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

by John Taylor

  “I’m Joe Lapchick,” the coach said, “and it’s been a pleasure to watch you perform.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Lapchick,” Chamberlain said. “Coming from you, that’s very nice.”

  “If I was still at St. John’s, I’d be after you.”

  “That’s all right,” Chamberlain said. “Everyone else is anyway.”

  That was no exaggeration. “It was a manhunt probably unprecedented in the history of college athletics,” Irv Goodman declared in Sport. More than two hundred colleges—Michigan State, Penn, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Holy Cross, Missouri, Oklahoma, Purdue, UCLA, to name just a few—expressed interest in recruiting Chamberlain. “About the only place I didn’t hear from was Alaska,” Chamberlain later recalled. Many people assumed this put Chamberlain in an enviable position, but in fact the deluge of interest—the pleas of desperate recruiters and the unsubtle insinuations of wealthy alumni—had a nightmarish quality, and made him feel both paranoid and megalomaniacal. “I couldn’t walk into my house without finding someone waiting for me,” Chamberlain remembered. “The telephone and doorbell never stopped ringing. Coaches were coming through the windows to get at me. Every mail brought more offers. I was hounded.”

  Wilt Chamberlain grew up in Haddington, a largely black neighborhood of West Philadelphia where small row houses were tightly packed on treeless streets. His parents, William and Olivia Chamberlain, had a total of eleven children, but two died in infancy, and Wilt and his two brothers and six sisters—he was the sixth child—were raised in a semidetached two-story gray brick house on North Salford Street. The house had four bedrooms, one for the parents and three for the nine children. It was extremely crowded, especially given his growing size, and while Chamberlain remained close to his family throughout his life, he never married, always living alone, and eventually built for himself in Los Angeles a huge, sprawling mansion that, among its many distinctive features, had only a single, if enormous, bedroom. Guests were consigned to a separate wing.

  Chamberlain’s father was originally from rural Virginia, had only a sixth-grade education, and worked as a janitor for the Curtis Publishing Company. He was taciturn but sober and responsible, the neighborhood handyman who could serve as an electrician, carpenter, mason, or plumber. Chamberlain’s mother, more outgoing than her husband, worked as a maid, but also kept the Chamberlain household clean and the nine children in washed clothes. While the children never went hungry, the family had very little money, and Chamberlain and his brothers and sisters all worked, delivering groceries, shoveling snow, and collecting newspapers and scrap metal to sell to the junk dealer. “Wilt worked with the milkman, the iceman, and the ragman,” recalled his sister Barbara Lewis.

  While Wilt’s father was only five feet eight, throughout his childhood Wilt was always a head taller than the other kids in the class photo. The milkman who’d hired him to help with deliveries when he was seven was under the impression he was twelve. He was also disproportionately long-legged, with an enormous stride, and at George Brooks Elementary School, he became the anchor leg and youngest member of the three-hundred-yard shuttle relay team. By the time he actually turned twelve, Wilt was six feet tall. That year Don Barksdale became the first black to play on the U.S. Olympic basketball team, and the sport seemed to hold out possibilities for young black boys in a way it had not before. The following year, the city built the Haddington Recreational Center a few blocks from the Chamberlain house, and Wilt began to spend long hours there playing pickup basketball games, tutored by Blinky Brown, the man who ran the center.

  Brown thought Wilt’s legs were so thin that he was surprised that they supported him. Wilt was also a timid kid who allowed other, shorter kids to shove him around. But Brown believed that all Wilt had to do was develop. He not only had his amazing height, but unlike most tall kids, who tended to be uncoordinated and slow, he was graceful and quick. Brown thought Chamberlain had such potential that sometimes in the summer, when Wilt and his friends begged him, he’d lock the rec-center gym and let them play undisturbed for hours at a time.

  Once he reached adolescence, Chamberlain’s growth rate, remarkable to begin with, accelerated dramatically. The summer he turned fourteen he grew four inches in two months, requiring a new pair of pants every four weeks, and reached a height of six feet seven with no sign of his growth leveling off. Jack Ryan, who covered high school sports for the Philadelphia Bulletin, watched Chamberlain play when he was still at Shoemaker Junior High School and was so struck by his heron-like legs that he nicknamed him Wilt the Stilt, a phrase Chamberlain always hated. He was also known as the Hook and Ladder and as Dipper—the only one nickname he ever liked—which came about because even before he became a teenager, he had to duck his head to get through a doorway.

  By the age of sixteen, when he was at Overbrook High School, Chamberlain could stand flat-footed under the basket, reach up, and almost get a finger on the rim. His combination of height and athleticism made him so freakishly good—and the Overbrook victories such decisive routs—that opponents felt playing the school was not just challenging, it was pointless. The team regularly won by margins of fifty points or more. In his senior year, in a game against Roxborough High School, Chamberlain scored twenty-six points in the first half. Roxborough, hoping to avoid a record rout, tried to stall, passing the ball to run down the clock, but Chamberlain went on to score thirty-one points in the third quarter, and thirty-three in the fourth quarter—twenty-seven of them in the last four minutes. His total score, including free throws, came to ninety. The final game score was 123–21. Joe Goldenberg, a player on the West Philadelphia High School team, had been asked by his coach to scout Overbrook in the game against Roxborough. Afterward, Goldenberg told his coach that Chamberlain scored ninety points.

  “Where does he shoot from?” the coach asked.

  “Anywhere he wants,” Goldenberg said.

  Eddie Gottlieb, who ran the Warriors, had naturally gone out to Overbrook to watch Chamberlain play. Gottlieb figured Wilt was one of the few high school basketball players who could, if he wanted to, join the NBA right out of high school. He was ready. And it would have been good for the league, Gottlieb figured, since it did not in the mid-fifties have many truly big men. George Mikan was the best big man in the league, but he was past his prime. Wilt was faster and could jump higher. Gottlieb had Neil Johnston playing at center for the Warriors, but Gottlieb was certain that Wilt, even as a high school student, would make sliced bananas out of Johnston.

  If the rules had permitted it, Gottlieb would have taken Chamberlain that very year and made him a starter. But that would have required changing the rule that players were eligible only after graduating from college, and he knew the other owners wouldn’t go for it. “They didn’t want to wreck their relationship with the colleges,” Gottlieb later recalled. “The colleges were their minor leagues. They polished the prospects for us, and it didn’t cost the pro teams a dime. But I’d have taken Wilt. Wilt was special. It was a waste of time for Wilt to go to college.”

  Gottlieb tried to persuade Chamberlain to go to college in the Philadelphia area so the Warriors could claim him in a territorial draft, but he learned that Wilt was determined to go out of state. So at a league meeting in early 1955, before Chamberlain had graduated from Overbrook High, Gottlieb proposed a rule extending the territorial draft to high school. To Gottlieb, it was entirely logical. The league was still struggling. Hometown boys, big at the box office, could make the difference between whether a team stayed afloat for another couple of years or sank. “This time, I benefit,” he told the rest of the owners. “Next time it’ll be your turn.” Other owners with promising local talent supported him, and despite the opposition of Ned Irish, the rule was approved. Gottlieb then selected Chamberlain in the 1955 draft even though he would not be eligible to play for four more years.

  Chamberlain spent much of his senior year flying around the country with his Overbrook coach, Cecil Mosenson, at the expense of vario
us universities. The NCAA rules limited athletic scholarships to tuition, room and board, and $15 a month in laundry money. But alumni, ostensibly operating independently as freelance recruiters, approached Wilt in the hopes of luring him to their schools. They made tantalizing suggestions about the money that would come his way, oblique references to no-show jobs, to gifts from alumni of new cars, to pocket cash that could run as high as $100 a week, and to slush funds in the tens of thousands of dollars that would accrue interest while he was in college and then be his when he graduated. Some of the recruiters were so aggressive that they seemed willing, Jimmy Breslin wrote in The Saturday Evening Post, “to violate the Lindbergh kidnapping law to grab the Stilt for alma mater.”

  The desperation of so many coaches to recruit Chamberlain, and the shamelessness and alleged illegality of the offers, became the talk of the sports world. In fact, while still in high school, Chamberlain received a letter from the NCAA asking him to detail any illegal offers that had been made. Later, the NCAA sent an investigator to the Chamberlain family’s house to question Wilt about offers from alumni. Around the same time, investigators for the Internal Revenue Service questioned him about any cash he might have received. No evidence had as yet emerged that any college had actually made Chamberlain illegal offers, but the assumption that such offers had been made was so widespread, and so widely discussed, that some colleges decided not to try to recruit him, because they feared that if they succeeded, it would be taken for granted that they had bribed him. “Nobody will believe he ‘just came here,’ ” said Jerry Ford, the athletic director at the University of Pennsylvania, when he heard that various alumni were in pursuit of Chamberlain.

  The two universities pursuing Chamberlain the most aggressively by then were Kansas and Indiana. The rivalry between the schools was intense. Two years earlier, Kansas had beaten Indiana for the NCAA title. Phog Allen, the Kansas coach, and Branch McCracken, the coach of Indiana, personally despised each other so much that they refused to schedule games between their two teams and met only in the playoffs. McCracken thought he had the edge in the competition for Chamberlain. He ran one of the top basketball programs in the country, having won two national collegiate titles, and Indiana had played a pathbreaking role in integrating college basketball: Bill Garrett, the team’s center, was the first black to play basketball in the Big Ten. After Wilt visited the campus, McCracken became so convinced that he was going to come to Indiana that the coach actually announced it.

  But McCracken had been outmaneuvered by Phog Allen. The Kansas coach had first heard of Chamberlain in 1952, when Don Pierce, the university’s director of sports publicity, had seen a photograph of Chamberlain in a newspaper, clipped it, and forwarded it to Allen, who pinned it to his office door. The following year, he received a firsthand account of Chamberlain from one of his own players, all-American B. H. Born, who played in the summer on a Catskills team sponsored by Shawanga Lodge. Born had a national reputation, and before the players from Kutsher’s Country Club took on his team, Auerbach warned Chamberlain, Born is going to make chopped chicken liver out of you. Chamberlain, however, scored some forty-five points while holding Born to eight, and when Born returned to Kansas, he told Allen that on a basketball court Wilt Chamberlain was in a league of his own.

  Allen was a legendary figure, the man responsible for making basketball an Olympic sport. He had been the protégé of none other than the game’s inventor, James Naismith, who had been hired by the University of Kansas in 1898, seven years after coming up with the idea for basketball at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts. Naismith started the basketball program at Kansas, but he was a devout Christian, unassuming and gentlemanly, with an aversion to competition and a belief that the primary object of all sport should be enjoyment and exercise. Once competitive league play started in basketball, he lost his enthusiasm for the sport, and at Kansas he preferred to watch the university’s gymnastics team.

  As a student at Kansas, Phog Allen had been one of the Jayhawks’ first outstanding players, comfortable at any position. He’d been hired as basketball coach in 1916, and had been there ever since. In fact, he was now sixty-nine, and the University of Kansas had a policy of mandatory retirement at seventy. But the Kansas Jayhawks were Allen’s life, and he could not bear the thought of retiring. If he succeeded in recruiting Chamberlain, the freshman would have to wait a year until he was eligible to play, and Allen was convinced that the university’s administrators would not force him to retire the very year that the greatest player in its history—a player he had personally brought in—joined the team. Chamberlain could mean a championship, even a string of championships. He would fill seats and drive fund-raising for the new arena the university was planning. But he would need a coach with Allen’s stature to guide him. And so, Allen reasoned, if he was able to sign Chamberlain, he could postpone his retirement, enjoy a final run of glory with this tremendous player, and thrash Indiana, thereby sticking it to Branch McCracken.

  Other colleges had approached Chamberlain when he was just a sophomore, but Allen held back until February of Wilt’s senior year. When he did make his overture, he decided that a central element of his approach to Chamberlain would be to assure him that Lawrence, Kansas, offered a racially comfortable environment, and to that end he devised a strategy that he later described, with remarkable candor, as “the Negro talking to the Negro.” Allen arranged for some of Lawrence’s prominent blacks to court Chamberlain, including Lloyd Kerford, who owned a number of enormous limestone caves rented by the federal government as storage facilities. Allen also brought in Dowdal Davis, editor of the Kansas City Call, a black newspaper, and the concert singer Etta Moten. Kansas was not as rigidly segregated as the Deep South, but blacks were still treated as blatantly inferior by most whites. Davis, the newspaper editor, thought that if Chamberlain simply showed up in Kansas, played basketball, and behaved himself, his prominence and success could help the entire state make racial progress. “They wanted another Jackie Robinson out here,” Allen later recalled. “And they wanted to win. Wilt was a way to kill two birds with one stone. I wanted to win. I didn’t care about another Jackie Robinson. I played every angle I could think of to get him.”

  Allen visited the Chamberlain family in their West Philadelphia row house. He was courteous and considerate and emphasized Kansas’s academic program and the superb education Wilt would get there. But he also treated Chamberlain like royalty. When Wilt visited the school, a reception committee met him at the airport, he was driven to the campus in a Cadillac, the head of a Negro fraternity supplied his own girlfriend as a date, and a group of alumni whom he later referred to as the “godfathers” privately assured him that he would be provided with some $4,000 a year in cold, hard cash.

  On May 14, 1955, Chamberlain announced that he would be attending the University of Kansas on a basketball and track scholarship. Many Philadelphians felt betrayed and suspicious. After all, their city had four of the best basketball schools in the country. “Why does a Philadelphia boy have to travel halfway across the country to go to college?” one columnist wondered. The rumor had it that Chamberlain had received anywhere from $25,000 to $30,000 in cash from Kansas alumni. The joke going around was that all the money Kansas had promised to pay Chamberlain was hidden in Lloyd Kerford’s limestone caves. “Isn’t the NCAA investigating reports of a special trust fund due to mature on Wilt the Stilt’s graduation?” demanded the New York Journal-American’s Max Kase. At Bloomington, Branch McCracken insinuated that Wilt had demanded a bribe to attend Indiana. “We couldn’t afford that boy,” McCracken joked to a reporter. “He was just too rich for our blood.” The cynical humor was pervasive. “I feel sorry for the Stilt,” wrote Leonard Lewin of the New York Daily Mirror. “When he enters the NBA four years from now he’ll have to take a cut in salary.”

  4

  THREE YEARS BEFORE Wilt Chamberlain, amid all the acclaim and controversy, announced he was going to the University of Kansas, a young man n
amed Hal DeJulio decided to attend a basketball game at Oakland High School in California. DeJulio was an alumnus of and former basketball player for the University of San Francisco, a member of the USF team that won the National Invitational Tournament in 1949. After college, he began a career in insurance, but basketball remained his singular passion, and he spent much of his free time in high school gymnasiums as a volunteer scout for his alma mater, watching games with the hope of finding an undiscovered talent who could lift USF from the obscurity into which it had fallen since DeJulio’s glory days.

  DeJulio had gone to the game with the intent of scouting Truman Bruce, the all-city all-star center for Oakland High, and also to take a look at the three all-star players on the other team, which was from McClymonds High School. But instead he found himself closely watching the man playing opposite Bruce, a rail-thin black kid named Bill Russell. DeJulio had never heard of Russell. McClymonds played in the Oakland Athletic League, which had only six teams, and when each season was over, the local reporters produced a First All-League Team, a Second All-League Team, and a long string of honorable mentions, and Russell’s name had never appeared on any of those lists.

  During the game, Russell scored fourteen points, hardly an astonishing feat, but it was not the points themselves, it was the moments at which he scored them that caught DeJulio’s attention. Russell ran up eight points just before the first half ended and another six at the tail end of the game. Russell struck DeJulio as a clutch player, someone who could make a decisive contribution at a critical moment. He could also jump like nothing DeJulio had ever seen. The first time he saw Russell’s head rising above the other players, he thought it was a mirage, but then he saw it again. And on defense Russell showed glimmers of genuine originality. His fundamentals were atrocious, and he still seemed awkward, but DeJulio thought he had an extraordinary instinct for the game. He was one of those players who could anticipate where the ball was going to go.