He was only 23, straight from the hill country of West Virginia, when Hot Rod Hundley first saw the Boston Garden. A rookie with the Minneapolis Lakers, he saw the bolts sticking out of the parquet floor. He felt the mezzanine seats shudder when the trains went by underneath. He smelled the sweat and liniment and the steam from the radiators. He sat in the tiny locker room and hung his clothes on a nail.
And he was enchanted by the magic of it all. "I was in awe," says Hundley, 35 years later. "But even now, you can't walk in and not feel something. The ghosts are in the walls."Soon the ghosts of games past must take up residence somewhere else. Rats in the basement and a dilapidated building make it imperative the Celtics find a new home. The organ music and the scoreboard without an electronic replay screen will give way to computer graphics, video games and aerobic dance teams.
Next to the Garden a new arena, the Shawmut Center, is going up. Plans indicate the building will be finished in 1995. Then the Garden will be razed and basketball will never be the same.
"Cousy, Heinsohn, Russell, K.C. Jones, all those guys were there," continues Hundley. "I was just a rookie. But I never could wait to play games there."
For years the Garden's problems have been widely publicized. Shower nozzles don't work. The temperature in the dressing room is usually stifling or freezing. The lines at bathrooms and concessions are endless. Dead spots dot the court. When Hundley arrived in the NBA in 1958, the building was already 30 years old.
But that doesn't change the feelings of those who were there. Or anyone who ever dribbled a ball in the driveway and dreamed he was Cousy snaking a pass behind his back; Russell swatting Wilt's finger-roll away; Bird lobbing in a shot while toppling out of bounds; Havlicek leading the break.
"I can still hear (announcer) Johnny Most shouting a thousand times, `Havlicek stole the ball! Havlicek stole the ball!' " says Jazz assistant coach Gordon Chiesa.
Chiesa first saw Boston Garden in 1986, long after it had fallen into disrepair. He was an assistant coach at Providence College, in town with the Friars to play Boston College.
"What struck me was the smallness of it," Chiesa continues. He remembers the smell of burning charcoal and the pretzel vendors outside the arena.
Chiesa is cautious, though, not to become too nostalgic. The Jazz play in the Garden Friday night. It is a place where they have won only one regular season game in their history. "It isn't the character or charisma," says Chiesa. "Winning is what creates the mystique."
"It was a disappointment then," Chiesa says of his first look at the arena, "and it still is."
By 1965, the year Jazz coach Jerry Sloan entered the NBA, the Garden was even more famous than when Hundley arrived. Boston had won seven of an astonishing 10 straight NBA titles. Cousy's number was already retired, but Russell and Havlicek were going strong.
"I remember the banners of the hockey and basketball teams and the numbers of the retired players," says Sloan. As with Hundley, most of the numbers that now hang in the roof of the Garden were still being worn, or were yet to be worn. Reggie Lewis wasn't born until 1965, Larry Bird was only nine.
"The biggest thing was they knew how to win," says Sloan. "They had an aura about them. They wanted to intimidate you. They wore those old black tennis shoes and made you think they were slow. But they weren't. They were great teams."
Sloan says in his playing days the locker rooms were worse than today, the court rougher and more dead. He remembers the night he fell and skidded across a bolt sticking up in the court. "It took skin off my knee," says Sloan fondly. "But the skin grew back."
Hundley says one of his most vivid memories is of 1962, the first year Boston played Los Angeles for the title. "Seventh game, for the world championship," says Hudley, his mind drifting back over the years. "That was a great game."
Though the Lakers lost in overtime, the team owner came in the locker room and told players he was giving them an extra $1,000 each. Combined with the $2,000 second-place prize, the Laker players made exactly the same money as the Celtics did for winning the championship.
"He told us, `Go out through that building with your heads held high. In my opinion, you are the world champions,' " says Hundley.
Hundley was also part of a 173-139 regular season loss to the Celtics, which at the time was the largest point total by two teams in NBA history. Tommy Heinsohn scored 45 points, Cousy had 31 points and 28 assists and Hundley 24 points and 15 assists.
"I had some good games there," he says.
Hundley says the Garden is his favorite arena of all. He revels in the damp smells and crumbling plaster. "The smell of the building," Hundley says, "is the smell of sweat. The smell of a place where they play basketball. The Forum doesn't smell like that. None of the new places smell like that. But Boston Garden has the smell of a place where the game is played."
"They can put the memorabilia in another building," says Sloan, "but it's not the same. It's like Chicago Stadium. Now all we'll have left is the memories of the games played there. Probably the best memories of my life were in those buildings."
Hundley smiles a sad smile. Half a lifetime ago he was a young man, playing in the most famous arena of them all. But soon the Garden will be gone. And the trains will rattle through the dark, past the gleaming new glass and steel building, stirring memories of the house where history waited.
"I loved playing there," Hundley says. "They ought to make a national monument out of it and never tear it down."
The place the game was played.