Basketball was a very different game in 1950.
The NBA was a fledgling organization still trying to find its way. Michael Jordan wasn’t yet born. The three-point line wouldn’t be adopted by the league for about another three decades.
And before that year, the NBA had never had a Black player.
That all changed when the Celtics selected Chuck Cooper, an All-American out of Pittsburgh’s Duquesne, in the second round of that year’s draft — the first of three Black players to join the league that year. And even if his career numbers may not catch your eye at first glance, his son Chuck Cooper III wants to make one thing clear.
“My father was a great basketball player,” he said.
Cooper wasn’t the only important Celtic who entered the league that day. The Tri-Cities Blackhawks, a predecessor of today’s Atlanta Hawks, selected Bob Cousy out of Holy Cross in Worcester. But he was traded to the Chicago Stags, who folded before the season began. Eventually, Boston selected his name out of a hat and Cousy became a Celtics rookie alongside Cooper.
That’s where the two quickly became friends.
“We bonded almost immediately,” Cousy said.
Now, 75 years after a fateful day — April 25, 1950 — Cooper’s early days, the bond he formed with Cousy and the hurdles he had to leap still carry weight.
Cooper’s legacy
About seven points a game.
That’s what you’ll see when you look up Chuck Cooper’s career NBA numbers. Good, but not the double-digit domination stars are associated with.
But Chuck Cooper III, who was 21 when his dad passed away in 1984, says that his father began playing in the NBA in a pre-Emmett Till America — and that he and some of the NBA’s other early Black players were brought in to fill a specific role.
“The early African American pioneers — my dad, Earl Lloyd, Nat 'Sweetwater’ Clifton, Don Barksdale — they were brought in primarily to rebound and play defense,” he said.
Cooper, Lloyd and Clifton were the first Black players to play in the league when all three entered the NBA in 1950. Barksdale would be the first Black player to make it to the All-Star game.
“The NBA wasn’t ready for a Black star.”Chuck Cooper III, Chuck Cooper’s son
But even if they were confined by the era, Cooper III believes they had to the potential to do more. He points out that his father wasn’t often put in a position to score early on.
“The NBA wasn’t ready for a Black star,” he said. “If any of those four guys that I mentioned were provided the same opportunity, they would have had fantastic numbers.”
The NBA may have not been ready for him, but Cooper was ready for the NBA. His rookie year he averaged over nine points and eight rebounds a game, a career best.
And he wasn’t playing around when it came to the dirty work.
“He immediately established himself in the NBA as one of the best rebounders,” Cooper III said. “His rookie year he was the 11th-leading rebounder in the NBA that year at just 6’5”, barely 6’5“. And he established himself immediately as a shutdown defender.”
A friendship is born
Today Bob Cousy is 96 years old, and living in Worcester. Speaking to GBH News earlier this year, the 13-time NBA All-Star and Hall of Famer remembered the 1950 draft vividly.
As Cousy tells it, when Celtics owner Walter Brown selected Cooper, another team’s executive asked if he knew Cooper was a “Negro.”
Walter Brown’s response was quick, according to Cousy.
“‘I really don’t give a s--- if he’s polka dotted. My new coach, Red Auerbach, thinks he can help us win,’” Cousy recalled of Brown’s reaction. “And that’s how it all started.”
After a couple of twists and turns with other franchises, Cousy found himself as a rookie alongside fellow first-year Cooper. The two quickly built a rapport.
“He ran the floor well. He had certain attributes, certain weaknesses,” Cousy said. “And oh yeah, by the way, his skin color was a little darker than mine.”
Off the court, their personalities clicked. They had a similar sense of humor and shared a love of jazz.
One of their favorite musicians was pianist Erroll Garner.
Cousy said a trio of Celtics — Cooper, himself and Ed Leede — comprised a “Three Musketeers” of sorts and would go to see Garner together when he came to town.
“The three of us bonded and we would sit ’til two in the morning drinking beer and listening to Erroll tinkle those keys,” Cousy recalled.
Playing through racism
Although Cooper found friendship with Cousy, he still experienced racism during his playing days.
Sometimes he wouldn’t be welcomed in arenas because he was Black. Other times, Cousy remembers Cooper would be denied lodging because of his race — that’s what happened on a trip to North Carolina. Red Auerbach was ready to raise hell, but Cousy and Cooper opted for another route.
“We said, ‘Arnold, don’t make a fuss. We’ll play the freakin’ game, Chuck and I will take our bags with us to the arena, we’ll go to the ... station after the game and get out of town and we’ll meet you in Boston in two days,’” Cousy said.
Once at the train station, Cooper and Cousy stopped by a bar some drinks.
But they ran into a problem when they went to the restroom.
“And for the first time, either one of us sees those ugly, big white signs on the wall saying ‘colored’ with the arrow pointing one way and ‘white’ the other way,” Cousy said.
So the duo found a creative solution.
“My father never told me this part of the story,” the younger Cooper said. “Cooz said they went to the platform and they took a leak together. So that was kind of a solidarity moment for him.”
It was also a moment of clarity.
“When you’ve got those kind of things going on, you can’t help but to realize that the path that you’re taking has some additional obstacles in it that your teammates don’t have to navigate around or go through,” Cooper III said.
The beginnings of a dynasty
The bond forged by Cooper and Cousy helped to turn the tide for the Celtics. The five-year-old franchise finished with a winning record for the first time ever their rookie season.
“You look at Boston before that, [and] they were a bad team,” said David Finoli, who co-authored “Breaking Barriers: The Chuck Cooper Story.” “You never thought them about as not only [winning] a championship, you never thought about them sniffing a championship at the time.”
Cooper played four seasons with Boston before getting traded to the Milwaukee Hawks. Though he later expressed some regrets for missing out on playing with another Celtics legend.
“My father would always kid around and say, ‘Hey, if I knew Bill Russell was coming, I would have never asked for that trade,’” Cooper III said. “So hindsight is 20/20, right?”
Joseph Cooper is a professor at UMass Boston who studies race and sports. He believes that pioneers like Cooper helped create a new precedent.
“It’s that, ‘OK, we had previously conceived notions about who’s capable of playing at this level in this way,’” he said. “So once that barrier is broken, gradually certain racist attitudes begin to — at least have to be modified, at a minimum, and eroded altogether, at a maximum.”
Cooper was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019. His alma mater, Duquesne University, renamed the campus field house in his honor and retired his college jersey. After his playing days were over he continued to blaze trails, becoming the city of Pittsburgh’s first Black department head.
And even if his time in Boston may have been relatively short, Chuck Cooper III, who runs the Chuck Cooper Foundation in his father’s honor, knows where his dad’s loyalty lied.
“He was a Celtic at heart,” he said.
