Walter A. Brown
Walter A. Brown ( born February 10, 1905 in Boston, Massachusetts, † September 7, 1964 ) was an American sports official and hockey coach. His father, George V. Brown was also a sports official.
Career
Walter A. Brown won five championships as Hockey Coach of the Eastern Hockey League with the Boston Olympics. With the U.S. national hockey team, he won at the World Ice Hockey Championships in 1933 for the first time in the history of the country the gold medal at a World Cup. The United States, he led also to win the silver medal at the World Championships in 1931 and 1934, as well as for winning the bronze medal at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch -Partenkirchen. In 1937 he took over the management of the Boston Garden by his father, George V. Brown.
Walter A. Brown was one of the founders, the Basketball Association of America was founded in 1946 and helped with their merger with the National Basketball League in 1949 for the National Basketball Association. The Americans also founded in 1946 with the Boston Celtics own basketball team, the championship of the NBA could win in the seven years before his death six times. With the financially troubled hockey club of the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League Brown bought in 1951 also a more professional team that fought out their home games at the Boston Garden, and which he was president until his death. From 1954 to 1957 he served as president of the International Ice Hockey Federation IIHF, for which he had already worked twice ais vice president. At the Olympic Winter Games 1960 Brown won with the U.S. as a manager the gold medal.
Brown died on September 7, 1964 at the age of 59 years. Because of his contribution to the sport in the United States, he was then taken up in 1965 in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In 1962 he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Other awards were recording in the United States Hockey Hall of Fame and the appointment of Walter Brown Arena in his hometown of Boston to him. The league since the foundation in 1949, awarded to the champion trophy was renamed in 1964 in Walter A. Brown Trophy and retained this name until its renaming in 1983 Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy. Since his death in 1964, the Boston Celtics awarded in his honor the number one no more than jersey number to a player.