The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball

by John Taylor

  During games, Auerbach wore a dark suit or loud plaid sport coat and carried a rolled-up program in his left hand. His right hand was usually cupped around his wide-open mouth as he shouted in disgusted disbelief at the benighted officials. When a call particularly outraged him, he rose from the bench and raced along the sidelines shouting or ran onto the court and up to the offending official, thrust his face forward until they were standing nose to nose, arguing so heatedly it was almost impossible for the official to get a word in. He was, referees and rival coaches agreed, obnoxiousness personified. “He incites a murderous rage when he takes his place on the bench,” one sportswriter declared. “When I first met Auerbach, I disliked him,” an unnamed coach once told a reporter for the Boston Record. “But gradually it grew to hate.”

  One reason other coaches hated Auerbach was that he was becoming so successful. In the fall of 1959 he had won two NBA championships in the past three years. By the time he retired, in 1966, he had won seven more, a record unmatched by any professional team coach in any sport. 1* But Auerbach also had the improbable distinction of being one of professional basketball’s most significant social pioneers. That first game between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain was played just weeks before the dawn of what John Kennedy, in the upcoming presidential campaign, would call “the challenging, revolutionary sixties.” At the time, the greatest turbulence in the country centered around race relations. Black migration out of the rural South had continued strong since the end of World War II, and the 1960 census found that in Washington, D.C., blacks for the first time had become a majority in a large American city. But segregation remained the rule throughout the Deep South, and in April 1959, seven months before the game, the most notorious lynching since the murder of Emmett Till took place when a group of hooded men kidnapped Mack Parker, the black suspect in the rape of a white woman, from a jail in Mississippi and left his mutilated body in the Pearl River.

  As the civil rights movement gathered momentum in the early and mid-sixties, basketball, more than any other major sport, would find itself caught up in the issue of race. Its integration was more sudden and complete than in football or baseball. Within a few short years after Chamberlain’s arrival, four of the top five players in the league—Chamberlain, Russell, Elgin Baylor, and Oscar Robertson—were black. They became wealthy celebrities and, whether they liked it or not, role models. While the NBA in general integrated more quickly than any other team sport in the country, the Celtics set the pace within the league. They were the first team to field a majority of black players, the first to field an all-black team, and the first team in any major-league sport to hire a black coach. These developments were greeted with incredulity, skepticism, and outright resistance from some fans and sportswriters in the racially torn city of Boston, but they contributed to the Celtics’ dominance of the NBA during the 1960s. While Auerbach was responsible for them, he was motivated not by any sense of social mission—he was so apolitical that he never even bothered to vote—but instead by a simple ruthless calculation in his desire to win. Whatever it takes.

  ARNOLD AUERBACH grew up in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section, a thriving immigrant neighborhood of Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, and Eastern European Jews who lived in wood-shingled row houses—destroyed during the thirties in the federal government’s first slum-clearing project—and worked in the sugar refineries, breweries, soda bottling plants, and kosher food factories on the East River waterfront. In Brooklyn in the twenties, just about everyone had a nickname. Auerbach’s father, Hyman, a Russian immigrant from Minsk who owned a delicatessen and later operated a dry-cleaning establishment, was known as Hymie. Arnold Auerbach had red hair, and from an early age his inevitable street moniker was Red. In addition to providing him with the nickname by which he would be known long after he turned balding and gray, the rough, noisy, exuberant streets of Brooklyn stamped themselves on his personality. The borough forced boys to become tough and fearless and scrappy, to learn to work hard but also to take chances, to play the angles, and to appreciate the value of intimidation as a survival tool.

  Red and his friends hustled for nickels by cleaning the windows of the cars that stopped at Williamsburg gas stations. They strapped on roller skates and grabbed the fenders of trolley cars, which pulled them through the streets. They sneaked into the movie palaces on Atlantic Avenue to watch Gloria Swanson and Buster Keaton and into Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers. But while rooting for center fielder Dixie Walker, known throughout the borough as “Da People’s Cherce,” Red Auerbach played little baseball because neighborhoods such as Williamsburg lacked the open space for fields. The games of choice in Williamsburg were punchball, handball, stickball, and basketball. Basketball had been invented less than three decades earlier, but because it was uncomplicated and fast-paced and could be played just about anywhere, it had proved wildly popular in schools and colleges around the country. In Brooklyn it was played on the black-tar rooftops of apartment buildings by the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, and the Jews—the inner-city ethnic groups of the times. The game, the American Hebrew observed, “requires a good deal of quick thinking, lightning-like rapidity of movement, and endurance; it does not call for brutality and brute strength.”

  At the Eastern District High School, Red made the varsity basketball team, and while he was neither tall, at five feet nine, nor particularly quick, he nonetheless played the game harder than anyone else—getting into fights, pushing and shoving, struggling for control of the ball—and consequently became the first boy from Eastern District High to be listed by sportswriter Lester Bromberg in the New York World-Telegram’s Schoolboy Hall of Fame. Even so, only one institution of higher learning offered Auerbach a scholarship: Seth Low Junior College, a Brooklyn branch of Columbia University so small that its 175 students did not even have their own campus. Seth Low’s classes were taught in the Brooklyn Law School, and the basketball team played in the gym of the nearby Plymouth Church.

  Gordon Ridings, the basketball coach at Seth Low, had gone to college at the University of Oregon, where he played under coach Bill Reinhart, who had just been hired to be the basketball coach at George Washington University. In the winter of Auerbach’s freshman year, the George Washington team came up to New York to play Long Island University, and Ridings invited Reinhart and his players to take on tiny Seth Low in an informal scrimmage match in the Plymouth Church gym. George Washington overwhelmed Seth Low, but Auerbach played as if his team actually had a chance. In fact, his tough, aggressive but also smart moves—blocking, setting picks, using his elbows—made such an impression on Bill Reinhart that the coach, thinking Auerbach might bring some hard-edged city tactics to the simple run-and-shoot game favored by his players, offered him a scholarship to come to George Washington.

  Some athletes and leaders are at an early age clearly destined for greatness. Red Auerbach at eighteen—the son of a dry cleaner, boisterous and quick with his fists but neither academically nor athletically distinguished—was not one of them. “He wasn’t much as a player,” recalled Moe Goldman, who played professional basketball in the thirties and who knew Auerbach from Eastern District High School. “He was lucky a lot of times.” Indeed, if Bill Reinhart had not, as a favor to Gordon Ridings, allowed his team to play that scrimmage match at Plymouth Church, Auerbach might well have remained in Brooklyn all his life as a high school phys ed instructor, his ambition at the time. That he eventually became one of the greatest professional coaches in mid-century America owed more than a little to that chance encounter with Reinhart. The life of Auerbach’s greatest player, Bill Russell, turned on a similarly fateful minor moment, and this gave both men a ferocious determination to fight to keep what chance had granted them—a determination that was missing in many men who, at the same point in their lives, were much more obviously talented.

  WHILE NEVER a top-tier school, George Washington from time to time beat teams from much larger schools such as Ohio State, and in Auerbach’s senior year h
e was made team captain. After graduating, he married the daughter of a local pediatrician, worked for two years as a high school teacher and coach, then joined the navy during World War II. He remained stateside, at the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, and after the war, he prepared to return to his old job. A comfortable if utterly conventional and anonymous life seemed to stretch out before him. Then in the spring of 1946, Auerbach read a newspaper article about a meeting to be held in New York at the Hotel Commodore by Ned Irish, the general manager of Madison Square Garden. For a second time, chance was going to allow Auerbach an opportunity to change his life, if he had the audacity.

  The Saturday Evening Post once called Ned Irish “Basketball’s Big Wheel.” Like Auerbach, Irish—the game’s first truly successful promoter—was a man alert to opportunity. In 1933, while covering a basketball game at Manhattan College as a junior sports reporter for the New York World-Telegram, he found the doors to the small gym shut. He was forced to climb through a window, and in the process tore a hole in his suit pants. This convinced him that college basketball games needed larger venues, and the following year he persuaded the directors of Madison Square Garden to grant him the concession for college basketball by promising them a percentage of the gate, with a minimum of $4,000 a game. He didn’t have to put up a cent of his own money; it was the middle of the Depression and on many nights the Garden was dark.

  Basketball games rarely ran longer than ninety minutes, which did not strike most spectators as a satisfying return on their dollar, and so Irish came up with the idea of offering doubleheaders: four teams playing two games back-to-back for the price of one ticket. His first event, with a highlight game between New York University and Notre Dame, easily exceeded the $4,000 target, and Irish himself, who had been making forty-eight dollars a week at the World-Telegram, personally took home $1,100. By the end of the year, Irish had arranged eight doubleheaders that overall had drawn 99,528 paying fans. The idea caught on throughout the east, with dozens of college teams traveling a circuit of big-city arenas, and Irish soon was named executive vice president of Madison Square Garden, where he still owned the basketball concession. The hustling young newshound had been transformed into a haughty, calculating executive; it was said of him that he could move the Empire State Building if he thought there was a loose buck under it.

  The meeting Irish organized at the Hotel Commodore took place nine months after the Japanese surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri officially ended World War II. Veterans were streaming home—245,000 a month from the navy alone—in search of work and diversion. At the time, baseball was the sport that mesmerized Americans. Stadium crowds had more than doubled since the beginning of World War II; the Yankees were drawing more than two million home spectators a season. But Ned Irish had made college basketball a large draw, and Max Kase, sports editor of the Journal-American, the largest afternoon newspaper in New York, had become convinced that professional basketball could prove just as successful. Kase had talked to the owners of several large arenas about starting a professional league. The Depression and the war had created a long stretch of lean years for the arena owners. With the war over, attendance was rising, but the no-strike agreements made by labor unions during the war were also over, and strikes were breaking out around the country; just the previous month, Harry Truman had signed an executive order seizing the railroads when a strike by rail workers threatened to cripple the country. The unions that had contracts with the arenas were demanding substantial raises, and Max Kase had argued that a professional basketball league could provide a new source of revenue to the arena owners without incurring a substantial new investment.

  The country’s first pro league, the American Basketball League, had been started in 1925, during the first great American sports explosion, with teams such as the New York Gothams and the Original Celtics, but it folded in the early years of the Depression. In 1937 the National Basketball League was formed, primarily in the Midwest, where companies such as Firestone and Goodyear and General Electric sponsored teams in their hometowns of Akron and Fort Wayne. The league, organized by promoters, limped along for years, but it lacked facilities and sports editors generally ignored it, and as a result it never developed much of a following.

  The men meeting at the Hotel Commodore, by contrast, were arena owners, with connections to sports editors due to the hockey teams most of them owned and the horse shows, bicycle races, and boxing matches they booked. Their arenas were much larger than the ones in which the National Basketball League played, and since they were in bigger cities than the cities that were home to the NBL teams, they had the opportunity of drawing larger crowds. It seemed all upside. Max Kase had hoped to start the New York franchise himself and rent out Madison Square Garden, but Irish informed him that the Garden Corporation would need to own the team, and Kase had to be satisfied with a cash payment of several thousand dollars for his efforts to found the league. At the meeting, the owners drew up bylaws and established rules for the Basketball Association of America (BAA), named a commissioner, and created charter franchises in eleven cities.

  When Red Auerbach read about the formation of the BAA, he thought it might actually work. The audience was there. After all, really good college players attracted passionate followings. But once they graduated there was no real league for them and so they vanished. Pro basketball for the previous twenty-odd years had been pretty lame, in Auerbach’s view, but that was because it had been handled badly: bush teams playing in bush towns in a bush league. Handled correctly, it had genuine potential.

  Auerbach’s wife had just had a baby, but he was, at twenty-eight, still young. He could play it safe and remain a high school coach for the rest of his life, or he could take a gamble, try to get in on this new league at its launch, and see where—and how far—it would take him. Auerbach’s father, who’d left Minsk at the age of thirteen and arrived in New York unable to speak English, was a man who understood that it was impossible to get ahead in the world without taking a chance, and so was his son. Despite the fact that he’d never played professional ball, coached a college team, or developed any sort of national reputation as a college player, Auerbach approached Mike Uline, the owner of the Washington Arena and one of the men at the meeting at the Hotel Commodore, and proposed himself as the coach for Uline’s new team, the Washington Capitols.

  Auerbach made his case to Uline by giving him a singular analysis of the state of basketball at the time and how he could exploit it to put together a winning team. Since the sport was intrinsically improvisational, and since television, then in its infancy, had yet to create a national audience with common expectations of how it should be played, the game of basketball had, in the five decades of its existence, evolved distinct regional differences. One outstanding player influenced how everyone else in town played. One forceful coach imprinted all the good players of one state with a certain style, and they passed it on to the kids they coached. As a result, for example, Midwesterners emphasized a running game while New Yorkers focused on perimeter set shots. Most of the professional teams being put together in the summer of 1946 hoped to capitalize on the popularity of local college players by drafting and featuring them. As a result, those teams would inevitably lean heavily on the prevailing local style of play.

  However, Auerbach told Mike Uline that what no one seemed to understand was that the way to build a winning team was by hiring players from all regions of the country, each bringing with him the special skills that his region emphasized. Auerbach explained to Uline that he had firsthand experience of how successful such a team could be. While in the navy, he had been a chief petty officer in charge of recreation at the naval station in Norfolk, where he ran an intramural sports program and consequently got to know basketball players from around the country. Those men were now all being discharged and were in need of jobs. If he became coach, Auerbach told Uline, he could put together a talented, inexpensive team from that pool of ex-navy men, fielding backcourt players fro
m New York, runners from the Midwest, rebounders from California. Most of the other franchise owners were hiring college coaches; Ned Irish brought in Neil Cohalan from Manhattan College to run his new team, the Knickerbockers; the Chicago investors signed Harold Olsen from Ohio State. But Mike Uline, an innovative Dutchman who’d made his fortune patenting various types of ice-making machinery, liked Auerbach’s idea and offered him a one-year contract for $5,000.

  Going into his first season, Auerbach knew that no one had ever heard of him, that he had no reputation to speak of, and he was afraid the referees and the name coaches such as Cohalan and Olsen would dismiss him as nothing more than an overpromoted lightweight high school coach. He also wanted to establish his authority over his own players, since most of them were his age or older, and all of them were better basketball players than he’d ever been. “If you get obnoxious you build incentive,” he once told one of his players. And so he turned himself into a courtside presence that everyone in the league would be forced to contend with. During games he did not so much feign rage as he allowed it to engulf him. He pounded his fists together so angrily that his knuckles became swollen, and so he began rolling up a program before each game and using it to smack his hand. He snarled at the opposing team’s fans, shook his fist, sighed, waved his cigar, smacked his hand with his rolled-up program. He hated hearing the word why from his players—Why’d you take me out?—and none of them were allowed to question or ask for an explanation for any of his decisions. He protested virtually every call made against his team, storming over to the official in question, tapping cigar ashes on the man’s shoes, and flecking his face with spittle as he shouted at him. He wanted to keep officials off balance and doubting themselves in the hope that, in the crucial closing minutes of the game, they might hesitate to rule against his team. And so he never gave ground, acting on the assumption that he was always right and everyone else was always wrong. He wanted it understood throughout the league that no one was going to hose Auerbach.