Sports are synonymous with celebration. After winning the biggest trophy of their lives, athletes want to indulge in the payoff that comes with seeing their dreams realized. Teams go into the locker room, where a waterfall of champagne hits them in the eyes, and swimming goggles seem to be a requirement, lest you walk around on the best night of your life half blind. While drinking is often the activity of choice after winning a championship, the NBA has an alternative symbol of greatness that other sports don’t use nearly enough: the victory cigar.
Basketball is a team game, but it’s also an individual canvas for solo superstardom. After winning an NBA championship, the coaches and players who sit atop the throne have long smoked a cigar in the locker room, during the parade, or even on the bench before the clock has hit zero. There’s nothing quite like a good stogie to signify the ultimate win over the rest of the league, but how did the victory cigar get so ingrained in NBA championship celebrations? We want to take a walk down memory lane and look at some of the historical moments and people who made the cigar what it is within the NBA today.
Red Auerbach’s victory cigar on the bench
The Boston Celtics thoroughly dominated the NBA throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Led by Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Sam Jones, and a plethora of other Hall of Famers, the Celtics took the championship in 11 out of 13 seasons between 1957 and 1969, including a record eight consecutive from 1959 through 1966. While the players on the floor always deserve the most credit for the success of a sports dynasty, the coach who molds the players into their vision of a cohesive team should also be recognized for their efforts. Enter Red Auerbach.
A feisty New Yorker whose personality towered over the league despite standing a foot shorter than many of his players, Auerbach infused the Celtics’ bench with confidence and cockiness that was needed to remain on top of the standings year after year. His whiteboard symbolized his intelligence, and the victory cigar he lit up on the bench in the waning seconds of nine different NBA Finals symbolized the bragging rights his teams had over the sports world. Auerbach coached during a time when indoor smoking was still allowed in most indoor venues across the U.S. This archaic and unhealthy tradition of the period helped kick-start the NBA’s indelible image of championship glory.
The stories associated with Auerbach and his cigars are as legendary as anything that took place on the court. It gave the NBA an extra layer of aura that other sports couldn’t match, and it was much needed because the sport was still a distant third to the NFL and MLB during the 1960s. Big Red’s reputation as a trash talker and cigar smoker meant that Boston was building something unmatched in professional sports. Just thinking about Red’s stogies conjured up pride in the New England area. It also forced his team to play even harder to ensure they didn’t lose once he started gloating about victory. This excerpt from Dan Shaughnessy’s book, Ever Green, as quoted by Holt’s Clubhouse, explains the flipside to Auerbach’s arrogance.
“It [the cigar] made us all uncomfortable,” Bob Cousy said. “It was more offensive to us and everyone else on the road. When he did this, it got everyone’s attention. And he**, we had enough hostility focused on us as it was. This was another trigger point. The fans were already pi**** off because then it looked like they’d lose the game. And they did. This was an irritant. He sat benignly and comfortably on the bench, smoking away, with a guard behind him. Meanwhile, we were out on the floor taking all this abuse. The feeling among the players was: ‘Why get their attention anymore? Why pi** ’em off?’ The fans would get more belligerent and hostile toward us, and we had to bust our tails to keep the lead because once he went for the cigar, the other team’s intensity went up 100 percent. I hated that thing. Paul Seymour [a Syracuse Nationals player from 1949 through 1960] told me that his ambition in life was not to win an NBA championship as much as it was to have Auerbach light up prematurely and lose, so that he could go down and stuff that cigar in his face. That’s all Seymour wanted to do in sports. It created this kind of reaction from opponents. As players, who needs it?”
In many ways, Auerbach’s victory cigar celebration served as not only a middle finger to his opponents but to the NBA’s etiquette. If opponents, the league at large, and even his own players didn’t like cigar smoking on the bench, the celebration turned into a risky proposition for the league. Not many continued Auerbach’s tradition until Michael Jordan evolved it in the 1990s.
Michael Jordan redefines the victory cigar in the 1990s
Something about dynasties and cigars just goes hand in hand in the NBA. There wasn’t another team that dominated yearly the way the Celtics did during the 1960s until Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls took the sports world by the horns in the 1990s.
Jordan soared through the air with an insatiable thirst for victory. He led the team to six championships between 1991 and 1998 and almost every victory became a moment for Jordan to break out a smoke and enjoy the spoils of the night. Unlike Red Auerbach, though, Jordan enjoyed the act of smoking a cigar in and of itself. Smoking wasn’t reserved just for lifting the trophy, but as a method to relax and push him toward greatness, as he described to Cigar Aficionado during an interview in 2005.
“I smoked my first cigar in 1991, when we won the championship. Up to that point, I had never smoked a cigar, never smoked anything. We won the championship, and Jerry Reinsdorf gave me one of his cigars. He’s a big cigar smoker.
The next time I received a cigar was from my good friend, Ahmad Rashad. He used to get these Churchills from Las Vegas that were dipped in rum. I wouldn’t smoke them, but I would sit there and chew on them. I got to the point where it became very relaxing.
In Chicago, I tell people this, and they have to understand the context of what happened. We had to be to the stadium at 6 o’clock for home games, and traffic was so bad it would take us an hour and 15 or an hour and 30 minutes to drive. So now I’m sitting in a car for almost an hour and a half, and I’m very tense. I’m worried about the traffic. So I started smoking a cigar going to the games. In 1993. It became a ritual for every home game.”
Seeing Jordan fall in love with smoking cigars as a byproduct of his greatness on the court meant that the cigar wasn’t just a symbol of winning as it was for Auerbach, but a tool that produced the success. In a literary sense, Jordan’s cigar smoking represented a poetic marriage of cigar culture and high-level basketball competition. What made Jordan relax was also what allowed him to succeed. Surely, cigar companies enjoyed the attention it brought their products and the NBA couldn’t deny that Jordan transformed habits that would otherwise be thought of as unhealthy vices into positive ones. Fun fact: Jordan’s favorite cigar is the Partagas Lusitania, according to Cigar Aficionado.
LeBron James and Steph Curry maintain the cigar tradition
As training regiments continued to evolve into the 21st century and athletes looked for every edge over their opponents, you wouldn’t be surprised if smoking a cigar, even for a single celebration, started to die out. Yet here we are with LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and so many other icons of the NBA throughout the last two decades still finding ways to carry on the cigar-smoking tradition while maintaining some of the best training routines in the world.
Seeing a basketball superstar relax after a championship and engage in tradition, even if it’s not a physically healthy choice anymore, helps show that sports are bigger than just the present moment. They represent generations of athletes from the past and into the future. Kids right now watching James and Curry will continue to aspire to be like them, and that includes smoking a victory cigar.
The enduring cultural symbolism of the victory cigar
The NBA certainly doesn’t have a trademark on cigar smoking. Other athletes around the world have used the celebratory smoke for decades to cap off a job well done or an accomplishment years in the making. It’s the way NBA figures have smoked cigars and the frequency at which it’s performed by some of the sport’s absolute best that willed the recreation of smoking into an artful salute to the sport. It’s a tradition that paints the NBA with sophistication and an ironic juxtaposition.
Tobacco and exercise don’t traditionally mingle, but in the hands of the best athletes in the world, smoking is somewhere between a guilty pleasure and an unorthodox right of passage for champions. Don’t be shocked if you see this year’s champion light up in the hours after lifting the Larry O’Brien trophy. It wouldn’t feel right without it.
