Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  His Warriors teammates thought Tom Meschery, the Mad Russian, unusual in the way all Californians were unusual. Meeting him for the first time, Sportswriter Stan Hochman of The Philadelphia Daily News noticed it instantly: “Meschery was a guy who looked slightly offbeat. You could see he had the makings of a flower child.” Meschery was six-foot-six and boxy, had a nice jump shot and a short fuse that lit whenever he opposed Boston’s sneering Tom Heinsohn. Meschery fought willingly, if not competently; much of the blood spilled was his own. “Tired of his guff,” Meschery threw a first punch at Heinsohn in a late-season game and walked off the court a bloody mess, saying, “My only regret is that I missed the punch.”

  Certainly, he had a fighter’s bold lineage. Meschery’s maternal grandfather, Vladimir Lvov, was of Russian nobility, had owned thousands of acres of timberland east of Moscow, and was said to have been nearly seven-feet tall. Lvov had been a senator in the Duma, the Russian national Parliament convened and dissolved four times between 1905 and 1917, and once lived in the old home of the mad monk Rasputin. Lvov had served as chief procurator of the Holy Synod, the lay head of the Russian Orthodox church. Tom Meschery had heard the family stories over the years—always from his proud, talkative mother, Masha, because his father, Nicholai, like most Old World men, said barely a word. Meschery also had read some of the old letters his family kept. Alexander Kerensky, the Social Democrat who led the Provisional government, had viewed Lvov as a nettlesome meddler, centrally involved in a military conspiracy to overthrow him. As part of the conspiracy, Lvov had been the one to ask Kerensky to step aside. “You must be joking, Vladimir Nikolaevich,” Kerensky said. Lvov replied, “I certainly am not.” Kerensky had him arrested and jailed in the Winter Palace. Lvov bribed his way out, and his fate never was entirely certain to the young Meschery, who inherited his lost grandfather’s impressive size.

  Tom Meschery’s father had fought as an officer with White Russians on the western front with Admiral Kolchak and later fled with so many others across the border into China, settling in Harbin, Manchuria. There he met and married Lvov’s daughter. In Harbin, Tom Meschery was born (ergo, a second NBA nickname, “The Manchurian Candidate,” title of a 1959 Cold War novel and 1962 hit movie with Frank Sinatra). Three years later, in 1941, his father, having sailed away and settled in San Francisco, sent word for the family to join him—too late. Pearl Harbor turned the family’s world upside down. The Japanese sealed the harbors, which kept three-year-old Tom Meschery, his older sister, and mother from leaving. They spent the next several years in an internment camp in Tokyo for women, children, and displaced persons. From missionaries there, Tom Meschery first learned English. Their camp was bombed—a church next door took a direct hit—and as fires spread, the Mescherys left in a hurry through a cellar door. When the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima in August 1945, the Mescherys were walking the streets of Tokyo, young Tom on his mother’s back. After the war, through the Red Cross, the family reunited on the docks of San Francisco. As the McCarthy era unfolded, his father changed the name from Mescheriakoff to “Meschery” because it sounded less Russian. Kerensky would come to America to lecture at Stanford University. Meschery’s father hadn’t forgotten the past. He and some of his Russian friends, with a little too much to drink, crashed a car into a wall near the university. Inside the trunk of their car, police found a loaded pistol, two swords, and a photograph of Czar Nicholas the Second.

  Tom Meschery had a wonderful laugh that his teammates loved; it was deep, genuine, and infectious. But his ambitions were difficult for them to grasp. Meschery had an affinity for history and wanted to travel the world. Entering St. Mary’s College near San Francisco, he had wanted to join the U.S. Foreign Service, perhaps working in Russia, but his curiosity about basketball interceded. Basketball became his mission. Two years, Meschery told himself, upon his selection as a first-round draft pick of the Warriors. That was his time frame—to make it as an NBA player for at least two years. But now that he was producing twelve points and seven rebounds per night, the rookie was modifying that time frame. He was having fun, making good money, and watching the Dipper’s heroics. The Foreign Service, he decided, could wait.

  Meschery played every minute of every game as if proving himself as an athlete and as an American. Onto the court he carried a fighter’s spirit: a loaded pistol and two swords.

  Arizin believed every team could be subdivided into three categories: “There are the real drinkers and the woman chasers. Then there are the guys who are milk-shake drinkers who never drink [alcohol] at all. Then there is a ‘middle class’ in between them.” He might have added that for the Warriors, as with the nation, there also was a racial divide. These Warriors subdivided socially into four cliques: white veterans, white rookies, black players, and Wilt Chamberlain. (The Dipper was the only Warrior to room alone on road trips, a contractual perk.) On the road, roommates Attles and Rodgers, the only other black players on the team, went out with Chamberlain to dinner or a movie, but only occasionally; with white teammates that never happened. The white teammates simply rode Chamberlain’s coattails on the court, some willingly, some reluctantly; all gladly pocketed the extra playoff money he earned them.

  What little frivolity broke out in the Philadelphia locker room usually was the work of the chatterbox Rodgers. Good-looking and glamorous, Rodgers had the gift of gab and was the most animated Warrior. He might even sing Bobby Darin’s version of “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” or “Mashed Potato Time,” the number-one hit by Philadelphia’s Dee Dee Sharp: “Mashed Potato, feel it in your feet now, / Mashed Potato, come on get the beat now …”

  Chamberlain was restrained in the locker room, except to argue small points or to spin tales about his poker winnings, the Globetrotters, or his driving skills. As Meschery would say much later, “Wilt did everything in grandiose proportions. Even his truths were larger than truths.” Hearing Chamberlain boast loudly about how fast he had driven his Cadillac—from New York to Los Angeles in thirty-six hours, nonstop—Guy Rodgers took him on. “Let me get this right, Dip,” Rodgers said, licking a finger as if it were an imaginary pencil. “You would’ve had to average about a hundred miles per hour, is that right?”

  “Hey, my man,” Chamberlain said, “there’s no speed limit in Kansas.” In Kansas, it seemed, the Dipper hit 120 miles per hour.

  “You ever stop to take a leak?” Rodgers asked.

  “Not once,” Wilt said, proudly. Nor did he stop to eat; he packed sandwiches and bottles of 7-Up. As for refueling the car, he said, “My Cadillac’s got auxiliary gas tanks.”

  These Warriors came to know Chamberlain’s playful embellishments and bluffs—those cropped up in poker games on airplanes where Chamberlain refused to fold, always upped the ante, and usually won because, as Meschery realized, “he had a lot more money than we did.” Because his stories sometimes seemed exaggerated (and often were, for effect), a few Warriors didn’t believe his claim to have scored ninety points in a thirty-two-minute high school game. (Chamberlain had newspaper clippings to prove it.) He talked often about the Globetrotters and told his stories with fervor. To ask, “How would the Trotters do against an NBA team?” was to prompt him to up the ante. Chamberlain boasted that the Trotters could beat any NBA team. “And the Trotters play baseball, too,” he would say, “and I’m tellin’ you they could beat the New York Yankees!”

  After his rookie season in the NBA, Chamberlain had visited Russia with the Globetrotters—Gotty even joined his old friend Saperstein on that trip—and his Moscow story was a richly textured classic. In a hotel lobby, the Dipper told teammates of how the Trotters had played nine games in seven days, sold out Lenin Stadium every time, and he said about fourteen million people watched on television. By the final night, he said Russian musicians were playing “Sweet Georgia Brown,” the Trotters’ theme song. The Politburo invited the team to dinner, he said. That night waiters kept bringing more bottles of vodka to the table. The Dipper was not a drinker, bu
t he said he couldn’t disappoint the Kremlin, after all. He clinked glasses, even proposed a few toasts. And Khrushchev says, “Nobody leaves until only one man is sitting up straight!” One by one, Chamberlain explained, the Trotters’ heads dropped, falling gently against their arms on the table, defeated by vodka. Meanwhile the Politburo members, wearing their blue suits with little medals hanging from their lapels, began to drop, too. Chamberlain’s own head throbbed at the temples. Now, it’s the next day. He said the Trotters and Politburo members slept at their chairs. There are only two of us left. Just me …, the Dipper paused for story-telling effect, and that mother-fuckin’ Khrushchev! His teammates howled with laughter. The Dipper could tell a tale.

  Each Warrior understood his role—McGuire made certain of that—even obscure players who had no roles at all during games. Backup center Joe Ruklick was the Kennedy liberal from Northwestern University. He rarely played, though he had his fun. A smoker of L&M cigarettes (the cigarette of choice, he’d heard, of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy), Ruklick made his contribution to the team by practicing hard against Chamberlain and by stirring animated conversations in hotel coffee shops and on trains, planes, and buses, with Catholics such as Gola and Conlin. Inwardly intense and intellectually curious, Ruklick riled up these teammates by waxing passionately about the Democrats (especially galling to Gola, a Nixonian) or by philosophizing about oral sex (Gola, blushing, insisted it was a venial sin) or by reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, the bestselling memoir of an American expatriate in Paris published in the United States in 1961 to great fanfare and banned in some libraries as obscene. “This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word,” Miller wrote. “No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty …” Ed Conlin, Ruklick’s roommate, thumbed through Tropic of Cancer in their hotel room. Of a Parisian prostitute Miller wrote: “Perhaps it wasn’t so pleasant to smell that boozy breath of hers … but the fire of it penetrated her, it glowed down there between her legs where women ought to glow …” Ed Conlin, once a star at Fordham, a Jesuit school, growled at Ruklick, “Your mother would kill you if she knew you were reading this.”

  Ruklick had been an all-conference player at Northwestern, a big man with a deft little hook shot, but Chamberlain played every minute of every game, so no one got to see Ruklick and his deft little hook shot. Instead, he became a keen observer of the team, sitting on the bench with forward Frank Radovich, a couple of Midwestern sentinels, joking and staring at pretty women in the crowd. Once at the Boston Garden, seeing a gorgeous woman, so gorgeous Ruklick swore she must have been a Kennedy, Radovich advised, “Joe, you sit at the end of the bench tonight because I want a better look at that girl. She’s got a short skirt on.” During another game, there came a shrieked catcall: “Hey, Radovich, you and Ruklick ever do anything besides cheerlead?” Radovich turned and yelled, “Yeah. We screw your wife!” Ruklick scrunched down low and said, “Frank, you’re going to get us killed.”

  The sentinels agreed that part of their role was to protect the Dipper if a fight broke out on the court. Ruklick couldn’t forget the first time he’d seen Chamberlain, at a luncheon in the student union in Lawrence, Kansas, in December 1956, the day of the Dipper’s first college game against … Joe Ruklick. The anticipation on campus had been merely huge: Phog Allen, just forced to retire as Kansas coach by age restrictions, saying of the Dipper, “He is the best that has ever been.” When the Dipper walked into the student union, dipping his head beneath the doorway, Ruklick saw his sweater with a deer and a snowflake on it. Ruklick cringed and thought, My God, Wilt skis, too. Ruklick scored twenty-two points that night, but the Dipper produced the biggest night of his college career with fifty-two points and thirty-one rebounds in an 87–69 victory for Kansas. Newsweek magazine put it like this: “Chamberlain’s great performance came under the pressure of an unparalleled build up. The national consensus: For better or worse, basketball is stuck with what looks like an unstoppable scorer, who may eventually affect his game as radically as Babe Ruth affected baseball.” That night Ruklick had been even more direct, saying, “It’s just ridiculous. He made me feel like a six-year-old kid.” And, lo, six years later, the Dipper still made Joe Ruklick feel like a six-year-old.

  Ruklick arrived to the team with the Dipper in 1959 and had served as his backup ever since, rarely playing. Three years later, Chamberlain still called him “Rookie,” in part because he struggled in pronouncing the name, “Ruh-da-lick.” Ruklick noted how his white teammates, particularly the veterans, rarely talked to Chamberlain, even during games in courtside huddles. It was, Ruklick decided, a freeze-out. He saw his white Warrior teammates speaking more freely and frequently to white players on opposing teams than to Chamberlain. Once, during Wilt’s rookie season, Gottlieb walked into the Convention Hall locker room, his players sitting on their folding chairs. Gotty handed each player a sheet of paper. “A bonus check, Mogul?” forward Joe Graboski had cracked. Gottlieb shook his head. “Just read it.” What the players found in their hands was a ballot for the NBA all-star team. They were not permitted to vote for teammates, only for players on other teams. Ruklick approached Gola. “Why don’t we vote for [Phil] Jordon at center or [Jim] Krebs or Larry Faust,” Ruklick said, meaning anyone but the Celtics’ Bill Russell. That way, Ruklick suggested, Chamberlain might get more total votes than Russell and be named to the NBA all-star first team. He saw Gola’s face harden. Gola reminded Ruklick that he was only a rookie, and rookies like Ruklick needed to keep their mouths shut. Gola, a solid citizen, was a locker room Gibraltar. He told Ruklick the integrity of the ballot was “to vote your honest opinion.” All of the Warriors heard the exchange, including Chamberlain, who said nothing. Ruklick didn’t push it but felt embarrassed, chagrined. He voted for Phil Jordon, anyway. And Russell won the players’ vote over Chamberlain.

  Ruklick came to believe that his white teammates didn’t like Wilt Chamberlain because they didn’t know or understand him. Nor did they want to. They had absorbed the ethnic, working-class racial prejudices of their fathers formed early in the century. Of course, Chamberlain’s personality didn’t do much to bridge the divide. He did not freely reach out to his teammates. That wasn’t his style. He didn’t seek friendship from them, only the basketball. Sometimes he would refer to himself in the third person, as “Norman.” Teammates didn’t get it as first. He set them straight: “Wilton Norman Chamberlain.” He could be aloof, funny, boorish. Once McGuire called a practice strictly for free-throw shooting. Players understood this was McGuire’s way of saying, “Wilt, you’ve got to improve your free-throw shooting.” The Dipper showed up, reluctantly, and brought two big dogs with him. He strung their leashes around the backboard post. He didn’t even change from his street clothes. He practiced free throws at the distant end of the court, alone. None of his teammates wanted to rebound for him because they feared the dogs. McGuire watched it happen and practice broke up quickly. Throughout Chamberlain’s most remarkable season, his white teammates watched him with acute fascination. They might as well have looked through a telescope for the Big Dipper, so far from them was he.

  There were precious few private moments that provided teammates real insights into the complexity of Chamberlain and what it was truly like to be the Dipper.

  Ruklick once saw Chamberlain sleeping on a train, from Syracuse to New York City, in a driving snowstorm, crammed into a six-foot berth, and it seemed a metaphor for his basketball life—the Dipper was too big for the small-time NBA. As a rookie in 1959, Ruklick carried onto the Warriors bus a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a seminal novel about a day in the life of working-class Dublin that used the structure of the Homeric Odyssey. As Ruklick passed down the aisle, the Dipper noticed the book and said, “Yeah, I saw that movie”—a reference to the 1955 Kirk Douglas adaptation of Homer’s epic poem. Ruklick suppressed a smile and kept walking.

  Attles connected with the Dipper on a playful l
evel. When the Dipper challenged him to enter an empty boxing ring before an exhibition game, they sparred, danced, and popped their fists into the air, laughed out loud, make-believing they were Archie Moore and Cassius Clay.

  Luckenbill had shared an elevator with him during training camp in Hershey, just the two of them. In a frisky mood, the Dipper playfully slammed his elbows into the elevator’s back wall. Bam! Bam! Why he did that Luckenbill didn’t know, but when the Dipper stepped from the elevator the rookie from the University of Houston noticed two dents in the wall. An NBA greenhorn raised in Elkhart, Indiana, Lucky learned plenty from the Dipper. He had arrived for one team flight wearing shirt, slacks … and white socks. The Dipper shook his head and said disdainfully, “You’re not in college anymore. Here, take these,” and handed Luckenbill a pair of colored socks from his own bag. Now, Luckenbill thought about the dents in the elevator wall and returned to the elevator minutes later. Alone, he stepped inside, let the elevator door close and then slammed both of his elbows into the wall, same as the Dipper. Bam! Bam! He searched but found no new dents. Then a new cognition—pain! His elbows hurt. That was the day Luckenbill realized not all men were created equal.