On, no! "Havlicek stole the ball!" I can hear Johnny Most shouting that into the mic. During the Cousy-Havlicek-Siegfried era, my parents took me to many games in the old Boston Garden. We almost always grabbed a parking spot on Causeway St. and walked a few blocks to No. Station. Our favorite seats were in the first row of the 2nd balcony--relatively cheap but we could look down and see the whole court. (I'm afraid of heights, so as soon as we got to our seats I'd lean as far back as I could with my toes curled up inside my shoes as if they were claws trying to dig into the floor, but after a while I'd begin to relax, and by the time the action really got going I'd lean over the railing--still seated, of course--and yell until my throat was sore. If we couldn't go to a game, we'd listen to Johnny Most on the radio. If the game was televised, we'd watch with the tv sound turned down and listen to Most on the radio. After I graduated from college, I lived and worked farther south in RI and couldn't get to games. Also, my mom passed away in my first year of teaching, so priorities shifted. The Havlicek moment I remember best was a time when a player propelled the ball out of bounds and Havlicek jumped over the team's bench while the seated players parted to make way for him and he deflected the ball back toward the court. Sadly, he came crashing to the floor behind the bench and was hurt. All the way home, about an hour's drive, we listened to the radio to hoping to hear any news of his recovery. It was a relief to hear that he would return to the court after he recovered.
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