Smalls Paradise was a legend that dated back to the Harlem Renaissance of the Twenties when its waiters danced or roller-skated across the room with service trays held high; the club was known then as the Hottest Spot in Harlem. Chamberlain had long wanted his own nightclub, an environment that had always drawn him as a stage for his fabulousness—why, even when he was just sixteen, his rival at West Philadelphia High, Ray Scott, had spotted him at a dance at the O.V. Catto Elks Lodge in Philadelphia and noticed how the Dipper flourished in such a setting, managing what all of the other boys couldn’t, a laid-back, Miles Davis, be-bop cool. Chamberlain well knew the precedents of black athletes owning such places in New York. Back in the Twenties, Club Deluxe in Harlem briefly was owned by the prizefighter Jack Johnson, a controversial figure excoriated by the white press in the early part of the century for having twice married white women and later imprisoned for transporting a woman across state lines in violation of the Mann Act. Now Joe Louis and Ray Robinson lent their names and money to The Brown Bomber and Sugar Ray’s. It wasn’t so much the fast life that attracted the Dipper to buy a piece of Smalls in the spring of 1961. He rarely drank or smoked and he exercised every day, pushing his own physical limits. (Before one weekend trip to Atlantic City, his friend Cal Ramsey tried to pick up Chamberlain’s suitcase but found it too heavy. Ramsey looked inside and discovered why—the Dipper’s barbells.) What attracted Chamberlain to Smalls Paradise was the chance to explore new avenues of his own celebrity.
In calm moments, the Abyssinian Baptist Church crowd came for early Sunday dinners. But on most other nights, the nightclub was, like its part owner, full of the energy and exuberance of youth. “The Twist” by Philadelphia’s Chubby Checker was yet the rage, and the Tuesday night Twist contests packed the downstairs Wilmac Room. Limousines and taxis carrying big-money whites triple-parked out front. “Meeting again at Smalls Paradise as their fathers did before them, a brand-new generation of monied fun-seeking whites is flocking happily to Harlem,” Ebony magazine noted. “And Wilt Chamberlain’s cash registers are running as hot as the gyrations on the floor.” It was a see-and-be-seen crowd, sophisticated, elite, and integrated. Smiling for pictures for Ebony magazine on a Tuesday Twist night were comic Jack Carter, famed saxophonist Cannonball Adderly with actress Olga James, a Rockefeller, an Astor, Edward Smalls (the former owner who sold the club in 1955), the Greek ambassador to the United Nations, singer Lloyd Price, and of course, the Dipper himself.
His nightclub impressed other African-American players in the NBA, not only for its high style and glitz but because it suggested Chamberlain’s business acumen. They considered Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise a must-stop along the Strip in Harlem along with Jocks and the Red Rooster. The Knicks’ Willie Naulls and Johnny Green were regulars at Smalls. The Celtics’ K.C. Jones, in with Bill Russell once, met James Brown, and was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Godfather of Soul’s ego.
Here, in Harlem, was the Wilt Chamberlain few white Americans knew: easing comfortably through what W.E.B. Du Bois once had called “the Black World Beyond the Veil.” Here was the Apollo Theater and Showman’s Lounge, the Big Apple bar, The Harlem Moon, Lickity Split, and Roy Campanella’s liquor store. The neighborhood was thirty years past its heyday; no longer the hub of black intellectual and cultural life, Harlem had become riddled with crime, dope, and storefront vacancies, an urban despair and bleakness suffused with racial tension and frustration. Still, the Strip retained some of its old-time flair. In the neon flash and bustle, crowds moved from one nightclub to the next. At the Red Rooster, where Willie Mays had held sway during the early 1950s, you could still find Congressman Adam Clayton Powell surrounded by admirers. A club hopper could see comic Nipsey Russell at the Baby Grand on 125th Street, stop by Sugar Ray’s on 126th, and then walk six blocks over to Count Basie’s club. Next door to Count Basie’s on 132nd was Shalimar by Randolph, a nightclub that featured a late-night beauty salon. When Knicks first-year guard Sam Stith, a Harlem resident, came out to the Strip in 1962, he dressed to the nines and no one crowded him. A few years before, Stith had taken his girlfriend to Shalimar by Randolph at 11:00 one night to get her hair done. She finished at 3:00 A.M. While he waited, Stith saw a hustler, all primped up, enter and shout, “Suits!” The hustler looked at the Knicks guard. “What size?” he asked. Stith replied, “Forty-two.” The hustler put the same question to another man sitting nearby, then said, “I’ll be back in an hour.” Stith looked at his watch: 1:00 A.M. An hour passed, back came the hustler, suits in hand. Stith didn’t buy; the other guy did. Another hour later, Stith and his girlfriend headed to Wells Restaurant for the famous chicken and waffles, a perfect way to end the night, or start the morning.
In this animated environment, Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise remained a bright light. So hot was the revelry at Smalls on Twist nights, local columnist Jesse H. Walker asked, “Will this thing never end?” In Harlem, Jackie Robinson co-hosted a cocktail party for New York’s Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller; Malcolm X, in his dark suit and shined black shoes, made his rounds through the streets surrounding the Nation of Islam’s Mosque Seven in Harlem (and periodically ridiculed the nonviolent movement, including sit-ins, saying, “Anybody can sit. An old woman can sit. A coward can sit…. It takes a man to stand.”); and Wilt Chamberlain moved through his own celebrated orbit. If Philadelphia was his workplace, Harlem was his living room. He gravitated to a black world shared with whites, not an exclusive world or an excluding one. Each night in the NBA, the Dipper played for white team owners and predominantly white crowds, but here, at Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise, surrounded by icons of black life in the lingering glow of Harlem glamour, whites came to him—to his place.
The March 2 game in Hershey meant little to Chamberlain … except another Friday night away from Harlem. He had spent Thursday night, and the wee hours of Friday morning, doing what the Dipper often did, enjoying the spoils of his celebrity. He dropped off his date at her home in Queens at 6:00 A.M. and only then set his sights on Hershey. He would travel the 170 miles to Chocolate Town on his own.
Wilt Chamberlain had one incentive in Hershey. On another scoring rampage, he was closing in on 4,000 points for the 1961–62 season; no other NBA player had ever scored even 3,000 points. On the previous Sunday, the Dipper had torn into the Knicks for sixty-seven points. Two days later, in St. Louis, he scored sixty-five in a victory over Bob Pettit’s Hawks. On Wednesday, he had annihilated the great rookie big man, Walt Bellamy, and the expansion Chicago Packers, scoring sixty-one on Bells and blocking twelve of his shots. In that game, the Dipper also made thirteen of his seventeen free throws, typically the Achilles heel of his game. Chamberlain, who loved statistics (especially his own), needed 237 more points over the remaining five games to reach the once-unthinkable 4,000.
As Ruth, with his fifty-four home runs in 1920, had lifted baseball from the dead-ball era, so Chamberlain was lifting pro basketball into a new realm of scoring possibilities. At Madison Square Garden, the Dipper once proved like the gluttonous Ruth in another way, sending a ballboy to get him two hot dogs, and then eating them, while in uniform, on the bench, just before the game started. And like the Babe, the Dipper kept his eye on pretty women in the crowds. A married man, Ruth could be loud and coarse, once telling his teammates, “You should have seen this dame I was with last night. What a body. Not a blemish on it.” The bachelor Chamberlain was more careful about his liaisons in winter 1962. “The blonde sitting underneath the basket,” he whispered to a Warriors official sitting at the scorer’s table during a game. The Dipper raised a brow and whispered, “Get her number for me.”
CHAPTER 2
The Shooting Gallery
AFTER ANOTHER HARLEM NIGHT DEVOTED to wakeful pursuits that left minutes rather than hours for sleep, the Dipper made his way down to Hershey alone and unaware, as all were, that however splendid the night of March 1, 1962, had been, this night would be even grander.
“What are you doing?” he
said to Ken Berman.
The Warriors’ twenty-four-second clock operator, a third-generation Philadelphia jeweler, Berman had become Chamberlain’s friend when the Dipper pulled hidden valuables from a sweat sock. He showed the jeweler a ten-carat diamond and ordered up a ring that Berman made. Now, in the Hershey Sports Arena’s penny arcade, near a hot dog stand, Berman was shooting bears.
As tiny tin bears moved mechanically across the game’s far end, players used a rifle to shoot ’em down. “I’ll have you a match,” Chamberlain said.
Faster than he could feed the machine its required nickels, the Dipper became a kid again. Playful, competitive, he shot every bear he saw and regaled fans gathered to watch.
Pro football’s Eagles and Colts, arriving to play a preliminary basketball game that always proved popular with fans, saw Chamberlain in the arcade and heard him howling in delight. Two African-American running backs on the Eagles, Clarence Peaks and Tim Brown, knew the Dipper as onetime neighbors in west Philly. Brown had attended the same parties as the Dipper, dated a few of the same women. Peaks had been awed once when Chamberlain walked into his garage and lifted 350 pounds of weights as if it were nothing. Now, the two Eagles exchanged greetings with him. Gino Marchetti, the Baltimore Colts all-pro defensive end, came by, too. When the Eagles wide receiver Tommy McDonald shook Chamberlain’s hand once after a practice, he had been amazed, horrified even, that his hand had disappeared entirely in the Dipper’s massive mitt. Not so with the six-foot-five Marchetti. He wanted to ask the Dipper the same question he’d been asked too many times over the years, “How’s the weather up there?” But he resisted that temptation. When he spotted the Dipper in Hershey, Marchetti told him that he had attended the University of San Francisco where he watched Bill Russell and K.C. Jones play. He chatted amiably with Chamberlain, while thinking Russell never seemed this big, and then left for the dressing room to suit up for the prelim. Though these prelims were meant to be relaxed, they rarely turned out that way. The NFL players usually earned about $50 for these games—Marchetti would spend about forty-five on beer afterwards—but they played to win. Outside shooting was preferred, especially by the Eagles’ Sonny Jurgensen and Tim Brown, since driving to the basket might prompt a 280-pound lineman to get in their way. En route to the locker room, Marchetti had a passing thought about Chamberlain: God, he would make a good tight end!
As the Dipper kept racking up big numbers in the arcade, here came The Philadelphia Daily News sportswriter Jack Kiser, walking with a slight limp, a cigarette between his lips, and the sound of east Tennessee in his voice. Small, edgy, and combative, Kiser was the pugnacious Warriors beat reporter for the tabloid newspaper, a journalistic barnacle clinging to the hull of the leviathan Chamberlain. Kiser was always digging, always looking for a story. The best story was always Chamberlain; the Dipper was a beat unto himself. To best cover that beat, the hustler Kiser ingratiated himself to Wilt. Kiser heard a security man, sitting nearby, say, “Few people ever score four thousand on this here machine. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody score over six-five.” At that point, Chamberlain reached 7,700, and the guard said, “Impossible.”
The Knickerbockers’ bus pulled in from Harrisburg. Passing through the arcade, forward Dave Budd and center Darrall Imhoff heard the Chamberlain commotion, heard the Dipper yowling, “Man, look at this,” heard him announce exactly how many free games he’d won, saw the big man animated by a kid’s game, his greatness certified by knocking over tiny tin bears with a popgun. Imhoff thought, That’s Wilt, and kept on walking.
The Knicks’ players felt a small chill inside the big arena, a reminder of its original icy purpose. Upon its grand opening decades earlier, a time when the locals still proudly called their hockey team the Hershey B’ars, The New York Herald-Tribune opined, “The visitors saw what looked, from a distance, like a dirigible hangar, but once inside they were convinced that it deserved the title of ‘finest hockey rink’ which its builders claim for it.” Like Wilt Chamberlain, the Hershey Sports Arena was born in 1936 and became a landmark for its time. Its monolithic barrel shell roof was a product of a technology brought over from Europe by the architect Anton Tedesko. Warming the newly poured concrete in winter had required a burst of Pennsylvania Dutch ingenuity—manure carted in from the farmlands did the trick. A hulking structure, designed to make a small town big league, it was foremost a hockey arena. Hanging beside the metal scoreboard now were the American and Canadian flags, and next to the COMING ATTRACTIONS sign, three maroon-and-white banners honoring the Hershey Bears as Calder Cup Champions in 1947, 1958, and 1959. It was a cold, cavernous place, cement on cement, a dirigible hangar still.
New York’s rookie guard, Donnie Butcher, looked at the Hershey arena for the first time and cringed. It isn’t Madison Square Garden. A Kentucky coal miner’s son, the fifteenth of sixteen children, Butcher appreciated the NBA as the good life. When Knicks scout Red Holzman had shown up at his home in Paintsville, Kentucky, over Thanksgiving in an attempt to sign him, he had flashed thousands of dollars in a briefcase full of one hundred dollar bills. Those bills all looked good to this coal miner’s son. But the Hershey Sports Arena did not. To Butcher, it reminded him of a coal mining camp, dingy, dirty, and gray.
Inside the arena, Bill Campbell set up his WCAU Radio equipment. Campbell was the defining voice of Philadelphia sports, working play-by-play for the Eagles and Warriors. It had been a long climb. He’d been in radio since 1941, initially a kid disc jockey at the Steel Pier and Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City where the big bands of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey played. (He’d even dated Miss Atlantic City that summer.) For a small man, Campbell had a big voice, deep, full, and so smooth one listener was convinced he gargled before each broadcast with Turtle Wax. His nightly sports show on WCAU in Philadelphia began with a rousing song of victory at sea and ended with the broadcaster intoning, “This is Bill Campbell, good night, good sports.” Campbell wasn’t happy about having to work this game in Hershey. But he had made the long drive, and now he set up his microphone on a table. He would work alone. Once the game started, he would lean forward slightly as he spoke into his microphone. He thought it would be hard to get excited about this game. Only five games remained in the regular season, and the Warriors, with a 46–29 record, remained in second place, eleven games back of Auerbach’s first-place Celtics. The Knicks, in last place already, could not fall any lower. By the day after tomorrow, Campbell figured, no one would even remember the game was played.
As the game’s legend would grow, so would the size of the crowd. Had they all been there, all those who in later years told the Dipper they saw him score the hundred points, they’d have been stacked atop one another a dozen high, for the Hershey Sports Arena had seats for little more than 8,000 souls.
Alas, half of those seats were empty on March 2. Gottlieb’s enthusiastic crowd count was 4,124, a number that was, politely put, imprecise. Philadelphia sportswriters knew that Gotty famously fudged his crowd totals. Just because Gotty was round didn’t mean his estimates were, and so 4,124 it was. The people of Hershey, out for a night on the town, dressed for the occasion. A panorama of the crowd revealed men in ties and overcoats, ladies in dresses, including a few (keeping up with the trends) in bouffant hairdos, and a slew of clean-scrubbed boys with crew cuts.
So many others later wished they’d been there to see the Dipper. They wished they’d seen the great man glistening in the arena’s dim lights. They wished they’d had the foresight to be in the smoky building, to be part of the Pennsylvania Dutch army forming up behind Chamberlain the night of his march into history. But who knew?
Earl Whitmore had no plans to be in Hershey that night. Then, shopping on the town square in nearby Palmyra, he and his wife saw a General Electric refrigerator with a freezer compartment. Because the price, $549, seemed a sticking point for the two chocolate factory workers, the salesman made a proposition: “You’re a sportsman, Mr. Whitmore, right? There’s a game at the sp
orts arena Friday night and here’s two tickets—if you buy the refrigerator.” So, with the incentive of two prime tickets that would have cost three dollars apiece at the gate, the Whitmores bought the refrigerator for $549. Come game night, Mrs. Whitmore stayed home with her new appliance. Her husband took a friend to see the Dipper.
Paul Vathis had already seen history through a camera lens. An Associated Press photographer from nearby Harrisburg, Vathis brought his ten-year-old son to the game as a birthday present. The previous spring, just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Vathis had been at the presidential retreat Camp David during a meeting of John Kennedy and his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower. As these men representing America’s future and past began to walk down a stone path, JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, told the gathered photographers, “Okay, boys, that’s it. Lids on.” But Vathis, kneeling by the path, held his place, lens cap off, and overheard JFK say to Ike, “I’ve never been here before. Where do we go?” He heard Ike, who’d created the camp and named it after his grandson, reply, “I know a place up this path where we can go.” Vathis clicked off one more shot, from behind, the two men pensive, heads bowed, Ike holding his hat in his hands behind his back. Salinger heard Vathis’s shutter and shouted, “I told you, ‘No more pictures!’” Fair enough, Vathis thought. He had a beauty already. On this night in Hershey, Vathis left his camera in the trunk of his car.
Wilt, 1962 Page 4
