Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Bill Campbell didn’t understand why Frank McGuire never removed Wilt Chamberlain from games. Why play a big man forty-eight minutes every night, even when you’re winning by twenty points with two minutes left? Campbell figured that Gotty or McGuire had cut a deal with the Dipper before the season: If they wanted him to break scoring records, certainly he would score more points on the court than on the bench. Chamberlain had missed only eight minutes, thirty-three seconds of play during the season’s first seventy-five games. He missed that entire time against the Lakers thanks to referee Norm Drucker. Chamberlain so vigorously argued a call that he earned three technical fouls and an ejection. The harangue was a rarity, Drucker knew, because the Dipper respected referees. (By the end of the eighty-game regular season, Chamberlain had committed just 123 fouls, an average of one and half per game.) As lead official, Drucker reported the incident in Los Angeles in a telegram to President Maurice Podoloff at NBA headquarters in the Empire State Building. Drucker explained that fellow referee Earl Strom gave Chamberlain a technical. “A t this point,” Drucker wrote, “Mr. Strom informed me that Chamberlain had made reference to Earl Strom’s old mother.” He added, “Before the foul was shot, Chamberlain yelled at Strom that he must be gambling on the game. This was in earshot of all the front row spectators. I immediately applied another technical.” Drucker and Strom recommended a $300 fine for the Dipper; Podoloff settled at $150.

  Bill Campbell knew there was no chance the Dipper was coming out of this game. When Chamberlain hit sixty points, Campbell wondered how high this might go. His own boyhood romance with radio had led him here. In 1937, he’d heard Ted Husing broadcast the remarkable five-set Davis Cup tennis final between the American Don Budge and Germany’s Baron Gottfried von Cramm. Husing, sitting too close to the court, had distracted the players with his call. He agreed to speak more quietly. Listening from his father’s Buick as they drove through Philadelphia, Campbell heard Husing whispering—whispering for an hour and a half. It was chilling, mesmerizing. It was so dramatic that when he arrived home, Campbell brushed aside his father, saying, “Not now, Dad,” and ran into the living room to turn on the radio. Husing’s fine work merely reinforced Campbell’s desire to enter the radio business. A summer intern in 1940, Campbell heard a dreadful radio call of a rowing race between two lifeguards in Atlantic City. His boss at the radio station asked if he could have done better. Campbell said yes and was put to a test in the studio. “Describe this room,” his boss said. Campbell did his best, giving small details about the curtains, the chair, and the table and even the microphone he was using. He got the job.

  Campbell later moved on to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he recreated minor league baseball games on radio. He read the pitch-by-pitch recap on the Western Union wire and then described games as if he were actually there. He moved on to WCAU Radio in Philadelphia, where in October 1948 he interviewed baseball legend Connie Mack:

  “This is Bill Campbell speaking to you live from the ballroom of the Warwick Hotel in downtown Philadelphia where tonight the Reciprocity Club of Philadelphia is honoring Mister Connie Mack, celebrating the completion of Mister Mack’s 48th season as a manager of the Philadelphia Athletics…. First of all let me paint a picture of this magnificent ballroom for you, ladies and gentlemen….” He introduced Mack: “It’s awfully good to see you, Mister Baseball.” Connie Mack replied, “Why, it’s just a great pleasure to be here.”

  Campbell was the Warriors play-by-play broadcaster during the middle 1950s and on road trips roomed (on Gotty’s tab) with Coach George Senesky, a calm, pragmatic man. Both Senesky and Campbell dreaded Gotty’s late-night calls but came to expect them, especially after defeats. Once, Senesky handed over the phone, saying, “Gotty wants to talk to you, too.” That night the Hawks’ Bob Pettit missed several free throws in the game, and Campbell had told his WCAU listeners, including Gotty, “Pettit, usually a very, very good foul shooter, is off his speed tonight.” Pettit made the next free throw. So now Gotty was on the phone, saying, angrily, “What did you have to say that for? If you’d kept your mouth shut, he would’ve missed that one, too!” Campbell brushed it off. That was just Gotty. What a piece of work.

  When the players of this game had grown old and gray, they would yet light up in conversation remembering the way the young Dipper ran the floor on a fast break. They would speak about it with a hushed reverence, as if they’d seen something otherworldly, like aged Plains Indians recalling their first sight of the steam locomotive. Guy Rodgers would remember playing against the Dipper in practices, telling a writer, “You’ll never know what it looked like to be backpedaling and see Wilt Chamberlain fill the lane.” Attles, sitting back in his office chair decades later, would remember the cadence of the Dipper’s breath at full throttle, like the huff-and-puff of a mighty train, and that the Dipper never ran on the break too far to the outside and that, “You better get out of his way otherwise you are going be run over.” Ruklick would remember that the Dipper accelerated and screeched to a halt like no one of his size any of the Warriors had ever seen and that as the Dipper raced down court on the fast break he made it seem so effortless, never gritting his teeth or clenching a fist or bowing his head to get a jump start. More than once in Hershey, it happened like this: Rodgers accepting the outlet pass and dribbling to the middle, Attles racing in quick little steps to his left, and the Dipper to his right covering eight feet of hardwood with each elongated stride. On the fast break, he was exquisite to watch—in the mind’s eye, the other players on the court dissolved around him. The Dipper made the court seem shorter, and he made it his. “It was as if he were an enlarged version of a smaller guy,” Ruklick would say, still marveling at the memory, “as if when he thundered through a gaggle of players he was a superimposition of disproportionate dimensions on them.” Among those precious few signature images that qualify among the defining best in NBA history—Russell’s shot block, Cousy’s dribbling, Jabbar’s sky hook, Erving’s swooping dunk, Magic’s no-look pass, Jordan’s midair majesty—is the Dipper, at twenty-five, out on the right, running the floor.

  In the winter of 1962, as Chamberlain moved toward Hershey, the writer John McPhee watched eighteen-year-old Bill Bradley play for Princeton’s freshman basketball team for the first time. He loved the way Bradley played the game, moving without the ball with a grace and simplicity, no extraneous motion, always anticipating his next move. In his book A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee wrote:

  My own feeling for basketball had faded almost to nothing over the years because the game seemed to me to have lost its balance, as players became taller and more powerful, and scores increased until it was rare when a professional team hit less than a hundred points, win or lose; it impressed me as a glut of scoring, with few patterns of attack and almost no defense any more. The players, in a sense, had gotten better than the game, and the game had become uninteresting. Moreover, it attracted exhibitionists who seemed to be more intent on amazing a crowd with aimless prestidigitation than with advancing their team by giving a sound performance…. After watching Bradley play several times, even when he was eighteen, it seemed to me that I had been watching all the possibilities of the game that I had ever imagined, and then some. His play was integral. There was nothing missing. He not only worked hard on defense, for example, he worked hard on defense when the other team was hopelessly beaten. He did all kinds of things he didn’t have to do simply because those were the dimensions of the game.

  If Bill Bradley had mastered the dimensions of basketball as it once was, Wilt Chamberlain mastered the dimensions of the new game that would replace it. What Chamberlain was doing to the old game was much like what Elvis Presley had done to traditional American popular music. He didn’t destroy it; he simply placed it in a new context. The old pro game was more regimented and patterned, much like the lives of the men who played it. The new game was faster, more spontaneous and inventive. It was played increasingly above the rim and with a more luminous athleticis
m. Wilt Chamberlain scored more points in 1961–62 than the entire Philadelphia Warriors team, a division winner, scored during the 1947–48 season. Many basketball fans could not identify with the new game. In the new game they could not see themselves. Players were taller—too tall, as some fans saw it—and much faster, and many of the greatest stars were black, a breakthrough that was part of a larger societal revolution.

  The advances made by African-Americans in the NBA were swift and stunning: For the first time, in 1961–62, the league’s four highest scoring averages were recorded by black players (Chamberlain, Baylor, Bellamy, Robertson). Since Mikan, and before, basketball big men had been called pituitary freaks or glandular goons, but in some of the new criticism there was racial coding, as well. There were suggestions that the new NBA stars didn’t appreciate or understand the game, its patterns, and its pure intangible qualities. The new stars were showboats, stars only because of physical advantages, which were unearned and unfair. It was so unlike baseball. “Baseball’s time is seamless and invisible,” Roger Angell would write, “a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors.” The Dipper and others were changing the speed and the geometry of their game.

  The criticism of the new game came from predictable sources—the traditionalists, those who were being one-upped or replaced; no one had ever accused their game of being electrifying. They resisted the new game for its individualism, its blackness. The new game had been incubating for years on urban asphalt, including each summer at the Rucker Tournament in Harlem. There, black players from college and the NBA and street legends whose careers had ended prematurely played in the park on outdoor courts, fenced in, local fans packed tight, with some watching from perches in nearby trees. By design, the Rucker game was a cultural spectacle, the talent kaleidoscopic, all bravado and strut, slam dunks and crossover dribbles that raised the crowd to near hysteria.

  In the summer of 1962, a team from Brooklyn would play a team from New York in a celebrated Rucker game. Brooklyn featured the Hawk (Connie Hawkins), the Czar (guard Eddie Simmons, who was said to rule the court), Big Bells (Walt Bellamy), and the jumper Jackie Jackson (who was said to have once plucked a half-dollar from the top of a backboard, though Wilt wondered aloud, “Well, who put the half dollar up there?”). In addition to Chamberlain, the New York team included Celtic Satch Sanders and the former Knick Cal Ramsey. The Hawk showed up late, a rumble passing through the crowd as he appeared, the Czar gently leading him by the hand, saying, “Let’s go, baby!” Early in the game, Brooklyn’s Jackie Jackson performed a double-pump dunk as Wilt trailed the play, sending the crowd into a delirium. Connie Hawkins, a stylistic genius at work, scored on a finger-roll over Wilt. Then the Dipper awoke. He blocked Hawkins’s next shot and Dipper-dunked, again and again and again. Did the Dipper make dunks on eight consecutive possessions or was it nine? The last, he slammed with such force the ball bounced over the eight-foot fence, which stopped the game until that ball—the only ball—could be retrieved. Fans held their heads in disbelief and shouted as the Dipper jogged slowly down the asphalt, nodding, still king of the court.

  Sports columnist Sandy Grady, rising to Chamberlain’s defense six weeks before Hershey, wrote in The Evening Bulletin, “To the anti-basketball skeptic, Chamberlain’s massive scoring may be ridiculous, but it is no more outlandish than Roger Maris’s homer orgy.” But on the day before the hundred-point game, Temple University Coach Harry Litwack, at the weekly Basketball Writers Club luncheon in Philadelphia, predicted baskets soon would be raised above the ten-foot level in the colleges and perhaps in the NBA, too. Litwack hated to see a team work hard and patiently for a basket and then, at the other end, “some goon stands under the basket and taps in a missed shot and that’s two points, too. I never thought that was fair.”

  When he wasn’t hearing about his unfair height advantage, Chamberlain was hearing, ad nauseam, about Bill Russell. On the night of the hundred-point game, Russell and his Boston Celtics were playing, and losing, in St. Louis. Yet Russell’s spirit loomed in the Hershey arena as it loomed wherever Chamberlain played. No matter how superior Chamberlain’s individual scoring achievements during his third season, he was reminded constantly of how Bill Russell, at six-foot-ten, the greatest shot-blocker and defender in basketball history, had played five seasons and already won four NBA titles, and how Bill Russell once had won an NCAA title at the University of San Francisco and an Olympic Gold medal in Melbourne, Australia, and an NBA title … all within thirteen months. Bill Russell was considered the consummate teammate, the game’s greatest winner. His style of play harkened to the game McPhee revered: integral. While Chamberlain ferociously swatted opponents’ shots ten rows into the grandstands, Russell blocked shots and somehow managed to keep the ball on the court in hopes of starting a fast break. That was Russell—all for the team.

  To see them side-by-side—Chamberlain was nearly four inches taller, forty pounds heavier—made Russell appear the underdog, a ridiculous notion the Celtic center gladly embraced. Of course, Russell had five teammates in 1961–62 who one day would join him in the Hall of Fame while Chamberlain had just two (Arizin and Gola). In Red Auerbach, Russell also had the game’s superior coach and game tactician. “I respect Russell and he’s my friend,” Chamberlain said in December 1961. “But people don’t understand one fact—he’s with Boston, I’m with Philadelphia. He’s got the greatest team in basketball around him. That’s not my opinion, but fact. Bill doesn’t have to carry a scoring load. If he doesn’t score a point, Boston can win. Bill’s out there to play defense and rebound. Now when I go on the floor for a game, I know I’ve got to hit forty points or so, or this team is in trouble. I must score—understand? After that I play defense and get the ball off the boards. I try to do them all, best I can, but scoring comes first. If I were with Boston, maybe I would be a different player. I don’t know. Maybe it’s lucky that Russell and I are where we are, but I wish people would understand that our jobs are quite different.”

  Auerbach derived great pleasure in publicly needling Chamberlain—it seemed Auerbach’s favorite pastime—suggesting that the Warriors center cared not about winning, only his own statistics, and also that he didn’t always play hard, especially on defense. (The latter criticism was true, but could be easily explained: the Dipper in 1961–62 played an unheard-of 3,882 minutes, averaging forty-eight and a half minutes per game, including overtimes. Playing all those minutes every night, it would’ve been impossible for a seven-foot-one center to go full bore at every moment.) At times during the season, even as the Celtics won eight of twelve games against Philadelphia, Chamberlain dominated Russell, overpowering him with his strength. Russell was, at best, an ordinary shooter, making just forty-four percent of his shots, most from in close. Chamberlain could have skipped the final forty-four games of the 1961–62 season and still outscored Russell; he scored more points in thirty-six games than Russell did in eighty. It is true that Russell limited him to roughly a forty-point average in head-to-head meetings in 1961–62, ten points below his season average, the league’s only center to limit him to less than thirty points in a game (twenty-eight and twenty-six points), the best defensive effort staged against the Dipper by any center or team (Chamberlain scored fifty-three and fifty points against Boston in two other games Russell missed due to injury). But, seen differently, it is also true that, in 1961–62, Chamberlain averaged nearly forty points a game against the greatest defensive center in history—an average that, alone, would have led the league in scoring.

  Russell was famous for his rebounding skill, yet Chamberlain outrebounded him during the season. In one game in November 1960, Chamberlain also had grabbed a league record fifty-five rebounds—against Russell. Chamberlain was chastised for playing forty-eight minutes every night in 1961–62, as was Frank McGuire for allowing it, yet Russell averaged forty-five minutes per game that season. Chamberlain was chastised for his sixty-one percent free-throw shooting
percentage, yet Russell made just fifty-nine percent of his free throws that season. Indeed, in their college days, Russell at USF and Chamberlain at Kansas, Coach Pete Newell of the University of California had learned the essence of both players: They conquered in their own unique ways. With his devastating shot-blocking skill, Russell put a trauma on Newell’s shooters that lasted several games. Russell didn’t block shots from merely one spot; he moved laterally in a wide arc, using his quick leap to block shots from behind or from the side. Newell discovered that his most confident shooters suffered nightmares during subsequent games, somehow imagining that Russell would emerge from the shadows to block their shots anew. In two games against Chamberlain and Kansas, Newell tried to be creative. He had seen other college teams gang up on Chamberlain, to no avail. Newell hoped Chamberlain would shoot his fade-away, rather than turn toward the basket, so he advised his own center, just six-foot-five, “Tell Wilt when he shoots that fall-away shot what a great shot it is. Tell him you want him to teach you that shot.” That’s what the Cal center did, but with only a limited payoff. With Wilt scoring twenty-three and nineteen points, Kansas won both games.

  The two cities, Philadelphia and Boston, founded as William Penn’s Quaker town and John Winthrop’s Puritan “city on a hill,” had developed a fierce rivalry through the generations. Chamberlain versus Russell fit neatly into this charged competition. Referee Norm Drucker, working Warriors-Celtics games, made sure never to stand near the visiting team’s bench during timeouts at the Boston Garden or Convention Hall for fear he’d get hit by eggs or coins thrown from the crowd. Gotty loved the city-to-city rivalry and especially the Chamberlain-Russell hyperbole. Whenever possible, Gotty stoked the embers of it. In the newspapers, he decried Russell for his criminal goaltending on defense while privately pulling Russell aside in the locker room to say, “I assume you’re not paying any attention to all that stuff about goaltending. It just helps to keep our seats filled and our flock growing.” Then Gotty went back out and howled some more.