Boston’s Danny Ainge recalls how Celtics icon Red Auerbach beat him in racquetball
Younger fans of the Boston Celtics may not be aware that current team President Danny Ainge was a player with the franchise and won two titles in the mid-1980s.
Fewer still know Ainge was a three-sport All-American, earning national recognition as a high school athlete in his native Oregon while playing basketball, football, and baseball. He played baseball professionally in college before joining the Celtics in 1981. As adept as the future Celtic was at sports in high school, he met his match in another sport in one Red Auerbach, the iconic Boston coach and team president behind the bulk of Boston’s banners.
Ainge was asked if there’s a sport he isn’t good at on a recent episode of the popular New England Sports radio show “Toucher & Rich.”
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This prompted the former BYU star to regale listeners of his run-in with Red on a different sort of court when he was still donning the green and white — and how he almost got away with what is evidently a dirty trick.
“Yeah, there’s a sport,” answered Ainge. “Racquetball.”
“I could never really get good at racquetball because I use both hands when I play tennis,” he added.
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“There was a time when he did challenge me, and he was beating everybody on the team,” he added.
“It was like in the middle of training camp. I’m going ‘Red, I’ve got a second practice coming up here in a while’. He goes ‘C’mon, Ainge, you’re the only guy I haven’t beat.’ So, I went back in the racquetball court and I beat Red, but I beat him without putting the string around my wrist. And so Red, when Red found out — from I think it was (Kevin) McHale who tattled on me — when Red found out that.”
“You can’t do that,” explained the Celtics president. “Then (Red) wanted a rematch, and then he beat me.”
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While the intricacies of racquetball rules remain opaque to us, we’ll take Danny’s word given we know how fiercely competitive the legendary Celtics general manager was.
So while Ainge may have been a three-sport All-American, it’s safe to say racquetball wasn’t among them.
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