Sublime

The compassion, though genuine, had taken a back seat to calculation; the Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, who covered Johnson for many years, was to write, in an incisive phrase, of his “real, though expendable, compassion.” In Johnson’s unending, silent calculations about the best way to further his career, it was the Alvin Wirtzes and the Herman

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He spoke to each of us differently. This was never an affectation. He had an uncanny ability to pick up intonations, inflections, and body language in every one of his players. When he listened, he had what I like to think of as a built-in, shockproof lie detector. We used to have a saying on the Celtics, “Don’t lie to me, boy!” That came from Red.

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