“If Bellamy scores forty and Jerry West gets sixty-three, then Wilt should get one hundred and sixty-three some day.
“What should we do, chop his head off, or his arms off because some people think he has an unfair advantage?”
CHAPTER 7
McGuire and His Warriors
THE DIPPER’S COACH, FRANK MCGUIRE, had the chesty confidence of an old-time ward politician. In his fine tailored suit and with his hair slicked back and parted just so, he looked like a millionaire. Before the game, McGuire had stood near the Warriors bench, relaxed and congenial, posing for a picture and kibitzing with the Hershey crowd. He was a rookie NBA coach, though hardly a coaching rookie. He’d been a college stalwart at St. John’s and then the University of North Carolina, posting a 267–93 combined record and taking both schools to the NCAA title game. Years later, he would joke that his biggest responsibility while coaching the Warriors was “to see that Wilt made the plane on time.” Brought in from the college game to help close an eleven-game deficit to the Celtics from the previous season, McGuire arrived in Philadelphia already a star. He drove a big car, attended mass with devotion, and had a beautiful wife from a proper family. McGuire had married up, as the saying went, and his lovely wife had polished his rougher edges to the point where soon he was buffing his fingernails and being named by the Barbers of America as one of the nation’s ten best-groomed men. With his expensive suits he set a new standard of couture among NBA coaches. One of thirteen kids of an Irish-cop father who died young, McGuire had walked the New York waterfront as a boy and later worked on it. He played for a few years during the Depression for the Brooklyn Visitations of the old American League, building a name on his defensive skills. When the Warriors flew into New York late at night, McGuire stopped by police precincts to visit old friends till the wee hours of morning; a few of them had patrolled the streets with his father. To his players, he defended his old friend Carmine De Sapio, chieftain of the Tammany political machine in New York, against charges of bossism. (“It’s a bum rap,” he insisted.) McGuire joked that in New York he needed two sets of complimentary tickets for games: On one side he’d put the cops he knew, and on the other the robbers. His Warriors players heard him talk about his friend, the President, another handsome Catholic with chesty confidence. Articulate, robust, and above it all: That was Frank McGuire.
Meschery fell under McGuire’s motivational spell and came to believe that his coach was part basketball, part Barnum&Bailey circus. Even so, Meschery liked and respected the man. McGuire was also a big spender, his legend at North Carolina tarnished only by bloated expense accounts. He carried himself as if he’d known wealth forever, though he retained a soft spot for working people. In New York restaurants, McGuire dropped names and money, greasing palms, a ten-spot to the hatcheck lady and a twenty to the maitre d’. He made quite a pair with Gotty. According to one sports journal, the Warriors owner and coach were “as dissimilar as a bagel and a steak.” The coach lived at the Cherry Hill Inn, an expensive place in New Jersey, and drank J&B Scotch Mist. The owner’s miserly ways caused him to chafe. The Warriors once ran out of tape in Syracuse and had to borrow some from the Nationals. McGuire was incredulous. Wilt’s making all this money and we’ve got no tape for his ankles? During exhibition games on the road, McGuire, with no assistant coach or equipment manager, had to look after his players’ valuables. He put their wallets and watches and as much as $10,000 in expense money and gate receipts in a bag and placed it beneath his spot on the bench. (The Dipper once cracked to his coach, “I don’t want you to worry about what I am doing on the court. I’d rather you worry about my cash and my rings.”) Finally, McGuire snapped. Waiting for the team bus before an exhibition game in Oklahoma City, he saw a converted camper pull up. Small and cramped, it had a makeshift bed in back. Gotty’s players had long known such bargain-basement vehicles. But Frank McGuire hadn’t. He stood in the stairwell of the camper en route to the arena that night, steaming mad. Early the next morning, he sat beside Attles and Rodgers in the hotel coffee shop and said, “You lost your coach last night. I quit.” McGuire explained that the team’s accommodations were not acceptable. They were not conducive to self-respect or to winning. At Chapel Hill, he’d grown accustomed to going first-class. (“It costs twenty-five cents more on the dollar to go first-class,” McGuire often said.) Never had he envisioned this. But Gotty convinced him to stay.
At his hiring, McGuire was awarded $20,000 a year for three years, the added title of vice president, and only one guiding instruction—this was Wilt Chamberlain’s team, make sure he scores a lot of points.
And so McGuire did.
At training camp in Hershey, McGuire had applied his well-rehearsed oratorical skills in his first meeting with players. He proclaimed the Dipper the most dominant force in basketball history and said the Warriors would beat Boston by getting the ball to Chamberlain “two-thirds of the time.” The established stars of the team translated his talk differently. Paul Arizin heard McGuire say, “We should win the pennant—with Wilt.” Tom Gola heard McGuire say, “We’re ahead 50–0 at the start of every game,” and Gola read between the lines, believing that what McGuire really meant was, Okay, Wilt’s got his fifty points, now what are you other guys going to do? Guy Rodgers knew that players’ salaries were determined by their scoring averages so, leaving nothing to chance, he asked, “Coach, whatever you say is fine, but will you sit in with us when we go to talk contract [next season] with Eddie Gottlieb?” McGuire smiled and said he would.
McGuire did his Wilt research carefully. His predecessor, an all-star Warriors player turned coach, Neil Johnston, had lost his job in large part because of his inability to get along with Chamberlain. During halftime of a game they would lose to Syracuse, Johnston had chastised Chamberlain in the locker room for not playing defense. “Wilt, [Johnny] Kerr has made five shots from the corner. Go out and get him. His name is Kerr.” Chamberlain snapped back: “My name is Chamberlain. I’ll go get him when I want to.” This exchange, carried out in front of his team, effectively neutered Johnston. McGuire had heard about this. He considered it a cautionary tale. He spent hundreds of dollars on phone calls inquiring about Chamberlain. From Kansas, Coach Dick Harp advised, “Wilt responds to leadership by someone he respects.” Six seasons earlier, as Chamberlain’s sophomore season at Kansas began, McGuire had been quoted in Chapel Hill, saying, “Chamberlain will score about a hundred thirty points one night and the other coach will lose his job. There might be somebody in the penitentiary who can handle him, but I guarantee you there is nobody in college.” McGuire was coach of the North Carolina team that defeated Kansas and Chamberlain in the 1957 NCAA title game. McGuire had placed one player in front of Chamberlain, the rest in a zone designed to collapse around him whenever he touched the ball. He also tried a psychological ploy or two. He used five-foot-eleven guard Tommy Kearns for the opening jump against Chamberlain. Naturally, Wilt won the tap, but McGuire hoped to let the Dipper know he had a few new tricks in his bag. North Carolina won that title game in triple overtime, 54–53, and limited the Dipper to just six field goals and eleven free throws, in all twenty-three points. That victory fortified McGuire’s reputation as a winner and Chamberlain’s as a great individualist unable to win a title.
Now, as Warriors coach, McGuire spent considerable time with his star center, explaining himself and his expectations. “How long do you want to play?” McGuire asked. “Forever,” the Dipper replied. “No,” McGuire said, “I mean how long each game.” The Dipper said, “When you take me out, I’m sitting next to you. I’m not scoring or rebounding. And when I go back in, it takes another three minutes to get this body going.” McGuire determined to play him every minute of every game. He brought Chamberlain to his summer home at Greenwood Lake in New York. There, Wilt played with Frankie, McGuire’s ten-year-old son born with cerebral palsy. Always a soft touch with kids, Chamberlain let Frankie tug on his mustache and chin hairs. Chamberlain warmed quickly to
his glib new coach. Gola realized what was happening: All of the Dipper’s previous coaches had given orders to him as to what to do, but McGuire didn’t and Wilt responded to him. When McGuire suggested that Chamberlain, having missed 500 free throws the previous season, try shooting his foul shots underhanded, Chamberlain willingly tried it—and stayed with it. (He converted sixty-one percent of his free throws for the season, nothing to brag about, but still the highest such percentage during his NBA career.) On another occasion, after an overtime loss in Los Angeles, Gola saw the Dipper sitting in the locker room with football’s Roosevelt Grier, smoking a cigarette in clear violation of one of McGuire’s rules. Wait’ll Frank sees this! Gola thought. Just then, McGuire appeared, walked past the Dipper. “Tough game, Wiltie,” McGuire said and kept walking without another word.
The respect was mutual. Chamberlain once saw McGuire alone in his hotel room, quietly despondent about being away from his wife and children, especially Frankie, and became for his coach a sympathetic listener. The Dipper asked, “What’s wrong?” McGuire replied, “Look at this room.” In the postmidnight darkness it looked especially tiny. The Dipper said, “I got a room twice this size at the end of the hall, Coach. It’s all yours.” He gave the coach his room key.
In the fall of 1961, their relationship and their season taking flight, the Dipper and McGuire stood together on the cover of Sports Illustrated beside a mocking headline: PROBLEM FOR A NEW COACH. In his cover story, sports-writer Ray Cave saw dramatic implications in their relationship: “[McGuire’s] challenge is to develop further and properly use the game’s greatest individual talent—and toughest problem—Wilt Chamberlain. And his eventual effect may be to measurably change the character of professional basketball from the brawling, hustling, cigar-in-your-face and eye-on-the-till game it has been for decades to the major league sport which it longs and deserves to be.”
The Warriors bus had departed in midafternoon from the Sheraton hotel in Center City where Gotty kept his office. As the bus crossed the Schuylkill River, the Philadelphia skyline receded. Bumpity-bumping down the two-lane highway on a two-hour drive, past signs pointing toward Allentown and Reading and into the Pennsylvania heartland, the Warriors soon were staring at fat Dutch barns, orchards, and grazing livestock. The driver kept turning over his right shoulder to yammer at no one in particular. No glamour here: bags thrown across ceiling racks, players’ long legs stretched across aisles. With Gola at home and the Dipper traveling separately, only nine players made the trip, plus a few game crew officials and ball boys, which meant a lot of empty seats. It was a team of Catholics, African-Americans, and a veritable Rushmore of homegrown Philadelphia basketball heroes—Chamberlain, Gola, Arizin, and Rodgers. Gotty also liked having four rookie players, not because it made for a stronger team (it did not), but for a cheaper team.
Al Attles was closer to Chamberlain than the other Warriors. A quiet fellow, deep ebony in complexion, and only a shade over six-feet tall, Attles was, in personality, the antithesis of the Dipper: deferential in conversation, never overreaching. Raised in an integrated section of Newark, Attles attended Weequahic High, the alma mater of novelist Philip Roth, who in Portnoy’s Complaint recalled the school’s predominantly Jewish student body and the football team’s fainthearted cheer: “White bread, rye bread, / Pumpernickel, challah, / All those for Weequahic, / Stand up and hollah!” On the court, though, Attles was hellfire on defense and the consummate team player on offense. He played every game as if it were his last. His nickname, The Destroyer, grew from a collision, in which he and others dove for a loose ball; his opponent emerged with fractured facial bones and Attles with a don’t-mess reputation.
Attles always knew when Chamberlain was around: The bus would resound with the Dipper’s deep voice and the playful challenges he issued. Earlier in the season, as the Warriors flew over the Midwest, the pilot announced, “We’re passing over Toledo, Ohio.” Hearing this, Chamberlain had turned to Attles: “How many people you think live in Toledo?” Attles raised a brow. “I’m not a census taker, Big Fella. I don’t know,” he said. “Take a guess, my man,” the Dipper insisted. Attles sighed, then guessed, “Four hundred thousand.” Chamberlain said, “You’re wrong.” Attles said, “How many do you think?” Chamberlain said, “Three hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.” Attles rolled his eyes. The Dipper said, issuing yet another challenge, “I’ll bet you that I’m closer.” Attles played along. “Okay, how much should we bet?” Wilt: “Six thousand dollars.” Attles’s salary was $5,500. “Unh-uh,” he said, shaking his head. “Okay,” Wilt said, “if you don’t take the bet then I win.” Attles said, “Fine, you win.”
Such kindred moments with Attles, friendly as they were, were the exceptions in the Dipper’s relationship with his teammates. For the most part, even in their presence, he seemed beyond their reach. They would exchange quips with him, listen to his Globetrotter stories, or play cards on a team flight, usually a five-card rummy game called Tonk. But the Dipper was guarded, self-protective, didn’t let anyone too close. After three seasons, his teammates hardly knew him—certainly none of the eight white players did. At best they could only imagine what it would be like to be the Dipper, and even that was a stretch. In public, Chamberlain drew attention, crowds. Rookie Ted Luckenbill grew tired of fans rushing at the Dipper to ask, “How’s the weather up there, Stilt?” Once, Luckenbill heard it from a particularly obnoxious fan. Wilt answered, “I’ve got a phone in my ass. Why don’t you call and find out?”
Each night there was a statistical sameness for these Philadelphia Warriors: Chamberlain rolled out his big numbers, unprecedented totals, dropping fifty-seven points on the Lakers’ Ray Felix or fifty-eight on Detroit’s Walter Dukes or sixty-five on St. Louis’s Larry Foust, his unique athleticism making the Knicks’ Phil Jordon or the Nationals’ Swede Halbrook seem weak, doltish. The Warriors played in Convention Hall, a cavernous auditorium on 34th and Spruce Streets, thick with cigarette smoke and the cold echoes of Wendell Willkie’s acceptance speech at the 1940 Republican Convention. Their upstairs locker room seemed an afterthought, more like a storage room. A small room with clean-scrubbed white walls, it had space for eleven folding chairs but no lockers, the kind of room Willkie might have used to be alone with his thoughts for a few moments before facing the cheering crowd and the specter of Franklin Roosevelt. During games, Warriors players draped their clothes over the chairs and put their shoes beneath them. Afterwards, the water boy brought towels, the first always to Wilt. There the Dipper guzzled a bottle of 7-Up followed by a large bottle of milk, talking to a reporter or two.
To his teammates, there was something disquieting about Chamberlain. It wasn’t so much that the Dipper thought himself a great player or that he was as great as he believed or even that he was great in a way they never could be. These were incontrovertible facts. It was simply his overwhelming presence. It was as if when he was in the room, they weren’t. He made them feel their inadequacy and smallness. He was large, luminous, and occasionally loud, at the center of every moment. Not one of them had ever known anyone quite like him. His white teammates knew only that he had an apartment in New York and a nightclub, and they heard rumors about women and an entourage in Harlem. He existed apart from his team, orbiting in his own glittery realm. The Dipper’s teammates saw him only at practices and games, and then, just like that, he was gone again. Their friends would ask: “What’s Wilt Chamberlain really like?” His Philadelphia Warriors teammates would only shrug and show their palms to the sky.
Paul Arizin had seen it all, teammates coming and going, for more than a decade. At thirty-three, his hairline sharply receded, Arizin was in the final weeks of an NBA career that had started a dozen years before. Though he lost two seasons of his prime to military service, his professional career had been remarkable. Arizin had been around the NBA so long that he not only had played against George Mikan, he stole the league scoring title from Mikan in 1952, and then won it again in 1957.
The idea of Arizin and Chamberlain in the same lineup now seemed incongruous: a merging of disparate talents and personalities from disparate NBA eras, like Ulysses S. Grant fighting alongside George Patton. When Arizin joined the Warriors as a rookie in 1950, the Dipper was in junior high school—both players stood six-foot-four then. At that time, Arizin played against an army of set-shooters, NBA players whose shooting style harkened to those described in Walter E. Meanwell’s 1922 book The Science of Basketball for Men. Meanwell described the game’s three defining shots as the “Two-Hand, Underhand Loop Shot” (feet spread, fired from the waist up), the “Overhand Loop Shot” (shot with two hands from the chest in the set position) and the “One-Hand Push Shot” (jumping toward the basket while shooting). Arizin played hard, yet always under control, and made himself into one of the great players of the NBA’s first decade. Married, with kids, he would shortly begin a new career in sales at IBM. The Warriors rookies looked to Arizin almost as a wizened uncle.
He was still scoring twenty-one points a game, still hanging in midair too long for most defenders, still shooting his jump shots without arc, still looking at his open palm after scoring a basket (a nervous tic Ruklick had detected), and still wheezing up and down the court, the result of a breathing ailment many thought was asthma. When Boston’s Red Auerbach heard Arizin gasping for breath on the court, he believed it all a trick, because once Arizin got the basketball in his hands he streaked past the Celtics and scored. Auerbach even told his players not to feel sorry for Arizin: “Don’t pay attention to his breathing. He’s got asthma? So what? I’ve got asthma, too!” Unlike his teammates, Arizin didn’t want to talk about basketball away from the court. It made him fidgety. He preferred to be alone, working The New York Times crossword puzzle or reading a book, a mystery by Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler or perhaps a biography. On the road he spent time with Gola and veteran forward Ed Conlin but most often he stayed to himself. He brought his seven-year-old son into the locker room on occasion. Little Michael Arizin got along handsomely with the Dipper. He talked with him more than his father. Paul Arizin hardly knew Wilt Chamberlain. In three years as teammates they never had a meaningful discussion. That was due, in part, to Arizin’s personality—serious, sober, much as you might expect from someone raised in his grandparents’ south Philly funeral home. Funerals were held in the living room, and sometimes the young Arizin walked past an open casket as he headed upstairs. It’s no wonder he developed a lifelong aversion to flowers.
Wilt, 1962 Page 11
