R.I.P. John Havlicek (1935-2019); Boston Celtics HOF Legend

  

John Havlicek, a relentless force for the Boston Celtics over two decades and two championship eras and one of the greatest clutch stars in N.B.A. history, died Thursday in Jupiter, Fla. He was 79.

His death was announced by the Celtics. No cause was given, but the team said that he had suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

Havlicek showed an unassuming but unyielding consistency throughout a 16-season, Hall of Fame career. He was known by the nickname “Hondo,” given him by a childhood friend who had trouble pronouncing his surname and who thought Havlicek’s strong, silent demeanor was reminiscent of John Wayne in the 1953 movie of the same name.

One play epitomized Havlicek’s reputation as the pre-eminent hustle player of his time and possibly, as many older Celtics fan would argue, of all time.

On April 15, 1965, the Celtics were clinging to a 110-109 lead in the decisive seventh game of the 1965 Eastern Conference final playoff series. With five seconds remaining, center Bill Russell’s inbounds pass from under the 76ers’ basket hit a guide wire overhead, giving the 76ers the ball and a chance to win the series.

Guarding Chet Walker, a star forward for Philadelphia, in the area near the free-throw line, Havlicek began silently ticking off the five allotted seconds that 76ers’ guard Hal Greer had to inbound the ball. Then, at the count of four, Havlicek peeked back at Greer, who had just tossed the ball in Walker’s direction.

Havlicek reached and tipped the pass to Celtics guard Sam Jones, who then dribbled out the clock to cement the Boston victory, setting off pandemonium in Boston Garden. Havlicek was hugged by Russell, mobbed by fans and stripped of his No. 17 jersey.

The play was immortalized by the Celtics’ longtime radio broadcaster, Johnny Most, whose call — “Havlicek stole the ball!” — became enshrined in every highlight reel of the Celtics’ glorious history.

“Red Auerbach always said, `Look for an edge,’” Havlicek recalled in a 2015 N.B.A. video marking the 50th anniversary of the steal, referring to the Celtics’ organizational patriarch and nine-time champion coach. “I did what I was supposed to do. I never realized it would last this long, but it is everlasting.”

Spanning eras that included Russell and Dave Cowens, star center of the 1970s, Havlicek was part of eight Celtics championship teams in all, never losing in an N.B.A. finals. He was also a standout at Ohio State when the Buckeyes won an N.C.A.A. title in 1960 and reached the championship game in two subsequent seasons, in which Havlicek co-starred with his roommate Jerry Lucas, another future Basketball Hall of Famer. Those teams won 78 of 84 games. (Another member of the roster was Bob Knight, who would go on to a renowned and controversial career coaching college ball.)

It was with the Celtics that Havlicek developed his game as a unique two-position player — small forward and shooting guard. Early in his career he raised the visibility and value of the sixth man, or first man off the bench, before becoming a starter when Russell, a player-coach, retired after the 1968-69 season and Tom Heinsohn, a former teammate of Havlicek’s, took over as coach.

Havlicek was voted to the all-N.B.A. team four times, the second team seven times and the defensive first team five times. Russell, who is considered to have been the most indispensable Celtic of all, called Havlicek “the best all-around player I ever saw.”

Havlicek, who averaged 20.8 points for his career, played in more games (1,270) for Boston than Russell, scored more points (26,395) than a later Celtic star, Larry Bird, and handed out more assists (6,114) than any other Celtic playmaker except Bob Cousy.

But when he joined the Celtics as a rookie in 1962 as the seventh pick of that year’s college draft, Havlicek was mainly a tenacious defender with an indefatigable work ethic. Some teammates, Cousy included, doubted he would amount to much.
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“He didn’t really shoot from the outside or dribble that much,” said Heinsohn, who had played alongside Havlicek for several seasons in Boston. “But he was like a wide receiver in football, and he would run and catch long passes from Cousy for layups.”

Before joining the Celtics, Havlicek almost did become a wide receiver, for the Cleveland Browns. The Browns selected him in the seventh round of the 1962 N.F.L. draft, even though Havlicek — who had been an all-state high school quarterback in Ohio — had repeatedly rejected offers to play big-time college football at Ohio State for Woody Hayes, one of the sport’s coaching giants. (He also played baseball in college, as an infielder).

But after a disappointing initial contract offer by Auerbach, Havlicek accepted an invitation by Paul Brown, the Browns’ coach, to try out as a wide receiver. The Browns wanted to take advantage of his height, a shade over 6 feet 5 inches.

Lucas recalled asking him, “You’re going to do what?” He added, in a telephone interview, “John was that good an athlete — pretty much any sport — and especially that good a runner.”

Fred Taylor, Ohio State’s basketball coach, liked to use members of the university’s cross-country team as pacesetters when he had his players run laps. “John would run away from us, and then he’d run away from the pacesetters,” Lucas said.

After playing in two preseason games, Havlicek was a late cut by the Browns and soon after joined the Celtics in training camp. He quickly let his new teammates know what they were in for.

In his first scrimmage, Havlicek was matched with Jim Loscutoff, a burly forward known for his physical play. After a while, a winded Loscutoff yelled out: “Hey, you’re crazy. Nobody runs like that. Slow down.”

Havlicek responded, “Quit pushing me so hard and I’ll quit running so hard.”

Havlicek never did stop moving, all the way to April, 9, 1978, when he scored 29 points in a victory over the Buffalo Braves. It was the last time a Celtic wore No. 17.

John Joseph Havlicek was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, on April 8, 1940, the second son of Frank Havlicek, who had emigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia at 12, and Mandy (Turkalj) Havlicek, who was of Croatian descent but born in the United States. His parents ran a general store, and the family lived above it, on U.S. 40 in nearby Lansing, an Ohio Valley town of a few hundred residents near Wheeling, W.Va.

Fearing traffic on the busy roadway, Havlicek’s parents refused to let John have a bicycle as a youngster, so he tended to sprint everywhere to keep up with friends.

“Maybe that’s where I developed my stamina,” he wrote in “Hondo: Celtic Man in Motion,” a 1977 autobiography written with Bob Ryan. In a 1988 interview with Sports Illustrated, Havlicek attributed his “exceptional lungs” to all the running he did, claiming that doctors “have to take two chest X-rays to fit them in.”

Havlicek liked to cut through an uphill wooded area on the way to meeting his friends, including Phil Niekro, who lived across the street and, along with a brother, Joe, went on to pitch in the major leagues. On the way home, Havlicek would run all the way downhill, dodging trees, falling often.

“But maybe I developed the instincts for all the shuffling in basketball,” he wrote in his book.

The discipline to keep running, keep working, came naturally, he said, perhaps from watching his parents labor in their store. Frank Havlicek — a fan of soccer, a game John didn’t play — seldom had time to attend his son’s basketball, football or baseball games at Bridgeport High School, in the Ohio River village of Bridgeport, where he was heavily recruited for basketball. (Its gymnasium was named for him in 2007.)

According to Lucas, Havlicek worked diligently at everything, including his college studies. He was bewildered by Lucas’s reliance on his memory skills, fearing that his roommate would become academically ineligible and “ruin our team.”

As a professional, Havlicek was so focused on avoiding body fat that he typically arrived at training camp slimmed down and had to “eat his way back to his playing weight,” Heinsohn said.

“But he could do things like that because he was so darned disciplined,” he added.

Havlicek was a man of such preparation and routine that he folded his socks on a hanger in the locker room before slipping into his game uniform.

In an interview, Ryan, Havlicek’s co-author, who covered the Celtics for The Boston Globe, called him “the all-time standard of stamina, the essence of moving without the ball and the greatest sixth man in history.” He added that Havlicek too often “falls between the cracks” of historical measure when compared to generational peers like Oscar Robertson and Jerry West.

In Boston, Havlicek was never undervalued after his rookie year, Heinsohn said. More than anything, the Celtics could count on him to play hard and hurt, as he did in another Eastern Conference final seventh game, coached by Heinsohn, against the Knicks in 1973.

Earlier in the series, Havlicek had run into a screen set by Dave DeBusschere, the Knicks’ bruising power forward, separating his right shoulder. After sitting out one game, Havlicek labored through the last three games, reduced to mainly using his weaker left hand.

“His right arm was dangling — most guys wouldn’t have even been out there,” Heinsohn said.

The injury caught up to Havlicek in Game 7, when he was able to make only one shot and score 4 points as the Celtics lost a seventh game in the postseason at home for the first time. The Knicks, with Lucas in their lineup, went on to win the N.B.A. championship.

The Celtics won the N.B.A. championship title the next season, defeating the Milwaukee Bucks led by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) in seven games. On a rejuvenated Boston team featuring Cowens, Paul Silas and Jo Jo White (who died last year at 71), Havlicek was voted most valuable player of the finals.

In the years after retirement from the Celtics, he maintained a low basketball profile, splitting his time between New England and Florida with his wife, Beth (Evans) Havlicek, whom he had met at Ohio State and married in 1967.

An avid golfer, Havlicek continued the work he had begun during basketball off-seasons, as the vice president of the International Manufacturing & Marketing Corporation in Columbus, Ohio. He also started a company, John Havlicek All Sports Products, and owned Wendy’s franchises.

Havlicek is survived by his wife; a son, Chris, who played basketball at the University of Virginia; and a daughter, Jill Havlicek Buchanan, a high school basketball and lacrosse player who also played lacrosse at Virginia and married Brian Buchanan, a former major league player.

While Havlicek was at first glance no imposing specimen on a basketball court, he had the sinewy look of the long line of mine workers on his mother’s side. In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, he scoffed at the notion that his era’s best would struggle athletically against the more high-flying modern-era players.

The game, he said, was still about executing fundamental basketball skills and the willingness to run opponents into submission.

“I certainly think we could compete, and given the same latitude” as modern players — “wraparound dribbles, three or four steps to the rim — we would be even better,” he said. “For every dunk they’d get on us, we’d probably get two backdoor layups on them.”