Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Bruised by his work, Hec Lalande, a hockey player for the Hershey Bears, came to the arena for a whirlpool treatment and rubdown. The Canadian brought along a friend, Bill Pavone, a young bartender at Martini’s, a bar where Lalande lived in a back-room apartment. People in the bar said he and Pavone were look-alike twins. Nothing else to do, the buddies stayed for the game. The NBA players didn’t much impress Lalande. “They can’t even skate,” he said.

  The editorial The Harrisburg Patriot showed up in the Hershey Sports Arena crowd, too. Bern Sharfman had been raised in New York City, where his father had manufactured ladies’ underwear and often playfully crowed, “I’m in ladies’ panties. I pull down twenty thousand a year.” Sharfman inherited his father’s humor and became a comedy writer for a time (it was Buffalo Bob Smith, host of the Howdy Doody Show, who first suggested shortening his name from “Bernard” to “Bern”) before he turned to newspapers. Since moving to Harrisburg in 1954 from New York, Sharfman had come to Hershey infrequently, and he had his reasons. He found the people of Hershey very insular. He believed that Jews, such as himself, and blacks were not really welcome there. Friends in the area told Sharfman in 1954 “that the two places you didn’t try to live—if you were a Jew or black—was the West Shore of Harrisburg or Hershey.”

  A twenty-three-year-old worker at Bethlehem Steel named Ted Russ brought two weightlifter friends from the Harrisburg YMCA. They were big, all three guys, each more than 240 pounds with Popeye biceps. The steelworker had met Chamberlain once at the High Hat Club in Harrisburg. He talked to the Dipper that night and found him friendly, much different than when he’d seen from the grandstands the perpetually scowling Bill Russell.

  In the second row, directly across from the Warriors bench, sat a man in a fine-looking suit. That was the reason he sat in the second row—his fine-looking suit. He’d come from Harrisburg with a milkman and a bartender. They bought three cheap tickets, a dollar and a quarter apiece, nosebleed section, Peanut Heaven. The guy in the fine suit, unhappy with those seats, talked to a manager in the ticket office. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got two salesmen with me. I’m trying to make an impression. Can you help me out?” Presto! Three seats, second row. Never mind that the salesman was not a salesman at all. James Hayney was just out of the Navy, where he’d been a sonar man on a destroyer, and now was a twenty-two-year-old student at Harrisburg Junior College. He was tall, too, and when a kid in the crowd approached to ask, eyes hopeful, “Are you a basketball player?” he replied, “Why, sure!” He signed an autograph—“Jim Hayney”—and then a few more kids came to him. He signed their programs, too.

  Then there was the remarkable case of the Italian brothers, two men in their midforties, Ermo and Evo, regulars at Hershey hockey games every Wednesday and Saturday. Hockey, Evo knew. Basketball, no. Baseball, Evo had been to one of the great American games, once seen the New York Yankees and that had been six years before, during the 1956 World Series. His boss had asked that morning, “Evo, how’d you like to see the Yankees this afternoon?” Evo said sure. They flew on the small company airplane—Evo had never been on a little airplane before, either—and landed at a small New Jersey airfield called Teterboro. Arthur Godfrey’s plane was parked one spot over. A limousine took them to the game. Inevitably, as a man seeing his first baseball game, Evo declared it boring. Nothing happened until the Yankees catcher Yogi Berra jumped into the pitcher’s arms. How odd! Evo heard someone say Don Larsen had just pitched a perfect game, whatever that was. So, like everyone else, he cheered. But he never went to another baseball game. Now he would give basketball one try.

  Before you could hitch yourself to history for a ride that would last a lifetime, you had to be near enough to reach up and grab hold. Kerry Ryman, a fourteen-year-old chocolate factory worker’s kid, stole in to the arena that night. Hooking in, he called it. Same as sneaking in. Ryman and his scamp buddies, carrying monikers such as Sandman, Bugs, and Spammer, could have scared up enough quarters for tickets, but what’s the thrill in that?

  Decades later Ryman and his rascal friends couldn’t be certain which method they’d used to sneak into the Hershey arena on this night, so often had they done it. They might have slid through a window of an out-of-the-way lower-level dressing room. Or perhaps they trod softly through the un-patrolled room where the Zamboni ice-smoothing machine was parked. Failing in those stratagems, they might’ve pooled enough coins to buy a single ticket at $1.25. Then, when an usher’s attention was diverted, the boy with the ticket would have propped open a door on the backside of the arena to let everyone in. They would have scattered to all points of the compass, perhaps temporarily to the men’s room; there they would have shut the stall doors and, to keep sneakered feet out of sight, clambered atop the toilets. As insurance against removal from the arena, they kept an eye to the floor for dropped ticket stubs they could claim as their own on the off-chance of apprehension by one of Hershey’s part-time constables, quasi-police officers in chocolate brown uniforms.

  The constables knew the boys’ routines. The boys knew the constables’ routines. The boys generally kept a step ahead, scouting for unoccupied seats they would fill. When the arena lights dimmed for the national anthem, the boys made their moves. They jumped a railing and, at “rockets’ red glare,” were in their initial chosen seats. Of course, by game’s end, they usually had worked their way down to the front rows.

  What is certain is that on this night Kerry Ryman, the Sandman, Bugs, Spammer, and others, hooked in. Safely inside the arena, they calculated their next moves at the very moment Wilt Chamberlain came out onto the floor.

  CHAPTER 3

  First Quarter

  REFEREE WILLIE SMITH BOUNCED the leather ball at midcourt, echoes reverberating in the big arena from the temporary hardwood floor. It was a Gotty type of floor, cheap and functional. Created in 1936 for roller skating, it clicked together in sections over an ice rink, tongue in groove, to be unclicked by morning for the Rochester Amerks–Hershey Bears minor league hockey game. As the starting fives took their positions for the opening tip, nothing in the players’ fatigued movements or expressions suggested this night might be memorable. With the Dipper, the Warriors started guards Guy Rodgers and Al Attles and forwards Paul Arizin and Tom Meschery. Since September, the Warriors had played ninety games (including exhibitions), the Knicks eighty-seven. Muscles, knees, and lower backs ached. The two teams knew each other well, too well, this being their eleventh meeting of the season (Philadelphia led six games to four). Just this week, the Warriors had played the Knicks at Convention Hall on Sunday and shared a doubleheader in Chicago on Tuesday. They would play in Hershey on this night and again in Madison Square Garden on Sunday. They’d seen each other more often than they had seen their wives. The Warriors had all but memorized the tendencies of the Knicks starters, guards Richie Guerin and Al Butler, forwards Johnny Green and Willie Naulls and the young center, Darrall Imhoff. Players on both teams had little to prove, or so it seemed. According to The New York Herald-Tribune’s betting line, the Warriors in Hershey were eleven-point favorites.

  Now, Smith tossed the ball in the air, and Wilt Chamberlain and the Knicks’ Darrall Imhoff rose to meet it, the Dipper winning the opening tip, as he usually did, tapping the ball to Rodgers. The Dipper moved down the court in long, loping strides, his movements athletic, elegant, even with a sore lower back. He arrived, just as Imhoff expected, at the usual spot, down low, on the left side. Rodgers swung a pass to Paul Arizin in the corner. Arizin’s low-line jumper would one day carry him into the Hall of Fame. This time, though, he missed. The Dipper rebounded and dunked for the game’s first points, even before some fans had made it to their seats.

  Back in pro basketball’s Paleozoic age, even before there was Chamberlain, there was George Mikan. On a cold day in late November 1950, in a Northwestern Railroad club car, among officials of an NBA team bound for Minneapolis, a conspiracy was hatched. The intent was to stop Mikan, at six-foot-ten the most dominant
big man in the pro game. The unintended result nearly toppled the NBA. Ultimately, the conspiracy caused a change in the pro game that would make possible the Dipper’s night in Hershey twelve years later. It began in the club car with Fort Wayne Pistons Coach Murray Mendenhall laying out his plan for his general manager, Carl Bennett, saying, “We’ve never beaten Minneapolis in Minneapolis. Let’s just sit on the ball tonight. Let’s just hold it and maybe if we’re lucky we can beat them in the last minute.” Mendenhall knew his Pistons had struggled to penetrate the Lakers zone defense. He knew his team could not match up with Mikan or with Lakers forwards Vern Mikkelsen and Jim Pollard, especially at the Minneapolis Auditorium, where the two-time defending league champion Lakers had won twenty-nine consecutive games. At the hotel, during the Pistons pregame meal, Mendenhall offered his strategy to his players: They would stall. His players were game to try it.

  That night 7,000 fans showed up to see Mikan score his usual twenty-eight points. Instead they saw Mendenhall’s guards holding the ball. A standoff ensued. The Pistons held the ball for three minutes at a time and longer without shooting, waiting for the Lakers to come out of their zone defense with Mikan in the middle. Minneapolis players stared back, waiting. Fans booed loudly and stomped their feet like a thundering herd. They hurled objects toward the Pistons bench: oranges, crushed paper cups, a shoe. After the first quarter, Fort Wayne led 8–7. Worse than boring, this was shameless. Pennies and game programs flew onto the court. By halftime, the Lakers had edged ahead, 13–11. Catcalls rained down from the rafters. After three quarters, Mikan’s Lakers maintained a one-point lead, 17–16. “PLAY THE GAME!!!!” fans shouted. Minneapolis Coach John Kundla repeatedly told his players not to worry about the Pistons: “Let them do what they want.” No matter, Kundla believed his team would win. The booing grew louder, ear splitting. The foot stomping rolled through the old auditorium. On the court, Lakers guard Slater Martin asked Ft. Wayne’s Boag Johnson, “Why are you doing this?” Holding the ball, Johnson replied, “Well, you’re playing a zone.” On and on it went. Trailing 18–17 with only nine seconds to play, the Pistons passed to center Larry Foust, whose second shot of the game, over Mikan’s outstretched arms, went in for the game-winner: Fort Wayne, 19–18. Only four points were scored in the entire fourth quarter.

  At game’s end, Fort Wayne players raced jubilantly to the locker room but not before a pregnant woman pulled out an umbrella and used it to strike Pistons guard Johnny Oldham in the back of the head. Another fan hit him with a wet towel; Oldham turned and coldcocked that fan. In the locker room, Pistons players slapped backs and laughed. They waited thirty minutes longer than usual before leaving, to keep out of the crowd’s sight. Mikan had been nullified by the strategy. He took eleven shots and scored fifteen of his team’s eighteen points. The Pistons attempted thirteen shots, roughly one every four minutes. Disbelieving Lakers fans at home inundated local newspapers and radio stations with calls to confirm the lowest scoring game in league history. The Minneapolis Tribune headline the next morning blared: “Lakers Defeated 19–18; That’s Correct, 19–18;” The St. Paul Dispatch called it “slow motion that would shame the movies.” “[The Pistons] gave pro basketball a great big black eye,” Kundla said in the locker room. “Many more games like that and we can shut up shop.”

  NBA President Maurice Podoloff agreed. He thought 19–18 a sham, a mockery. “I want to find out to what extent league rules were violated and, if they were, to take proper action,” Podoloff said. “In our game, with the numbers of stars we have, we of necessity run up big scores.” Podoloff called Mendenhall and Kundla to New York for a meeting. The problem didn’t go away. Later in the season, Indianapolis defeated Rochester, 75–73, in a six-overtime NBA game: Stalling by both teams produced two scoreless overtime periods. So shameless did the stalling become, in one of those five-minute sessions, neither team even attempted a shot.

  The larger issue, of course, was the league’s struggle for credibility; the NBA could hardly afford to lose its few fans. Team owners aspired for a faster-paced game with both teams scoring one hundred points. That’s what fans wanted. In the 1950–51 season, each NBA team averaged slightly more than eighty points per game. But the issue wasn’t about points: It was about flow, excitement, gate receipts, money. Team owners, including Gotty, wanted the game to pick up speed. Their concerns about Mikan’s domination—or domination by any big man in the future, for they knew there would be more—led to the widening of the lane from six feet to twelve feet the following year, forcing Mikan to move further from the basket. With the pro game on the brink of extinction, 19–18 was held up as a danger sign and spurred an even more dramatic rule change, one that liberated the game, saving it from Mendenhall’s strategy, saving it from itself—teams must shoot within twenty-four seconds of gaining possession. No longer could such stalls happen; teams would be compelled to shoot before a twenty-four-second clock clicked to zero or give up possession of the ball. The idea belonged to Syracuse owner Danny Biasone. He had noticed that each team averaged about sixty shots per game and so he did the math: 120 total shots divided by 48 minutes (or 2,880 seconds) equals 24 seconds per shot. After foot-dragging and haggling among team owners, the rule was instituted for the 1954 season.

  Immediately, scoring by NBA teams rose to ninety-three points per game, and within a few years attendance had jumped to 4,800 per game, an increase of more than 40 percent. Fans wanted scoring and the NBA provided it. A half-century later, Fort Wayne’s Johnny Oldham vaguely recalled that on the night of the 19–18 debacle, seated in the front row of the Minneapolis Auditorium were the Three Stooges. There was no record that anyone else saw them. Still laughing about it into the twenty-first century, Oldham decided that if the Three Stooges did not come to the 19–18 game they should have.

  Where Mikan stood like a statue amid falling pennies and oranges as two teams scored a scandalously low thirty-seven points, now in 1962 it was predicted that Wilt Chamberlain, on a glorious night when the planets aligned, would score one hundred points by himself in a game. His coach said it would happen. So did Jack Kiser, the chain-smoking Philly newshound. It was predicted even by the Lakers’ Elgin Baylor, an elegant scoring stylist about whom once it was said “he has more moves than a clock,” the same Baylor whose record seventy-one point game against the Knicks in 1960 prompted team owner Bob Short to buy his team silver cufflinks that read “71.” That’s how dramatically the shot clock, the influx of new talent, and the Dipper’s own unique skill set had changed the NBA: It was as if a corral door opened and the horses were loosed.

  The NBA game became wide-open, fast-paced, shots fired in rapid succession, defense (and shooting percentages) be damned. By the end of the Dipper’s first season in 1959, NBA teams averaged 115 points per game, and by his third season, nearly 119 points. Superior offensive talents ascended in the NBA, and many, including Baylor, Robertson, and the Dipper, were black. Of course, playing against Baylor always stirred the Dipper to competitive heights. Sitting on the Convention Hall stage and watching the first game of a doubleheader on December 8, 1961, Chamberlain saw Baylor walking past with his travel bag. “Hey, big man,” the Dipper called to him, “you hear the news? I’m covering you one-on-one tonight. Just me and you. I’m going to take you outside and kill you with my jump shot.” Baylor smiled and replied, “I’m nervous enough before a game. Don’t shake me up, buddy.” The Dipper said, “You better be nervous. You’re my pigeon tonight.” In triple-overtime that night, the Dipper scored seventy-eight points to shatter Baylor’s record. Nevertheless, his Warriors lost, 151–147, with the pigeon Baylor scoring sixty-three points of his own. After the Lakers’ two centers fouled out, Coach Fred Schaus deployed forward Howie Jolliff, only six-foot-seven, and a box zone against Chamberlain, to little avail. The Dipper scored twenty-five points during the three five-minute overtime periods. In all, during the sixty-three-minute game, he made half of his sixty-two shots—the most shots anyone ever had taken in an NBA game�
��but only sixteen of thirty-one free throws. Had he made a few more baskets and a few more free throws he would have reached ninety points. Of course, his critics would happily note that even with seventy-eight points the Dipper had lost the game. Afterwards, Coach Frank McGuire praised his center. “I think he played a great game,” he said. “And I think he would have scored a hundred if he wasn’t playing against a four-man defense. But I’ll make this prediction: One of these days Wilt is going to score a hundred. Even against a five-man defense.”

  Chamberlain later told The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin sports columnist Sandy Grady that a hundred-point night was possible. “Someday I could do it if I were relaxed, cool, and had a terrific night when all the shots are dropping.” “Hey, don’t worry about it,” Baylor told Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn about his former scoring record, while taking a long drag on a cigarette. “The Big Fella is going to get one hundred one night real soon.”

  Now, in Hershey, Knicks guard Richie Guerin dribbled the ball near the top of the circle, searching for a small space through which to knife into the lane. That was Richie Guerin’s style—always on the attack. In Hershey, Guerin would find a way inside. Through attitude alone, the all-star Guerin commanded attention at every moment. Not so with his teammate, forward Willie Naulls. Naulls was quieter, smoother. He moved now to the outside, virtually unseen. So smooth was Willie Naulls’s game, so accurate his shot, he could score twenty points before breaking his first sweat. Guerin and Naulls carried the Knicks nightly. Earlier in the week, Guerin had scored fifty points and Naulls thirty-three to lead the Knicks past the Warriors in Philly. That afternoon Guerin had driven into the lane repeatedly, slashing in from odd angles. If the Dipper had moved in his way, Guerin passed to Naulls in the corner or to his center underneath. He kept probing, daring, and attacking. Guerin argued a call by a rookie referee with such vehemence that day you could hear him in Convention Hall’s $1.25 cheap seats. That was Richie Guerin. One way or another, his voice would be heard.