Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  That simple. Richie Guerin was not passing the ball to the straitlaced rookie.

  The golden boy would have to prove himself.

  The sound of trumpets was not heard again that season.

  Or the next.

  Guerin was a gladiator. Five last-place finishes (and four different coaches) in six seasons in New York might’ve dulled the spirit of other players. Not Guerin: all those losses fueled his competitive rage. He performed well at every aspect of the game—shooting, passing, defending, and fighting, especially fighting. He threw tantrums, elbows, and fists, carrying the 1950s spirit of the league into the 1960s. Fighting was at the center of his reputation. Guerin charged once, fists raised, at Rod Hundley, the Lakers guard. Hundley did what made sense: He turned and ran. When the referee stepped in, Hundley was backpedaling and screaming, “Get that sucker away from me!” (Then, when passions subsided, Hot Rod Hundley said, purring like a kitten, “Hey, Richie, I don’t want any part of you, my man.”) Guerin was, at six-foot-four, too big for most opposing guards to handle, an advantage he seized at every turn. Guerin could score and inflict pain while doing it. Backing in, working his elbows, he turned his body into the defender, knocking him out of the way and drawing a foul at the same time, a brutally effective move. Guerin regularly annihilated the Celtics’ Bob Cousy in the low post, Cousy pleading, “C’mon, Richie! I’ll give you whatever you want from the outside. Just get out of here!” Each night Guerin wanted his Knicks teammates to play as hard and as well as he. That rarely happened.

  At twenty-nine, Guerin was at the pinnacle of his career. Only Robertson and West, among guards, scored more, and by only a fraction. Guerin had produced big nights himself this season, scoring fifty-one points, fifty, forty-seven, and forty-six; two of those games came against the Warriors. A fiery ex-Marine, Guerin treated every game like the battle for Corregidor. He wouldn’t shy even from Bill Russell; he drove into the teeth of the Celtics’ great defensive front. That was Richie Guerin’s style, on the court and off.

  The rookie Donnie Butcher admired Guerin’s moxie. They were friends; their wives sat together at games in Madison Square Garden. Butcher would go on about his friend Guerin: Richie knew people in every city. Richie could walk into a restaurant in L.A. that had a two-hour wait and get a table right away. A sold-out Bing Crosby concert, you say? Not a problem: Richie will get you front row seats. Richie had the smile. Richie had the style. Richie liked a good party and, boy, could Richie dance. Richie was dashing in his full-length coat. Richie knew Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford and Richie could throw down a few at Clete Boyer’s place, too.

  Guerin was a crowd favorite, a star—and he knew it—and he got royal treatment.

  A year earlier his close friend, Knicks Coach Carl Braun, had tried and failed to transform Guerin into a playmaker. Guerin was a splendid passer—only he wanted to shoot. He spent nearly two hours a day in the off-season working on his two-hand set shot. Joining the team from St. Bonaventure University for the 1961–62 season, Eddie Donovan said of Guerin, “A new pro coach like myself appreciates having him around.” His teammates stepped lightly on the court around Guerin and so did the referee Pete D’Ambrosio. Once in New York, D’Ambrosio had whistled Guerin for a foul and heard Guerin growl at him, “I’ll get you outside.” Then D’Ambrosio heard Guerin say, “I’ll punch your head off.” He cited Guerin for a technical foul. Later, D’Ambrosio mentioned the incident to another referee, Sid Borgia. “Yeah,” Borgia said, “Guerin said the same thing to me once.”

  That rookie season had passed ignobly for Imhoff. He didn’t play much. When he did, his game stuttered. Not enough experience, too much left hand. Sometimes, he showed up at games only to learn that he was not among the Knicks’ eleven players suiting up. He watched in street clothes. Every day was a learning experience for Imhoff: One day Knickerbockers veteran Johnny Green bet him $20 that he could dunk a basketball ten times in fifteen seconds. Imhoff looked at Green, then at the basket. “No way,” Imhoff said; the bet was made. Imhoff watched Green work like a machine, dunking with his left hand and catching it with his right, then doing it again and again. Green made his ten dunks with a few seconds to spare. He looked at Imhoff and said, “Gimme twenty, rook.” That the Knicks, in mid-season, had reacquired Jordon from Cincinnati (they’d sold him to Detroit three years before) did not boost Imhoff’s confidence. Several times the rookie Imhoff had scored baskets near the end of a game at Madison Square Garden and heard boos from the hometown crowd. It confused him until Knicks veterans explained that gamblers were upset the Knicks beat the point spread.

  Few realized how far Imhoff had traveled. The game of basketball had not come naturally to him. He’d gone to it, clumsily, in part because he kept growing. He wore size thirteen shoes at age thirteen and size fifteen shoes at age fifteen. His family joked that you could hear him growing. He had long wondered about his size, where it came from. His parents were of modest height. Not until 1973, when his lengthy NBA career was ending, did his mother approach him, box of tissues in her hand, to say, gravely, “Darrall, there’s something we need to talk about.” Imhoff feared his mother was about to tell him she had a terminal illness. Instead, she startled him with other news: She told him the man he’d known as his father was not his biological father. She had been married once before, briefly, to an actor in Hollywood, a Norwegian named Petersen; as their marriage was ending she learned she was pregnant. Against the wishes of some, she had the baby in 1939, a boy she named Darrall Tucker Petersen. Soon after, she married Clark Imhoff, who proudly and lovingly adopted and raised the boy. Early on they legally changed his name, to Darrall Tucker Imhoff. Stunned by what he was hearing now, Imhoff hugged his mother and told her that he loved Clark Imhoff even more for what he had done thirty-four years earlier, for being as devoted as any father could be. As an aside, Imhoff’s mother mentioned that Petersen, the actor, was six-foot-eight.

  Darrall Imhoff had figured his basketball days ended long before that when an Alhambra High School teammate snapped him with a towel in the locker room. Imhoff gave chase, slipped and fell and broke his elbow, ending his senior season. He might have become the tallest park ranger in American history—if not for an aunt. He trudged off to college to major in forestry. His aunt, Vivian Tucker, a professor of humanities at Berkeley, helped him search for a place to live on campus. She phoned Cal basketball Coach Pete Newell. “I’m not a housing director,” Newell said, politely. “I’m a basketball coach.” But Vivian replied, “He’s six-foot-eight and a half, Pete.” Newell’s interest was piqued. “What’s his name?” Though Imhoff made the Cal team as a walk-on, he didn’t play much the first two years. But he kept eating, kept growing: up to six-foot-ten. Newell had a way with words. “Son,” he told Imhoff, draping his arm around his shoulder during one practice, “I never yet have had a player who didn’t learn from his mistakes. And you are going to learn a lot.” But Pete Newell was patient, and with Imhoff, his patience would pay off. The turning point came during Imhoff’s junior year when he finally received a scholarship, though to earn it, he had to sweep out the Berkeley student union at 6:30 on most mornings. Trailing the play in a game against San Jose State, Imhoff swept in from behind to block the opposing center’s layup, pinning the ball against the glass.

  It shocked the crowd, and Newell, even Imhoff. He built himself into a defensive stalwart and rebounder and served as passing hub of the Bears’ reverse action offense. Newell kept him well grounded. As his confidence and his performance improved, Imhoff once stalked angrily to the bench during a timeout, muttering that teammates wouldn’t throw the ball to him. “What they ought to do,” Newell howled, “is throw a rock at you.” Imhoff would lead California past Oscar Robertson and the University of Cincinnati in the NCAA semifinal and past Jerry West and West Virginia University in the final to capture the national collegiate championship.

  As his game matured during his second season with the Knicks, so did Imhoff. Naulls became his first Afr
ican-American roommate and introduced him to the jazz music of Dave Brubeck and his odd-meter masterpiece album Time Out. Imhoff and Naulls got along famously and certainly never had a cross-cultural moment as laughable as when Knicks teammate Dave Budd mistakenly used the tightly bristled hairbrush of roommate Johnny Green to clean his shoes. In games, Imhoff did not shoot well, though he played effectively on defense, blocking shots, picking up a teammate’s lost man, vocally directing coverage—aspects of the game that didn’t show up in box scores. But he was neither Robertson nor West, his fellow first rounders, and the New York press reminded him of that often.

  Yet there were a few shining moments. Leonard Koppett, who covered the Knicks for The New York Post, wrote as the 1961–62 season entered its final month that few Knicks fans grasped how much Imhoff had improved during his second year in the league since most of his best efforts had occurred on the road. Imhoff was only twenty-three, after all, and Koppett wrote, “His potential is such that every team in the league would like to have him on the squad, but up to now it has remained mostly potential.”

  Of course, as the game in Hershey approached, Leonard Koppett was far, far away. On a sunny morning in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he joined other baseball writers in the swimming pool at the Yankee Clipper hotel. Koppett could hardly believe it. The world champion New York Yankees had arrived for spring training, and so had he. The creation of the expansion New York Mets had forced The New York Post and other dailies to send a second writer to Florida. It was a plum assignment, a badge of honor among sportswriters, a quantum leap up from the NBA. On his first morning in the Florida sun, Koppett looked around. Could this really be late February? Where is the snow? Where are the Knicks?

  To the last question Koppett knew the answer: last place. He’d predicted as much in The Post before the season opener. Even with their overnight remaking, a new coach and a fifty percent roster turnover, the Knicks faced “the bleakest outlook in their history,” Koppett wrote. “Nothing indicates sufficient strengthening to make up 17 games on Syracuse.” If the Knicks made the playoffs, Koppett wrote, “It would roughly astonish everyone in the NBA.”

  Koppett had covered the Knicks for most of their sixteen-year history, initially as a stringer in 1946 chronicling the Basketball Association of America for The New York Herald-Tribune and then on staff for The Post. He had watched the downward spiral of the Knickerbockers, a name that originated in the 1600s with the Dutch settlers in the area and the trousers they wore rolled up just below the knees. Attendance at Knicks games in 1961–62 fell twenty percent, to 8,000 per game, the lowest such figure in franchise history, which meant nearly 10,000 empty seats at the Garden. Koppett had seen the team’s more successful years in the early 1950s. But even in those successful days, to make room for bigger ticket events like the Ice Capades or the circus, team president Ned Irish pushed the Knicks out of the Garden and into the 69th Regiment Armory. Not that Koppett had criticized Irish for that. Irish, after all, had been the originator of the college basketball doubleheader at the Garden, a brilliant idea during the Depression that gave customers real value for their money: three hours of entertainment, same as a night at the movies or a baseball game. That had been a problem for the NBA in its earliest years. Basketball fans had grown accustomed to seeing two games, not just one, and so doubleheaders became common in the NBA; on those nights, half the league was in the same building. (NBA players liked the Garden doubleheaders; afterwards, twenty players or more gathered at an Eighth Avenue tavern called the Everglades, leaving bags from four different teams in a pile by the bar.)

  Koppett had seen the Knicks dissolve in the late 1950s under coaches Vince Boryla, and Fuzzy Levane, and Braun. Now it was Eddie Donovan’s turn. Koppett liked Donovan, the thirty-eight-year-old coach, though it seemed hardly anyone in New York watched the Knickerbockers anymore. There was no radio coverage for most Knicks road games. WINS Radio, with Les Keiter handling play-by-play, couldn’t secure a sponsor. The Knicks’ performance hadn’t helped: a losing record against every team in the league, even the expansion Chicago Packers. “Did the Knicks set any records this year?” a kid at a summer camp would ask Johnny Green. The Knicks forward looked at Sam Stith and Willie Naulls, smiled, and replied, “No, but a lot of people set records against us.”

  The New York press treated the Knicks with indifference or sarcasm. Columnists such as Red Smith of The Herald-Tribune and Arthur Daley of The Times and Jimmy Powers of The Daily News preferred football, boxing, baseball, dog shows … anything but professional basketball. Powers referred to pro basketball’s big men as “freakish” or “praying mantis types.” Red Smith’s boss at The Herald-Trib, Stanley Woodward, a bloated six-foot-four press-box legend who wore thick-lensed glasses and had played football at Amherst while studying Latin and Greek, considered basketball a necessary evil. “I have strong reservations,” Woodward said, “about the masculinity of any man who plays the game in short pants.” Of course, Koppett knew that his own paper, The Post, an afternoon tabloid, was important to the NBA. The Post had a liberal Jewish readership and basketball, a city game, remained popular with Jews; in the century’s first decades, immigrant Jews in New York City had been drawn to the gritty game (as well as boxing) and produced many of basketball’s earliest star players.

  One of the Knicks’ biggest problems over the years had been the college draft. Jerry Izenberg, covering for The New York Herald-Tribune, had noticed that each player the Knicks selected had some physical deficiency. But the Knicks’ party line usually went like this: “Yeah, Johnny Green is only six-foot-five, but he plays like he’s six-eight.” Or: “Yeah, Cleveland Buckner is skinny, but he plays like he’s 230 pounds.” So Izenberg sidled up to Ned Irish in 1961 and asked, “Ned, is it possible for the Knicks to draft somebody who is six-seven instead of someone who plays like he’s six-seven?”

  What these Knicks had, to their credit, were three members of the 1961–62 NBA all-star team: Johnny Green, Naulls, and Guerin, that is, a jumper, a shooter, and a fiery leader. To Hershey, the Knickerbockers would bring five black players, the most (along with expansion Chicago) of any team in the league—three starters (Naulls, Green, and guard Al Butler) plus Buckner and Stith. At the team’s first practice in training camp, Donovan had gathered his team and then pointed to Guerin and Naulls, saying, “You’ve been around longer than I have. I’m going to rely on you two guys to help me out.” Stith heard this and thought it a mistake, a sign of Donovan’s inexperience; playing for Donovan at St. Bonaventure, Stith had never heard him show such softness. Between them, Guerin and Naulls dominated the Knicks offense, combining for nearly fifty shots a game. Green, an extraordinary leaper whose primary job was rebounding, produced sixteen points and thirteen rebounds a game. Occasionally, Green grabbed Guerin’s shots from above the rim and dropped them into the basket—which was good for the Knicks but irritated Guerin, who was credited with a missed shot on such plays. Guerin reciprocated by passing the ball—selectively. “A lot of times you would be open,” Green would say years later, “and Richie wouldn’t pass the ball in close to the basket. He was having a great year and a lot of times he’d be selfish with the ball because he was trying to feather his own bed.” A long-simmering tension between the two all-star players bubbled over in a locker room fight. Green, a former Marine himself, lunged at Guerin and threw him to the floor. Startled Knicks players, who had never seen the easygoing Green so enraged, pulled him from Guerin, whose face reddened with fury. Donovan was in shock. “This is not to leave the dressing room,” Donovan warned his players. Later that night Guerin let bygones be bygones, calling to Green, “What’s the matter? You’re not playing cards with us tonight?” Green replied, “I’ll be right there,” and he joined the card game in progress.

  Now, at 10:00 in the morning in Fort Lauderdale, a Cadillac convertible delivered Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris. The New York sportswriters quickly toweled off. Maris was their big story. He had hit sixty-one home runs the
previous year to break Babe Ruth’s single-season record. Unsigned for the new season, Maris sought a raise from $29,000 a year to $80,000, or $2,000 less than Mantle. Only two other Yankees in history had ever earned so much, Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth.

  The writers crowded Maris: “What’s doin’, Rog?”

  Maris told Koppett and the others he had reached an agreement and would sign his Yankees contract in a few hours. To the morning papers, this news would have to wait until tomorrow. But The New York Post was alive with editions yet to come at 11:00 A.M., 1:00 P.M., and 3:00 P.M.

  Koppett retreated to his room at once to phone his sports editor, Ike Gellis. He broke the news. Rog would sign for $72,000.

  Koppett considered his great fortune. Here it was only 10:30 in the morning, the sun was shining, he’d already talked to Rog, Mick, and Whitey, and his news story for the day was done. The swimming pool awaited him. This was the big time. No snow, no half-empty arenas, no hard-earned story of his buried next to the tire ads. The Knickerbockers’ record was 27–45. Last place, still.

  No wonder none of the New York papers cared enough to send a writer to the game in Hershey.

  Two days before Hershey, Imhoff stared into the waters of Jamaica Bay as the Knicks took off on American Airlines Flight 51 from New York’s Idlewild Airport en route for Chicago.