Because a man doesn’t forget receiving news that a close friend has been stabbed, John Connor, the long-time Celtics equipment manager, remembers the feeling when Rick Pitino called him 20 years ago this week.
Connor had bonded with Paul Pierce from the start. On the night the Celtics drafted Pierce, the organization sent Connor as its delegate to the draft site in Vancouver. Pierce slipped to the 10th spot, where the Celtics took him. Connor was the first to welcome the rookie to the organization. He and Pierce hung out deep into the night. Eventually, they developed into shooting rivals and trash-talking buddies. Before games, Pierce would step into what he called “The Dungeon” – Connor’s office at the Celtics home arena. Connor, widely known as Johnny Joe, called his friend “Hobbs,” after Roy Hobbs from “The Natural.”
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The two were tight. So the phone call on Sept. 25, 2000, gutted Connor.
“Monday morning, getting ready to go to Brandeis for practice,” Connor said, “and I got a call from coach Pitino just saying you’re not going to believe this. Say some prayers for the kid.”
Pierce had been stabbed multiple times in the early morning hours. He had been rushed to the hospital. He needed surgery right away.
At first, Connor said, the Celtics weren’t even sure Pierce would survive. Twenty years later, Pierce’s stabbing stands as one of the most important near-tragedies in professional sports history, a frightening, awful moment that could have been far worse. He has said the incident changed his life. Privately, it forced him to reconsider his lifestyle, made him paranoid enough to have 24-hour police surveillance at his house and convinced him to carry a gun for two years. Publicly, he showed hardly any effects.
Barely more than a month after emergency lung surgery, Pierce scored 28 points in the Celtics’ season-opening win. He went on to average 25.3 points per game – easily a career high at the time – while appearing in all 82 games for the first time. Because he survived and because the injuries never derailed his game, the stabbing is often seen as a footnote in Pierce’s basketball story. It’s infrequently mentioned. But some who were around him at the time consider his bounceback one of the greatest stories rarely told.
“The shadow on that organization back then, it was just like an incredible eclipse,” Connor said. “From the sun out to darkness. And then to have him write the book the way he did? It’s an all-time sports story.
“This guy being on his death bed and fighting for his life after an incident like that, it’s up there with anything.”
‘That’s what bailed Paul out’
When the Celtics drafted Pierce, Pitino told Connor the forward’s toughness would change the team. The first two seasons of Pierce’s career were rocky for an organization that was already going through hard times. In his first year, the Celtics went 19-31 during a lockout-shortened season. Pierce made the All-Rookie first team after averaging 16.5 points, but it was Boston’s sixth straight season under .500.
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Pierce had been paired with Antoine Walker, who arrived in 1996 as another top-10 pick, but the Celtics still added another year to that losing tally with a 35-47 record in the 1999-2000 season. Pierce lifted his scoring average to 19.5, showing signs he could develop into a franchise cornerstone. Still, the Celtics experienced enough frustration to prompt Pitino’s epic rant – “Larry Bird is not walking through that door, fans” – after a two-point loss in March. In Boston, where the Celtics had been beloved for so long, it was growing easier and easier to turn toward other sports.
In September 2000, Pierce had not yet made an All-Star Game or qualified for the playoffs. A championship ring seemed like a fantasy. In Pierce and Walker, the Celtics were hopeful they had two players to build around, but they were just barely getting started together.
Then on Sept. 25, Pierce, just 22, was stabbed.
In the days after, Connor said, Pitino organized a trip to the hospital to visit Pierce.
“Everybody went,” Connor said. “And it was very tough. When I had gone down, there was already some light at the end of the tunnel. So that made it easier. But then you’re thinking, this guy, how is he going to resume his career? What’s he going to end up being? But he just looked inside. I remember (Pitino) just being so excited about his toughness. And that’s what bailed Paul out: his own toughness.”
‘This guy’s going to be one of the best that ever did it’
For Celtics PR guru Jeff Twiss, now the team’s vice president of media relations, the morning of Sept. 25, 2000, spun by as a tornado of chaos.
Around 2 a.m., he received a phone call that Pierce had been stabbed. By the time Twiss arrived at the hospital, he said, Pitino and Celtics general manager Chris Wallace were already there. The news spread quickly. And it was huge. Some television outlets wanted to shoot video from the hospital and were even requesting interviews on site. The Celtics didn’t even know how Pierce would come through surgery.
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“I’m sitting there going, ‘Time out. This just happened,’” Twiss remembered.
Pierce had gone to the Buzz Club in Boston’s theater district with a group of friends, including Celtics teammate Tony Battie. During a recent appearance on the All the Smoke podcast with Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes, Pierce said the trouble started after he chatted with a group of women. As Pierce remembered, a man approached to tell him to stop talking to a young lady. Shortly after that, the tussle began. Pierce said that initially he did not even know he was being stabbed.
“Stabbed three times in the stomach and five times in the back by like two different knives,” Pierce said on the podcast. “I got hit upside the head with a bottle, I’ve got a scar on the right side of my eye that I had to have plastic surgery all on this part because it was all scraped out. When your adrenaline is flowing, you don’t feel none of that. I wasn’t on the ground out of it. You know, like, I’m up. And then when it was over I realized this was all happening.”
Pierce said he looked up to see his jacket ripped and blood everywhere.
“Coming leaking down my face,” he said. “I can barely keep my eyes open. And they’re like, ‘You’re stabbed, you need to go to the hospital.”
He was rushed to the hospital in the back of Battie’s car. Once he was there, Pierce still wasn’t sure he would survive.
“I remember being at the hospital, banging on the hospital door and asking, ‘Am I going to die? Am I going to die?’” he said. “I’m having shortness of breath. It really changed my life for me to get through that.”
One of the stab wounds was seven inches deep. According to several reports, doctors suggested a leather jacket, which Pierce wore that night, might have saved his life. Two and a half weeks after the incident, Pierce said he probably would have passed away if the knife had entered his body either one inch to the right or left. Not fortunate enough to escape all serious damage, he required surgery for the collapsed lung.
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The Celtics had already lost two rising stars to tragic deaths. Len Bias passed away from the effects of a cocaine overdose shortly after the team drafted him in 1986. Then in 1993, All-Star Reggie Lewis died of a heart issue on the team’s practice court. When most of the Celtics learned about the shocking Pierce news later in the morning, the team still feared his life was in peril.
“My first initiative was just like, is he going to survive?” said teammate Kenny Anderson. “‘Is he OK?’ And then I couldn’t believe when he came back and survived everything that they said, that he had the year he had. I was just like, ‘Wow.’ It was just amazing that he even played that year after having those injuries.”
Pierce returned to practice weeks after the incident. Though the psychological toll of the stabbing impacted him deeply, as he has explained since, he considered the basketball court a sanctuary where he could get away from it all. Anderson said he always thought his younger teammate would become an NBA star, but raised his expectations after Pierce played in the Celtics’ season opener just 37 days after being rushed to the hospital. To perform at a high level again so quickly – and to do it in the same city where the stabbing occurred – opened Anderson’s eyes.
“I really didn’t understand how he did it,” Anderson said. “And then when he started playing and played very well, I was like, ‘This guy’s going to be one of the best that ever did it.’ I really believed it. Not only how tough he was, but how he survived in that type of environment.”
Two years later, two men were convicted for roles in the incident. William Ragland was sentenced to 10 years in prison for assault, and Trevor Watson was sentenced to a year for hitting Pierce.
‘I can’t think of a tougher guy’
All those All-Star teams, all those big shots and all those playoff runs could have been wiped out that one fall night in Boston. Pierce is not just the star who stayed with the Celtics, but the star who survived and persevered. He won the Finals MVP award in 2008. The Celtics retired his jersey 10 years later.
Even after the big moments, Connor rarely stopped to reflect on the bar fight that nearly robbed Pierce of everything. Maybe, Connor thought, that’s because of how Pierce moved forward.
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“Maybe it was the way Paul just went on and got on with his business, and had that toughness and that love to play the game,” Connor said. “I mean, he wasn’t perfect, but that guy suited up and that guy produced. Coach Pitino was definitely on the money with toughness when he labeled this kid tough. I can’t think of a tougher guy that’s been there my 24 years (with the team).
“(The stabbing) definitely put him on his heels. I can definitely remember him being more guarded, more mellow, a little more subdued. And then he came through the Garden and just laced them up. I mean, it was amazing to watch. It’s an amazing story, this kid.”
Pierce’s number 34 is already hanging from the TD Garden rafters. He will be in the Hall of Fame one day. After the resolve Pierce showed in 2000, Anderson said he knew accolades like that would pile up eventually. He said Pierce rarely let teammates see how much the incident stuck with him. All the pain, all the emotional anguish he dealt with, and still he just kept giving the Celtics everything he had.
“I just knew that he was going to be special,” Anderson said. “That just took it overboard. And then I said, ‘Oh, man. He’s going to be a great. He’s going to be up there with Larry Bird. Boston needs to keep this young man.’ And they did. And he won a championship. And he deserved it. I’m just happy that all the things he wanted came to fruition. When I see him, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is a guy that recovered from a lot. From a lot of downfalls. And he regrouped. And he got his passion back.’ That, or I don’t know if it ever left – his passion that he had for the game of basketball. To give everybody in Boston the love, and to win that championship for them, it’s just amazing.”
With all that Pierce accomplished in his career after Sept. 25, 2000, it can sometimes be overlooked how close Pierce came to dying that morning.
“And people don’t talk about it. Don’t nobody talk about it. But it’s crazy,” Anderson said. “This young man probably should have been dead. Let’s call a spade a spade: He got stabbed. Numerous times. That’s crazy. That is crazy. Still living. And still playing. It was nuts. The whole situation was just nuts. For him to compete and play the way he played, it just was remarkable coming back from all that. Just playing, having the will to understand that – and in the same city. In the same city. See, you’ve gotta understand. You run away from that. He played 11 or 12 (more) years in the same city it happened in. To this day, it’s crazy just even talking about this.”
(Top photo of Pierce: Noren Trotman / NBAE via Getty Images)