Other times the boys created their own unique thrills. They carried nicknames such as Sandman, Spammer, Big Al (for Capone), and Bugs (for gangster Bugsy Moran). Ryman’s closest friends were the Damore brothers, Dave and Steve, a.k.a. Sandman and Bugs. They made quite a trio. Dave Damore, three years older than Ryman, was a smart-alecky, hard-nosed athlete, his younger brother, Steve, predictably unpredictable or, as the boys would say, “Bugs will do anything.”
Years later, Kerry Ryman would say, “We raised a little hell, but we raised good hell.”
From the rooftop of the Community Club, Kerry and Bugs once dropped a water balloon only slightly smaller than the Hindenburg. Five stories below, it struck a woman’s umbrella with such force it inverted the umbrella, sucking it upwards. The boys hid on the rooftop, howling, “That’s the biggest damned raindrop she ever saw!”
Tourists were their favorite prey. Standing on the bridge near the Acme grocery store across from the chocolate factory, they waited to see an out-of-town license plate. When a tourist’s car passed, one of Ryman’s buddies pushed another, who fell backward off the bridge, screaming. A watching tourist could not have known that the falling boy had landed only a few feet below the bridge—on top of an unseen freezer. Once, a tourist saw this, screeched his car to a stop, raced over to the bridge’s edge, and looked down, only to hear the boys’ laughter. The easiest marks, of course, were those picnic baskets left on Hershey Park tables by tourists who strolled off to the Tunnel of Love or Ferris wheel. Ryman and the scamps swept in and claimed a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a chicken leg, or maybe an apple.
To sneak into the Hershey Sports Arena and Hershey Stadium, the boys used their speed, ingenuity, and at least once, bolt cutters. No one saw them do it. In a hidden area at the football stadium, they snipped the chain-link fence, stepped through, tied back the fence so nothing appeared out of place, and merged with the crowd watching the Eagles play an exhibition game. If caught in the act, the consequences would be dire. The constables would turn them over to their fathers—and to their fathers’ leather belts—a predicament that was, to the boys, every bit as grim as what the pigs faced at the abattoir.
According to the 1960 U.S. Federal Census, among the more than 12,000 people living in Derry Township, which included Hershey, there were but six African-Americans. The only black man in Hershey known to Kerry Ryman was Ollie, the Community Club janitor, who years earlier had chauffeured for Ryman’s maternal grandfather, Leo Poorman, a Hershey butcher and local politician.
Being back in Hershey now reminded Timmy Brown and Clarence Peaks of the Philadelphia Eagles how uncomfortable and culturally isolated a black man could feel in the town. A night owl, once a nightclub singer with his own band, and friends with Philadelphia’s Fabian and Chubby Checker, Timmy Brown lamented Hershey’s social torpor. To him, that was even worse than the hardship of wearing eighteen pounds of football equipment in Hershey’s ninety-five-degree summer heat and humidity. So bored was Brown during the Eagles training camp in the summer of 1961, he saw El Cid in the Hershey Theater eleven times. He loved the movie’s end when the lifeless body of Charlton Heston’s character was placed atop a horse and carried into battle, his image scaring off the enemy. (Brown had started to honor El Cid during games, emerging from huddles and holding up his arm, bent at the elbow, in an L-shape. “You supposed to be the indestructible El Cid or something?” Packers linebacker Maxie Baughan asked him during one game. “Yeah,” Brown answered, “that’s right. I am indestructible!”) Hershey made Clarence Peaks uncomfortable, too, especially Martini’s. Peaks had the sense that blacks weren’t welcome at the bar, “kind of an unwritten rule.” After several summers of discomfort, Peaks decided to prove a point. He walked into Martini’s. There he saw Sonny Jurgensen and teammate Billy Barnes at a table, listening to a band. Peaks joined them and felt every eye in the room on him. But he wasn’t leaving, not yet. He stayed about thirty minutes. He felt self-conscious but proud. When he finally left, he was relieved. Clarence Peaks told himself, “There. That’s done.”
Wilt Chamberlain had an immodest desire to the perfectible. It was a classically American impulse, an ambition to greatness. The business titan Milton Hershey had a similar impulse. Hershey attempted to create a utopian town from chocolate, seeking his own symbolic perfection.
And so here, in M.S. Hershey’s neat, quiet, modest, well-run, paternalistic, virtually all-white company town, with its postwar vision of the good life and the American Dream, came a new vision of that Dream: Wilt Chamberlain blaring down Chocolate Avenue in a drop-top Cadillac, a black man flaunting his wealth in a way that fascinated and discomfited locals. The Dipper’s hundred-point game would create that same fascination for fans in Hershey who would come to see the Dipper play basketball as no one else could—they would get their money’s worth, and more—and create that same discomfort, distaste, and dissonance for Eddie Donovan and Richie Guerin and other custodians of the game’s hard-earned traditions.
A brief notice appeared in the Hershey newspaper: “Star performer for the Warriors, Wilt ‘the Stilt’ Chamberlain will be among the host of top ranking basketeers to be seen at the National Basketball Association contest.” As if Kerry Ryman didn’t already know all about it.
As the fourth quarter dawned, Ryman and his scamps still were on the move. They had started in the cheapest seats in Peanut Heaven, where they played “Kick Hockey” near the concession stands, positioning a goalie at each end and using a crushed cup as their puck. Then, when the arena lights turned low for the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner,” they’d slid beneath the railing and lowered themselves one level. Jumping, they called it. (Once, Bugs Damore had jumped and landed on the shoulders of an unseen constable, Clem Miller, who had just emerged from the men’s room below—a bad night for Bugs.)
When they reached the lower level, they separated into smaller groups. As part of their earlier reconnaissance, they had scoped out vacant seats near the court. They went to them, breaking into groups of two or three. Ryman found his way near the front row.
On this night, with forty-six seconds to play, history moving him to audacious derring-do, Kerry Ryman would improve even on that front-row position. He felt certain Mr. Hershey would understand.
PART TWO
The Fourth Quarter
CHAPTER 12
Stirrings
THE HERSHEY SPORTS ARENA HAD AGED like Dorian Gray: not at all. Inside, it looked and felt like the year of its birth, 1936—severe. Here was the arena: half empty, cold, and gray, cement barrel shell roof, cement floors, and a metallic scoreboard at one end, up in Peanut Heaven, designed for hockey, reading home, visitor, foul, penalty. Beside it, a Canadian flag, limp. However drab, this was now the Zink’s stage, the showman sensing the curtain drawing back, rising to meet the moment, his persona unleashed, no pretty waitresses to schmooze at courtside now, no Formost salamis to give away, his words on the p.a. echoing off so many empty wooden, hard-backed, fold-down seats in the arena’s upper reaches.
It was 10:30 P.M. in Chocolate Town. The Hershey Department Store, open late on Fridays, was closed. At the Hershey Theater, Sail a Crooked Ship with Robert Wagner, Dolores Hart, and Frankie Avalon was over, the folks gone home. Mr. Hershey’s factory was yet alive and thrumming, the late-night workers moving through miles of aisles of chocolate vats and machinery. At 50 West Chocolate Avenue, Lucille Ryman had watched the president, in a nationwide television address from the Oval Office, say that the nation would resume nuclear testing as a deterrent to Khrushchev’s missiles. “Were we to stand still while the Soviets surpassed us—or even appeared to surpass us—the Free World’s ability to deter, to survive, and to respond to an all-out attack would be seriously weakened,” John Kennedy said. Four of Lucille Ryman’s five kids were home, tucked in bed. She waited for Kerry to get back from the game. On the living room couch, she read and dozed.
Outside, only twenty degrees, wind chilled the streets of Hershey.
In
Harrisburg, thirteen miles away, Reuel Ryman played the Hammond organ with the Charlie Morrison Trio at the 210 Club, a crowded downstairs place, thick with smoke, a favored spot for Pennsylvania legislators and conventioneers. A few blocks away, at the Hotel Penn Harris, lay Phil Jordon. The only other Knick who might’ve slowed the Dipper was in dire straits—hungover, the flu, vomiting. Eddie Donovan could’ve used Jordon, who had played the Dipper nearly even in an early-season game, scoring thirty-three points to the Dipper’s thirty-four. For that matter, Donovan could’ve used the entire New York City skyline—the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building (with little Maurice Podoloff, NBA president, rising to Wilt’s waist, on its eighty-second floor). In the fourth quarter, Donovan would use what he had, all of it. With Imhoff in foul trouble, Donovan had no player taller than the six-foot-eight Buckner. Naulls and Budd were six-foot-six, Green six-five, Guerin six-four, Butcher six-three, Butler six-two. If Donovan stood all seven players, one atop the next, he could build a wall forty-four feet, ten inches high, weighing more than 1,400 pounds. He then could raise it, like a prison wall, tall and turreted, around the Dipper. Only problem was, he could build no such wall; he could only order his undersized men to throw themselves against Chamberlain.
In New York City, at the sports desk of The Herald-Tribune, no one had penned the Knicks-Warriors game on the schedule. A wiseacre asked, “Hey, where are the Knicks tonight?” Sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, who often covered the team, said, “I don’t know. Want me to go look for them?”
Entering the fourth quarter, the Warriors led by nineteen points, 125–106, the final outcome all but sealed. Yet Chamberlain was on a scoring spree. With sixty-nine points and twelve minutes yet to play, the Dipper stood ready to enter uncharted territory. This was not merely about a scoring record. He’d already exceeded Baylor’s old mark of seventy-one points twice this season, with seventy-three and seventy-eight. It was about pushing the limits of curiosity and imagination, a notion that energized the Dipper.
For the Knicks, it was a train wreck. But for fans, in a more thrilling way, it was akin to watching the Friendship 7, which only ten days before, with John Glenn aboard, had rocketed into space and orbited the earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour. Upon his return to earth, Glenn said, “I don’t know what you can say about a day when you see four beautiful sunsets.” As no other American had seen what Glenn had, no other player in NBA history had gone where the Dipper would go on this night. The fans and Warriors players shared Chamberlain’s passion for going into the unexplored, to see basketball’s equivalent of four sunsets. The possibility piqued Meschery’s curiosity, as it did to all the Warriors. They would have to subjugate themselves in the fourth quarter to become the Dipper’s partners in exploration. The Knicks didn’t know where this would end, though surely they didn’t like where it was heading.
Richie Guerin, the gladiator, grew angrier by the moment. Chamberlain’s rising total amounted to rubbing it in, an honor code broken. Guerin’s face became a mask of tension and fury. Eddie Donovan, with his wife, Marge, in the crowd, had to wonder: What is Frank McGuire thinking?
In a few minutes, all these colliding thoughts and emotions would intensify.
In the crowd, a few NFL players had stayed after the prelim to watch the main event. Clarence Peaks, Timmy Brown, and Sonny Jurgensen were enthralled. Peaks, who knew Chamberlain’s strength from watching him lift weights in his garage, now saw the Dipper overpower several Knicks defenders. Jurgensen, in near awe, marveled at Chamberlain’s fade-away shots. Through the Zink’s announcements, Jurgensen would track the rising point total. No awe for Timmy Brown. The way Brown figured, Wilt was a dominant force and he was in his own zone, getting the ball and taking it at inferior players. Besides, Timmy Brown never got too excited watching a game because he was used to being gotten excited about. The Colts’ Gino Marchetti told teammate Bill Pellington that he’d never before watched a player that big who was so agile and strong. “Usually tall guys are sort of clumsy,” Marchetti said. But, thirsty and thinking about beer, Marchetti and Pellington left the Hershey arena at the start of the fourth quarter and headed for Martini’s. Kerry Ryman and his buddies had dispersed. Dave Damore had pulled off a miniature coup. Even before the game started, the Sandman sat on a bench at courtside next to folding chairs for Warriors players. A team manager questioned Damore. The Sandman said he’d been told that kids from the Community Club could sit there. He stayed and soon looked back to his buddies and motioned for them to join him. None did.
Referees must keep their thoughts to themselves during games. Pete D’Ambrosio had officiated many of Chamberlain’s games, though never one like this. Once, after working a Warriors game in Hershey, D’Ambrosio and referee Earl Strom stopped at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. Inside were the Warriors. In the parking lot, Chamberlain saw D’Ambrosio’s 1956 Plymouth station wagon. “Yo, Pete,” Wilt said, smiling broadly, “go get yourself a better car!” “If I had your money, Wilton,” he replied, “I’d have a better car.” D’Ambrosio liked Chamberlain. A good kid. Chamberlain had never caused him trouble on the court, not like Bill Russell, who sometimes muttered sarcastic jibes—nothing D’Ambrosio could whistle him for, but unsettling. Working this game on this night, D’Ambrosio watched Chamberlain’s physical superiority and thought, He’s just eating them up.
As Chamberlain and the Warriors came out onto the floor for the fourth quarter, some fans moved closer to the court. Ushers did not try to stop them, for they, too, were caught up in the excitement. A basketball arena, like a courtroom, can become a universe unto itself, drama unfolding with its own distinctive characters and truths. As the outside world fell away, Bill Campbell leaned into his microphone and told his listeners, “This is the big fourth quarter and everybody’s thinking, ‘How many is Wilt gonna get?’”
CHAPTER 13
Meschery
TOM MESCHERY WAS THINKING ONLY this: Don’t shoot. An odd thought for the Mad Russian. His jumper was smooth, the dangerous dagger in his game. He was an eighty-two percent free-throw shooter, among the NBA’s best. Usually searching for an opening, now he had one: The Knicks’ Dave Budd and Naulls sloughed off to surround the Dipper, leaving Meschery open, more than just open, We-dare-you-to-shoot, rookie open. But Meschery knew his place. He heard the kids in the arena, screaming, “Give it to Wilt!” He didn’t need to be reminded.
Meschery would shoot now only if he had no choice. In the fourth quarter’s opening moments, the veteran Ed Conlin, wide open, had lobbed the ball inside to Chamberlain, who turned in, amid a crowd, and scored: seventy-one points.
Meschery was an analytical fellow, always thinking. Frank clearly is absolutely awed by Wilt. But Frank’s a con artist. Meschery knew McGuire’s strategy: Give the Dipper his space, let him think he’s in full control, cajole him, play to his pride with the usual “Attaboy, Wiltie,” and then quietly slide in Arizin and Gola and the rest, get them their numbers, put a little salve on their self-respect. Behind his cufflinks and presence, McGuire was a talker, a motivator, and a shrink. McGuire wanted the Dipper to score and, well, here was his night, Meschery figured. This night was the pinnacle, all right … for Frank McGuire and his stealth and guile. Not only was it the Dipper’s big night, Meschery, Rodgers, and Attles all were scoring above their averages; only Arizin, who was resting now, was slightly below his scoring norm. Months before, Meschery’s canceled double date with the stewardesses had brought him and the Dipper closer. Now he willingly submitted to his teammate’s chase of history.
Attles dribbled above the circle, stalling, giving Chamberlain time to move through the Knick-thicket in the lane. Budd, Buckner, and Naulls bounced the Dipper around like an amusement park bumper car. Attles moved the ball across the perimeter to Meschery. The Dipper covered, no other options, Meschery shot and scored, 129–108. The Zink, matter-of-factly on the p.a.: “Meschery.”
On WCAU, Bill Campbell said, “The Warriors are keeping the defe
nse honest.” The Knicks swept down the court quickly, Willie Naulls on the fly, hitting a jumper from the left corner, virtually uncontested, 129–110. The Warriors were hardly playing any defense. The Zink: “Nauuullllssss.”
Meschery had felt for much of the year like most twenty-three-year-old rookies: alone, trying to fit in, staying with the other rookies, never overstepping with the veterans. Early on he attended a dance with Ted Lucken-bill at a Polish-American club in Philadelphia. He had roomed on the cheap for a while with Frank Radovich in a small apartment, near a deli, in the Olney district—they’d bought a used TV for thirty bucks—but then Radovich got his own place. Over time Meschery’s confidence and his game expanded, one feeding the other. His intensity on the court was, to Attles, scary, especially the way Meschery would lose himself in the moment, the way his eyes would roll back in his head. To Darrall Imhoff, Meschery played “like a cock-eyed wild man. It was like they’d turned somebody in Borneo loose.” Meschery produced some big games, drew some big headlines, and even some high praise from St. Louis’s Bob Pettit in The Saturday Evening Post (“That Meschery is going to be a real terrific player, one of the great ones”). He averaged twelve points and nine rebounds, solid numbers for a player aiming just to prove his Americanness. As the season wore on he became more talkative—he was, at heart, a noisy fellow, though not now. In this fourth quarter, he was quiet, submissive, hardly the Mad Russian. This was all about the Dipper.
Wilt, 1962 Page 18
