{"id":3836,"date":"2015-06-24T02:50:03","date_gmt":"2015-06-24T10:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/?p=3836"},"modified":"2023-02-09T02:38:05","modified_gmt":"2023-02-09T07:38:05","slug":"was-bill-russell-traded-for-the-ice-capades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/2015\/06\/24\/was-bill-russell-traded-for-the-ice-capades\/","title":{"rendered":"Was Bill Russell Traded for the Ice Capades?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about basketball and whether they are true or false. Click here<\/a> to view an archive of the basketball urban legends featured so far.<\/p>\n

BASKETBALL URBAN LEGEND<\/span><\/u>: The Rochester Royals passed on Bill Russell in the 1956 NBA Draft because the Boston Celtics arranged for the Royals to get the Ice Capades.<\/p>\n

On the day of the 1956 National Basketball Association (NBA) Draft, Boston Celtics general manager (and coach) Arnold “Red” Auerbach made one of the greatest trades in NBA history. He dealt All-Star Center Ed Macauley and rookie small forward Cliff Hagan (drafted by the Celtics in 1953 but never played for the team as he remained at the University of Kentucky for one more season and then spent two years in the military) to the St. Louis Hawks for University of San Francisco center Bill Russell, who had been selected with the second pick in the draft. Macauley and Hagan were both great players (they are both in the Basketball Hall of Fame), but Bill Russell was one of the greatest players of all-time and led the Celtics to a remarkable eleven championships in his thirteen seasons in the NBA (amusingly, one of the only years he failed<\/em> to win the title was in 1958 when he and the Celtics were defeated in the NBA Finals by none other than Macauley and the Hawks, which still remains the only title in Hawks franchise history). <\/p>\n

\"nba1957celtics-russellmeek2\"<\/p>\n

You might have noticed, though, that the trade was for Russell after he was taken with the second<\/b> pick in the draft. The Rochester Royals had the first pick in the draft. Why didn’t they<\/em> draft Russell? There is a legendary story explaining why they passed on Russell. Here is Auerbach telling the story to John Feinstein<\/a> in Feinstein’s 2004 collection of Auerbach stories, Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game<\/em>:<\/p>\n

‘So how’d you get them to not take Russell?’
\nRed smiled. I had set him up perfectly.
\n‘The Ice Capades,’ he said.
\n‘The Ice Capades?’
\n‘Sure. Walter Brown [the owner of the Celtics] was president of the Ice-Capades. I had him call Les Harrison, the owner in Rochester, and tell them he’d send the Ice Capades up there for a week if they didn’t draft Russell.’
\n‘So you got Bill Russell for the Ice-Capades?’
\n‘You got it.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Auerbach told basically the same story to Terry Pluto<\/a> for Pluto’s classic 1992 oral history of the early days of the NBA,
\nTall Tales: The Glory Years of the NBA, in the Words of the Men Who Played, Coached, and Built Pro Basketball<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen, most people don’t know it, but we had assurances from Rochester that they would not take Russell. Lester Harrison was having trouble booking the Ice Capades. At one time, Walter Brown owned part of it. So Walter told Harrison, ‘If you pass on Russell, I’ll help you get the Ice Capades.’ That clinched the deal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bill Russell has told essentially the same story, as well,<\/a> but he also specifically noted that it was Auerbach who told him the story much later on (as he was not privy to the details of the trade at the time). <\/p>\n

The “Bill Russell was traded for the Ice Capades” story has now become an accepted part of basketball lore. But is it true?
\n<\/p>\n

Before we examine the story any further, it should be noted that Walter Brown never spoke about the incident before he passed away in 1964. Lester Harrison, for his part, vehemently denied the story before he passed away in 1997. Auerbach told the story a number of times before he passed away in 2006. So we’re dealing with a disputed story involving three deceased gentlemen. So if we can’t ask them about it anymore, what we can<\/strong> we do? Well, we can look at what the situation was in April of 1956 and determine how credible the story is. The two major areas of dispute are “Is it unbelievable that Harrison would pass on Russell otherwise?” and “Would Harrison need Brown’s help to have the Ice Capades in Rochester?”<\/p>\n

IS IT UNBELIEVABLE THAT HARRISON WOULD PASS ON RUSSELL OTHERWISE?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here, it seems as though Harrison had a number of reasons not to draft Bill Russell. <\/p>\n

First off, you have to understand the differences between the various owners in the NBA in 1956. The league was formed by a 1949 merger between the Basketball Association of America (BAA) and the National Basketball League (NBL). The biggest difference between the leagues was that the BAA was formed by arena owners looking to get more use out of their arenas (Walter Brown, for instance, owned the Boston Garden) while the NBL was formed using semi-pro corporate teams that rarely played in arenas. The Rochester Royals, for instance, began life as a semi-pro team representing Seagram’s distillery (they called themselves the Rochester Seagrams). Lester Harrison was the coach and general manager of the team for many years and did a wonderful job with the assets he had. After World War II, the NBL was looking to expand and Harrison’s Rochester squad was one of the teams that they wanted to add. Harrison had already split with Seagram’s in 1945 over his decision to make the team a full-time professional squad (they did not believe that the endeavor would be profitable) and he joined the NBL in 1946 (Harrison’s brother Jack helped co-found the team). Unlike some of his opponents, Harrison did not own his own arena. The city of Rochester owned the arena that they played in (the Edgerton Park Arena, an arena so small that Rochester could not have a hockey franchise until Rochester built a modern arena, the Rochester Community War Memorial, in 1955). The owners who came to the NBA from the NBL tended to be small-time businessman striving to keep up with their much richer opponents. Even before the 1956-57 season, the other NBA owners had been pressuring the smaller teams to move to bigger cities (Ben Kerner had already moved the Hawks from Milwaukee to the bigger market of St. Louis just a year earlier). Of the five NBL teams that survived the NBL\/BAA merger, remarkably all five<\/strong> moved within a decade of the merger. So in an era before television opened up a whole new revenue stream, attendance was the way that teams would make money and Rochester drew poorly (they had the worst record in the league, so it is not a surprise). It is important, then, to note that Harrison was strapped for cash going into the 1956 NBA Draft. <\/p>\n

Money was a major factor with regards to the drafting of Bill Russell. Abe Saperstein’s Harlem Globetrotters were very interested in signing Russell themselves, and the popular barnstorming exhibition team was doing much better financially than any NBA franchise was in 1956, so they had a lot more money to spend on the top African-American players in the game. The rumor (almost certainly propagated by Saperstein himself in an attempt to scare off NBA teams) was that the Globetrotters were prepared to offer Russell $50,000. In truth, they had really only offered him $15,000 (eventually upping their offer to $17,000) but the rest of the world did not know that. With an offer so large, NBA teams were justifiably worried about spending a top draft pick on a player who would eschew the NBA for the Globetrotters. What Harrison and most other NBA owners did not know, though, was that Russell was never going to play for the Globetrotters. For a player as competitive as Russell was, not playing in the NBA was likely never really an option but in a 1958 Sports Illustrated feature on Russell by Jeremiah Tax<\/a>, Russell gave an even greater reason why he would never play for the Globetrotters: <\/p>\n

Saperstein came to see me and my coach, Phil Woolpert. He just said hello and goodby [sic] to me. All the time he was there he talked to Woolpert. He told Woolpert what he could do for me and how much money I’d make and all that jazz. He never said a word to me. He treated me like some kind of idiot who couldn’t understand what the conversation was all about. I made up my mind right then that I’d never play for him….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harrison did not know this. Auerbach, though, did<\/em> (if he did not know the exact specifics of the exchange, he knew enough from sources in California, like former Celtic Don Barksdale who had retired to San Francisco and was friends with Russell’s family, that the Globetrotters were likely not a real contender for Russell). Moreover, Harrison actually did meet with Russell and Russell informed him that it would take $25,000 to get Russell to play in Rochester (Russell was also irritated that Harrison brought along a former African-American player of his, Dolly King, to his meeting with Russell<\/a>. It likely reminded him of his Saperstein meeting). He might as well have been asking for $250,000, as Harrison would be extremely hard pressed to pay that sum (later, Hawks’ owner Ben Kerner said as much about the chances of the Hawks also being able to afford Russell themselves had they kept the second pick). Russell ended up signing with the Celtics for roughly $22,000 (pro-rated for time Russell missed in his first season).<\/p>\n

Next, while money was clearly a major factor, so, too, were the doubts about Russell’s game. It is not that people did not believe that he was going to be a good NBA player, as that much was obvious. He had led the University of San Francisco to back-to-back NCAA championships and 55 straight victories. <\/p>\n

\"U1301129INP\"<\/center><\/p>\n

However, going along with the money issue, the question was whether he was good enough to be paid as much as the very best players in the NBA, players like George Mikan and Bob Cousy (which is where he would be if he made $25,000). After all, Russell’s greatest skills were as a defender and defense was not as much of a priority for big men back in 1956. College scouting was much different back then, as well. Games were not televised and teams could not afford extensive scouting, especially for players on the west coast. One of the biggest showcases for college talent was the annual East versus West All Star Game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Russell did not play especially well at these tournaments. Even Auerbach noted that his files on Russell at the time said that Russell’s best comparison was to New York Knicks’ center Walter Dukes, a frequent comparison for Russell at the time in NBA circles. Dukes had been a top draft pick in the 1953 NBA Draft and had not done much to impress so far during his career (he had a bit of a resurgence a few years later for the Detroit Pistons, by which time he had already played for three teams in the NBA). Later on, Harrison would become convinced that Russell intentionally played poorly at the showcase games to keep the small market teams away from drafting him. <\/p>\n

Also, while not nearly as big of a concern, Russell was very vocal about representing his country in the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. That would not normally be a big deal, except that in 1956, since the Olympics were held in Australia, the events took place in November instead of July or August. Since Avery Brundage, longtime President of the International Olympic Committe (IOC) had strict rules about amateurs competing (rules that were not exactly based in the actual history of the Olympics<\/a>), Russell would not be able to sign a contract until after the Games were over to maintain his amateur status. So not only would you not have your top draft pick for a third of the season (that is why Russell’s first Celtics contract was pro-rated), but you wouldn’t even get a chance to sign him until after the Olympics finished (and again, the specter of the Globetrotters swooping in to sign him away still loomed – in fact, they made one more attempt to sign Russell after the Olympics, offering him $32,000. He passed).<\/p>\n

Finally, the last (and perhaps the most notable) reason Harrison would be willing to pass on Russell was that the Royals already had<\/b> a great center. Maurice Stokes was the second pick of the previous NBA Draft and had just won the NBA Rookie of the Year. Nearly thirty years later, the Portland Trailblazers passed on Michael Jordan because they already had Clyde Drexler, so the notion of an NBA team passing on a great prospect because he duplicated a player they already had on their team is a well-established one in NBA history. Stokes tragically suffered a brain injury during his third season in the NBA (he was an All-Star in all three seasons) that ended his career and ultimately his life in 1970. However, in 1956, he was a clear stud player and made the idea of spending so much money on another center seem perhaps not a good idea.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the Royals drafted a well-regarded first team All-American guard\/forward from Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, Sihugo Green. Green had a respectable eleven-season career in the NBA but was never an All-Star (and he was particularly unproductive for Rochester as he dealt with injury problems in his first and second seasons, ending up only playing in 33 games for the Royals before he was dealt to the Hawks). <\/p>\n

Given their financial situation and the fact that they already had Stokes on the team, it seems realistic that the Royals would pass on Russell. However, what about the Ice Capades angle?<\/p>\n

Go to the next page for the rest of this story…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

WOULD HARRISON NEED BROWN’S HELP TO GET THE ICE CAPADES IN ROCHESTER?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Ice Capades were founded in 1940 by John Harris, owner of the Pittsburgh Gardens. Like his fellow arena owners, Harris also owned teams that played in his arena. His hockey team, the Pittsburgh Yellow Jackets, played in a variety of non-NHL hockey leagues. On March 31, 1936, Harris hired Sonja Henie, a Norweigian figure skater who was just coming off her third<\/b> Olympic Gold Medal for Figure Skating at the 1936 Winter Olympics. The 24-year-old Henie had just turned professional after the 1936 World Figure Skating Championships in February of that year. Despite Pittsburgh just recently suffering a massive flood a few weeks earlier (water was as high as 46 feet!), the crowds came out in full force for Henie’s performance, which was just simply her Olympic routine. It was apparent that ice shows were going to be huge. By the end of the year, Henie was a superstar. A vaudeville-esque ice show called the Ice Follies came next in 1937. Harris realized that it would make sense to own his own<\/b> ice show. I spoke to Harris’ nephew, John Harris Sheridan, and he explained how Harris’ good friend (and fellow arena owner) Walter Brown suggested that Harris turn to his fellow arena owners in the Arena Managers Association to help fund his plan. Not only would they all put up the capitol needed to create a competitive ice show, they would be able to better manage scheduling, which was a major problem for ice shows at the time. Traveling from Toronto to Los Angeles to Chicago to Boston to Denver was just too inefficient and ate up too many tour dates with traveling. Now they could arrange it so that this new show would start in Major City X and then play dates in cities surrounding Major City X on their way to Major City Y. While the Arena Managers Association made Harris’ plan a reality, he was the President and owner of the new company (which eventually was named the Ice Capades). They just each had a piece of the pie. So reports that say that the Arena Managers Associated created the Ice Capades are erroneous. By the end of the 1940s, performances of the Ice Capades and similar ice shows were drawing in larger audiences than even Major League Baseball! <\/p>\n

So yes, by 1956, having the Ice Capades in your arena was clearly a big deal. In fact, when Walter Brown accidentally booked the Ice Capades on the same day he had a Boston Celtics game at the Garden in 1952, the Celtics game was pushed to midnight!<\/a> I spoke with Don Watson, former ice skater and later lighting director and company manager of the Ice Capades, for insights over how the Ice Capades worked at the time. At each arena, they dealt with whoever was in charge of the biggest professional sports franchise in the area. In the case of Rochester, it would be Rochester Royals’ owner Lester Harrison. By 1956, the Ice Capades had purchased a competing ice show called the Ice Cycles. They maintained it under the name Ice Cycles for a few years before deciding to re-brand it as Ice Capades International. While this was never stated officially, it was pretty clear that this touring group was the “B” Squad to the “A” Squad that was the Ice Capades proper. The biggest stars were in the main Ice Capades touring group and the newest routines would debut in the main Ice Capades touring group. The Ice Capades touring season was basically the same as the NBA season (Fall to Spring). Well, according to Watson, the main Ice Capades touring group played in Rochester in their new building (as mentioned before, Rochester finally<\/strong> had a modern arena) from December 12-18 in 1955. This tour was a major success, bringing in over $200,000 over the week (it would have been even more but there was a large amount of free passes because it was the debut of the Ice Capades in the new building). During the next touring season, Harrison also had the Ice Capades from September 4-10 in 1956. In April of 1957, Harrison gave in to pressure to move his team to a bigger market (specifically a bigger market further west than the rest of the NBA) and moved the Royals to Cincinnati. In November of 1957, Rochester received Ice Capades International (they went back to having the main Ice Capades in 1958). Harrison acknowledged that Brown did, in fact, give him assistance with the Ice Capades at one point, noting to Terry Pluto<\/a>: <\/p>\n

It is true that I had the Ice Capades for two years, then I was in jeopardy of losing them. I was having trouble with the people who ran our building in Rochester, and Walter Brown did come down to talk to them, saying that I should have the Ice Capades. But this had absolutely nothing to do with the draft. Walter and I were friends and we did favors for each other all the time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, as noted above, the second year of the Ice Capades that Harrison mentions in this quote was after<\/b> the NBA Draft. So any problem Harrison had with his arena owners would almost certainly have had to be about the upcoming 1957-58 season, not the already passed 1956-57 season. Harrison obviously was having issues with Rochester (after all, he ended up moving soon after), so it appears as though Harrison’s conflict would have been well after the April 1956 NBA Draft and therefore would not have been able to be the basis for a deal between Harrison and Brown for Russell.<\/p>\n

Putting it all together, it seems that it was an open secret in the NBA that Harrison was not going to draft Russell with the number one pick, both for the money reasons but also because he already had a future Hall of Fame center in Maurice Stokes. Meanwhile, Rochester already had had the Ice Capades before the NBA Draft (and, by the way, Brown was not the President of the Ice Capades, as is often part of the story) and it does not appear that whatever conflict Brown helped him with occurred before the NBA Draft. In addition, since Harrison and Brown were<\/em> good friends, it is reasonable to expect that Harrison would give Brown assurances regarding his draft decision if Harrison had decided to pass on Russell (and as reader Peter Masnik rightly noted, the Celtics did not actually make the trade until the Hawks had officially selected Russell. In other words, they did not trade for the #2 pick. They traded for Russell specifically, so that certainly also suggests that they weren’t positive that Russell was going to be selected #1, or else they would have just traded for the #2 pick BEFORE the draft). <\/p>\n

In closing, as mentioned in the beginning, when you’re dealing with three men who can’t explain what precisely was said to each other fifty-seven years ago, you’re never going to be 100% certain, but the information that we do have certainly suggests that Auerbach exaggerated what happened to the point where I feel safe in stating that the legend is…<\/p>\n

STATUS<\/span><\/u>: False<\/p>\n

As an aside, before their deal to acquire Russell, the Celtics forfeited their first round pick by using their territorial pick. Back in the old days of the NBA Draft, the NBA would allow teams to waive their first round pick before the draft and select any one player who played college ball within a 50-mile radius of the NBA team (this practice ended in 1965). The Celtics used their territorial pick on Holy Cross star forward Tom Heinsohn. They later drafted Russell’s University of San Francisco teammate K.C. Jones. So yes, in one single draft, the Celtics acquired three<\/b> Hall of Famers! Not too shabby. <\/p>\n

As one last aside, there are also rumors that the reason the Hawks were so willing to deal Russell for Macauley and Hagan is that Macauley and Hagan were White and the Hawks had an all-White team at the time. I don’t think you’ll ever get a definitive answer on that one. It wouldn’t exactly be SHOCKING if true, but I don’t think you’ll ever get a clear cut answer (Russell certainly believed that to be the case, but, again, while Russell was an amazing man, both on and off the court, he is not the perfect judge of what other NBA executives privately believed in 1956). <\/p>\n

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments at bcronin@legendsrevealed.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about basketball and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the basketball urban legends featured so far. BASKETBALL URBAN LEGEND: The Rochester Royals passed on Bill Russell in the 1956 NBA Draft because the Boston Celtics arranged […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[685,686,692,693,691,688,689,687,694,690],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7MjWh-ZS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3836"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3836"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4305,"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3836\/revisions\/4305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legendsrevealed.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}