When Bob Ryan would begin writing a Celtics game story — a “gamer,” as it’s known in the trade — he’d look for a lede. An insight, a gag, a short scene. Something he could extract from his brain before deadline that would give the reader a proverbial starting point.
So let’s get to it.
A fellow Boston Globe writer named John Powers once noticed that Ryan didn’t include many quotes in his game stories. Quotes were the chief information-dispensing device of other NBA writers.
Bob, Powers asked, why aren’t Globe readers hearing from the athletes?
Ryan replied, “I’ll tell ’em what they ought to know!”
Ryan was the king of the categorical statement, noted Grantland’s Charles P. Pierce, who wrote for three Boston papers. In game stories, categorical statements are minor embellishments that help readers see the uniqueness of the thing before them — e.g., “No coach ever had a greater asset than John Havlicek.”
So let’s get to it.
No newspaper ever had an NBA beat writer like Bob Ryan. No one talked in the same blustery, Joycean word bombs. “He talks like 78 RPM records,” said ex-Globie Peter Gammons. No one’s game stories glowed with more opinion, more enthusiasm, more — call it what it is — fandom. No one was quite as likely, after Paul Silas would grab a rebound and throw it to Havlicek to start the break, to turn to a fellow Globie and give them a hug.
“He’s the best game-story writer in journalism history,” said former Globewriter Jackie MacMullan. See that categorical statement? MacMullan learned from Ryan.
In the age of NBA League Pass, the game story has become a sad anachronism — a recap of an event we already saw, quoting players disinclined to relive it. Ryan made it such a swaggering pulpit that during three tours on the Celtics beat (all between 1969 and 1988), there existed dueling Ryan impressions. In the first, the Globe’s Clif Keane would pull his pants up high and flap his arms. In the second, the Celtics’ Dennis Johnson would jam his hands in his back pockets and bob his head up and down like a duck. That was Ryan stalking press row at Boston Garden, as if he were the sentry guarding the place. Which he pretty much was.
Ryan’s writing was muscular and acerbic and very nearly inspiring. “Should [Ralph Sampson] reject the Celtics’ offer in favor of coming out next year,” he wrote in 1980, “I would then question whether we would even want such an unthinking kid to begin with.”
Lesson: Don’t let anyone tell you the Internet invented the royal “we.” Or the just-this-side-of-tasteful overstatement. “Last year I felt that if the Philadelphia 76ers had succeeded in defeating the Portland Trail Blazers for the NBA championship,” Ryan wrote in 1978, “it would be as if Hitler actually managed to invade England.”
What’s that, Chief? My game story’s due in 20 minutes? OK, OK, moving along …
An NBA gamer is no place for big chunks of biography. A gamer can accommodate hints of a player’s personal history.
Hints, then. As Ryan writes in his new memoir, Scribe, he grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, rooting against the Celtics. Meaning, his advocacy for the Celtics brand was acquired in a professional capacity.
Ryan, like Gammons, went to an elite prep school. Gammons’s father was a teacher at Groton. Ryan’s mother was a secretary at Lawrenceville.
Ryan’s dad died when he was 11, forcing him to assume the role of the household’s trivia-spouting senior sports fan. Not by choice, he instantly became the guy we now know as Bob Ryan.
Hints. Moving along …
Bob Ryan and Peter Gammons started at the Globe on the same day: June 10, 1968. It wasn’t immediately clear they could write. It was immediately clear they could talk. “Ryan and Gammons were the originalPTI,” said Lesley Visser, who joined the paper in 1974. They could argue about anything. Their voices were passionate and nerdy and would sound throughout the Globe’s sports desk.
One day, Tom Fitzgerald, a crusty hockey writer, looked up from his copy and said, “Is my typing bothering you two?”
“No, no, don’t worry about it!” Ryan said.
We imagine Ryan and Gammons as a matched set, but there were differences. Gammons likes Springsteen; Ryan favors old standards. Gammons’s eye wandered from the Red Sox to the whole league; Ryan was a Celtics man first and foremost. “Peter was a repository of information, where Bob was maybe a repository of opinion,” said Leigh Montville, a Globecolumnist.
Both exercised their ambition by filing more and more and more copy. Soon, the Globe was surrendering whole pages of the paper for their Sunday notes columns. “If it were up to them,” said Dave Smith, the Globe sports editor in the ’70s, “we’d turn the section over to them and let the other guys go home.”
The Globe could have filled its beat slots by poaching the best writers from the Herald Traveler or Record-American. But Tom Winship, the Globe’s editor, took a chance on two former summer interns. They talked so passionately. And they just seemed ready, even though neither had any experience outside his college newspaper.
Ryan and Gammons’s first morning was a busy one. Robert Kennedy had been assassinated the week before. The rookie reporters were assigned to gauge the reaction to Major League Baseball’s decision to play on Lyndon Johnson’s day of mourning. Around 3 p.m., they were able to hold the afternoon edition of the Globe in their hands and look at their byline, “Peter Gammons and Robert Ryan,” names so placed for alphabetical order.
They celebrated at the Eire Pub, a “gentlemen’s prestige bar,” scarfing down 15-cent beers and hot dogs. Ryan turned to Gammons with a big smile and said, “This business ain’t so bad after all!”
The first thing Ryan noticed on the Celtics beat was the loneliness. He was 23 years old. He would go to practice and find he was the only reporter there. The Record-American’s Celtics writer was a football prognosticator and desk man — he had no time.
The Celtics had won 10 out of the last 11 NBA titles. But the Globe, too, had limited use for them. Ryan’s predecessor on the beat read a book during timeouts to stave off boredom. The paper saw little value in covering road games. So Ryan spent many nights of the 1969-70 season at his desk, waiting for coach Tommy “The Hawk” Heinsohn to call and explain what happened.
Outside of Philadelphia supernova George “The Silver Quill” Kiseda, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a famous NBA beat writer in 1969. “It was for the most part a place where young reporters got sent who couldn’t get a more exciting gig,” said David Stern, the league’s former commissioner. But it was the assignment’s relative obscurity, its distance from the lights of Fenway Park, that shaped Ryan’s literary style.
Athletes and writers worked in closer quarters then, but on the Celtics beat there was virtually no separation, especially when the Globe sent Ryan on the road. Ryan would walk up to Don Nelson, the hero of the ’69 Finals, and ask to play one-on-one. Ryan was a 6-foot-1 big man in pickup games, the guy who was always trying to back you down. He wanted to see what an NBA player could do. “He wasn’t a very good player at any position,” Nelson said, “but he was a heck of a writer!”
In 1980, Dave Cowens walked into Ryan’s hotel room and handed Ryan a stack of papers. It was a retirement statement Cowens had scratched out. Cowens wanted a rewrite. “I’ll need some time,” Ryan said. “Maybe an hour.” After Cowens told his teammates he was quitting, he realized he didn’t have a ride home to Kentucky. Ryan rented him a car from Avis.
Road trips were Ryan’s favorite part of the job. An NBA player never reveals himself more than when he’s killing time in an unfamiliar city. General manager Red Auerbach had a rule that the Celtics could drink only beer when they hit the town. Heinsohn was Red’s enforcer. “Wine was a European evil of some kind,” Ryan said. One night in Milwaukee, Ryan and Nelson and John Havlicek got cultured and ordered a bottle of rosé.
“If Hawk comes in,” Havlicek told Ryan, “you’re drinking the wine.”
Ryan was close to the players — probably too close, he later realized. He also became interested in the plight of pro basketball. In Boston, Charlie Pierce explained, “the Red Sox have this deep, historic reservoir of support, and then there are temporary enthusiasms.” The enthusiasm of the ’70s was Bobby Orr’s Bruins. In Ryan’s first year on the beat, the hockey team drew 14,800 a night in the Garden. The Celtics drew 7,500.
“It pissed me off, the Bruins thing,” Ryan said. “It was just so frustrating. I really believed in the [NBA]. I thought all the myths were bullshit: They don’t play defense. If you see the last two minutes, you’ve seen the whole game.” This is what happens when you cover a bush league: You become not just a scrivener but also an evangelist — the guy telling readers they’re missing a great game.
But the best thing about covering the ’70s NBA was the freedom. The Globesports page was already a three-man weave for writers, encouraging “voice” and “long form” before those labels had been stuck on them. “The worst thing was always if Page 1 would take your story,” Montville said, “because they would try to put some common sense into it.”
And to be a basketball writer on the Globe was to be free of history. There was no Ghost of the Bambino demanding tribute. No lilting style flowing from the veins of Red Smith. As former Philadelphia Bulletin writer Mark Heisler noted, there were so few columnists going to NBA games that the beat writerbecame the columnist. Every night, as Ryan searched for his lede, he was doing the work of two journalists.
