christmas. And the Boston Herald-Traveler did some kind of promotion where if you bought a subscription you’d get a copy of the album.” (At the time, the Herald-Traveler Corp. owned the newspaper as well as the WHDH television and radio stations.)
Soon Fleetwood went national, producing record albums for the Detroit Tigers, Pittsburgh Pirates and Baltimore Orioles. Its “Miracle Mets” album, chronicling the 1969 New York Mets’ World Series championship season, was one of Fleetwood’s biggest sellers. Also in 1969, the company produced an album commemorating the 100th anniversary of Major League Baseball. Some of the narration was done by actor James Stewart, with Giarusso personally flying to Los Angeles to record the tracks. Fleetwood produced a few more Celtics albums, two albums dedicated to the Bruins, and “Super Sox ’75.”
But the “Impossible Dream” album is in a class all its own, this because of the witty, poetic narration written by John Connelly, a news writer at WHDH-TV who would succumb to diabetes just two years later. Connelly, in concert with his wife, Claire, went the extra mile by writing a ballad in honor of Red Sox star Carl Yastrzemski. They took an early 20th century composition by Henry Fillmore called “Shoutin’ Liza Trombone” and then worked until two o’clock in the morning in the kitchen of their Norwood home, listening to a 78 rpm recording over and over as they wrote the lyrics to what would become known as “The Yaz Song.”
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“Carl Yastrzemski, Carl Yastrzemski, Carl Yastrzemski,
the man they call Yaz,
we love him.
“Carl Yastrzemski, Carl Yastrzemski, Carl Yastrzemski,
what power he has.”
WHDH radio personality Jess Cain was brought into Fleetwood to record the song. Years later he said he knocked it out in one take.
The bad news is that “Havlicek Stole the Ball” has none of John Connelly’s snappy prose, and there are no songs dedicated to Bill Russell, the greatest Celtic in history. But that’s also the good news, because “Havlicek Stole the Ball” serves a much different role in that it provides glimpses into the early years of the Celtics dynasty while also putting Johnny Most’s magnificent play-by-play skills on display.
As the legend of the Celtics grew, so, too, did the legend of Johnny Most. He evolved into more of an entertainer, placing his beloved Celtics on a heavenly pedestal and dismissing opposing players as so many villains and miscreants. The aging Johnny Most screamed and hollered his way through each game, and to a degree that his voice would sometimes fail him, this because of too many years of cigarettes, coffee and sleepless nights.
But “Havlicek Stole the Ball” the album was produced at a time when Most’s shtick was still evolving. What we have, then, is a Johnny Most with a deeper voice and more focus on what was happening on the court, a Johnny Most whose precise, colorful descriptions of what was happening on the court pulled listeners right into the radio.
“I grew up listening to him, the transistor radio under my pillow and all that, and he was a mechanically sound broadcaster,” said Glenn Ordway, the WEEI talk-show host who worked alongside Most for most the 80s before officially taking the No. 1 role in 1989. “He was excellent, clear-cut, telling you where the ball was, who’s feeding off of it. He was great at it, terrific at it.
“But I think as time went on, Johnny did become an entertainer. My guess is, and it’s a guess because I didn’t work with him in those days, but he probably studied rosters and looked into what a team was doing, what plays it was running. But when I came around he had already become the entertainer. It was good guys against the bad guys. And it worked for him. Everybody was noticing. He was outrageous. He would call guys on the opposing team names. People loved it.”
But, yeah, that was all later on. Early-days Johnny was just as much a homer, but he was also a technician, on top of the flow of the game and sensing the drama about to unfold. We know this because “Havlicek Stole the Ball” doesn’t deliver highlights in the traditional sense. In “The Impossible Dream,” for instance, key moments from the Sox’ 1967 season are condensed to bite-sized clips, with most play-by-play calls lasting no more than 20 seconds. Not so with “Havlicek Stole the Ball.”
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According to Leo White, a longtime graphics coordinator for Celtics and Red Sox telecasts who would later write the narration for other Celtics-themed record albums produced by Fleetwood, Most wrote the narration for “Havlicek Stole the Ball.” And there was very little of it. Instead, the album consists of long stretches of Most’s play-by-play work, with such sidekicks as Al Grenert and Jim Pansullo getting in a word now and then.
The first “highlight” of “Havlicek Stole the Ball” covers the final 2:03 of Game 7 of the 1960 NBA Finals, a 122-103 Celtics victory over the St. Louis Hawks at the Garden.
With timeouts and other stoppages in play included, the clip soldiers on for six minutes and 22 seconds, all the better for modern-day listeners to be treated to Most doing play-by-play on two levels.
On one level, he calls the game action.
On another level, he substitutes Red Auerbach for the game clock as the Celtics close in on their third championship in four years:
• “On the right the pass comes out to Russell. Now to Cousy, Cousy moving the ball around on the left, loses it, picks it up. Cousy a long set is in and out. The rebound by Russell is good. Red Auerbach has his coat off. Red Auerbach is taking off his clothes bit by bit because they’re gonna heave him in the shower.”
• “Auerbach walks out off the floor to get his cigar. Cousy bringing that ball back up . . .”
• “Sam Jones, the rebound is good . . . 117-97 the score, Auerbach is lighting up the cigar. On the right now, Green with the ball . . .”
Noting that rookies Gene Guarilia and K.C. Jones have entered the game with 53 seconds remaining, Most now focuses on the two men they have replaced.
“Cousy is over on the bench, he’s weeping out of pure elation and relief. And Russell is over there with him. Cooz, head down on the bench, is crying out of sheer joy and relief. He had a disappointing playoff series up to the middle of this one …”
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Finally, Johnny brings down the curtain: “And the buzzer goes off! It’s all over! The Boston Celtics are once again the world champions! And Tom Heinsohn runs over to Cliff Hagan and Bob Pettit and congratulates them for a good effort. The crowd is out on the floor …”
Again: This one clip is six minutes and 22 seconds long! Had it not been for “Havlicek Stole the Ball,” it likely would have been destroyed long ago, thereby depriving today’s students of basketball and sports broadcasting history this description of the 1960 NBA Finals.
“Even a lot of the stuff in the ’80s is gone now,” said Ordway. “It was on reel-to-reel tape, and it was expensive. You would have needed four or five reels for every game. You couldn’t keep all that stuff. First of all, the storage would have been expensive, and the tape doesn’t hold up over a long period of time. It starts to fragment and break down. Now all you need is a hard drive and you can save anything forever.”
In those days, said Leo White, “I think they were only required to keep air checks for 30 days. And then they’d recycle the tape and use it for other games.”
In addition to other long, fascinating clips of Johnny Most’s play-by-play, “Havlicek Stole the Ball” also contains Bob Cousy’s March 17, 1963, retirement speech, including the part where a fan, years later identified as Joe Dillon of South Boston, yells out, “We love ya, Cooz.” Bill Doyle of the Worcester Telegram has written that what Dillon said that day “could be the most famous phrase ever uttered in Celtics history.”
The album captures the spontaneous round of applause that follows “We love ya, Cooz,” and then picks up Most’s narration: “Yes, Cooz, we love you. We did then and we do now. Bob Cousy had retired as a Boston Celtic, but he had one more task to perform, that of playing in the 1963 playoffs.”
The album jumps to Game 6 of the NBA Finals at Los Angeles, and to a scary moment when Cousy has to come out because of a sprained ankle, allowing the Lakers “to chop the Celtic lead to pieces.”
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Cousy re-enters the game with the Celtics up by 1 point. He didn’t score, but, Most says in the narration, he “added inspirational value” to Boston’s 112-109 victory.
Side 2 of the album includes a tribute to the late Celtics owner Walter Brown, plus a clip from the Havlicek-stole-the-ball game that lasts more than five minutes.
The album closes with Most’s call of the Celtics wrapping up a 95-93 victory over the Lakers in Game 7 of the 1965-66 NBA Finals, but there is some foreshadowing here: Johnny’s voice comes and goes on him in the last seconds.
The Celtics’ 1989-90 season was the last in which Johnny Most got behind the mic, and even then he only made a few appearances. He had already been forced to yield full-time play-by-play duties to Ordway, having undergone triple-bypass heart surgery on Sept. 18, 1989. He didn’t make his first appearance until the Celtics’ Jan. 4, 1990, game against the Washington Bullets. The Boston Herald reported that Most sounded weak, but had “a touch of that old-time fire at the enemy.” The newspaper account quotes Most as saying that Bullets guard Ledell Eackles “threw his first pass since last December.”
“The goal was to bring him back and have him do a quarter of the game,” said Ordway. “The first four or five minutes he’d be fine. The adrenaline would be flowing and he’d be all pumped up and excited, but then he wouldn’t have the energy to continue on.”
As the postseason neared, there was speculation Most would return to action. How could the Celtics be in the playoffs without Johnny Most?
It didn’t happen. And the Celtics, despite a 52-30 record during the regular season, were upset by the Knicks in a best-of-five first-round playoff series. After winning the first two games of the series — scoring 157 points in Game 2 — the Celtics lost three straight.
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Tom Carelli, a former producer on Celtics radio broadcasts and now senior vice president of scheduling for the NBA, remembers that “those last years were awkward, but it was Johnny so you tried to do the best you could while remaining concerned about his health … he always wanted to work, but his health was an increasing problem during the years I was there.”
Johnny Most never did return. He died on January 3, 1993. He was 69.
“Toward the end, there were rumors going around that the Celtics wanted him out, that Glenn Ordway wanted him out,” said Jamie Most, Johnny’s son. “It was the exact opposite. They all wanted him back. And my father wanted to come back. But the doctors came to me and said he’s just not well enough to do it anymore.”
To Jamie Most and his family, “Havlicek Stole the Ball” remains a cherished family heirloom.
“A lot of what the NBA and collectors have consists of little clips,” he said. “But this album, and there were a couple of others later on, is pretty awesome. My dad had a reputation in the ’80s, and that was fun, that was crazy. But what makes this so significant is that it’s in the ’60s and you can really hear what an excellent broadcaster he was in terms of keeping up with the ball, letting you know where the play was going, which sometimes gets overlooked.
“‘Havlicek Stole the Ball’ is something I’ve told my kids they absolutely have to hear,” he said. “I have a 19-year-old, a 17-year-old and a 12-year-old, and they never got to meet him. For them, that album is a treasure.”
As it is for Celtics fans of all ages.
“Havlicek Stole the Ball” can be found on YouTube. Fleetwood has CDs available for $15 here.
(Photo: Dick Raphael / NBAE via Getty Images)
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