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

by John Taylor

  The letter to Heinsohn from Commissioner Maurice Podoloff announcing his selection was accompanied by a check for $300. Heinsohn received it during the first round of the playoffs, while sitting in the Celtics dressing room. Russell, whose hook in the dressing room was next to Heinsohn’s hook, saw it.

  “I think you ought to give me half that check,” Russell told Heinsohn.

  “Why?” Heinsohn asked.

  “Because if I had been here from the beginning of the year,” Russell said, “you never would have gotten it.”

  He wasn’t smiling.

  THE CELTICS finished off the Nats in three straight games to take the Eastern Division title in a best-of-five series, then sat back to see who emerged victorious in the Western Division face-off between St. Louis and Minneapolis. Cousy and a number of other Celtics hoped they would end up playing the Minneapolis Lakers in the finals. The Lakers were superior to the Hawks in terms of talent, but the Hawks were much more driven. They had desire and determination, and when they beat the Lakers, Cousy and the other Celtics knew the championship series would be tough and hard.

  The Hawks were then in their second year in St. Louis, trying hard to win the hearts of a town that seemed to have no love for any team except the Cardinals and hoping to avoid the fate of the Bombers, the basketball team that had folded seven years earlier. Ben Kerner’s decision to trade the right to draft Russell for Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan had paid off for the Hawks. The two players had attracted fans and rounded out a team that also included Bob Pettit, Slater Martin, Chuck Share, Jack McMahon, and Alex Hannum, the player-coach. The first game, played in Boston, underscored Cousy’s concern. St. Louis won 125–123 after two overtimes. Cousy had a hot hand that night, scoring twenty-six points, but with three seconds to go in the second overtime, he missed a shot, and spent the rest of the night kicking himself for costing his team the game. The Celtics won the second game walking away, 119–99, then flew to St. Louis for game three.

  St. Louis was a brawling city of breweries and German and Slavic immigrants. It had been the site of one of the country’s most notorious race riots—the East St. Louis Massacre of 1917—and racial tensions remained high. In fact, those tensions were one more reason Hawks owner Ben Kerner had decided not to draft Russell. The Hawks still had an all-white roster, and when the Celtics played there during the regular season, the crowd pelted the team with eggs and taunted Russell with shouts of “Coon!,” “Black nigger!,” and “Baboon!” If possible, they despised Auerbach even more. “The hatred between Red Auerbach and St. Louis is a beautiful thing—deep, lasting, and built on mutual disgust,” wrote one local columnist, who went on to describe the “rapturous acrimony” between the two. The personal antagonism between Red Auerbach and Ben Kerner added to the hostility between the Celtics and the Hawks. Auerbach had never forgiven Kerner for overruling him on the John Mahnken trade back in 1950 when Auerbach had been coaching the team in its incarnation as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. Kerner, for his part, considered Auerbach an obnoxious upstart and was irritated by the talk that Auerbach had outsmarted him in the Russell trade.

  One reason Kerner and Auerbach disliked each other so intensely was that they were so similar. Kerner was just as obsessed with control as Auerbach, and almost as brash and volatile. At every game, he could be found sitting at half-court next to his mother, the team’s most devoted fan, and a group of friends who were referred to by officials as Murderers’ Row for the noise they made protesting the calls that went against St. Louis. If the Hawks lost, Kerner was apt to storm into the locker room afterward, his tie askew, throwing chairs and screaming, “You’re all stealing from me!” But emotion also carried him away when his players did well. Once when the team was on a winning streak, he called out before a game, “Make it five straight, boys, and I’ll buy everybody a new sport coat.” They did and he did. “Win tonight,” Kerner shouted before the next game, “and you will all get a new pair of slacks.” It happened. “Make it seven in a row,” he said the next night, “and you get new sweaters.” Eventually, the commissioner forbade such incentives, but by then, Bob Pettit figured, the Hawks were the best-dressed team in the league.

  Both teams were playing for the championship for the first time—the Hawks had made it into the playoffs only once since Auerbach coached them—and Kiel Auditorium on the night of game three was wilder than any St. Louis crowd the Celtics had ever seen. To get to the court from the dressing room, they had to walk down a passage that cut through the seats, and the fans showered all of them, but particularly Russell, with abuse. Auerbach was determined to show the Hawks and their fans that he and his team did not feel intimidated. He began by complaining about the beat-up balls the Celtics had been given to practice with. Then, as the Celtics were warming up, Bob Sharman started shooting free throws that fell short. He felt that the height of the basket was slightly off, and Bob Cousy agreed.

  Auerbach complained to the referees, Sid Borgia and Arnie Heft, that the basket at the Celtics end of the court was not regulation height. Kerner stood nearby watching irritably. “What the hell is going on, Red?” he called out. The officials measured the distance and found it to be exactly ten feet high, which proved to Kerner that Auerbach, as usual, was hoping to throw the officials off balance and insinuate that the Hawks were cheating. “That’s bush!” Kerner shouted. “It’s just a cheap trick!”

  Auerbach’s back was to Kerner. Before the sportswriters, the officials, the players on both teams, and thousands of fans, he turned and, operating on the Brooklyn-street theory that you always strike first, smashed Kerner in the mouth with his fist. The blow gave the shocked Kerner a bloody lip and knocked loose a tooth, but before he could respond, his staff pulled him and Auerbach away from each other. “Look at that,” he said despite the blood and pointed to his mouth. “Nothing happened.” He turned to Auerbach. “You can coach that team of yours from a hotel room!” he yelled. “And on top of that, you can’t even punch!”

  The fight was over so quickly that many people in the arena were unaware of it, and when reporters surrounded Maurice Podoloff to ask what he intended to do, the commissioner said, “I must ascertain the facts.” Auerbach was not thrown out of the game, which had not officially started at the time he hit Kerner, but Podoloff subsequently fined him $300, causing Walter Brown to write a letter to Podoloff complaining that Kerner should also be fined for inciting the incident. “From all I hear,” Brown declared, “Auerbach had some provocation.”

  For all Auerbach’s theatrics, the Hawks won game three, and the series remained intensely competitive, with the teams alternating victories and the outcome at times decided by a single basket in the final seconds. By mid-April the series was tied 3–3, and the seventh and final game was scheduled to take place in Boston on a Saturday afternoon, April 13, 1957, before a sellout crowd and a national television audience. The Celtics began arriving at the Garden two hours before game time. The team’s locker room, behind the green clubhouse door under the stands, was smaller and drabber than many college locker rooms. In fact, it was not, strictly speaking, a locker room at all, since it had no lockers. What it did have was one toilet, two benches, one shower, and ten hooks. After each game, Walter Randall, the locker-room attendant, washed the players’ uniforms at home and before the next game hung them on their proper hooks. After each player arrived, he put on his uniform and hung his street clothes on the hook. If the players tossed towels on the floor, Randall would come down on them hard: Don’t be throwin’ no towels around! Clean up after yerselves!

  The locker room also had a hot plate and a coffeepot. Each player had a mug with his team number stenciled on it. Most players had a cup of coffee before the game. With the championship at stake, the dressing room was quieter and more tense than usual. Bill Sharman stretched and brewed a cup of tea. Auerbach smoked a cigar, and Heinsohn smoked a cigarette. Some players ate: a can of corn, a bologna sandwich. Russell vomited. The Celtics were notorious for playing with injuries, f
or appearing courtside wrapped, bandaged, and patched, and before the game Jack Nichols, one of the bench players, taped every team member who needed it.

  Just before it was time to take the floor, Auerbach called the players together. Auerbach did not, as a rule, believe in pep talks, which he thought were more effective on high school and college kids than grown professionals, and so he didn’t go in for any rousing oratory. He did point out the size of their playoff bonuses if they won: a total of $18,500 to be split among the team. “Defense and dollars,” he said. “Dollars and defense.” Russell had already vomited once when it came time for the Celtics to take the floor, but he still felt so nauseated that he told Auerbach he didn’t think he could play, and the team left the dressing room without him. Russell sat alone for a few seconds and then, realizing that regardless of how he felt he would never be forgiven and would never forgive himself if he missed even part of what might turn out to be his first championship, he hurried after them.

  In the years to come, some of the sportswriters who saw it would decide that the seventh game of the 1957 NBA championship series was one of the greatest athletic events they’d ever seen. Both teams, still financially unstable, were desperate for their first championship. Boston had won two of the three games played in the Garden during the series, and the home-court advantage made the Celtics slightly favored, but both clubs played fast-breaking ball, both were operating at peak intensity, and from the outset, the game was frenzied and high-scoring. Bob Pettit and Tommy Heinsohn, shooting better than anyone else on the court, practically traded baskets, but both Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman had gone cold in game six, and they remained cold during the first half. As a result, the Celtics went into halftime trailing by two points. The dressing room during the break was largely quiet. Then Auerbach told the team to go out and play the way they always played and their superiority would decide it.

  In the second half, Cousy and Sharman remained cold, but Auerbach kept them in, feeling he had no choice but to maintain his confidence in his key players and hope they would shoot their way out of their slumps. Heinsohn made the difference, scoring at key moments, rebounding, even passing, tearing tirelessly up and down the court. Russell was also playing magnificently, spinning, running, blocking shots, but in the huddles he excoriated himself for his inability to contain Pettit. “Shut up, Russell, you’re doing great,” Auerbach told him. In the fourth quarter, the Celtics established a six-point lead, but then the Hawks surged, going up by two with twenty seconds left. Then Russell scored, St. Louis recovered the ball, and Jack Coleman raced down the court on a fast break. It looked as if Coleman was going to put the game away for the Hawks, but Russell, in an astonishing display of athleticism and sheer determination, raced after Coleman, caught up with him, and at the last moment was able to knock aside Coleman’s layup. Heinsohn thought it was the most incredible single play he’d ever seen.

  When the clock ran out, the game was tied 103–103. In the first overtime the two teams traded baskets, neither able to break out. As the second overtime started, Heinsohn, who had scored thirty-seven points—more than anyone on the team, more than Cousy and Sharman combined—fouled out. Heinsohn didn’t want to leave the game and argued hysterically about the call, but by that time, he was almost too exhausted to continue playing. Because of his bad wind, Auerbach normally played Heinsohn for short bursts, but the rookie had proved himself so crucial in this game that Auerbach had kept him in, and now that he was finally going out, he was so drained—and the tension in the Garden was so high—that he walked off the court in tears, sat down on the bench, and wrapped his jacket around his head so the crowd would not see him crying.

  With less than four minutes left to play in the second overtime, the Hawks center, Ed Macauley, fouled out. The Hawks had been fouling out right and left, and by then the only players still sitting on the team’s bench were Irv Bemoras and Alex Hannum, the player-coach. Hannum was an aging journeyman who’d played all over the league and had been picked up on waivers by Ben Kerner once the regular season started. Hannum had spent most of his time on the bench, however, and when Kerner fired his coach, Red Holzman, midway through the season, Hannum had ended up with the job more or less by default, but then to everyone’s surprise had managed to bring the team all the way to the finals. While Hannum was still on the team roster and suited up in his uniform, he’d been devoting himself almost entirely to coaching and had not played in a game in three weeks. In other circumstances, Hannum would have sent in Bemoras. But Irv Bemoras was six-three. Hannum had four inches on him and since, at this point, rebounding was more important than shooting, Hannum put himself into the game.

  Boston had established a narrow lead, and as the clock wound down, the team managed to cling to it, largely because Russell was making it difficult for the Hawks to score. It seemed to Ben Kerner, watching from the sidelines, that Russell had retrieved practically every defensive rebound since the fourth quarter began. How could you possibly win, he wondered, if you got only one shot on every possession? But the Hawks were also making unforced errors. Alex Hannum, rusty after weeks without playing, muffed an easy shot and a few moments later had to turn the ball over when he was called for walking. In the final seconds Boston had a one-point lead and was trying to run out the clock, and when Hannum fouled Jim Loscutoff to force a turnover, Loscutoff made his free throw, bringing the score to 125–123.

  Hannum called a time-out. The Hawks had possession, but by then only a single second remained on the clock, which meant they did not have time to dribble the ball the length of the court and set up a play. But Hannum liked to sit around brainstorming improbable game situations and how he’d handle them, and he’d contemplated just such a moment. When Hannum had played for the Rochester Royals, one of his teammates was Bobby Davies, who had such an incredible arm that he could stand at one end of the court and hurl the ball all the way down its length, hitting the backboard at the far end. Since the clock did not start until another player touched the ball, such a throw would be a way of getting the ball downcourt without using up any time, though its success depended of course on the player who was making the inbounds pass actually hitting the backboard.

  It was a long shot, but Hannum thought that since the Celtics would be expecting a pass, it was worth a try, and during the time-out he told Pettit to make his way downcourt and keep his eyes on the basket. Hannum himself would make the full-court inbounds pass. Hannum had never practiced this throw, but he had strong shoulders. Still, he was one of the worst shots on the team, and Ed Macauley wondered how he was going to hit the backboard from ninety-four feet out when he had trouble hitting it from fifteen. Standing under Boston’s backboard, Hannum reared back and hurled the ball in a line drive to the far end of the court. Auerbach, watching from the sidelines, realized what Hannum was trying to do and thought, Impossible. To everyone’s surprise, Hannum’s included, he actually hit the backboard, but he had thrown the ball so hard that it ricocheted off with too much force, and Pettit did not have complete control over it when he batted it up toward the basket. Still, the ball hit the rim and rolled around and around before, just as the clock ran down, finally falling out.

  Russell stood on the court watching. His jersey was soaked, his controversial goatee—the one he’d grown during the season and had promised his teammates they could cut off if the Celtics beat the Hawks—was dripping with sweat. When the ball fell out he instinctively raised his arms in victory. In thirteen months, he had won an NCAA championship, an Olympic gold medal, and now an NBA title. For a man who, four years earlier, had graduated from McClymonds High and applied for a job as a sheet-metal worker because he had no other prospects, nothing would ever compare to such moments of pure unadulterated triumph, when the game was finally over and he stood there alone, the winner.

  8

  BY THE END of his sophomore year at Kansas, Chamberlain had grown accustomed to the fact that controversy would be a constant in his life. Off the court, he continued
to be dogged by accusations that he had taken money under the table to enroll at Kansas. Walter Brown—afraid that if Chamberlain joined the Philadelphia Warriors, they might unseat the championship team he had just put together with Bill Russell—had demanded that the NBA investigate Chamberlain’s financial arrangement with the university, and that, if it discovered any impropriety, it should ban him from playing in the league. “I have no definite proof what might be the figure,” he told reporters, “but it is a matter of fact that no one in the NBA can afford to pay Chamberlain what he gets at Kansas.”

  The problem, as Brown conceded, was that he had no proof. Neither did anyone else. Chamberlain and the Kansas administrators maintained that all he received from the university was tuition, room and board, and the fifteen dollars a month that he earned by selling programs during the college’s football games. But it was obvious to everyone that Wilt’s lifestyle required more than fifteen dollars a month. When he first arrived on campus as a freshman, he was driving a two-year-old Buick that he claimed to have paid for with money he’d made from his summer job as a bellhop at Kutsher’s Country Club. But then in his sophomore year, he began driving a brand-new Oldsmobile convertible.

  To the officials at the NCAA, this was too egregious to ignore. They summoned him to their Kansas City office, where they turned on a tape recorder and interrogated him about his finances. They wanted to know the exact nature of his financial arrangement with Kansas, whether he was compensated for his campus radio show, Flipping with the Dipper, and how he had paid for his car. Chamberlain insisted that he’d taken out a loan for the convertible, and had received no illegal payments of any kind from the university or its alumni. The interview lasted four hours. “It was nice talking to you,” the chief investigator said when the interview was finished, “but I don’t believe a word of it.” 7*