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

by John Taylor

  Furthermore, Harrison had no idea whether Russell was really of professional caliber. He himself had seen him play once, at the East-West College All-Star Game in New York City, and had been unimpressed. In any event, what Harrison really needed was a shooter. His top player was center Maurice Stokes, a Rookie of the Year who had established himself as one of the best rebounders in the league. But the Royals backcourt was weak. Another prominent draft prospect, Sihugo Green, a guard from Duquesne, could shoot and handle the ball, and he made a better fit with the team than a tall man who would throw Stokes out of position.

  Auerbach, trying to anticipate whom he would have to trade with to acquire Russell, asked Walter Brown to call Harrison and try to find out if the Royals intended to draft him. It was not ordinarily the sort of information one owner would share with another, but Brown and Harrison had a relationship based on the fact that the Ice Capades, of which Brown was part owner, had performed in the Rochester arena. Harrison told Brown that he could not compete with the offer the Globetrotters were expected to make for Russell. “I’m going to have to pass him up and go for Sihugo Green,” Harrison said.

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” Brown replied. 5*

  With Harrison eliminated as an obstacle, Auerbach now focused on Ben Kerner, owner of the St. Louis Hawks, which had the second pick in the draft. The franchise had led a peripatetic existence in the six years since Auerbach had coached it in its incarnation as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. The year after Auerbach left, Kerner had moved the team to Milwaukee and changed its name to the Hawks. They did well their first season, but then in March 1953 the Boston Braves unexpectedly moved to Milwaukee, completely eclipsing the Hawks in the affections of the city’s sports fans, and in 1955 they moved on to St. Louis, a nomadic tribe in a plaintive quest for a home they could call their own.

  Kerner knew St. Louis could prove fatal to sports teams. The city’s previous professional basketball team, the Bombers, had folded in 1950, but Kerner had reason to hope his team might survive. The Hawks star forward, Bob Pettit, was from Louisiana. Playing in St. Louis, he was considered almost a local boy. KMOX, a 50,000-watt station that began broadcasting the Hawks games, could be heard in Louisiana, and fans began coming up from Pettit’s home state to see him play.

  Since Kerner already had, in the six-nine Pettit, one of the biggest men and best rebounders in the league, he was not seriously considering drafting Bill Russell. An unknown and unproven rookie from California, he would hardly be an immediate box-office draw in St. Louis. And if Russell missed the first six weeks of the season due to the Olympics, he might arrive too late to help the team break out in a crucial year. Kerner needed someone who could galvanize the gate on opening night.

  Auerbach knew this as well, and he intended to propose that Kerner trade his second-place draft pick for a player who suited Kerner’s needs perfectly: “Easy” Ed Macauley, the Celtics center. The idea of trading Macauley bothered Auerbach. Auerbach hated having to call a player—any player but particularly a talented, dedicated player such as Macauley—into his office and tell him he was trading him. It was the worst part of the job. Auerbach had done a lot of trading at first both when he took over the Blackhawks and when he took over the Celtics, but once he’d assembled his team and gotten to know the guys, it became more difficult, and as a result he traded players a lot less frequently than other coaches. Still, he did it when he had to. One of the main reasons he avoided becoming too close with his players—going to their houses for dinner, getting to know their wives and kids—was that he might need to trade them one day, and if it came to that, he didn’t want to be tearing himself up about how the move would upset the player’s pretty little wife and cute little kids.

  But Auerbach thought that Macauley might actually welcome the trade. He had grown up in St. Louis and gone to St. Louis University, where he’d been a top player, and had played for the Bombers. He and his wife had kept their home there, and his one-year-old son, Patrick, had recently contracted spinal meningitis, leading to a high fever that brought on cerebral palsy, and was under the constant care of specialists in St. Louis. If Macauley was traded, he would be able to spend more time with his son.

  When Ben Kerner heard from Auerbach proposing that the Hawks trade the Celtics their draft pick for Ed Macauley, he liked the idea. But he realized that it was, in effect, Boston’s opening bid, and if Auerbach was that eager to acquire the second draft pick, he might get him to raise the ante. As it stood, the Celtics were already acquiring Tommy Heinsohn, the Holy Cross center, under the territorial draft. Kerner, figuring the Celtics could afford to give up another player, said he would agree to the deal if Auerbach threw in Cliff Hagan, an all-American whom Auerbach had drafted from Kentucky in 1953 but who had gone into the service and was only now being discharged. “Red, I need bodies,” Kerner said. “You got the rights to Cliff Hagan when he comes out of the army, and I can use him, too. You’re getting Tommy Heinsohn, and you got that gorilla Jim Loscutoff. You give me Hagan with Macauley, and you get Russell, and we’re even up.”

  Auerbach instantly agreed, and the deal, which one historian would later declare was the most important trade of the decade in any sport, was struck.

  THE U.S. OLYMPIC basketball team, with Bill Russell playing center, went on an exhibition tour that summer to raise money. One of the stops was Washington, D.C., where Auerbach always spent the summer with his family. Auerbach had seen Russell play only once, when San Francisco met Holy Cross at the Holiday Festival, and he’d paid more attention to Tommy Heinsohn, whom he was already planning to acquire in the territorial draft, so he went out to watch the Olympic squad take on an all-star team in College Park, Maryland. Russell played one of the worst games of his life. Auerbach thought he was awful, horrible in fact. He thought, God, I’ve traded away Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan for this guy. He felt like holding his head in his hands. Later, Russell came over and apologized, saying that he’d never played so poorly but that he was suffering from a hernia. Auerbach said that he hoped that was the case because if it was not, then he, Auerbach, was a dead pigeon. Russell sounded sincere, and anyone could have an off night, but Auerbach couldn’t help wondering if the people who said Russell was not cut out for the NBA had been right.

  Russell had not yet signed with the Celtics, but the fact that he’d been drafted caused Avery Brundage, the head of the International Olympic Committee, to question whether he had lost his amateur status. “If he intends to turn professional, then he violates the ethics of amateurism,” Brundage declared. “He should guarantee that he will continue as an amateur or he shouldn’t compete in the Olympics.” Russell insisted that he was in fact an amateur, that he had no control over whether the NBA drafted him, but some sportswriters argued that he was compromised by a Jim Thorpe taint, and as the Olympic games approached, this attack on his integrity put Russell in an angry mood.

  Then, on the flight to Melbourne, one of the plane’s engines caught fire and it had to return to Hawaii, precipitating a fear of flying that would dog Russell through the endless travel of his long professional career. Once Russell’s team reached Australia, however, it won the gold medal, scarcely breaking a sweat in the process, and Russell flew home for his scheduled marriage to Rose Swisher. Walter Brown was so eager to court his prospective player that he flew out to San Francisco to attend the ceremony. And in a sign of the celebrity that Russell had already acquired, the San Francisco Police Department provided him with a police escort from the church to the reception.

  THE CELTICS were out of town when Russell and his wife arrived in Boston, but Walter Brown and Bill Sharman, who was injured, were on hand to meet them. Russell had never in his life actually seen a regulation NBA game, and so, before his debut—scheduled for a Saturday afternoon game in the Garden that was to be televised nationally—Auerbach had him fly down to New York to watch a doubleheader in which first the St. Louis Hawks played the Fort Wayne Pistons and then the Celtics played the Knicks. As pa
rt of Russell’s introduction to the major leagues, Auerbach invited Milton Gross, the sports columnist for the New York Post, to join them.

  Gross was a dry, vinegary man, a chain-smoker who favored scotch and soda, had a master’s degree in economics from Fordham University, and wrote a thousand-word column five days a week that was syndicated in one hundred newspapers in cities ranging from Atlanta to Jerusalem. Gross was also an unapologetic liberal at a paper then known, under its owner, Dorothy Schiff, for its liberal politics, and he had established himself as a writer who understood, sympathized with, and championed black athletes. At the time, he was the Post’s second sports columnist after Jimmy Cannon. Gross’s column was anchored on the first inside page from the back, next to the crease, or splayed across the top of the back page itself if he had an especially hot exclusive. Cannon never had much of a feel for basketball, but Gross, who’d played the game in high school in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, did. And in the mid-fifties he sensed the sport growing, felt the pro game was on the brink of becoming major-league, and he covered it energetically.

  There were seven newspapers in New York at the time, and the competition was ferocious. The Post’s sports editor, Ike Gellis, was a gambler as well as a passionate sports fan, and he edited his section for men such as himself, making the Post the first newspaper to run the betting line on all games in all sports. Gellis wanted hard, exclusive sports news for insiders, and so Gross was not a poetic lyricist in the vein of Red Smith and Grantland Rice, not a Homer evoking the beauty and pathos of heroic competition. Instead, he was a hustling newshound, a “digger,” as his colleague Dick Young called him, someone who could create a scoop out of a locker-room interview, getting good position right next to the athlete and murmuring his questions out of the side of his mouth so none of the other reporters could hear him—a type of question that became known as a Milty. He was always running off to catch a plane or tracking down a source in a distant hotel room, always searching for the scoop or angle that would be uniquely his, and sitting next to Russell as the Celtics’ new young center watched his first regulation NBA game would provide just the sort of inside material that made for a prototypical Milton Gross column.

  When the first game of the doubleheader began, Madison Square Garden, at Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, was filled. Kids were packed into the fifty-cent-a-seat upper balconies, which on the sides extended so far out that they blocked the view of part of the court, while a smoky haze was rising to the rafters from the cigars of the swells in the top-dollar courtside seats. Russell was paying particular attention to the Hawks, since that was the team against whom he would make his debut the following Saturday. The speed and the bulk of the players impressed him, and so did the unremitting pace of the game. As he was watching, Willie Naulls, who had played against Russell when at the University of California and who was now with the Knicks, came by to welcome him to the NBA.

  “This ain’t possession basketball,” Russell said.

  “You got to run in this league,” Naulls told him.

  Auerbach explained the tactics and styles of the different players to Russell. Bob Pettit liked to fake his jump shot and go around you. Mel Hutchins had a long shot from the side but he could also drive in with power. Charley Share sometimes dribbled just to better his position.

  At the end of the game, Gross asked Russell what he’d seen.

  “Nothing I didn’t expect,” Russell said. “Good shooting. A lot of shooting and a lot of running.”

  At the time, Gross felt Auerbach may have been oversold on Russell. Gross thought that it would take Russell time to adjust to the pro game, that his rebounding would not amount to much until he did, that he would never be a serious scoring threat, and that the other Celtics would get upset with the fact that the rookie would be earning more than all of them except Cousy. It was entirely possible, he thought, that Bill Russell would turn out to be a big disappointment.

  Auerbach was aware of Gross’s skepticism, but he did not share it. After watching Russell’s dreadful performance in College Park, which he kept reminding himself was the result of a hernia, he’d followed him in the Olympics and talked to more people, and he’d become a convert. Auerbach thought that Russell might actually turn out to be better than even his supporters believed he was. That was because Russell was essentially untested. Few of the teams he had faced in college truly challenged him, and he had not played any harder than had been necessary to win. When Russell joined the NBA, in Auerbach’s view, it would be like taking off the wraps. Auerbach’s only concern was whether Russell would be tough enough for the pros. He had the talent, no doubt about that. The question was: did he have the guts?

  Russell had yet to sign his contract and was still not officially a Celtic, and when the game between the Hawks and the Pistons was over and the Celtics prepared to take the floor, Auerbach asked the commissioner, Maurice Podoloff, who was sitting in the first row, if Boston’s newest player could join the team on the bench.

  “Why not?” Podoloff said. And then, as a joke, Podoloff added, “Every once in a while point out to the court and then point your finger at him. It will look good.”

  “Fine,” Auerbach said and turned to Russell. “You’ll sit with us.”

  “You won’t mind, of course,” Podoloff continued, “if I fine you twenty-five dollars for the privilege.”

  “After what you paid for Russell,” Gross said to Auerbach, “what’s another twenty-five dollars?”

  “He’ll make it up for us,” Auerbach said.

  Russell said nothing, but, Gross observed, he seemed to nod in agreement.

  When the Celtics returned to Boston, Russell sat down with Auerbach in the coach’s cluttered office to sign his contract. Russell was to be paid $24,000, only a bit less than Bob Cousy, the highest-paid player in the league, who earned a reported $25,000. But by going to the Olympics, Russell had missed more than a quarter of the regular season, so Auerbach agreed to pay him $17,000 plus a bonus, which at the time was considered an astonishing sum. “Not even pro baseball has ever paid a salary of that size to a rookie,” wrote Arthur Daley in The New York Times.

  Before Russell signed the contract, Auerbach wanted to reassure him that he shouldn’t worry himself over the endless press stories speculating about whether he had the ability to score. Auerbach had hired him to control the ball, and that was all he needed to concentrate on doing.

  “Russell, are you worried about scoring?” Auerbach asked.

  Russell said that while he wasn’t exactly worrying about it, he was indeed thinking about it.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” Auerbach said. “We’ll never discuss statistics when we talk contract. I’ll only discuss whether you played well. If you rebound and play good defense, I’ll just consider whatever points you get a bonus.”

  Russell played his first game as a Celtic three days later, on December 22, 1956. His arrival had been a topic of discussion in Boston since the start of the basketball season. “Bill Russell’s Buildup Rivals That of Ted Williams,” one newspaper headline declared. The game was scheduled for a Saturday afternoon, and afternoon games as a rule drew the smallest number of fans, but the biggest crowd of the season so far showed up, some 11,000 fans—4,000 more than appeared at a typical game—along with the city’s major sportswriters and a television crew for NBC, which planned to air the game live.

  The Celtics players usually arrived at the Garden two hours before game time, but Russell, still new to the city, became stuck in a Sumner Tunnel traffic jam, then got lost in the strange streets and reached the arena twenty minutes before the tip-off. He was so frustrated and angry when he appeared in the dressing room that Auerbach, angry himself over his new star’s absence, had to calm him down. Auerbach assigned Russell to cover Bob Pettit. The league’s leading scorer, Pettit was strong and fast. He could outrebound much taller men as well, setting up the Hawks’ fast break, and he kept his team fired up by moving tirelessly up and down the cour
t. Auerbach knew Pettit would get away from Russell and make him look bad by scoring, but he saw that as inevitable. The only way Russell would learn to play against men such as Pettit was by playing them. “Just try not to let him get away from you too often,” Auerbach said. “And whatever happens, don’t let it throw you.”

  Auerbach didn’t start Russell. Instead, to give his debut some theater, he sent him in after five minutes, and when the announcer called out his name, the crowd gave him a window-rattling ovation. Russell was immediately startled by the violence of the professional level of play. Nothing he’d experienced in college had prepared him for it. When the Hawks’ Charley Share knocked him across the chest with a forearm, Russell stopped to wait for the foul call, but it didn’t come and the Hawks took off upcourt, leaving him to chase the play.

  After his first quarter, Russell was also exhausted by the pace of the game, the sheer drain of running after Pettit, who never seemed to slow, much less stop. He was astonished that Pettit could keep it up. “Doesn’t this guy ever get tired?” he asked his veteran teammate Arnie Risen.