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

by John Taylor

  “Sure, he gets tired,” Risen said, “but he doesn’t look tired.”

  Auerbach, watching from the sidelines, was a little disappointed in Russell. He seemed timid. The Hawks kept setting screens and blocks that hemmed him in while Pettit raced downcourt to score. The Hawks were pressing Russell, testing him, knocking him around, and he did not act as if he was willing to hit anyone back. Auerbach wondered if Russell’s timidity was due to the fact that he’d just gotten married. That never did a guy any good—at least on the basketball court.

  For all his timidity, Russell had some incredible moves—jumping for a rebound and, while still in the air, twirling around and rifling the ball over the opposing players to a teammate halfway down the court. No one had seen that before. But his most amazing move was his shot blocking. Pettit, one of the tallest players in the league, had a distinctive jump shot that powered him way up over the heads of his opponents before he released the ball. It had generally been considered an indefensible shot, but Russell was outjumping Pettit and had actually been able to block his jumper three separate times, swatting the ball out of the air after it had left Pettit’s hand. And he did not knock the ball into the stands, the way some grandstanding shot blockers did—a crowd-pleasing move but one that gave the ball back to the other team. He reached under or around the ball and either tipped it up and caught it himself or deflected it to one of his teammates, making it a turnover as well.

  Auerbach knew that all rookies had to be introduced to the pro game by degrees, and after twenty-one minutes, he took Russell out. Pettit had held Russell to six points, which was not bad considering Russell had been in the game for less than two quarters. But Russell also made sixteen rebounds, a figure that caught the attention of the sportswriters because it meant that while he was on the court he had controlled the backboards. Johnny Most, who called the Celtics games for the radio, had a gravelly voice that he liked to joke was due to the fact that he gargled with Sani-Flush. During the game, he had been shouting so excitedly about Russell that he’d actually grown hoarse. “You’ll have to forgive me for losing my voice,” he croaked to his audience. “But I think we just witnessed the birth of a star.” Bud Collins, then with the Herald, reviewed Russell’s performance as if it were a dance: “After waltzing effortlessly—though nervously—about Walter Brown’s ballroom for twenty-one minutes, the willowy debutapper was adjudged a budding Brahmin for the NBA menagerie.”

  MILTON GROSS’S FEAR that Russell’s salary would create envious discontent on the Celtics was unfounded. Whatever initial irritation his new teammates may have felt when they learned Russell’s pay would exceed theirs—and none of them gave voice to any—it was quickly dispelled when Russell proved, as Auerbach had believed he would, to be an incredible draw at the gate. “It’s certain that the increased receipts Big Bill brings to every box office will pay off the investment in him,” a New York Times reporter predicted. Fans turned out in droves to see the new phenomenon. There was a blizzard in Syracuse the first time the Celtics played there with Russell, but attendance doubled. The Fort Wayne arena tripled its average attendance for his initial game against the Pistons. Record crowds watched him in St. Louis and Philadelphia, where ticket sellers had to turn away fans after the Arena sold out. Some 18,000 people showed up at Madison Square Garden, basketball’s premier venue, for his New York debut. “Boston Forming ‘Dynasty’ with Russell as Gate Draw,” a headline in the New York Post declared after Russell had played a mere five games. The paper’s correspondent Leonard Koppett pronounced him “the biggest attraction in the game” and presciently observed that “he has the potential to give Boston the kind of ‘dynasty’ Minneapolis had with George Mikan.”

  Russell, however, was so miserable that he was ready to quit. Hostile fans screamed insults and racial epithets, an entirely new experience that left him brooding and hurt until Bob Cousy told him, “If you let the names people call you bother you, you don’t belong in this business.” Russell continued to be surprised by how much he was knocked around by opposing players, and at first he was unsure how to respond. Physical aggression was an accepted part of basketball, and the NBA’s veterans made a point of testing the courage of every rookie who came into the league. Joe Lapchick, the coach of the Knicks, called it “putting the question.” Just how brave was the rookie? Could he be intimidated? What sort of pain could he endure? Could a sharp elbow in the ribs rattle him? Would he fight back? And if he did fight back, would that throw off his game even more?

  “What do you do when you get hit?” Russell asked one of his teammates.

  “Very simple,” his teammate said. “Hit back.”

  Still, Russell resisted. Then, at a doubleheader in Syracuse, Ray Felix, the six-eleven center for the Knicks, started harassing Russell, tripping, shouldering, elbowing, jabbing, and pushing. Auerbach, who could see what Felix was doing to Russell, knew that the rookie’s career in the league would be short-lived unless he demonstrated that he was just as aggressive. “Russell, what’s the matter with you?” he asked during a time-out. “Felix is murdering you out there. You don’t have to take that.” Back in the game, Felix continued with his tactics, but this time when Felix shoved with his elbow, Russell called him on it, pushing back. Felix, pretending to be the aggrieved party, drew his fist to hit Russell, but Russell was first, landing a crosscut to Felix’s jaw that dropped him to the floor, where he lay sprawled on his back, stone-cold unconscious. Auerbach cheered from the sidelines. And Russell felt that the twenty-five-dollar fine he received was worth every penny.

  But Russell also still felt like quitting, in part because he was mortified by the fact that he had the worst shooting record in the NBA. In one game against the Warriors, he missed fifteen consecutive shots. “Don’t worry about it,” Auerbach told him. “You’re not paid to score points.” Sportswriters, however, kept pointing out that other big men in the league, such as the Nats’ Dolph Schayes and the Warriors’ Neil Johnston, could shoot. As a result, Russell kept trying to raise his scoring totals, which irritated Auerbach. During one game, when Russell missed a long shot that he shouldn’t have taken in the first place, Auerbach screamed, “What the hell are you doing shooting from way out there—besides making a fool of yourself?”

  What Russell had no way of gauging, since he’d never played in the NBA before, was the impact he was having on the game. Years later, Auerbach would decide that Russell was one of the four men who had revolutionized basketball. Hank Luisetti had developed the one-handed running shot. George Mikan had turned the pivot into an offensive weapon. Bob Cousy made the game spontaneous, with split-second playmaking and the fast break. And Russell, with his blocked shot, created the modern defense.

  When Russell joined the Celtics he was six-ten. He had towered over most every college player he had played, but in the NBA the average player was six-five. Many teams had one or two or three players who were Russell’s height or close to it, and there were a few players actually taller than Russell. But in addition to his height, Russell had two other advantages. One was his reach. His wingspan—it had by now been measured—was seven feet four. And he was an amazing jumper who could kick the net and leap up and touch the top of the backboard. Sure, the Celtics reasoned among themselves, Russell had missed fifteen consecutive shots in that game against Philadelphia, but the important point was that Boston won the game. With Russell on the team, the Celtics finally became the fast-breaking club Auerbach had always wanted them to be. Auerbach hated to see a guard slowly dribbling the ball down the court—thump, thump, thump—while everyone else stood around watching. He wanted the entire team on the move all the time. One reason he liked the fast break was because the more you used it, the more the other team expected it, and that put them on the defensive even when they had the ball. Anticipating it, worried that they were leaving their own basket undefended, they backpedaled downcourt after shooting instead of moving in to the boards. Until Russell arrived, however, Auerbach’s team had not been abl
e to rebound consistently enough to make the fast break anything other than an occasional option. But with Russell now pulling down so many rebounds, the fast break became the central weapon in the Celtics’ arsenal. Russell would come down with the rebound and immediately fire a line-drive outlet pass to Cousy, who would already be streaking to the far end of the court. If the man defending the basket moved toward Cousy, he passed off to Tommy Heinsohn or Bill Sharman for a jumper. If the defender stayed back to guard Cousy’s teammates, Cousy went in for the layup. Such fast breaks, run one after another after another, literally changed the pace of the game.

  The Celtics also began guarding the basket in a more aggressive style, one they called the “ ‘Hey, Bill,’ defense.” Cousy would play his man close, with a hand in his face, and shut down his outside shot. Then, if the man spun and beat him on the drive, Cousy would just yell, “Hey, Bill!,” and Russell would move in to intercept the man. It was particularly effective because of the advent of the twenty-four-second clock. The rule had not been adopted in college at the time Russell had his great run with San Francisco, and on offense opponents could pass the ball around forever, wearing down the defense while waiting for an opening. But now, in the pros, Russell discovered to his delight that he had to maintain his defensive intensity for only ten to fifteen seconds before opponents would start to get nervous about running out the clock and take an off-balance shot.

  Russell’s most intimidating move, however, was his shot block. He would tell opponents he was going to make them eat the ball. He blocked so many shots, shoving them back down into the faces of the shooters, that the Celtics started referring to the balls Russell blocked as “Wilsonburgers.” Teams throughout the league adjusted to Russell by changing the way they played the game. Previously, offense in basketball had focused on driving into the basket and then putting the ball in with a hook shot or layup. But because Russell was so effective defensively, teams started passing more and relying on the mid-range jump shot. Outside shooting came to the forefront of the game, and the layup, except on the fast break, all but disappeared. By the spring of Russell’s rookie year, according to one calculation, 75 percent of all field goals were jump shots. “In one beautiful sweeping motion,” the Boston sportswriter Joe Fitzgerald observed, “he was turning the game around.” Of course, not everyone applauded the development. Shirley Povich, the gifted but contrarian sportswriter for The Washington Post, professed dismay. “In a single generation,” he wrote, “there has been a revved-up degeneration of basketball from a game to a mess. It now offers a mad confection of absurdities, with ladder-sized groundlings stretching their gristle in aerial dogfights amid the whistle screeches of apoplectic referees trying to enforce ridiculous rules that empty the game of interest.”

  6

  THE WEEK AFTER Milton Gross spent the afternoon with Bill Russell in Madison Square Garden, the New York Post columnist decided to fly out to Kansas City and meet the country’s other phenomenal new black basketball player. It was late December, and Wilt Chamberlain and the University of Kansas Jayhawks had come to Kansas City to play in the Big Seven 6* tournament. In a poll of sportscasters conducted by the Associated Press earlier in the season, Kansas had been ranked the top team in the country, thanks to Chamberlain, who was now a sophomore. He had already become such a celebrity that, as the tournament got under way, a crowd gathered all day in the Muehlebach Hotel, where the Jayhawks were staying, hoping for a glimpse of the star. When he finally appeared they murmured in astonishment at how he’d had to duck to get through the elevator doors.

  At the beginning of the season, The Saturday Evening Post had published Jimmy Breslin’s article “Can Basketball Survive Chamberlain?,” and many college coaches did not consider the question entirely rhetorical. Gross talked to a number of them during the Big Seven tournament, and there was a feeling that Chamberlain actually might be too good, that he so overwhelmed other players he could literally ruin the game. “When one player can louse up your offense because you can’t go around him and can’t go over him,” one Big Seven coach complained to Gross, “and he scares you so much that you pay no attention to his teammates while concentrating completely on him, it ought to be illegal.”

  In the first game Gross saw, however, Chamberlain was surrounded by a collapsing four-man defense and scored only twelve points. Bill Russell, Gross thought, had been more impressive the first time Gross had seen him playing for San Francisco. But then Chamberlain scored thirty-six points in the second game and forty-five in the third, Kansas won the tournament, and Gross became a convert. Chamberlain, he decided, was not just much more gifted than Bill Russell, he was the future of basketball, the player who would define the game for the next fifteen years if he remained healthy.

  Gross thought that Chamberlain had an astonishing ego for a nineteen-year-old, but it was, after all, commensurate with his talents, and it even served as a sort of survival tool because it enabled Chamberlain to enjoy the stares that he inevitably drew. “My height is getting me an education and all the other things I want,” Chamberlain explained to Gross. “It’s not too bad having people know me.” Gross decided that he liked Chamberlain. The young man was Gross’s type of athlete: colorful, controversial, driven, and not just talented but the best at what he did. “I’ve never seen anything like him,” he told his readers.

  Indeed, Chamberlain had defied comparison as an athlete almost from the moment of his arrival at Kansas. While more than a few sportswriters considered him ready for the pros, he could not, under the NCAA rules in effect at the time, join the varsity team during his first year at the university, and instead became a member of the freshman squad, which had no formal schedule and played exhibition games. At the beginning of each season, the freshman team took on the varsity squad, a game the varsity team had won every year since it was first played in 1923. Since the freshmen were always egregiously outmatched, the game had attracted little attention on campus in the past, but in the year of Chamberlain’s arrival a record 14,000 spectators crowded into the University of Kansas field house to watch it. Among them were several coaches from the Big Seven conference, including Jerry Bush of Nebraska, curious to evaluate the young man who had been the subject of so much hype. The freshmen easily won, and despite being double-teamed, Wilt scored forty-two points. In one spectacular play, he leaped toward the basket and then, while still rising up, twisted himself until he faced away from it, swung the ball one-handed over his head and behind him, and punched it down through the hoop. When he saw the move, Jerry Bush turned to a companion and said, “I feel sick.”

  After the game, Bush went up to Phog Allen and said he had detected a weakness in Chamberlain.

  “And what is that?” Allen asked.

  “He doesn’t handle the ball so well with his left foot,” Bush said.

  Allen could not resist the temptation to crow. “Wilt Chamberlain’s the greatest basketball player I ever saw,” he told reporters. “With him we’ll never lose a game. We could win the national championship with Wilt, two sorority girls, and two Phi Beta Kappas.” Chamberlain’s debut on the freshman squad had actually made headlines around the country, and in the South admiration for his athletic prowess seemed tinged with racial anxiety. The Daily Eagle in Enid, Oklahoma, ran an article headlined “Phog Calls Negro 7-Footer ‘Today’s Greatest Player,’ ” and reported that “Allen—and 14,000 others—watched in amazement as the big but graceful Negro poured in forty-two points.”

  Despite the claims made by the black Kansans who’d helped Allen recruit Chamberlain, Kansas turned out to be almost as racially divided as any state in the Deep South, as Chamberlain found out when, the day he arrived, he was refused service in a local diner. “It took me about a week to realize the whole area around Lawrence . . . was infested with segregation,” he recalled. Chamberlain informed Allen that he would not play basketball unless, on road trips with the team, he was able to sleep in the same hotels and eat in the same restaurants as the white players, and
Allen immediately canceled exhibition games the freshman team had scheduled with Rice, Southern Methodist, Louisiana State, and Texas Christian.

  The coach was prepared to do just about anything to placate his new star. Allen had turned seventy the night of Chamberlain’s freshman debut, and Chamberlain’s brilliant and highly publicized performance had convinced him that the Kansas administrators would now never dare force him into retirement. Although Allen’s assistant, Dick Harp, was in charge of the freshman squad, Allen worked personally with Chamberlain. He had him shoot foul shots blindfolded, to develop his intuitive feel for the basket’s location. And he presented him with a copy of Helen Keller’s autobiography, thinking it would help Chamberlain improve his sense of touch for the ball.

  Allen also served as Chamberlain’s champion and defender when scandal continued to dog him. Bill Russell, then in his final year at San Francisco, was on the U.S. Olympic basketball team going to the 1956 games in Melbourne, and Chamberlain was virtually assured a slot as well, but he announced he was not going to play, which led to speculation that he had already in some way compromised his amateur status. “Why isn’t Chamberlain a candidate for the Olympic team?” Colonel Harry Henshel, a member of the Olympic Basketball Committee, publicly demanded in March. “Is Kansas afraid to let him get around?”

  The question flared up again the following month, when J. Suter Kegg, sports editor of the Cumberland, Maryland, Evening Times, wrote an article alleging that Chamberlain had once received money to play under an alias for a local semipro team. “He played here under the name of George Marcus in a professional game,” Kegg declared. Harry Grayson, sports editor of the wire service NEA, and one of those who had claimed that corruption tainted Chamberlain’s college recruitment, picked up the story and gave it national coverage. At the time, Wilt firmly denied the allegation—“I was never there,” he stated—but while the charge was never proven, it also never went away, and years later Chamberlain admitted that it was true, he’d played some games in Cumberland and in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and in a few other cities for expense money and a few extra dollars—so what? He considered the NCAA rules against such games—while the universities were earning huge sums off their amateur stars—utterly hypocritical.