Sports fans 40 years old or less remember Don Nelson as the NBA’s second-winningest coach, a big man who wore wild neckties — my favorite was when he went through his “ties that looked like a dead fish” period, the gills and head touching his belt buckle — a large man who basically looked like your oversized uncle who’d lucked into great sideline seats for the Bucks-Sixers game.
Dallas Mavericks fans, who are now pulling for their rookie head coach Dusty May, a bona fide whiz and former Louisiana Tech assistant who most recently led Michigan to the NCAA men’s basketball title, remember the fun-loving, good-natured Nelson as the coach who corralled both Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash and turned the late-1990s Mavs into winners; Nowitzki was MVP of the Finals in 2011, the franchise’s sole championship.
But guys 20 years older those fans in their 40’s and 20 years younger than Nelson, who passed away this week at age 86, remember the NBA great as a workmanlike sixth man on the Boston Celtics teams of our youth. Boston won five titles with Nelson on the roster back in the 1960s and early 1970s when we HAD to have the NBA.
Repeat: guys my age HAD to have it. The Kansas City Kings and Tiny Archibald verses Wes Unseld and the Baltimore Bullets on a Sunday afternoon in the wintertime was necessary as oxygen to get you from football to baseball season.
And what glorious fun it was. Youth of today will find it hard to believe but there was a time when the game was played most of the time with 10 guys no more than 18 feet from the basket, give or take. Watching good NBA teams was like watching good music, seamless and graceful, occasional power, no wasted motion. Glorious, is what it was.
Best of all was a Celtics Sunday. Preferably a Celtics-Sixers or Celtics-Lakers Sunday, must-see TV through the 1980s. But the 1970s was about a guy like Nelson, a son of Middle America, a former Iowa star, a role player who shot one-handed free throws, probably because he was holding a doobie in his free hand. (And this is before we knew what a doobie was.)
When a gentleman like Nelson dies, a guy who’d long ago retired to Hawaii to raise coffee and flowers and cannabis and, by all accounts, was a loveable and huggable guy in his elder years, when a guy like that passes, the sports fan like me misses him less as an athlete and more as you’d miss the passing of a favorite entertainer, like Andy Griffith or Merle Haggard or Johnny Carson
He was a wonderful player. The Celtics retired his No. 19 jersey a long long time ago. But it was the way he played that made barely athletic guys like me love him. The “put me in coach” mentality, the one-handed free throws, the dirty blonde hair sweaty like heavy Iowa corn silk. Nothing fancy, just titles and, once the smoke had cleared, his jersey hanging in the rafters.
It was a much different time and a way different game. Nelson and John Havlicek. Paul Westphal. Paul Silas. The first time I’d ever heard of bone spurs was when Jo Jo White had to miss some games. Hurt me.
Oh goodness: just remembered Don Chaney of Baton Rouge, a Louisiana Sports Hall of Famer since 1991, and the great Dave Cowens, who was sort of like a faster, red-haired Don Nelson.
That the fire-breathing Tom Heinsohn was the coach just made it better. (By fire-breathing, we mean it semi-literally: Heinsohn was a two-pack-a-day guy back when it was common for the team bus and locker room to be filled with cigarette smoke. Like we’ve said: much different time, way different game.)
Memories of youth stay with you for different reasons. Who knows why we remember what we remember? But something about Don Nelson, who looked like he sang baritone in the choir on Sunday mornings, then would go out and get you 14 and 7 boards in the church league game on Tuesday nights at the local rec, will always stick with me. He’ll never know or could never have known that. But I do.
He and his hoop friends brought me and thousands of others my age a lot of joy. Still do. Always will.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu