The Charlie Scott Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Wednesday, May 11th, 2005
You
jumped to the NBA in 1972, and played three All-Star seasons for the Phoenix
Suns. Please tell me about this period in your basketball career.
Jerry
Colangelo was the general manger at that time. He and Al Ross worked that
deal. It was a great experience. Playing in the NBA was everything that I
thought it would be, and everything I wanted my basketball career to be about.
I enjoyed playing in the NBA. Phoenix was a great place to play, but we didn’t
have the talent to compete with players like Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain,
Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, and Dave DeBusschere. These players were stars on
very strong teams. We just didn’t have the personnel to win on a consistent
basis, at least as consistently as I would have liked. And I think management
felt the same way. We were in a division where 42 or 43 wins put you in third
or fourth place, and at that time only two teams from each division went to the
playoffs. That got us nowhere. So that was probably the most disheartening
thing.
Still, I have no complaints as far as getting an opportunity to play in the NBA. It was a big thrill for me. I was able to compete against all of those great players that I just mentioned, and that allowed me to measure myself against them on a daily basis. That was the ultimate basketball phenom. It was all that I could have wished for and more. But again, my whole basketball career had been defined by winning, and I wasn’t used to coming up short. It was a humbling experience. I think it made me more appreciative of the winning.
May 23,
1975: Boston trades Paul Westphal and two picks for Charlie Scott. What
emotions did you feel when you found out about the trade, and what was it
like to play with guys like Cowens, Havlicek, Silas and White?
I
remember that date well – I was on my way to Brazil. In fact, I was
standing in line and Paul Westphal was standing right in front of me. Talk
about irony. We were getting ready to catch a flight, and Larry Fleischer
asked me if I had heard the news. I said, ‘What news?’ He said, ‘You were
traded to Boston for him.’ And then he pointed to Paul. I thought it was a
joke. I said, ‘Nah, you know that’s not true. Phoenix got more than that
for me.’ I was kidding, of course [laughs]. Larry said no, and then
proceeded to tell me that I’d been traded to Boston for Paul Westphal and
two second round draft choices.
I was always a Celtics fan, and I had always wanted to play for them. When
I went to Lefty Driesell’s camp as a junior in high school, Red Auerbach was
one of the speakers at that time. So I had known of Red for the longest
time. And like you said, Sam Jones was a Celtic, and they had played a game
when I was in high school. The game was down in Charlotte, and my coach had
taken me to meet him. So I’ve always been a Celtics fan. I’ve always been
in love with winning. The Celtics were always the team that understood and
knew how to win, and being traded to that organization was the greatest
thrill. And like I said, I’m very fortunate when it comes to my basketball
pedigree. Going to Boston was the icing on the cake. I never worried about
fitting in. I never worried about anything. I knew that it was going to be
a great circumstance, and that it was going to be a positive situation. I
couldn’t wait.
Everyone
wants to talk about Game 5 of the 1976 NBA Finals. In Game 6, you were
dominant with 25 points, 11 rebounds, five steals and three assists. What
memories do you have of that triple-overtime classic, and what was it like
to win the championship one game later in Phoenix, of all places?
I’m
going to tell you the truth – I told [Boston Globe journalist] Bob Ryan
this, and you can ask anybody who was on that team and they’ll tell you the
same thing: We never worried about Phoenix beating us. We never thought
that Phoenix could win that series. One thing people forget about that
triple-overtime game is that we were up by twenty-five points at one time.
And give the Suns credit; they came back, things turned around, and they
were able to stay in the game and force it into overtime. It was a great
game – it has been billed by the NBA as the greatest game of all-time, and
I’m proud to have been a part of that. That kind of notoriety is good for
folklore, but the honest-to-God truth is that, to a man, we were never
concerned about them beating us. That whole year, Phoenix had never beaten
us. The only thing that made the games tight at that time, is the fact that
writers Bob Ryan and Mike Lupica kept writing in the papers about how the
Boston Celtics were bullying up on the poor Phoenix Suns. As a result, that
triple-overtime game was a very closely called game, and that’s’ the only
thing that made that game tight. It was a swing where we were so far ahead
that we never really felt bothered. Then, the next thing we knew, the score
was tied. That was our fault – our own nonchalance. But did we ever think
we were going to lose to the Phoenix Suns? Never in our wildest dreams did
we think they had the opportunity to beat us.
The thing we always looked at was player matchups, and we saw no position where we would be outplayed. That’s how you look at it in the playoffs. You ask yourself, ‘Okay, where is it that you’re going to be beat?’ That’s what we did: Paul Westphal versus Jo Jo White? Jo Jo is going to win that. Me and Ricky Sobers or whoever they’ve got? I’m going to win that. Paul Silas and Garfield Heard? Paul is gonna win that. John Havlicek and whoever they put on that other end? John is gonna win that. And then we’ve Dave Cowens in the middle, so tell me where the Phoenix Suns had an advantage over us. That’s how we looked at the game, and the series. So even though that game was such a great game, we, as a team, didn’t see any way for the Phoenix Suns to beat us. And to be honest, the team that probably would have been our toughest opponent would have been the San Francisco Warriors, the team that had won the title the year before. They lost to Phoenix in seven games. That was the Rick Barry team – they had beaten Washington the year before. And they had the best record in the Western Conference at that time. So, again, that game has been a great marketing tool for the league, but we never doubted our ability to win the championship that season.
Game 6
was played on a Sunday in Phoenix. In a sign of the times, the game was
played not in primetime, but early Sunday morning. Tell me a little about
that.
It
was played at nine o’clock in the morning. Championship game. CBS had a
golf tournament that they were committed to televising that afternoon, and
because CBS hadn’t scheduled that right, we had to go out and play in
Phoenix on a Sunday morning. I’ll never forget it; we had a five o’clock
wakeup call for a championship game. You have to remember, at nine o’clock
in Phoenix, it was noon on the east coast.
The start time was a small price to play – like I’ve said, I don’t have much bitching to do when it comes to my basketball career. Things worked out very well for me. If I had my choice, I would have gone to North Carolina. I did that. I would have played for the Boston Celtics and won a world championship. I did that. I feel very fortunate to have things play out the way they did.
