Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Anyone who would score one hundred points in a game must have superior scoring talent and the inclination to use it as a bludgeon. At the same time, the opposition must be vulnerable where the scorer is strongest. But first, his teammates must give him the ball. At the center of the last is the scorer’s relationship with his coach and teammates; they must want him to succeed and must be willing to help him. On this night in Hershey, as on all nights, Guy Rodgers was eminently willing, and able, to be the Dipper’s accomplice. Passing was what Rodgers did best, sleight of hand, behind the back, over the shoulder, running the fast break with Attles and the Dipper or operating more deliberately in a half-court offense with Arizin, Tom Meschery, and the Dipper. Rodgers’s passing skill, ofttimes breathtaking, had accounted for more than 1,700 assists over the past three seasons, the lion’s share to the Dipper. Barely six feet tall, stubby in build, Rodgers was the shortest starting player in the NBA. He often practiced his dribbling and passing repertoire alone in the gym, using a chair. He imagined the chair as Bill Russell and dribbled at it, feinting one way and passing high the other way, to an imagined Dipper. He knew the Dipper’s great strengths and how to take advantage of them. Rodgers was careening through an uneven season, moments of brilliance followed inexplicably by poor play. The Warriors’ official scorer, Dave Richter, checking Rodgers into games, often said, “Good luck, ‘Shake Hips,’” and the nickname seemed apt given the way Rodgers moved on the court, accelerating and decelerating, swiveling and whirling. But Rodgers had what his college teammate Hal Lear called rabbit ears. Any catcall from the crowd, Guy Rodgers heard it. The heckling preyed on his substantial self-doubt. Rodgers’s playmaker role on the team was understood: Get the ball to Wilt—thread the needle, bounce it, or lob it high, whatever it took. Sometimes, McGuire thought Rodgers dribbled too much. To make the point, McGuire once snuck a deflated basketball into practice. “Okay, Guy,” he said, “play with that one awhile.” Rodgers would average eight assists per game for the season, better than Cousy, second in the league to Oscar Robertson’s eleven. On this night, his passing would be masterful. Guy Rodgers would serve as Chamberlain’s supply line to one hundred.

  Let us now examine the Dipper in the flow of the Warriors half-court offense. Nearly always he sought to position himself in the most advantageous position: down low, on the left side, for he was right-handed. He stood inches beyond the lane, where he couldn’t be penalized for violating the rule that forbids players to loiter in the area beneath the basket for as long as three seconds. In his favorite position, the Dipper loomed dangerously only six feet from the center of the basket. So tall and elastic was he, with one mammoth and unimpeded lunge toward the middle, he could reach the hoop and drop the ball through it. More often, though, he would take a large step backward, away from the basket, for his favorite fall-away bank shot from twelve to fifteen feet. When forced by opposing defenses to the right side of the basket, the Dipper fancied a different finesse shot: a finger-roll in which he stepped toward the basket, raising his arm toward it, opening his palm to the sky as if releasing a dove, and letting the ball roll delicately off his fingertips.

  Now in Hershey, at his preferred spot, down low, six feet to the left of the basket, Chamberlain stood with the ball in his enormous hands, Darrall Imhoff pressed against his spine. New York gave its young center defensive help. The Knicks guards, Butler and Guerin, flashed in front of the Dipper. Forwards Green and Naulls sagged into the middle, just in case. Holding the ball high over his head, Chamberlain leaned back with his upper torso. Reduced to a recoiled position, Imhoff felt as if a tree were about to fall on him. Imhoff thrust his right forearm into Chamberlain’s upper back, the point of his elbow delivering a message between the Dipper’s shoulder blades. Imhoff also placed his right foot between Chamberlain’s spread legs, and his left foot just to the outside of Chamberlain’s left foot, to keep him from turning into the middle, toward the basket. But Chamberlain kept acting as if Imhoff wasn’t even there. The Dipper made his first five shots. The Warriors broke to a 19–3 lead with Chamberlain scoring thirteen points. McGuire, in his fine suit, handkerchief folded neatly in his breast pocket, looked pleased. “Attaboy, Wiltie!” he said.

  The game’s pace was up-tempo, like a flash flood, Rodgers and Guerin controlling the flow, whenever possible fast breaking, or in the parlance of the game, running-and-gunning. Precious little defense was played on either side, not unusual in late-season NBA games. Both teams seemed in a hurry to finish the game, and the regular season. Referees Willie Smith and Pete D’Ambrosio kept watch. Typically neither worked as lead official, that being the privileged domain of Sid Borgia, Mendy Rudolph, Norm Drucker, Jim Duffy, Joe Gushue, Richie Powers, and Earl Strom. Because the NBA paid its officials stingily, all of them held other jobs. NBA referees worked seventy games a year or more, and so with just nine teams, they knew the players well. They would see them one night in Boston, the next in New York, and sometimes they even traveled on the same plane or train. They faced rough crowds. In Syracuse a fan smacked Gushue in the head with a newspaper as he walked off the court. “Did you see that?” Gushue asked a police officer. “The way you called the game,” the cop said, “no one saw anything.”

  Smith and D’Ambrosio worked this contest because both lived nearby, saving the league travel expenses. Smith, earning $120 for this game, lived in Reading and D’Ambrosio, earning $90, in Philadelphia. D’Ambrosio soon would leave for Florida where he worked as a spring training umpire for major league baseball. Smith, on the other hand, worked only basketball. Players knew him as “Woozie” Smith and sometimes shared drinks with him at bars. To his fellow referees, Smith seemed somewhat of a neat freak: never a hair out of place, his clothes always folded neatly on hangers. He even brought his own brown paper to stand on in locker rooms, to keep his feet dry. A stubby five-foot-eight, Woozie Smith liked a sense of order in his basketball games, too.

  The Dipper was in the flow of the game early, aggressively seeking the ball. Imhoff silently wished a stronger lead official was working this game, perhaps Strom or Rudolph or Powers. The Dipper backed into Imhoff again, pushing him out of position. Woozie Smith whistled Imhoff for his third foul against Chamberlain. Imhoff thought, This is ridiculous. Why am I not allowed in here? The Knicks’ young center, in a dither, snapped at the referee, “Well, why don’t you just give the guy a hundred now and we’ll all go home!”

  Saint Gola, as Warriors teammates playfully called their captain, To m Gola, had been aware of Wilt Chamberlain from nearly the beginning. He’d seen the Dipper’s star aborning back in Philly when they were both just kids, and now, as professionals, they were teammates. Resting his sprained lower back now at home, Gola, with a beer in hand and hoping to be ready for the start of the playoffs two weeks hence, listened to Bill Campbell’s call on WCAU.

  Many Philadelphians viewed Tom Gola as an embodiment of basketball perfection or nearly so; he was a local hero, their own Jack Armstrong, cut from the same celebrated cloth as the 1950 Phillies Whiz Kids, the greatest homegrown star in Philadelphia college basketball history. Gola was a onetime Olney altar boy and three-time all-American who, as NCAA player of the year, led La Salle to the 1954 NCAA title. Gola knew his value and as a rookie in 1955 told Gottlieb he wanted $17,500 a year. “No way,” Gotty said, and offered $11,500. Finally, Gotty said, “You’re a local kid so we’ll have a night for you, and you’ll get enough in gifts to get your seventeen thousand five hundred dollars.” Gotty convinced local merchants to donate to Gola a few fine suits and a custom Dodge Royal Lancer. Everyone was happy, even Gotty, especially when his Warriors won the NBA title in Gola’s rookie season.

  The son of a Philadelphia cop, Izzy Gola, who left the police force after a shootout to work as a liquor store clerk, Tom Gola was a natural as Warriors team captain. He played hard, played hurt, and played for the team. His teammates respected him, his toughness, and essential integrity. Gola was the consummate team player: a six-foot-six forward asked t
o play guard and doing so without a gripe. He had played with league scoring champions such as Arizin and Neil Johnston and now Chamberlain. “Wilt was Philadelphia, I was Philadelphia,” Gola would say. They shared the same city, but little else. “He had his agenda and I had mine.”

  They had played in a summer league game many summers before, Gola already at La Salle, the Dipper only a ninth grader. Gola thought him gangly then; the Dipper’s coordination was not yet fully in place. “He wasn’t a player.” But the young Chamberlain left his mark on him that day, literally, with an accidental elbow that put a small dent in the bridge of Gola’s nose. Gola had not seen the Dipper in more than six years when, in fall 1959, he arrived as a rookie at the Warriors training camp in Hershey. What Gola saw made him gasp. He noticed that Chamberlain had grown massive, especially in his shoulders and arms. He’s huge, Gola thought, absolutely huge. The Dipper would so completely take over the Warriors offense that the Lakers Rod Hundley once saw Gola, before a game, throwing a ball absent-mindedly against the wall of the locker room. “What are you doing?” Hundley asked. Gola said, “Practicing our offense—throw the ball to Wilt and then stand there.” Tom Gola had his own game, his own pride, but he submitted to Coach Frank McGuire’s wishes. In Hershey, Gola heard the first quarter end, the Warriors leading, 42–26. The Dipper had made half of his fourteen shots and all nine free throws for twenty-three points. Already Chamberlain was thinking about a record—for most free throws (twenty-four) made in an NBA game. Back in Philadelphia, Gola was thinking about a second beer. He walked to a neighbor’s house. There he would have his beer and listen to the rest of the game on radio.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Rise of the Dipper

  OUT OF THE CRAMPED OVERBROOK HIGH SCHOOL gym in west Philadelphia, Wilt Chamberlain’s urban legend grew. His coach, Cecil Mosenson, only twenty-two years old, had left the back of his father’s delivery truck filled with bagels and rye bread to coach his alma mater. Mosenson’s parents were Rumanian Jews who wanted only for their son “to be a good boy.” Fiery and competitive as a Temple University player, Mosenson, as Overbrook’s new coach, quickly faced power struggles with Dippy Chamberlain. The young Dipper once ran onto the court for pregame warm-ups wearing a scarf, a beret, and dark sunglasses; he even shot a few layups in that getup. “Get out of here and take that off!” Mosenson screamed. Chamberlain assented, but once the game started, he refused to shoot. Mosenson benched him, saying, “If you’re not going to shoot, you’re not going to play.” Without him, Overbrook struggled. “All right,” Mosenson said minutes later from the bench, “are you ready to play?” No answer. In went Chamberlain. He still would not shoot. Out came Chamberlain. As a tight game reached its final minutes, Overbrook fans wondered what was happening with Dippy (Is he sick? Hurt? Why does Dippy look so angry?). Mosenson returned him to the game. Chamberlain took over, shooting and scoring at will, and Overbrook won. In the locker room afterwards, Mosenson fumed at his star: “You’re not going to pull that crap on me ever again!” Mosenson thought, He’s testing me.

  Chamberlain’s local legend had started with whispers: “There’s this big kid named Wilt going to the ’Brook.” Of course, in the early Fifties, big usually meant six-foot-five. The Dipper towered over his opponents at Overbrook, few of them taller than six-foot-four, and averaged more than forty-five points per game as a senior. Whenever his teammates encountered trouble on offense, they knew to blindly heave the ball toward the basket, certain Dippy somehow would grab it.

  His performances generated barbershop conversations and sensational headlines in Philadelphia. Broadcaster Bill Campbell and NBA referee Pete D’Ambrosio felt compelled to see the Dipper play at Overbrook and came away impressed. One summer, Hal Lear, star guard at Temple University, received a call from a white friend in northeast Philly, hoping to arrange a game. “I want you to come up here and play us. I’m going to have Tommy [Gola] with me.” So Lear replied, “Okay, well, I’m going to have a decent team, too.” Lear said he would bring Guy Rodgers, his Temple teammate, and Overbrook’s Dippy Chamberlain. Word of the game spread across town. When Chamberlain stepped from a car at A and Champlost in north Philadelphia for the game, Lear saw people gathered in the streets, awestruck, pointing at the Dipper and saying, “Woooooh!” Lear watched front doors thrown open and neighbors pouring into the gym to see if the legend of the young Philadelphia giant was true.

  At Overbrook, meanwhile, the girls were swept up by the Chamberlain phenomenon. “How big is Wilt?” they asked Dave Shapiro, the only white player in Overbrook’s starting lineup. “Six-eleven,” Shapiro said. “No, you see him in the locker room,” the girls said, suggestively. “How big is he?” The Dipper’s fame at Overbrook once saved Shapiro from a tense racial confrontation in the school’s hallway. A group of eight black classmates stood in front of Shapiro and another Jewish classmate, holding the classmate’s sneakers. “Give him back his sneaks—he needs them for gym,” Shapiro ordered. They refused and baited Shapiro: “And what are you going to do about it?” A showdown at hand, one of the black students recognized Shapiro as a basketball player. “Hey, wait a minute. This guy plays with Dippy,” he said, stepping forward. He handed over the sneakers and apologized. “We’re sorry, man. We didn’t mean anything by it. Don’t tell Dippy, okay?”

  Overbrook lost just once in 1954–55, Chamberlain’s senior year, a preseason game in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that ended with a referee’s controversial call. Overbrook players returned to their locker room that night enraged. They dented lockers with their fists. Shapiro saw the Dipper pull from his satchel a BB gun the size of a pistol and shoot the wire-glass window in the locker room, chipping off pieces of glass. In preparation for a game against Chamberlain, the West Catholic High School coach stood one of his players atop a chair during practice and asked him to swat at shots with a broom. Meanwhile, Joe Goldenberg, star guard of West Philadelphia High, scouted an Overbrook game, and when his coach asked, “Where does Chamberlain shoot from?” Goldenberg answered honestly: “Mainly from above the rim.” When Overbrook and West Philadelphia High played, a fight broke out on the court. Fans stood, many preparing to join the fight, but only until the Dipper, after separating the combatants, raised his arms at center court and motioned for fans to sit down. Miraculously, they did. Cecil Mosenson had never seen anything like it. Dippy Chamberlain was like a messiah.

  The Dipper learned the nuances of basketball—and nightclubs—when he left Philadelphia for the University of Kansas and entered a segregated society in Lawrence, Kansas. He honed his game against double- and triple-teaming, drew huge crowds and, occasionally, racial taunts. Just as the NBA had legislated rule changes to diminish the dominance of six-foot-ten Lakers center George Mikan with his perceived unfair height advantage, the NCAA altered some of its game rules to slow the Dipper, including offensive goaltending (players now were forbidden to guide a teammate’s shot into the hoop) and free-throw shooting. Kansas Coach Forrest “Phog” Allen had bragged that the freshman Chamberlain would become the first player to make every free throw; the Dipper, with a running start, would leap from behind the free-throw line and dunk his foul shots. The NCAA reacted to Allen’s boasting by mandating a player’s feet must be behind the free-throw line when the ball is released.

  At Kansas, the Dipper’s focus was not on the classroom. Discus thrower Al Oerter, winner of gold medals for four consecutive Olympics from 1956 to 1968, shared a business class with Chamberlain at KU. He always noticed when Chamberlain was there, which by Oerter’s estimate was “one out of ten [classes].” Oerter looked up from his final examination and saw a small white student signing his name on the exam as “Wilt Chamberlain.” Oerter whispered to the student, “Somehow you don’t look like Wilt.” Oerter trained with Chamberlain during Kansas’s outdoor track and field season; they shared side-by-side lockers. The Dipper’s strength and massive skeletal structure impressed Oerter. Chamberlain wanted to become a decathlete, no doubt to prove his strength and
endurance in the most physically demanding of Olympic events. The Kansas track coach asked Oerter to instruct the Dipper how to throw the discus. Because of his height, Chamberlain struggled with the throwing motion, though his raw power amazed Oerter. He also saw that when Chamberlain placed his hand on a sixteen-pound shot, his fingers wrapped around it and touched his palm. These would become problems for the Dipper if he hoped to become a world-class decathlete. (The pole vault event especially worried Chamberlain: “I’d get way up there, then find myself with a lot of legs.”) After a workout in spring 1957, Oerter saw the roly-poly Abe Saperstein appear in the locker room beneath the KU stadium. He heard Saperstein offer Chamberlain one-third ownership of the Globetrotters if he signed with the team at that moment. Eavesdropping, Oerter heard the Dipper say he wasn’t interested, at least not yet.

  Chamberlain found his escape from Jim Crow segregation in Lawrence by driving to the vibrant African-American community in Kansas City, a city known in the 1930s as the Paris of the Plains. There, Maurice King, his lone black teammate at KU and a native of Kansas City, showed him the nightclubs along 18th and Vine, a street corner immortalized in song by Joe Turner as being where “The boys jump and swing until broad daylight.” For the Dipper, Kansas City was a revelation. With King, he heard jazz jam sessions at nightclubs such as the Blue Room and El Capitan, played summer basketball games down the street at the Negro YMCA, and met former Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro baseball leagues Buck O’Neil, Satchel Paige, and Wilbur “Bullet” Rogan. He also met the colorful former Globetrotter Goose Tatum. King once had seen Tatum being chauffeured by his wife down 18th Street—well, actually he saw only Tatum’s bare feet sticking out the back of his convertible. As a kid, Chamberlain had idolized Tatum and relished the chance to know him. Tatum had a deft hook shot and, after converting one, was known to ask his opponent, “How’d you like that, young white boy?” He let the Dipper drive his car a few times, and together they made a trip to Detroit, Tatum’s hometown.