Red Auerbach Dies at 89

Long after handing over the coaching duties, Auerbach attended every home game and protected the Celtics' legacy with a proprietary pride.

"Auerbach alone was the Celtics -- substance and continuity, heart and soul," Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1982.

Still, he never lost his fiery competitive spirit. In 1984, during a fight between the Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers, he ran from the stands and challenged 6-foot-10 Sixers star Moses Malone to a fight: "Go on, hit me, you S.O.B.!"

Auerbach was 66 at the time.

In the early 1990s, he began to cede some authority in running the team, and in 1997 he lost his title as team president when Rick Pitino was named coach and chief of basketball operations. When Pitino proved to be a failure as a professional coach and left the Celtics in 2001, Auerbach got his title back. He made the trip to Boston less often, but he closely followed his team and remained an astute judge of players and coaches.

Auerbach lived in Washington, his wife's home town, throughout his career because it allowed him to keep his professional and personal lives separate.

"If we lived in the town where I coached," he said, "two things would happen: I'd end up bringing the family's problems to practice and the team's problems into our home. Without that solitude and concentrated time, I'm not sure that we could have accomplished all we did."

A Lasting Impression

As time went on, Auerbach's remarkable coaching achievements -- nine championships in 10 seasons -- began to acquire the patina of legend, and he mellowed into something of a grand old sage of basketball. In 1980, he was named the greatest coach in NBA history by the Professional Basketball Writers Association of America.

His career total of 938 regular season victories was finally surpassed in 1995 by Lenny Wilkens -- who needed six more years than Auerbach to reach the mark. In 2002, Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bulls and later the Los Angeles Lakers, equaled Auerbach's record of nine NBA championships.

Auerbach kept a hand in running the Celtics until the end of his life. After surgery for colon cancer in the summer of 2005, he recovered in time to go to Boston for the Celtics' opening game of the NBA season in October.

In Washington, he held a weekly 11 a.m. luncheon at a restaurant in Chinatown, dispensing wisdom and insights to a carefully chosen group of coaches, sportswriters and other friends. Items gleaned from these gatherings formed the basis of his final book, "Let Me Tell You a Story," written with Feinstein in 2004.

Auerbach was a longtime member of the Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, where he played tennis and cards several times a week. His wife of 59 years, Dorothy Lewis Auerbach, died in 2000. His younger brother Zangfeld Auerbach, a cartoonist at the old Washington Star and a fixture at his brother's Tuesday luncheons, died in 2003.

Survivors include two daughters, Nancy Auerbach Collins and Randy Auerbach; one granddaughter, Julie Auerbach Fleiger; one great-grandson, Peter Auerbach Fleiger; and two great-granddaughters, Hope and Noelle Fleiger.

Staff writer Martin Weil contributed to this report.