Good Times in the Garden

Boston sports fans are notoriously hard to please. In 1953 Lightweight Jimmy Carter had to floor Boston's own Tommy Collins ten times before the issue was acceptably settled; last season the baseball crowd was not sufficiently satisfied until Ted Williams, after again proving himself one of the great ballplayers of all time, condescended to spit at them, one and all. But this winter the fans are having a miserable time. Night after night, as they troop into the hugely nondescript Boston Garden, they find nothing to grouse about. Reason: the Boston Celtics are bouncing along toward the National Basketball Association title, and the Boston Bruins, after seven seasons of mediocrity or worse, are skating hell-bent for the National Hockey League championship.

Boston's Bill. Boston's basketball pros have long boasted most of the best players in the N.B.A.; now they fit together into the best team. The deadpan fakery and ballet-ball handling of Bob Cousy are as spectacular as ever. Under the backboards, muscular Jim Loscutoff, once of the University of Oregon, is throwing his weight (225 lbs.) around with bruising efficiency. The soft, high-arcing long shots of quiet Bill Sharman are hitting so often that he is now being called one of the greatest set-shot marksmen in the history of the game.

Until Sharman pulled a muscle in his right thigh this month, the Celtics had performed the remarkable feat of winning 14 of their 18 games. With Sharman out, they lost to Philadelphia, Rochester, Syracuse and New York, giving Boston rooters a chance to realize who was making the difference. In 19 games, 6-ft.-2-in. Bill Sharman had achieved a .433 field-goal percentage, far ahead of Cousy the Magnificent, and up there with the leading giants of the league, Philadelphia's Johnston, 6 ft. 8 in., and New York's Gallatin, 6 ft. 6 in. On the foul line he missed the incredibly small total of nine out of 121 foul shots.

Once a promising Dodger farmhand, U.S.C. Alumnus Bill Sharman used to nurse fond dreams of big-league baseball. ("I'm the guy who was going to shove Snider out of center field," he remembers with a wry smile.) Now he knows that basketball is his game. He is so central to the Celtics' championship hopes that last week Coach Red Auerbach refused to tempt trouble by putting him back in uniform too soon for the four and five pounding miles of running required in a pro game. So Bill bided his time until the St. Louis Hawks invaded the Boston Garden late last week. Then, Bill Russell, San Francisco's string of coordinated spaghetti, put on a pro uniform for the Celtics and overcame first-game nervousness to put on a defensive display of perfection. Cousy, cool as ever in the clutch, fired the team to a last-minute rally and Bill Sharman came through with a last-second basket that won the game, 95-93.