If you had to guess which early-1950s player was the MVP of the first All-Star Game, and who also was the youngest player ever inducted to the Basketball Hall of Fame, and who also retired in fourth place in points scored, you might reasonably guess that the player was Bob Cousy, George Mikan, Dolph Schayes or Bill Sharman. But it was none of them. It was Ed Macauley, who was also the first Celtic to have his jersey retired.
He was called "Easy Ed" because he rarely, if ever, got too excited, and was known for his effortless performances and fluid movement. If Macauley had had strength to go along with his speed and grace, the Celtics might have won a title with this 6-foot-8, 195-pound string bean playing center and forward in the early 1950s. Instead, he was traded to his hometown team, St. Louis, helped the Hawks win a championship in 1958 and, as a coach, to become perennial contenders in the Finals. When he retired from the pro game after his 10-year career, his 11,234 points trailed only Schayes, Cousy and Mikan.
Along the way, Macauley was instrumental in the 24-second clock being approved in 1954. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1960, when he was just 32.
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Ed Macauley was born in St. Louis on March 22, 1928. He first started playing basketball as a Boy Scout, but he had little confidence in his ability early on. He had a chance to play on the team at St. Louis University High School, a private Jesuit school with a strong athletic background and reputation. He sat out his freshman year because he had a typing class from 3-4 p.m. when the team practiced.
Coach Jack O'Reilly asked Macauley to play the next year, and he was only good enough to be a substitute. He had an unquenchable thirst for practice -- even following B-team practices with the team -- and he'd return to the outside courts and practice another hour. But Macauley was coming of age in the early to mid-1940s, a universe apart from the popularity that basketball would enjoy decades later. "In those days there was nothing to model yourself after, no TV, no pro basketball, no college basketball," Macauley recalled of his early days. "All the guys were away in the service. So you just worked and hoped you did something right. But I was not very good when I was young. I was skinny, weak, not very coordinated and couldn't rebound very well. The fact that I liked to practice and spent time at it was probably the difference as far as my career was concerned. I never had any goals in basketball, and I guess my nature was that I just wanted to be as good as I possibly could be."
Practice paid dividends by the time Macauley was a senior. He was all-district and all-state. He had scholarship offers to Notre Dame, Kentucky, Boston College, Washington University and St. Louis University. His father was an invalid, and Ed knew his mother wanted him to go to a school in St. Louis. The only place he could go was St. Louis University, since all the other Catholic universities in St. Louis were girls' schools.
Even with the attention he got from colleges, Macauley wasn't convinced that he was a great basketball player. "A lot of players have tremendous confidence in themselves," he said. "I never did, not even as a professional ballplayer. I was always fearful of my opponent. As a result, I said to myself, 'You're going to have to be prepared because you're probably not as good as these people,' and that's why I spent so much time practicing. I might go out and score 25 points, but I still didn't have that confidence and felt that I had to continue working."
St. Louis lost only three games in 1948, his junior year. Macauley was an All-American and led his school to the NIT championship, taking MVP honors for the tournament as the Billikens beat New York University 65-52. He also captured the Gold Star Award as the outstanding player to appear in Madison Square Garden.
In 1949, Macauley was a territorial pick of the St. Louis Bombers, which for the previous three years had been a Basketball Association of America (BAA) team. The league, spread out across several mostly small cities, was in tenuous financial shape. There were weak teams aplenty, like the Chicago Stags, the Bombers, the Sheboygan Redskins and the Tri-City Blackhawks (Moline, Rock Island and Davenport). But for all the cash-flow problems, Macauley signed with the Bombers for $10,000 and a $7,500 signing bonus, so he made $17,500 in his first year as a player (his other offer was $300 a month from the Phillips Oilers of the Industrial League). "I found out this was an awful lot of money when a player like Dick McGuire was only making $7,500 with the Knicks," Macauley said.
"Obviously the Bombers felt that a kid from St. Louis University, a college star, would come in and turn their fortunes around and they'd make a lot of money from me. But it didn't turn out that way. That was the worst team I ever played on in my life. We finished last in the division." Macauley called the circuit a "bush league," and the 26-42 club went belly-up before the next season. Ned Irish, the president of the Knicks, offered $125,000 to buy the franchise, just so he could get Macauley. But Boston coach Red Auerbach blocked the deal, demanding that Boston get the first choice since the Celtics had finished last in the Eastern Division (22-46) in the 1949-50 season. The league agreed, and Macauley went to Boston in the dispersal draft.
The Celtics' record jumped to 39-30, as Macauley finished third in the league in scoring (20.4), behind only Mikan and Alex Groza. He scored 20 points and earned the Outstanding Player award in the 1951 All-Star Game, the league's first.
With Bill Sharman joining the team for the 1951-52 season, Boston had what might be called the first "modern" backcourt -- a pure shooter in Sharman and a point guard in Cousy -- to help Macauley carry the scoring load. Macauley finished among the league's top 10 scorers in each of his six seasons in Boston. His 48.6 field goal percentage not only led the league in 1954, but established a league record.
Macauley was also instrumental in changing the game. Syracuse Nationals owner Danny Biasone's plan for a 24-second clock encountered widespread opposition, and it didn't look like it would get accepted. But at a luncheon in Boston, Macauley stood up and said, "Make us shoot the ball within a set number of seconds and you'll see a better game." His words were instrumental in making other players and coaches come around. In the summer of 1954 the 24-second rule was put into effect. With the exception of Biasone, Macauley probably had more to do with the rule's passage than any other individual.
In the mid-1950s Boston was consistently getting beaten in the first and second rounds of the playoffs. Macauley was giving away 50 to 75 pounds to other big men; while the Celtics had no trouble scoring, they "couldn't get the ball," in the rueful words of Auerbach. "We didn't have a rebounder. I wasn't big enough," Macauley agreed. "I could score, run, shoot, pass, play defense, but I wasn't a great rebounder. And we really didn't have a big ballclub, and that's what cost us championships.
"We were playing against people like George Mikan, 250 pounds and 6-10, and I was 6-8, 190 to 195, so I had to rely on my speed and skill. I went to the free throw line a lot because I'd get the ball in deep and fake. We had the six-foot lane, which I thought was wonderful. Of course, the other big guys thought it was wonderful, too, because they'd beat my brains out when I was playing defense against them. But I shot a lot of free throws, and got a lot of layups."
He drew a salary of $15,000, and Boston owner Walter Brown paid him another $2,500 if he had a good year. "He didn't define what a 'good year' was. But I made All-NBA and the All-Star team, so he paid me the bonus," Macauley said.
Playing and travel conditions were very different in the early 1950s, too, but Macauley didn't know anything else and didn't complain. "Everywhere we went, we went by train. It took 22 hours to get from St. Louis to New York. The guys would get on the train and bring two cases of beer." In Baltimore one night Macauley and his roommate D.C. Wilcutt were just getting back to the hotel at 10:30 after dinner and a movie, but some players were just heading out, thinking they had all day to recover for the next evening's game. "They had a hell of a time, but we lost the game," Macauley said.
It was also a time when a team tried playing its home games in other cities to increase the gate. So at times Boston played Philadelphia in New Haven. "We played games in different places," Macauley recalled, "because most of the teams weren't drawing that well at home and if you could get a good gate on the road, you'd take it for the guarantee."
"We stayed in fair hotels; not the best, but not flophouses either. We got $5 or $6 meal money a day. It doesn't sound like much now, but it was adequate, since we could eat on it: 75 cents for breakfast, $1.25 for lunch and maybe $2.50 or $3 for dinner and a couple of beers. Some guys played bridge or hearts or poker.
"Our ballclub didn't gamble a lot. Some, like the Knicks and Rochester, guys would lose $50 or $100 a night, which was a lot of money."
Macauley was an All-Star for all six of his seasons in Boston, but the team could not compete with the elite teams in the league without a strong man in the middle. Then in the spring of 1956, Brown called Macauley and said, "Red wants to make a deal to send you and Cliff Hagan to St. Louis in exchange for Bill Russell, but I don't want to make that deal. I can't imagine the Celtics without you." But Macauley had business interests in St. Louis, and his son Patrick was gravely ill. (His son had spinal meningitis and "wound up with his brain completely destroyed," in Macauley's words. "He had cerebral palsy, never could talk, walk or think. He spent the rest of his life in a crib, wearing diapers; he could only roll over." He died at the age of 14). Macauley told Brown the situation and said, "If you made the deal with St. Louis you'd really be doing me a favor."
In his first year with the Hawks, Macauley scored over 1,000 points for his eighth straight year. The fit was right, since St. Louis had Bob Pettit, Jack Coleman and Charlie Share to do the rebounding. The Hawks finished just 34-38 in 1957 but took Boston to the Finals. The Celtics needed seven games and two overtimes in the final to win 125-123. The following year brought a different result. St. Louis won the Western Division title and beat Boston in six games in the Finals. "We beat them in 1958 because we had a better ballclub with more desire and were better coached." Macauley was just a 20-minute-a-game-player by the 1958 postseason, and contributed 10 points and 5 rebounds.
A seven-time All-Star, Macauley played only 14 games the following season before retiring. St. Louis University wanted the popular Macauley to coach, but Hawks owner Ben Kerner offered him $20,000 a year for three years to take over the team's coaching and executive vice president duties. Kerner was known for firing his coaches, having previously let go of Red Holzman, Slater Martin, Alex Hannum, and Andy Phillip. Macauley lasted two years, however, winning the Western Division title twice. He packed it in after a seventh-game Finals loss to Boston on April 9, 1960, and was elected to the Hall of Fame that year. In retirement he did some sportscasting -- both football and basketball -- and made his home outside of St. Louis.
Macauley looked back at his career with fondness. "I was the first college player to shoot over 50 percent. I was the first Celtic to have his jersey retired and hoisted to the top of the Boston Garden."
If we turned those distinctions into a trivia question and asked who had achieved them all, you might swear it was someone else. But you'd be wrong.
The distinctions belong to Ed Macauley.
Basketball historian Ken Shouler has served as managing editor and a writer for "Total Basketball: The Ultimate Basketball Encyclopedia."