by John Taylor
Auerbach did find an ally, surprisingly enough, in “Colonel” Dave Egan, the sports columnist for the Boston Record. The Record was a Hearst tabloid, with a formula that relied heavily on scandal and sports, but it had a circulation of 500,000, and throughout New England, people bought it faithfully every day just to read the Colonel—though he never satisfactorily established what it was he’d been colonel of. A graduate of Harvard Law School, but also a hopeless alcoholic with a foul temper, Egan was the most talented, opinionated, and derisive sportswriter in the city. He had an ongoing feud with Ted Williams, whom he called “the inventor of the automatic choke,” and he had proposed that a cab driver who once almost ran over Casey Stengel, when Stengel was managing the beleaguered Boston Braves, be given an MVP award.
But the incorrigible Egan, who loved to play the contrarian, sensed immense potential in Auerbach and his reconfigured Celtics, and went so far as to compare him to Frank Leahy, the idolized football coach of Boston College who had taken his team to victory in the Sugar Bowl. “We know now, as Syracuse, Fort Wayne and Minneapolis and the giants of the game come striding toward Boston, that a winner has been forced upon us in the person of Red Auerbach of the Celtics, and that he will do for professional basketball what Frank Leahy did for intercollegiate football,” he wrote during Auerbach’s first year. Auerbach, who called Egan “my boy,” told an acquaintance, “I’d be dead without him.” Egan also approved of the way Auerbach was restraining Cousy and integrating him into the team. “This is not a team of ballerinas and prima donnas and temperamental, selfish stars,” he wrote. “They are young and hungry and full of heart, and they play the rambunctious, enthusiastic, blood-and-thunder basketball which only the young and the hungry and only the hearty can play.”
Blood-and-thunder basketball. That was indeed how the game was played in those formative years of the league’s existence, when basketball shared its rowdy fan base with the hockey teams playing in many of the same arenas, and as the owners all knew, hockey fans never felt a game was complete without one good fight. Many of the NBA games were played on so-called neutral courts in smaller towns in New England or upstate New York or central Pennsylvania, where the arenas had nicknames such as The Tub of Blood. Fans shook the basket when players were shooting, the ladies stuck their hairpins into the legs of players and smacked them with handbags, and miners heated pennies with their lamps before hurling them at the losers. The home courts were just as raucous. In Fort Wayne, where the Pistons played in a small north-side gym, spectators liked to reach out and pull the leg hairs of the opposing players when they were taking the ball out of bounds. The players retaliated by “accidentally” misfiring passes that sent the ball into the faces of the offending fans.
Through the early and mid-fifties, professional basketball proved most popular in the smaller cities that did not have either baseball or football teams. The Syracuse Nationals, who averaged more than 5,000 fans a game in the early fifties, sold more tickets than any other team. The rest of the league hated playing in Syracuse, in part because of the weather; they reached the town either by train or by DC-3, and in the depths of winter the cold and ice made the trip seem both grueling and dangerous. Players feigned illness so regularly to avoid the city that the condition became known as the “Syracuse flu.” But it was not just the weather. Syracuse was a raucous, two-fisted, blue-collar town—the Carrier air-conditioning factory was one of the largest employers—and its fiercely proud inhabitants loathed the teams from the big cities. Egged on by the Nats coach, Al Cervi, who turned to the crowd and gesticulated in mock despair whenever a call went against his team, the Syracuse fans hurled candy bars, cups of soda, programs, and popcorn boxes down on the court and poured beer and spat on visiting players as they walked along the ramp into the locker room beneath the stands. Every time Bob Cousy went up that ramp, he ducked his head. One Syracuse fan, a huge, bald man known among visiting teams as the Strangler, would reach down as visiting players walked by and try to choke them. He once put a stranglehold on Philadelphia Warriors owner Eddie Gottlieb while Gottlieb was sitting on the visitors’ bench. After fending him off, Gottlieb told the Strangler, “I’ll put fifty dollars in an envelope in Philly and we’ll get rid of you.”
The Nats fans also went after officials. After one game that fans believed the Nats had lost because of officiating, an irate mob gathered outside the referees’ changing room, and the officials, Sid Borgia and Johnny Nucatola, had to flee town on a late-night train. Nucatola was beaten up by fans after working another game in Syracuse, and on yet a different occasion, Charlie Eckman, an official who knew what had happened to Nucatola and became afraid from crowd noise that he might be similarly attacked, changed into his street clothes at halftime and simply disappeared. Nucatola believed that Nats coach Al Cervi and owner Danny Biasone, who screamed abuse from the sidelines, were responsible for inciting the violence against the officials in Syracuse. Nucatola publicly declared at a New York Basketball Writers luncheon that Cervi and Biasone should be reprimanded by the commissioner and fined up to $1,000, but when he brought the matter up with Podoloff, the commissioner, ever mindful of his own job security, told Nucatola, “We have to be careful. This is a funny bunch we’re working for. One mistake and we can all be out on our ear tomorrow.”
Biasone, who was not fined or reprimanded, responded to Nucatola’s complaints by telling Podoloff to keep “those New York refs” out of Syracuse. The officials worked freelance at the time, for $45 a game, and after criticizing Biasone, Nucatola stopped receiving assignments from the NBA. It was clear that some if not all owners wanted referees susceptible to crowd intimidation. After all, a crowd that believed it could influence the referees was an involved crowd, and that was good for business. One referee was said to be so easily shaken by crowd hostility that the odds shifted four points in favor of the hometown team when he was officiating.
The odds. Gambling was a primary reason fans throughout the NBA were so noisy and uncontrolled. The league had avoided the point-shaving scandals that devastated college basketball in 1951; during the fifties, only two people, an official named Sol Levy and a Fort Wayne player named Jack Molinas, were ever found to be involved in gambling. But the fans bet heavily. Some were gamblers first and fans second, attending games because they knew that by screaming at referees and players, and by barraging the court with litter, they could influence the outcome. In fact, betting was such a prominent part of fans’ attraction to the game that the cheering was at times louder at a shot that put a team ahead of the point spread than at a shot that won a game. In many arenas, bookies appeared under the stands at halftime, taking new bets. Johnny Kerr, a center for the Nats in the fifties, recalled that fans in Boston Garden would yell, “Hey, we doubled our bets on you shmucks, so you better beat the spread.”
Despite the rambunctious fans, the game itself often seemed oddly unrealized, at times a confused morass of struggling bodies, at times stilted and lifeless. One problem players faced was congestion under the basket. Too many of them struggled for rebounds, the offensive players crowding in, creating the impression of a wild rugby scrimmage rather than deft individual maneuvering. Since the lane was only six feet wide, it extended only three feet on either side of the basket, which meant a giant like George Mikan could station himself, in his metal-rimmed glasses, a mere three feet from the basket and wait for the high pass, then sweep away defenders with his Herculean left arm and loft in a right-handed hook shot.
To ease the congestion under the basket, the franchise owners voted in 1951 to widen the lane from six feet to twelve feet, and this had an immediate effect, forcing the players to rely more on distance shooting. But the game was still frequently boring, degenerating all too often into what were known as “freeze-and-foul” contests, with the team in the lead playing possession ball to run out the clock and the losing team fouling to try to recover, the game stopping each time it succeeded. In one notorious example of “stall ball,” as it was also known,
on November 22, 1950, between the Minneapolis Lakers and the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, the final score was 19–18. The Pistons coach, Murray Mendenhall, had decided not to run the ball but simply to hold it and wait until the end of the game to score the winning point. He succeeded, but fans were reading newspapers in the stands; some walked out and demanded their money back, others swore never to buy another ticket to a professional basketball game.
By the spring of 1954, it was obvious to the owners that the rules needed to be rethought. “When fans are walking out on your show,” Ned Irish told an acquaintance, “you don’t have to be awfully smart to realize that you’re doing something wrong.” Danny Biasone, owner of the Syracuse Nationals, argued that the league needed to pick up the pace of the game by limiting the amount of time a team could hold the ball. Biasone was alternately feisty and dour, a slight man with a large head who wore a fedora, spoke in an Italian accent, and sat on the bench during games, a cigarette dangling perpetually from his lips. Ned Irish derided him as the prototypical small-town owner, and in many ways he was—his wife made his players pasta and even washed their uniforms—but he was responsible for the single most important innovation in basketball since James Naismith invented the game. Biasone had decided that the exciting games were the ones in which each team took at least sixty shots. He divided the length of the game, 48 minutes, by 120 shots, 60 for each team, and came up with 24 seconds per shot. He had his team play some college students in an exhibition game using a shot clock that required both teams to turn the ball over once twenty-four seconds had elapsed. At first the players, not used to any time limit, rushed their shots. “Take your time out there,” Biasone called. “Twenty-four seconds is a long time.” The players slowed their pace and found out that they indeed had plenty of time to set up and shoot.
All the owners agreed to the measure. Walter Brown immediately saw its potential to make the game more exciting. The new rule did have its opponents, including Red Auerbach, who felt that stall ball worked effectively for the Celtics. Even though the fans hated it, toward the end of a game he’d take out Cousy and put in Sonny Hertzberg, who’d simply stand there holding the ball. Some sportswriters also complained that the innovation robbed the game of complexity. “Movement is no longer necessary,” wrote Milton Gross, the sports columnist for the New York Post. “Ballhandling now becomes a liability. The strategic freeze is outmoded. . . . It’s become a game for mathematicians, statisticians, clock-watchers, and coaches who are afraid to attack their problem at its sources.”
The new rule, which went into effect in the fall of 1954, was initially treated as an experiment. In the first games after the measure was adopted, someone simply stood on the sidelines with a stopwatch and after the twenty-four seconds expired yelled Time! But the new rule was such a success that by the end of the year all teams had invested in shot clocks. The owners without exception recognized the shot clock as a radical breakthrough that had completely reinvigorated professional basketball. The number of playoff games in which more than one hundred points were scored more than quadrupled. More important, over the next two years, attendance at NBA games increased by 50 percent.
3
IN THE FALL of 1954, when the twenty-four-second clock was officially introduced, the Boston Celtics were still a work in progress. Red Auerbach had been with the team for four years by then, and he had come to accept the fact that finding exactly the right players was an exercise in patience. Walter Brown was not as patient as Auerbach. The year he had hired Auerbach, the team had ended the season 25–16 and a rise in attendance cut his loss to a mere $11,000. But the following season attendance had fallen back, and the Celtics’ losses again began to exceed $100,000 a year. The team had yet to make it to the finals, much less win a championship, and only a victory like that, Brown believed, would excite Boston’s sports fans. The Celtics had an outsized payroll, and Brown began to feel he was not getting his money’s worth. When Cousy, the highest-paid man in the entire league, scored only four points in a losing game against the Warriors, Brown told the writers at a basketball luncheon: “That’s a lot of money per point. I don’t need an expensive club to lose games. I can lose just as easily with a cheap one.”
Brown blamed his coach as well, and after the 1954 playoffs ended with yet another loss to Syracuse, he cut Auerbach’s salary. “I hold him partially responsible for the poor showing of our team this year,” he said at the end of the season. Some sportswriters felt Brown should have gotten rid of Auerbach altogether. “Much to my sorrow, [Auerbach] will return to the Hub as chief of the Celtics,” wrote Tom Carey of the Worcester Gazette. “For my two points, Auerbach is the most overrated coach in the business.”
What Auerbach was trying to build was a team that excelled at fast-break basketball. In Cousy, his star, he had the man who could set the pace of the game, racing downcourt with the ball and then passing off or going in for the shot himself. In Sharman and Macauley, he had two terrific outside shots, while Bob Brannum provided him with some muscle. The problem was that Brannum, while strong, was just not very athletic, and Macauley, who had height, was simply too frail to muscle in for rebounds. The Celtics’ best rebounder was Jack Nichols, but he played only part-time because he was a dental student at Tufts College. As a result, the Celtics were weak on defense. That day Bob Cousy had arrived in Boston to join the Celtics, Auerbach had told him it was a big man’s game, and three years later Auerbach believed it more than ever. He knew that what the team still needed was one man who was tall and strong and could jump. The guy didn’t even need to be able to shoot. All he had to do was get the ball.
A year before, in the summer of 1953, Auerbach had met a player he was convinced could be the solution to all his problems. Auerbach had spent the summer at Kutsher’s Country Club, a resort in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. As part of their summer attractions, Milt Kutsher and some of the other resort owners hired the country’s top college basketball players, who worked as bellhops during the day and played on the basketball teams the resorts fielded. To coach his team, Kutsher had brought in Auerbach. While Kutsher usually hired only college students, there was that summer a high school kid in Philadelphia named Wilt Chamberlain who was such a phenomenal player that after watching him, Haskell Cohen, the public relations man for the NBA, had persuaded Kutsher to make him a bellhop. The first time Auerbach saw Chamberlain, moving along briskly in his bellhop uniform—striped pants, short-sleeved white shirt, bow tie—he just stood there and watched him walk. Just watched him walk. The kid was huge, but what Auerbach thought was incredible was how graceful he was for someone his size. A little while later, when he saw him on the basketball court, he realized that even though the kid was still in high school, he was comparable to the best college players Auerbach had ever seen.
Auerbach pushed Chamberlain hard during practices and tried to work with him on his moves, like guarding the pivot man, but Chamberlain, he found, was not a receptive student. Wilt was only sixteen, but because of his size and ability and all the press attention he’d already received, people even then had begun to treat him with awe, and it had gone to his head. Still, his talent was phenomenal, and so was his hustle. Even off the court he hustled, carrying guests’ luggage in and out of the hotel, pocketing tips, bringing trays of drinks to the patio. The NBA at the time had a territorial draft, which allowed each team to exploit the draw of local talent by giving it the right, regardless of its position in the regular draft, to acquire a top player graduating from a college within its territory. Which meant if Chamberlain went to a college in New England, Auerbach could claim him for the Celtics. “Why don’t you go to Harvard, kid?” Auerbach asked Chamberlain one day.
Auerbach was serious. He called Walter Brown, who was at his vacation house on Cape Cod, and urged him to come up and take a look at Chamberlain. “This is the most fantastic player I’ve ever seen,” Auerbach said. He added that it would be worth almost any amount of money to acquire him, and even suggest
ed that Brown consider giving the Chamberlain family $25,000—just out and out bribe the mother and father—if Wilt would attend a college within the Celtics’ territory. Auerbach argued that no league rules specifically forbade payments to a potential player’s family, but Brown considered it underhanded. Then Eddie Gottlieb, owner of the Philadelphia Warriors, heard about Auerbach’s scheme. He considered Chamberlain a Philadelphia talent and was determined to have him play for the Warriors. Gottlieb believed Chamberlain would be capable of playing for the NBA as soon as he graduated from high school. But if Chamberlain decided to go to college, that was fine with Gottlieb. If he had to, he was willing to wait six more years to get him. But one thing was certain, at least in Gottlieb’s mind: Wilt Chamberlain would play for the Warriors. “If that kid even thinks about blowing town for Boston,” Gottlieb told Milt Kutsher, “I’ll turn your joint into a bowling alley.”
BY THE TIME Chamberlain was ready to go to college, not just Auerbach and Gottlieb but every coach who had ever seen him play, and many more who hadn’t, wanted to sign him. In early 1955, when a team of Philadelphia’s high school all-stars featuring Chamberlain was traveling through the Northeast playing all-star teams from other cities, sportswriter Bill Libby and New York Knickerbockers coach Joe Lapchick went out to White Plains, a New York City suburb, to watch Wilt.
Lapchick was astounded by Chamberlain’s performance. He was six feet five himself and had been one of the original tall men in the earliest days of pro basketball, back in the twenties, before becoming the coach at St. John’s University and then taking over the Knicks. In all that time he’d never seen anyone dominate a game, both on offense and defense, as thoroughly as Chamberlain did. Afterward, he and Libby went down to the locker room to meet Chamberlain. Some dad was there with a camera, pestering Chamberlain to pose with his young son, and Chamberlain was graciously obliging. Lapchick figured he’d be doing a lot more of that in the years ahead.
