Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Below, Imhoff saw the crash site where workers searched for bodies. Only a day before, an American Airlines jet had crashed into the shallow waters. Ninety-five people were killed, and more than $60,000 floated in the Atlantic. One of Dwight Eisenhower’s friends, W. Alton “Pete” Jones, a seventy-year-old oilman, was a passenger headed for a fishing trip with Ike. Apparently, Jones liked to have cash available on trips. In his pocket he carried $16,500, including a $10,000 bill; his briefcase held another $46,000, wrapped in plastic. Now, as the Knicks’ plane banked in the sky, almost instinctively Imhoff leaned left, as if to help lift the plane away from the tragedy below.

  With eight games remaining, this had not been the season Imhoff hoped for. Two days earlier, in Philadelphia, Guerin had poured in fifty points against the Warriors and the Knicks won only their second road game in twenty-two attempts. Phil Jordon had been thrown out of that game by referee Norm Drucker for abusive language (not uncharacteristic for Jordon), and Imhoff once again had fouled out. In the fourth quarter of that game, with the Warriors too far behind to catch up, Chamberlain was matched against Buckner and scored twenty-eight points, an NBA record for most points in a quarter. The Dipper’s points were meaningless, though later they would be seen as a portent of Hershey. Chamberlain finished with sixty-seven points. Poor Cleveland, Imhoff thought as he watched that day from the bench. Buckner was so thin he nearly disappeared from sight when he turned sideways. At a disadvantage of five inches in height and fifty pounds in weight against the Dipper, Buckner had seemed a thin reed snapped by gale force winds. The Knicks returned home to the Garden the next day to play Syracuse, whereupon they squandered a sixteen-point lead and lost.

  Imhoff and Jordon had failed to solidify the Knicks center position. It only made matters worse that they played for an Eastern Division team, meaning they were matched against Russell and Chamberlain a combined twenty-four times a season. The Knicks scout, Red Holzman, had planned to select Walt Bellamy with the first pick in the 1961 draft, but that pick was awarded by the league to the Chicago expansion team and with it went Bellamy.

  The playing styles and personalities of Imhoff and Jordon could not have been more different. A Native American from the state of Washington, Jordon was in his sixth NBA season. He had not yet lasted with the same team for consecutive full seasons. Though well-liked by teammates, he was odd, quirky, and often practiced without energy or purpose. He’d bounced from the Knicks to Detroit to Cincinnati and back to the Knicks, lasting about a year and a half at each stop. Earlier he’d played at Whitworth College in Spokane but only after the local Spokane Kiwanis Club had granted his widowed mother a place to live as part of its Homes for Widowed Mothers program; naturally, this generated a recruiting controversy. (Jordon hadn’t lasted long at Whitworth, either.) “Like a tall pencil in shoes,” is how the broadcaster Les Keiter described him. Jordon brought to the NBA in 1956 a delicate outside shooting touch, especially for a six-foot-ten player, and a keen devotion to his nightlife. Often he went out on the town after road games and his teammates wouldn’t see him again until the next morning at the airport. His favorite late-night friendships were with Guerin and Butcher. The rookie Butcher didn’t think Jordon took basketball seriously enough. “If I don’t play, I don’t care,” Butcher heard Jordon say.

  Bleary-eyed, the Knicks gathered in the lobby of the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago at 6:30 A.M. on Thursday, March 1. Guerin’s thirty-four points had carried the previous night in a neutral-court victory over Detroit. Imhoff had played evenly against Walter Dukes as Jordon, complaining of a sore shoulder, did not play. The Knicks later watched from the crowd as the Dipper mauled Bellamy for sixty-one points in the second game of the double-header. Now they would fly to Pittsburgh and catch a connecting flight to Harrisburg. The season seemed interminable. Even Bob Cousy of the first-place Celtics complained: “The last two months of the National Basketball Association regular season were practically a waste of time.” Cousy estimated that, by the end of the playoffs, his Celtics would have played 116 games, including exhibitions. “I’m told it figures out to four and a half games a week and sixty thousand miles of travel, an endless procession of hotel rooms and one-night stands. That’s not basketball. It’s vaudeville,” Cousy said. “I don’t believe anyone—owner, player or fan—will argue that the caliber of play in the NBA in March is equal to that of November or December…. At the finish there’s not much more to the game than running up and down the court and shooting. Defenses are out of gas.” Cousy estimated that thirty percent of NBA players were injured. “The last time I noticed Syracuse was dressing seven men. Seven out of eleven.” Cousy had heard complaints that scores now were too high in the NBA. “The contention is that the big men who can reach the basket standing flat-footed are squeezing the little men out (which they are) and taking the premium off the field goal (also true), and the fan is sick of huge scores and the indefensible dunk shot. Well, first of all you can’t legislate against the seven-footer. It’s bad enough that he has to go through life with everybody staring at him. He should not be discriminated against in his chosen field, too. If you raise the baskets he will still be twelve inches closer than the six-footer.” Cousy offered two solutions: Shorten the NBA schedule and reemphasize defense. “The good defensive player is lost today under the deluge of points, points, points,” he wrote. “He gets little credit.”

  In Harrisburg, the Knicks set up at the Hotel Penn Harris, a fine and stately place not far from the state capitol. Though scheduled to room with Butcher, Jordon spent Thursday afternoon and early evening in guard Sam Stith’s hotel room. He brought a case of beer with him. Jordon knew that Stith’s wife was expecting their first child at any moment. “I’m staying right here,” Jordon said, beer in hand, “until that baby of yours is born.” He meant it, too. The hours and the beers passed in Sam Stith’s room, Jordon drinking alone happily, occasionally picking up Stith’s phone and dialing his buddy Guerin just to inquire, “Richie, how ya doin’?” Stith mostly listened to Jordon; this was only his first year with the Knicks so Stith thought it best to keep quiet, though he did have a passing thought of no small concern: What if Donovan walks in and sees all of this beer?

  His beer done at last, Jordon left Stith’s room and spent a late night with Butcher in Harrisburg. It made the next day, Friday, March 2, that much more difficult for Jordon. From behind the closed bathroom door in their hotel room, Butcher heard Jordon groaning and vomiting. He asked Butcher to get Pepto-Bismol to help soothe his stomach. Butcher stopped at a nearby pharmacy to get it. As the Knicks bus prepared to leave for Hershey, Jordon said to Butcher from behind the bathroom door, “Butch, tell them I can’t go. I’ve got to stay here.”

  And that’s how it happened that the Dipper was Darrall Imhoff’s to cover on March 2 in Hershey.

  CHAPTER 10

  Third Quarter

  HERE NOW WAS A TEMPO that mirrored Willie Naulls’s own preferred style of play: “Run, jump, beat the ball down, and get it on.” For both the Warriors and the Knicks in the third quarter, baskets came in bunches, a combined eighty-four points, the game’s pace caffeinated and at times breakneck. The Zink was getting a workout on the microphone—if only Gotty had paid him by the syllable. The Zink called out on his p.a. system, “Air-uh-zun” and “Gair-un” and “Nauuuuullsss” and—ten times in the third quarter alone, with a noticeable increase in pitch—“Chaaaam-ber-lain!” It was just as Bob Cousy had said: By March, the last month of a long NBA season, there’s not much more to the game than running up and down the court and shooting. Defenses are out of gas. For the Knickerbockers, Guerin created his own opportunities, while Naulls needed to be more inventive, using picks and screens set by forward Dave Budd, Buckner, or Al Butler. Naulls was piling up his points on free throws. When Naulls first joined the Knicks in 1956, he had despised the team’s slow, walk-up style of give-and-go plays and two-handed set shots. It was tortuous, confining. Not like this.

  Only the Dipper thought to o
ccasionally slow down the game’s pace, and he had his reasons. Pulling down rebounds on the defensive end, Chamberlain did not look to start fast breaks. Instead, he shimmied his body to bump away the Knicks as he held the ball aloft. Then, and only then, did he hand it to one of his guards, Attles, Rodgers, or Larese. His guards then waited for the Dipper to get down the court. This was not a new strategy for the Warriors. This was often their way. To the Celtics’ Red Auerbach, Chamberlain’s refusal to whip the ball down the court after a rebound proved that he was not, like Bill Russell, a true team player. Hogwash, Frank McGuire thought. In a calculated effort, McGuire let the Dipper be the Dipper.

  Now, from the free-throw line Chamberlain shot underhanded. He bent low, his knees spread wide—his least athletic move on the court, like a grown-up trying to sit in a kindergartener’s small chair. The flimsy rim vibrated as it jiggled: He made the free throw. The Zink announced to the crowd that the Dipper had fifty points. The Knicks’ Jumpin’ Johnny Green didn’t need to hear it. Green felt it, like the earth moving. No matter how hard the Knicks tried to slow Chamberlain, they could not do it. They met him in force above the free-throw line, throwing guards and the weak-side forward into the mix to help Buckner and Dave Budd. They banged on Chamberlain and pulled on him. Attles, Meschery, and Rodgers kept lobbing the ball to him. If the Dipper couldn’t get to his favored position, he moved to the right side of the basket or passed the ball back outside and burrowed deeper into the Knicks defense, until finally he got to his preferred position, on the left side, down low: home. Then the ball came back to him. Overmatched, the Knicks seemed in full retreat.

  Chamberlain once dribbled the ball down the court. From the Knicks bench, reserve guard Sam Stith shielded his eyes. Chamberlain dribbled the ball so high, Stith thought it made for an easy steal, but the Knicks were backpedaling. Stith cast a look at Eddie Donovan, his coach, sitting at the distant end of the bench. Donovan bit his lip, a nervous tic Stith well knew from their years together at St. Bonaventure. Angry, embarrassed, and flabbergasted, Donovan was enduring an uncoachable night. Without weapons, what could he do? Stith wished the game would end now, in the third quarter. Just get us on the bus and gone.

  At the WCAU Radio table, Bill Campbell seemed less than enthralled by what was transpiring on the court. Campbell didn’t say what he was thinking, that the last-place Knicks were terrible. His statistician, Toby Deluca, repeatedly slid pieces of paper to him, game facts and biographical morsels, such as “Imhoff won a gold medal for the 1960 U.S. Olympic team.” Deluca was music director at WFIL Radio in Philadelphia—Dick Clark’s American Bandstand desk was in his station’s library—and he’d watched Chamberlain sing in the studio on Bandstand a couple winters before. “A gimmick,” Deluca called it. “Schlock.” Watching him on the court now, though, Deluca was awed. This was total domination. On his score sheet, Chamberlain’s points, written in black ink, crossed over into the Guy Rodgers column. So Deluca pulled out a different pen to change Rodgers’s points into red ink. He slid another tidbit to Campbell: “Chamberlain has made fourteen of fifteen free throws tonight.” What? Campbell gave a quizzical look at his statistician, as if to say, Can this be right?

  There was, of course, a good explanation for Chamberlain’s fine free-throw shooting, more than just one of those nights. After all, he’d had two of those nights at the Hershey Sports Arena already this season. In victories over the Lakers and Hawks at the arena, Chamberlain had made a combined twenty-seven of thirty-eight free throws, nearly seventy-two percent. He would make all eight free throws in this third quarter, which meant twenty-one for twenty-two overall. How does a sixty percent free-throw shooter throughout the season convert ninety-five percent on a night in Hershey? The Knicks’ Donnie Butcher figured it had to be those flimsy rims, same as the ones he’d seen in Kentucky coal mining towns, weakened from years of local kids showing off by hanging from them. To Tom Gola, listening on radio at his neighbor’s house in Philadelphia, the Hershey arena floor was bad enough—one of the Lakers had broken through it in December when several boards gave way beneath him—but the rims in Hershey were, well, like magnets. Basketballs typically ricocheted off tight baskets, but these rims weren’t tight. They were old, soft, and forgiving; to put the ball near the hoop in Hershey meant, with a good roll, it was apt to fall in. Both teams were easily exceeding their customary shooting accuracy: the Warriors were converting nearly fifty-five percent of their field goal attempts, the Knicks forty-eight percent.

  Seated with a few of his buddies down near the court, Kerry Ryman knew exactly why Hershey’s rims had grown flimsy. Donnie Butcher had it just right. When the circus came to Hershey each year, clowns used red, varnished springboards as part of their act. Ryman and his friends had borrowed those springboards a few times. They used them to slam dunk balls into the baskets that had been pushed to the side of the arena, the same baskets being used now by the Warriors and Knicks. With long running starts and the benefit of the clowns’ springboards, Ryman and his friends rose through the air, feeling as tall as Wilt Chamberlain. Trouble was, they were only five-foot-four, or thereabouts, and needed to hang from the rim after each dunk in order to gain their balance before falling catlike to the floor. After a while, arena workers chased them away. Ryman and friends figured those rims were old and bent, anyway. When they got another opportunity with those springboards, they would do it again.

  The game offered smaller moments and images that, even without the Dipper, would’ve given fans in the Hershey arena their two dollars and fifty cents’ worth: Jumpin’ Johnny Green (only six-foot-five) rising for a rebound, his wrist fully above the rim; the old pro Paul Arizin, head faking and then driving for a one-handed runner; Sweetcakes Naulls releasing jump shots from eighteen to twenty feet, classically elegant; Rodgers, a whirling sensation, leading the fast break as stylistically as Bob Cousy ever did; and Leatherneck Guerin, without the injured Gola in his way, backing the smaller Attles into the lane, an executioner at work. The game in Hershey straddled two NBA eras with isolated images of the game’s past and future. Perhaps as an offering to basketball traditionalists, Guerin and the Warriors’ Ed Conlin attempted a few set shots.

  The metallic rat-a-tat-tat at the press table came from Harvey Pollack’s Olivetti manual typewriter. Like his Olivetti, Pollack was ink stained and indefatigable. Some called him the Octopus because he always seemed to be working eight jobs simultaneously; Pollack mailed Christmas cards each year that featured an Octopus on the cover, each of its arms identified by one of Pollack’s jobs. Pollack worked full-time for the city of Philadelphia’s recreation department, cranking out news releases each time a new park, playground, ice rink, or swimming pool was built or dedicated. Four blocks away, Pollack also worked part-time for Gotty as the Warriors’ publicist and game statistician. Since few in the media seemed to care about the game in Hershey, Pollack had added three more jobs to his list on this night: In the newsman’s parlance, he served as a stringer for two national wire services, the United Press (his usual account) and the Associated Press (short-handed on this night), and also for his city’s leading morning newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose own beat man, John Webster, didn’t make the trip.

  To Hershey, Pollack had brought his trusted Olivetti, a ditto machine (to make purplish-red copies of statistics), and his fifteen-year-old son, Ron, who during the game ran his father’s typed The Inquirer. Of course, Harvey Pollack barely had time to type. Watching the game intently, he recorded the official statistics and at each timeout banged out a few paragraphs on his typewriter. On this night, the Octopus was more like a centipede. Ron Pollack kept a running score for his father, handwriting on yellow Western Union The Philadelphia Inquirer sports desk was tuned in to Bill Campbell on WCAU because Harvey Pollack was handed a note from The Inquirer during the third quarter: “Please detail for us every field goal that Wilt gets.” I need this like I need a hole in the head, Harvey Pollack thought. Now the Dipper reached sixty points. The NBA�
�s all-time single-game record of seventy-eight points—his own, set in the triple overtime loss to the Lakers—was within reach.

  Pollack was cocksure, pugnacious, and very good at his work, though Chamberlain wasn’t so sure. He’d complained once to Gotty that Pollack undercounted his rebounds. One night Gotty asked Vince Miller, Chamberlain’s childhood friend, now a high school teacher and part-time Warriors scout, to keep track of the Dipper’s rebounds. When the game ended, Gotty privately asked Miller and Pollack how many rebounds they’d awarded Chamberlain. Then he approached his star. “Wilt, whose number do you want, Harvey’s or Vince’s?” Without hesitation, he said he wanted his friend’s. Gotty said, “Okay, but Harvey gave you more rebounds than Vince.” That was the last time Chamberlain ever questioned Harvey Pollack.

  A timeout. Pollack’s Olivetti sang: rat-a-tat-tat, a lonely journalistic tune on this night. No New York beat writers had shown up. Only two Philly sportswriters attended the game: Jack Kiser from The Daily News and Jim Heffernan from The Evening Bulletin, and they brought no typewriters since their deadlines were much later; they wouldn’t write until they returned to Philadelphia. Reporters from local papers such as The Lebanon Daily News and The Harrisburg Patriot would dictate stories by phone. After the game, Pollack would have many chores and little time. He would file a lead paragraph to The Inquirer by way of Western Union, then add up game statistics and crosscheck them with the official scorer, Dave Richter, and fill out the official box score. Then he would go to the Warriors locker room to facilitate postgame interviews. Next he would use a pay phone to call the United Press, dictating a story off the top of his head; his son then would replace him on the line to provide the box score information as Pollack moved over to another pay phone to dictate a different lead to the Associated Press. Then, after everyone had left, Pollack would return to his Olivetti to type a new story for The Inquirer’s later editions. A juggling act is what it was, every tentacle of the Octopus at work.