We Should All Be More Like Tommy Heinsohn

Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. — Mark 10:15

In more than 30 years of watching basketball, I have never witnessed anyone approach the game more like a “little child” than Tommy Heinsohn. Well into his 80s, he called the sport with a passion and an attitude you would more expect to see from a pre-teen.

This was never more true that when a referee made a call against the Celtics. There is an entire genre of youtube clips of Tommy Heinsohn petulantly yelling at referees. Here’s a classic example from 2017:

Fans from around the country watching games on League Pass tend to find this sort of thing embarrassing at best, infuriating at worst. Celtics fans have occasionally allowed themselves to get dragged into the vitriol, but have generally seen it for what it was: the hilarious rantings of an overly passionate old man.

His longtime broadcasting partner and close friend, Mike Gorman, nearly always had the perfect reaction, knowing instinctively whether to concede the point, challenge the logic, or come back with a dry joke to ease the tension.

Take the start of the video above:

Gorman: With the sound effects in the background, I could not see that call.

Tommy: I can’t! I could look at it all night! I can’t!

Gorman (laughing): It’s 2–2, come on.

Tommy: Get with the program, refs!

Gorman (still laughing): You are out of the box, early.

Tommy (also laughing): Early, tonight!

That is just great broadcasting! It is a shame that so many NBA fans dismissed Tommy Heinsohn as “that angry old Boston homer” so quickly that they missed the valuable lesson to be found beneath his rants.

If you’re one of those fans, think about this: why was he yelling? Why did he care so much? Keep in mind, this was the first quarter of the 45th game of the season, a meaningless game in the middle of the miserable Boston winter, in Tommy Heisohn’s 61th season playing, coaching, or covering the NBA. He was 83 years old.

A cooler, less out-of-touch young social media user might have responded to old Tommy with a clever “U mad, bro?” meme.

Tommy Heinsohn was not “cool.” He was not measured. He did not present to the world the face that he thought the world would like to see. Most of all, he was not cynical. He was never the worldly-wise, seen-it-all old veteran telling everyone to calm down. If the phrase “act like you’ve been there before” would seem to have applied to anyone, it should have been Tommy Heinsohn. No one in basketball history has “been there before” more often than Tommy. Yet he never, ever acted aloof. He was never “above it all.” His enthusiasm never wavered.

Have you ever spent 60+ years in the same field? I’m guessing not. I certainly haven’t. I can barely spend three weeks on a single project without starting to wonder whether there is anything new to glean.

Tommy Heinsohn made six all-star teams and won eight championships in just nine years playing in the NBA. He led three different championship teams in scoring, and somehow beat out Bill Russell for Rookie of the Year. He won two more championships as a coach, as well as Coach of the Year in 1973. He played alongside and coached some of the greatest players the game has ever seen, and competed against just about every great player of the 60s and 70s. He was inducted into the basketball Hall of Face twice, as both a player and a coach.

Next, he spent the 1980s announcing games for the player (Larry Bird) and the teams often considered to have played the most beautiful basketball in the history of the sport, teams that took the game to a level of artistry previously thought impossible.

That set of experiences would have spoiled just about anyone else. By the time I started playing and watching basketball in the mid-90’s, Tommy Heinsohn should have been groaning and rolling his eyes at the pathetic displays of those Celtics, reminiscing about the good old days and bemoaning the lack of talent, skill, discipline, and cohesiveness of some truly putrid teams. Plenty of other people did just that, and none of them had the justification for doing so that Tommy Heinsohn would have.

But that’s not what he did.

Instead, he came up with a catch-phrase for pint-sized Dana Barros (a career 6 points per game scorer) that I can still recite to this day: “Bing bang boom Daner Barros!” He turned “I LOVE WALTAH!” into an improbable rallying cry around a 5 ppg scorer who never cracked double figures in his career. He invented the “Tommy Point,” a way to recognize hustle plays decades before the analytics community would even attempt to figure out ways to do the same. And he continued to preach the Gospel of the Fast Break, believing without a shadow of a doubt that all basketball problems could be fixed by playing faster and running harder (the league has finally begun to catch up with this bit of wisdom as well).

Until Paul Pierce joined the team in 1998, the Celtics didn’t employ a single player in the post-Bird era worthy of tying Tommy Heisohn’s shoes. But you couldn’t tell him that. Far from acting arrogant or jaded, he approached every game with the same raw passion and energy that I did as a pre-adolescent experiencing it for the very first time. When the aggressively mediocre 2002 Celtics made an unexpected run to the Easter Conference Finals, it represented the first meaningful playoff games my favorite team had played since I’d started watching them, and I followed them with appropriately illogical passion. Tommy, on the other hand, had not only watched but played and coached in far more meaningful games than I could fathom, for nearly as long as my father had been alive. Yet his passion exceeded my own.

And that passion never wavered. The Celtics could be a championship contender or the worst team in the league; they could play a brand of basketball that could seemingly conjure a Mozart concerto out of thin air, or a style that could charitably be described as emetic. Either way, Tommy Heinsohn was there, sweating through his shirt and screaming himself hoarse as he tried to exhort them on to victory.

Over the last few years, fashionable cynicism has experienced a renaissance. Jadedness is always around to some extent, of course, but there are eras (just after 9/11, or during the early days of the Obama presidency) when sincere hope, passion and joy become more prevalent than ironic detachment.

This is the era of ironic detachment, especially on social media. Everyone seems to be “living rent free” in someone’s head, as if a properly-trained head should not allow a single thought or emotion to enter into it without some sort of monetary compensation. In our politics, we expect both sides to be corrupt and roll our eyes when another scandal occurs. We are a world of adults who have seen it all before, who can’t be impressed by anything, alongside a younger generation who (like every generation) believes that everything that has ever happened in the past pales in comparison to what exists now.

I propose that we all try to be a little more like Tommy Heinsohn. That we acknowledge and celebrate what is great about the past, while continuing to maintain our enthusiasm and passion for the present.

Take a listen to Tommy Heinsohn’s response when asked about the athleticism of Celtics’ rookie backup Center Robert Williams in 2018.

He praises Williams, calling him more athletic than former MVP Dave Cowens (whom Tommy coached in his MVP season), while calling Heinsohn’s former teammate Bill Russell the greatest athlete the Celtics have ever had, and explaining why he says that (maybe I was wrong about Tommy not being measured).

But Tommy’s admiration for Russell will not diminish his enthusiasm for Robert Williams, despite the fact that Williams could never, in his wildest dreams, be 1/10th the player Bill Russell was. He can appreciate Williams on his own merits. He can also allow himself to be lose his mind over a great play by Jaylen Brown or Jayson Tatum without worrying about whether the experience will live up to watching Larry Bird, or to anything else he has experienced in the past.

Tommy Heinsohn had more reason to be cynical, jaded, and aloof than anyone else in all of basketball, possibly in all of sports. Yet he was the least cynical, the least jaded, and the least aloof person you could hope to find. He treated every game with the fresh eyes of a child, for better or worse.

Look at how he responds to this Marcus Smart 3-pointer:

Tommy Heinsohn was not just a Celtics legend, he was an underappreciated American treasure.

And if you’re still not convinced, I leave you with this:

RIP, Tommy.