The Victory Cigar: From Red Auerbach to Your Biggest Win

Short answer: a victory cigar is a cigar you light because something good already happened. Not to relax, not out of habit — to mark it. The phrase comes from Red Auerbach, who lit one on the Boston Celtics bench the moment a win was locked up. Nine titles in his last ten years coaching. A lot of cigars.

Victory cigar meaning: what it actually signals

A regular cigar is time — an hour blocked out so the day can drain off. A victory cigar is punctuation.

The win is already in the books. The contract's signed. The kid graduated. The last payment cleared. You're not smoking to get somewhere — you're smoking because you got there, and a man needs some way to say so out loud without actually saying anything.

That's why it works. Nobody lights a cigar quietly.

Red Auerbach and the most famous cigar in sports

Arnold "Red" Auerbach coached the Celtics for 16 seasons. He retired as the winningest coach in NBA history with 938 regular-season wins against 479 losses, and he won nine championships in his last ten years on the bench — including a record eight straight from 1959 to 1966 (ESPN Classic biography).

And somewhere in the early 1950s, he started lighting a cigar before the clock hit zero.

Not at the buzzer. Before it. The second the thing was mathematically decided, out came the match, and 13,000 people in the Boston Garden knew the game was over whether the other bench liked it or not.

Why he did it (according to him)

Auerbach never pitched it as a taunt. His version was simpler than that — the work was finished, so he stopped working.

"The game was over. The day's work is done. Worry about the next game."

He was blunt about running up scores, too: "Why? I gotta win by 30? What the hell difference does it make?" (Holt's Clubhouse, on Auerbach and cigars).

The 5,000 cigars

Other teams took it personally. The best story: Cincinnati's front office handed out 5,000 cigars to its own fans, planning a stadium-wide light-up if the Royals beat Boston. Auerbach heard about it and used it as fuel (Holt's).

Even his own guys winced. Bob Cousy called it offensive and figured it only made opponents play harder. He was probably right. Red kept doing it anyway.

The league tried to stop it

Here's the part that'll make your jaw tighten a little. The NBA commissioner eventually barred Auerbach from smoking cigars on the bench — while other coaches went right on smoking cigarettes (Holt's).

Different rules for the leaf. Sixty years later, we're still untangling that one. This past April a federal judge reaffirmed that premium handmade cigars sit outside the FDA's deeming rule entirely, using a seven-part definition that comes down to whole-leaf wrapper, long filler, hand-rolled, no added flavor (Cigar Aficionado, April 16, 2026).

Red would've enjoyed that ruling. He'd have lit something to mark it.

The statue says it better than I can. Lloyd Lillie's bronze Auerbach has sat outside Quincy Market at Faneuil Hall since September 20, 1985 — on a bench, cigar in hand (Statue of Red Auerbach). They didn't cast him holding a clipboard.

Why do people smoke cigars to celebrate?

Auerbach made it famous. He didn't invent it.

Cigars have been attached to occasions since they first showed up in Europe, when they were rare enough that pulling one out was itself the event (Holt's, history of celebratory cigars). Scarcity made them ceremonial. The ceremony outlived the scarcity.

It is also why the hospital-hallway cigar refuses to die. A new dad handing out sticks is doing what Red did: telling the room the result is in. More on that in cigar gifts for new dads.

Three reasons it stuck:

• It takes an hour. You can't rush a cigar. So the celebration has to be long enough to actually register, which a toast never is.
• It's shared. One guy with a cigar is a guy smoking. Four guys with cigars is a thing that happened.
• It's deliberate. Nobody smokes a cigar by accident. The act itself says this was worth stopping for.

The occasions that earn one

Ask ten guys, get ten lists. Mine, roughly:

• A birth. The original. Still undefeated.
• A wedding. The box that gets passed down the line the minute the ceremony breaks.
• A graduation. His, or yours at 44, night classes, nobody clapped. See cigar graduation gifts.
• A promotion or a closed deal. The business victory cigar. Quietest one on the list and often the sweetest.
• Retirement. Forty years, and now you've got all Tuesday afternoon.
• Payday. Not a milestone. Still counts.
• A tribute. Someone's gone and you light one for them. Nobody calls that a victory cigar out loud, but it's the same mechanism — marking something that mattered.

That last one is sacred ground, so I'll leave it there.

How to smoke your own victory cigar

Five rules. None of them complicated.

1. Buy it before you need it. This is the whole trick. Put a good stick away now, labeled in your head for a thing that hasn't happened yet. Smokers call that putting one to sleep. Our guide to starting a cigar collection covers the storage side.
2. Light it the day of. Not the weekend after. The feeling has a shelf life and it is short.
3. Say what it's for. Out loud, to whoever's there. One sentence. "This is for finishing the basement." It feels ridiculous and then it doesn't.
4. Don't rush it. Fast smoking gets hot and bitter, and you'll remember the cigar being bad instead of the day being good.
5. Hand one to somebody. The offer is the part that lasts. Our lounge etiquette guide gets into the right way to do it.

Rule one matters more than the other four put together. The reason most wins go unmarked isn't that nobody cared. It's that the good cigar was already smoked on a Tuesday for no reason.

What counts as a win

You're not coaching the Celtics. Neither am I. Most of what we win doesn't come with a trophy or a crowd. You kept a kid in school. You made the last truck payment. You got the thing at work nobody else wanted to touch and you got it done, and the reward was an email that said "thanks."

That's the gap the victory cigar fills. No ceremony exists for the ordinary stuff, so you build a small one. An hour, a chair, a stick you put away for exactly this.

Red lit his when the outcome was decided. You can do the same thing. Nobody's checking your margin.

Frequently asked questions

What does victory cigar mean?

A victory cigar is a cigar smoked to mark an accomplishment — a championship, a promotion, a birth, a paid-off loan. It's not about the tobacco. It's a signal that something has been completed and it's time to stop working and enjoy it.

Why did Red Auerbach smoke a victory cigar?

Because once a Celtics win was mathematically safe, he figured his night was finished. "The game was over. The day's work is done," as he put it. He started doing it in the early 1950s, and it became the most recognizable gesture in NBA coaching.

Did the NBA ban Auerbach's cigar?

The commissioner did eventually prohibit him from smoking cigars on the bench — while cigarette-smoking coaches were left alone. The cigar had already become part of Celtics lore by then, and the statue outside Quincy Market still shows him holding one.

Why do people smoke cigars to celebrate?

Cigars arrived in Europe as a rarity, so they attached themselves to occasions early and never let go. Practically speaking, a cigar takes an hour, it gets shared, and nobody lights one by accident — so it marks a moment better than a quick toast does.

What's a good victory cigar?

One you already like, in a size that fits the time you have. A robusto runs 45 to 60 minutes; a double corona like Auerbach's can run two hours. Don't save a cigar you've never smoked for a big night — that's how you find out it's a dog rocket at the worst possible moment.

Is it weird to smoke a victory cigar alone?

No. Plenty of the best ones are solo on a patio at 9 p.m. with nobody watching. The win still happened whether anyone clapped or not.

The bottom line

Buy it early. Light it the day of. Say what it's for.

Red Auerbach won 938 games and the thing people remember is a cigar on a bench in a smoky arena. Not the X's and O's. The gesture that said this one's finished, and it went our way.

Go find something of yours that's finished. There's probably more on that list than you think.

Want more of where this language comes from? Start with the complete cigar slang glossary, then the long list of famous cigar smokers in history — Red's in good company. And if you're new to the brotherhood side of it, here's what BOTL means.

— Skip, Owner, Legacy Layers