We bonded plenty over baseball, the way most fathers and sons do, but it always went back to basketball for my old man, and always went back to the Knicks, and mostly went back to the early 1950s and some very good Knicks teams that were never quite good enough to beat the Minneapolis Lakers in the Finals.
It wouldn’t take much to get my father reminiscing, and soon he was back in the balcony at the Old Garden on 50th and Eighth, enveloped by cigarette smoke (to which he contributed his fair share), watching the Knicks play the Tri-Cities Blackhawks or the Fort Wayne Pistons or the Syracuse Nats.
Then the names would roll off his tongue: “Ernie Vandeweghe … Dickie McGuire … Harry “The Horse” Gallatin … Sweetwater Clifton …”
“And my favorite of all,” he would say, “Carl Braun. That was a basketball player.”
So, yes, it was a good day for me Saturday when I learned Carl Braun had been elected to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee. For a little while, my mind could draft the way my father’s would, and we were watching a Nets game together at the Coliseum, or a Knicks game at the Garden, or a St. John’s game at Alumni Hall, or a St. Agnes-St. Anthony game on the Island, and inevitably his mind would drift.
“I wish you could’ve seen the Garden in those days,” he would tell me.
It was, of course, an even greater day in the homes of Braun’s children, who saw their father’s name on the television screen. They’d been given a heads-up, but that heads-up had come on Monday — April 1 — and Carl Braun had sat on the veterans ballot so long that one of them wondered, “That’s not an April Fool’s joke, right?”
But then the name was there. And it was official. And it was forever.
“So overwhelming,” said Susan Braun, his daughter. “I couldn’t even describe the emotion.”
When Susan called her mom, Joan, in Florida, her response was a simple one: “Wonderful.” And when Susan pressed for more, Joan said, “People need to know your father loved the game so much that he would’ve paid the Knicks for the privilege of playing pro basketball.”
And that made Susan smile.
“He would tell us all the time about playing in Brooklyn [where he was born] and in high school [at Garden City] and at Colgate, where he would walk through the snow at 11 o’clock at night, just so he could get to the gym and shoot baskets by himself,” Susan said. “He was old-school in the very best sense of the word.”
Braun made five straight All-Star teams as a Knick and averaged 14.1 points for his 12 years in New York. He was in the service for the Knicks’ first two Finals matchups with the Lakers in 1951 and ’52, but he was on the 1953 team that lost to George Mikan and company a third time, and he averaged 13.5 points in the playoffs that year.
He capped his career by winning a championship with the Celtics in 1962, appearing in two games in the Finals that year. He died in 2010 at age 82.
Basketball has fallen on hard times in New York, but that was also something Braun would have been able to relate to, since following the departure of Joe Lapchick in 1955 the franchise fell on some terribly hard times — by his last year with the team, 1960-61, the Knicks were 21-58.
Yet hardcore fans like my dad kept going to the games then, as they do now. And in another time of famine for the Knicks, this seems a wonderful gift. Susan Braun certainly agrees.
“Basketball in New York was the home of basketball for my dad and for so many people,” she said. “For him to get in is really meaningful at a time when New York basketball needs something positive.”
Vac’s Whacks
I sort of feel Jim Bouton should get about 10 percent of Ron Darling’s book royalties, don’t you?
We lost one of the hardest-working guys in our business this week, Robert Elkin. He was a high school friend of Larry Brown, he was quiet, he didn’t drive yet covered everything. As my pal Marc Berman put it: “He took the bus, to the train, to the bus, to the train to cover many, many events.”
Good for Fairfield, making an A-plus hire with its new basketball coach, Jay Young, who helped Steve Pikiell craft some special basketball at both Stony Brook and Rutgers and will absolutely do likewise with the Stags.
I can’t remember the last time I was as excited to see a movie as I am to see “Yesterday.” Check out the trailer and see why.
Whack Back at Vac
Richard Siegelman: Could the Yankees and Red Sox become the first two division rivals to go from 100 wins each to 100 losses each in a mere year?
Vac: I won’t go that far. But the baseball standings do mostly seem like you’re reading them upside-down so far, don’t they?
Matthew Boccaccio: I don’t mind so much the new Jets uniforms, but I have a major issue with the helmet and logo. The old JETS
football over the NY was so iconic. That helmet logo was classic to the Jets. Now it has too much an ’80s look that Parcells got rid of in favor of the old AFL classic. Couldn’t they keep the old helmets and just change the unis?Vac: I love that helmet. But I also think it says a lot that the reaction of about 98 percent of Jets fans I know to the new look was, “Well, I don’t hate them THAT much.”
@GaryLevick13: I feel Aaron Boone’s seat getting a tad toasty.
@MikeVacc: My suspicion is no matter what, he lasts longer than Bob Lemon in ’82 and Yogi in ’85.
Louis DeMaio: I agree with the first four of your New York rivals, but I’d put Knicks-Celtics instead of Mets-Phillies.
Vac: Historically I’d agree. But it’s been quite some time since I can cite even one memorable moment from that dusty feud.