As it was, the Dipper retired for long enough to tour Europe with the Globetrotters. He returned to the Warriors in time for his second NBA season and signed a three-year contract with Gotty that rivaled the largest in all of professional team sports—Willie Mays’s $85,000-a-year deal with the San Francisco Giants. Upon his return, the Dipper explained how he’d talked with family, friends, and “leaders of my race” and decided, “It would be better for me and I could do more good for my race if I played rather than if I retired.”
Racial barriers remained in sports. In the college ranks, the South’s three most prominent athletic conferences—the Atlantic Coast, Southeastern, and Southwest—had yet to desegregate. In the nation’s capital, the Washington Redskins remained the NFL’s last all-white team. In Philadelphia, the Phillies had been the final team in the National League with a black player, a full decade after Jackie Robinson first joined the Dodgers. Even now, the NAACP branch in Philadelphia threatened to boycott the Phillies to protest the team’s continuing use of a segregated motel at spring training in Clearwater, Florida. This arrangement relegated the Phillies’ five black players to living in private homes in the black section of town.
A dozen years after the color barrier was broken in 1950, the NBA now had thirty-seven black players, roughly one-third of the total, and more than double the percentage of black players in either Major League Baseball or the National Football League. Referee Pete D’Ambrosio worked an NBA game in 1961–62 featuring the expansion Chicago Packers and noticed five black Packers on the court at the same time, something he’d never seen before. With the emergence of the black player, the NBA game was undergoing a cultural and stylistic shift. It was played faster, higher, and better than ever before. A new epoch was at hand, and it created tensions. For the NBA’s black players, St. Louis, the league’s southernmost city, remained the most difficult and racially intolerant place to play. (Bill Russell would call it “the loneliest town in the world.”) In the middle 1950s, each NBA team typically had only one or two black players. Now, most teams had three or four. Privately, the NBA’s black players talked about the league’s quota, certain of its existence, even if team owners would not admit to it; when black players lost roster spots to inferior whites, they viewed it as the quota’s evil work. Al Attles, who came to the Warriors in autumn 1960 from virtually nowhere (North Carolina A&T, a historically black college), learned that he had earned a spot with the Warriors from a black man who worked as a redcap at the Philadelphia airport. The redcap told him: “Woody Sauldsberry’s gonna be traded.” Attles thought the idea of trading his black teammate preposterous. After all, Sauldsberry had been NBA rookie of the year only two seasons before. But then Sauldsberry was traded and Attles did the math: That left four black players on the 1960–61 Warriors: the Dipper, Guy Rodgers, Andy Johnson, and Attles. He had heard about the quota—four black players per team, maximum. Now, here was Al Attles’s proof.
In October 1961, during the exhibition season, the champion Celtics had been involved in a racial showdown in Lexington, Kentucky. Boston’s black players left town hurriedly before their game against St. Louis after the coffee shop in the team’s hotel refused to serve Tom Sanders and Sam Jones. Celtics owner Walter Brown fumed that the Celtics would never play another exhibition game in the South, or any other place, where they might be embarrassed. Back in Boston, Russell told newsmen, “I will not play any place again under those circumstances.” One of Boston’s white players, Frank Ramsey, who once played at the University of Kentucky, apologized to his black teammates on behalf of the entire state. “No thinking person in Kentucky,” Ramsey said, “is a segregationist.”
In Detroit early in the season, the Pistons’ Ray Scott, an inquisitive and deeply introspective rookie, sought to understand the NBA and a black man’s place—his place—in it. He found a mentor in Detroit assistant coach Earl Lloyd, who in 1950 had joined Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, Chuck Cooper, and Hank DeZonie as the league’s first black players. In hotel lobbies, on the Pistons bus, in restaurants and in nightclubs, Earl Lloyd explained to the rookie the way things were in the early Fifties in the NBA: how in St. Louis, restaurants would serve you on Styrofoam plates because “if you were black your order always was to go”; how he used to pick up Clifton or Cooper from their hotel and bring them back to his house for dinner and how “you felt responsible for each other. It was kind of you against the world”; and how Don Barksdale, another black pioneer in the NBA, once played a full quarter of an NBA game in 1953 without receiving a pass from his white teammates. (Later Barksdale would say, “I about wanted to cry.”) Lloyd told the rookie that it was imperative for black players in the NBA now to carry themselves with a quiet dignity and strength and not step out too far unnecessarily. It was one thing, Lloyd explained, if you were Elgin Baylor or Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain. No one spoke for them. Their unique talents, to a certain degree, protected them. They could speak for themselves. But for the other thirty-four black players in the NBA the rules were different, more rigid: As a representative of the Negro race, you must wear a suit and tie. You must eat at the right places. You must conduct yourself as a gentleman at all times. Ray Scott listened carefully. He accepted all of it as gospel.
Of course, the Dipper remained his own man. “I’m not crusading for anyone,” he said in 1960. “I’m no Jackie Robinson. Some persons are meant to be that way … others aren’t.”
His seeming shrug, or passivity, in public about matters of race in the early Sixties stood in stark contrast to the way he crushed in his fist any race-based impediments to his own self-definition. Rather than complain, the Dipper imposed his own impressive will. He sometimes dated white women, if discreetly; drove his Cadillac convertible at high speeds; and made more money than anyone else in the league. By averaging fifty points per game in 1961–62, he proved his physical superiority night after night and made a mockery of the league and its racial quotas and the notion that his white opponents were the best players in the world. He reduced to rubble the white-defined ideas of fair play and sportsmanship, which he knew as lies. Whites didn’t want fair play; they feared it. The quota proved that. Beneath the veneer of public quiescence, the Dipper fought his own freedom struggle simply by being—aggressively, flagrantly, unapologetically—the Dipper.
CHAPTER 5
Second Quarter
EDDIE DONOVAN, THE KNICKS FIRST-YEAR COACH, had few options. These were the variables: his team trailing by sixteen points, his center, Imhoff, saddled with three fouls, Chamberlain with twenty-three points and ten rebounds … and the second quarter had yet to begin. Donovan’s usual starting center, Phil Jordon, hadn’t even made it to Hershey. Jordon remained thirteen miles away, at the team’s hotel, sick and vomiting, the effects of the flu and yet another late night for which he was famous among teammates. (He’d been out with his postmidnight crony, guard Donnie Butcher.) Donovan looked at his reserve players on the Knickerbockers bench: a bare cupboard. Without size or bulk, he chose smoke and mirrors instead: rookie Cleveland Buckner, a shooter, not a defender. He was one of scout Holzman’s proudest finds, with that peculiar shot of his, twisting, arms high over his head. “Like a swan with a broken wing,” Jack Kiser wrote. Buckner had had difficulty adjusting—not to the NBA game, but to the big city. New York City wasn’t Yazoo City. Sam Stith playfully teased Buckner for his Mississippi sound, calling to him, “Hey, Cleeve-laaaaand!” To teammates, Buckner seemed lonely. Johnny Green noticed that Buckner had lost weight since he’d started playing for the Knicks. “He was used to seeing country food and he comes to New York and doesn’t see any of it,” Green would say. Buckner could hardly afford any weight loss. He was a six-foot-eight Olive Oyl. Chamberlain had manhandled him earlier in the week, scoring twenty-eight points against him in a single quarter. For Donovan now, this was hardly a choice option. But he would get Buckner additional help. Whenever Wilt Chamberlain touched the ball, the coach said, every Knick in the vicinity was to descend upon him.
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By force of habit more than strategy, Chamberlain kept moving directly to the same spot, down low, six feet to the left of the basket. When Attles or Rodgers lobbed the ball to him there, over the heads of the Knicks guards, Guerin and Al Butler, Buckner tried to get in the Dipper’s way—as if that were possible. When the Los Angeles Lakers practiced in preparation to play the Warriors, a reserve center portrayed Chamberlain. Once, the ball was lobbed inside, the would-be Chamberlain turned toward the basket, and guard “Hot” Rod Hundley shouted, “Dip-per Duuuuuunk!” and the center defending the would-be Wilt, Jim Krebs, feigned fear, covered his head, and ran away. The Lakers broke up laughing and so did their coach, Fred Schaus. They understood, as did the Knicks, that once Chamberlain used his strength and bullied toward the basket, there was little that could be done.
But Chamberlain did not turn to the basket as often as Frank McGuire wanted. Chamberlain preferred a fall-away shot, stepping from the basket and shooting back over his right shoulder from a distance of ten to fifteen feet, banking the ball off the glass backboard. This was a shot a smaller man might use to overcome his opponent’s height advantage, a shot described by Philadelphia sports columnist Sandy Grady as “a backward explosion like a whale breaching water, with the ball flipped off the apex of Wilt’s jump.” Paul Arizin became convinced that, with this shot, Chamberlain had an ulterior motive: He did not want to be considered a great player merely because he was tall. That, Arizin believed, “was the overriding factor in Wilt’s whole psychology.” It wasn’t that the Dipper was denying his obvious size and strength advantage; it was merely an extension of that fact. Not only was he the biggest and strongest player on the court—anyone could see that—he was also the best. The Lakers’ To m Hawkins called it “the jolly giant’s fee-fi-fo-fum syndrome.”
His mammoth scoring achievements had prompted some of the nation’s leading sports columnists to turn their backs on the game. “Basketball is for the birds—the gooney birds,” Shirley Povich wrote in Sports Illustrated. “The game lost this particular patron years back when it went vertical and put the accent on carnival freaks who achieved upper space by growing into it…. Who can applaud Wilt the Stilt, or his ilk, when they outflank the basket from above and pelt it like an open city? These fellows are biological accidents who ought to be more usefully employed, like hiring out as rainmakers and going to sow a few clouds.”
Chamberlain set out to prove that he could also do what smaller men typically did so well—dribble, run the floor, shoot. (Referee Earl Strom figured the fall-away carried an added bonus for the Dipper: Fading from the defense, he was less likely to be fouled, for him a good thing, since he despised shooting free throws.) The Dipper sought to prove himself multidimensional and well rounded in other ways, too. He had stunned his parents and siblings in 1960 by showing up on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. He drove to the television show’s Philadelphia studio, and as the curtains parted there he was, in a five-button tweed Chesterfield with black satin lapels, standing before 150 teens screaming on cue. Chamberlain sang, “By the river … ’neath the shady tree, Just my baby … Ju-hust my baby and me.” Dick Clark, just five-foot-nine, would later say, “I tried to interview the guy standing up and he was out of sight.” The Dipper said, “My family’s always laughed at me singing. I did this just to make ’em stop laughing.” He added, “I did it to appease myself.”
Now, in Hershey, the Knicks’ Johnny Green lent aid to Buckner, down low. He crowded and shoved the Dipper. Green was six-foot-five, though he played taller because of his remarkable jumping ability. Stationed with the U.S. Marines in Japan years before, Green once saw “Jumpin’” Bill Manning dunk a basketball in a game played at the base. Green had never seen a dunk before. It left him speechless and eager to try it himself. He soon discovered that he, too, could dunk a basketball with ease. When Jumpin’ Bill Manning left the base in Japan, fellow Marines began calling Green “Jumpin’ Johnny,” and the nickname stuck. “Hey, Jumpin’ Johnny Green!” Chamberlain playfully called out during pregame warm-ups. “Betcha can’t block this shot.” Chamberlain turned and exhibited his fall-away jumper, kissing the ball off the glass. Green’s smile masked a deeper truth. Chamberlain was right. There was no way he could block that shot. But better the fall-away, Big Fella, Green thought, than the Dipper Dunk.
Say this for Cleveland Buckner: the Knickerbockers rookie couldn’t stop the Dipper, but he could shoot. Built like a stiletto and with that cockeyed over-the-head shooting style, Buckner kept the Knicks from disappearing altogether during the second quarter. This was Buckner’s type of game, not much defense, high scoring, wide open. Quick off the dribble or out on the wing, running the fast break, Buckner found his range against the Warriors. Underneath the basket, he battled hard for rebounds. A streaky shooter, Buckner played about ten minutes on most nights; on this night, circumstances, and his own shooting accuracy, would get him thirty-three minutes. If Guerin or Naulls didn’t take the shot for the Knicks, Buckner did. Holzman, the scout, had predicted Buckner would have breakout games such as this. On what would become the biggest scoring night of Cleveland Buckner’s brief and obscure NBA career, hardly anyone in the crowd knew his name.
Teams couldn’t compete with Chamberlain athletically so they tried to do it physically or psychologically. Typically, opposing centers came at the Dipper with pointed elbows and scowls, the guns and knives of their profession. Frank McGuire had never seen anyone hit in the mouth as often as the Dipper. Once, he saw Cincinnati’s center, Wayne Embry, put a kneecap in the Dipper’s crotch, and McGuire ran onto the court, screaming, “You can’t let Embry do that!” but got no satisfaction from the referees. When referees weren’t watching, opposing centers dug their fists into the small of Chamberlain’s back or bounced him with a hard hip or stuck an elbow into his ribs in the belief that he wouldn’t strike back. St. Louis’s Clyde Lovellette used his own bag of sneaky tricks to annoy Chamberlain. Playing from behind, Lovellette thrust his right knee into Wilt’s buttocks. He pinched Wilt’s leg, side, or elbow. He even grabbed his shorts, forcing the Dipper to lower his hand to brush him aside. In his first battle with the Dipper in 1959 at Kiel Auditorium, Lovellette had determined not to be embarrassed by the rookie sensation. He threw a wicked elbow that struck Chamberlain in his mouth and dropped him to the floor. Philadelphia players searched the hardwood for Chamberlain’s missing two front teeth before realizing they remained in his mouth—impacted upward, deep into the gum.
Chamberlain’s coaches long had pleaded with him to strike back, the way George Mikan always had. Mikan knocked his tormentors into the bleachers. But Chamberlain was not, by nature, confrontational. Once he began to respond, though, the unprovoked attacks against him diminished. Boston Celtics players secretly discussed starting an altercation with a Philadelphia player in the belief that Chamberlain didn’t like fights and didn’t play well after one broke out, whether he was directly involved or not. Boston Coach Red Auerbach, perhaps more than anyone, mastered the art and science of getting inside Chamberlain’s head. He had coached the Dipper one summer at Kutsher’s resort in the Catskills where outdoor games were played to entertain guests. Walking into a bungalow at half-time, Auerbach found the Dipper, just graduated from high school, reclining on a bed. “You get your ass out of that bed and sit up and pay attention!” Auerbach growled. “You are not that good!” That’s what Auerbach said, but what he thought was, Yes, you are that good. Now in the NBA, Auerbach fancied chasing the Dipper from his courtside conversations with referees during Boston timeouts by hollering, “What’s this boy doing here? Get him out of here!”
Of course, none of these tactics worked. In 1958, Detroit’s George Yardley became the first player to surmount 2,000 points in an NBA season. Yet on his own scoring climb, Chamberlain had transformed Yardley’s total into his base camp. The Dipper scored a record 2,707 points as a rookie (37 points per game) and then 3,033 points in his second year (38 points per game). By midseason of his third yea
r, there were whispers that Chamberlain might reach 4,000 points, doubling Yardley, though he would have to average 50 points a game to do it. The numbers startled. Syracuse’s Johnny “Red” Kerr walked into a local bar once after playing the Dipper. “How many did ya get, Red?” the bartender asked. “Thirty-six,” Kerr replied. “Well, then, set ’em up,” the bartender exclaimed, happily. “My boy got thirty-six!” Delivering the beer, the bartender asked, “How many did Wilt get?” Sheepishly, Kerr said, “Sixty-two, I think.” Kerr was silently thankful his complimentary drinks already had been delivered.
Earlier in the 1961–62 season, Walt Bellamy had tried a gentler approach. The new rising star among big men in the league had his own ideas how to stop the Dipper as he walked out for the opening tip on November 19, 1961, at the International Amphitheater in Chicago—all sweetness and tact.
“H’lo, Mister Chamberlain. I’m Walter Bellamy.”
A six-foot-ten jump-shooter and member of the 1960 U.S. Olympic team, Bellamy was scoring nearly thirty points a night for the expansion Packers. On the court, he often referred to himself in the third person (“Mister Bellamy”). Once his third-person bellyaching prompted referee Norm Drucker to blow his whistle and say, “Mister Bellamy, please tell Walt that he just got himself a technical foul.” Bellamy’s first NBA meeting with Chamberlain was greatly anticipated. The Dipper elevated his intensity when playing Bill Russell or Elgin Baylor; to that short list he added the name of Walt Bellamy.
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