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

by John Taylor

  Chamberlain spent part of the summer after his sophomore year traveling around the country testing his skills against other college and professional players. He went up to New York City for school-yard pickup games against people such as Tom “Satch” Sanders and Walter Dukes, and to Indianapolis to play Oscar Robertson. By the end of the summer he figured he’d learned more from these games than he had in that entire year with Coach Harp. He returned to Kansas determined to win the national championship that he’d been denied the previous year. But halfway through the season, when Kansas had won ten straight games and was ranked number one in the nation, Chamberlain was accidentally kneed in the groin during a game with Kansas State. The injury caused Chamberlain’s testicles to swell up, a condition the university delicately referred to as a “glandular infection,” and he was sidelined long enough for Kansas to fall out of playoff contention.

  By the end of the season, Chamberlain had recovered, and he and his team delivered a 61–44 thrashing to Kansas State as it concluded, but he decided he’d had enough of college basketball. It wasn’t just the injury, or the missed opportunity for another crack at the championship. Chamberlain had begun to find the game, at least the way it was played in college, frustrating. He was constantly triple-teamed, with opposing players crowding him so tightly he could barely move, and other teams froze the ball, passing endlessly instead of shooting, just so they could prevent him from scoring. Smaller players ran under him when he jumped, trying to cause him to fall and hurt himself, and at other times they climbed up on his back and just stayed there, clinging to him. He wasn’t developing the skills he figured he’d need in the NBA.

  Also, Chamberlain figured that he had ten years left as a basketball player. And to deprive himself of being a professional for one of those years just to earn a degree made no sense, because whatever advantage a degree might give him would never offset the financial loss of one of his ten years as a basketball player. He had to make his money now, while he was young. And there was his family to consider. His parents were still struggling to raise children on the sixty dollars a week his father, who was now in his late fifties, was making as a handyman and the money his mother brought in as a domestic.

  At the end of his junior year, Chamberlain got a call from Abe Saperstein. While Saperstein had failed to sign Chamberlain directly out of high school, he had not abandoned his hopes of hiring him. Saperstein had a minority interest in the Philadelphia Warriors and was well aware that Eddie Gottlieb had drafted Chamberlain. But under NBA rules, if Chamberlain left Kansas at the end of his third year, he would have to wait a year before turning pro, and Saperstein hoped he would play for the Globetrotters during that year. His two stars, Goose Tatum and Marques Haynes, had left to form a rival team, the Harlem Magicians, and the Trotters needed a new player with dazzling skills and a large personality. Once Chamberlain joined the team and got used to the money, Saperstein thought he might be persuaded to stay. And if he did not, he would at least be going to a team in which Saperstein had an interest.

  Saperstein offered Chamberlain a base salary of $46,000, but the package also included bonuses based on fan attendance that could bring it up to $65,000. Chamberlain found the terms irresistible, particularly the attendance bonuses. “Very early in my career, I learned to count the house and figure out what the crowd was worth to me,” he said later. Haskell Cohen, the publicity man for the NBA who had gotten Chamberlain his job as a bellhop at Kutsher’s, did not want him to go to the Globetrotters, thinking it would hurt his game and his reputation, but when Chamberlain told him how much he’d be making, Haskell said, “You might as well go ahead, you’re sure never going to get that kind of money in the NBA.”

  On June 18, 1958, Saperstein held a press conference at Toots Shor’s in New York to announce the deal. Chamberlain appeared in a red, white, and blue Globetrotters warm-up suit and, as a reporter for The New York Times noted, was “idly palming in each hand a basketball that appeared pea-sized in his monstrous grip.” As soon as the event was over, Chamberlain flew to Italy to join the Globetrotters. In Europe, he discovered to his delight that he was treated as an object of exotic fascination, but with none of the racial tension that complicated his popularity in the United States. As soon as he stepped from a hotel, a small crowd would gather and follow him wherever he went. In almost every city, he got requests to make personal appearances and give television interviews. The food was wonderful, and so was the climate, the wine, and the women. He was astonished at how available women were. His fellow Globetrotters did not even have to proposition them. If, during a game, a Trotter saw an attractive woman in the crowd, he invented some pretext to run into the stands, where he slipped her a note with his hotel room number. If he saw a woman on the street, he gave her tickets to the next game, where he passed her the note with the room number. In no time, Chamberlain was emulating the tactic.

  Many sportswriters had ridiculed Chamberlain’s claim that he was leaving college for the Globetrotters to play more challenging basketball, but in fact he was able to develop his game during his year with the team. Saperstein played him at guard, an entirely new position that allowed him to practice his feints and work on his passing and outside shooting. While Chamberlain had sworn he would not become one of the Globetrotters’ clowns, playing guard did allow him the opportunity to move around the court and engage in the sort of theatrical stunts that amazed spectators and sold tickets. In one of the team’s favorite plays, he would fall back to mid-court, another Trotter would feed him the ball, and he would then take two of his enormous nine-foot strides, which would carry him into the paint and up into the air toward the hoop for a dunk.

  After touring Europe, the Globetrotters returned home and barnstormed around the country. Saperstein calculated that his ticket sales had increased 20 percent as a result of Chamberlain’s presence on the team, and he offered Chamberlain a considerable raise to stay on with the Globetrotters. Chamberlain had enjoyed himself immensely that year. It would prove in fact to be the most enjoyable year in his entire basketball career. The Globetrotters’ travel schedule was grueling, and they played a total of 205 games a year, which meant sometimes two or even three games a day, but the games themselves were not demanding. Since victory was foreordained, there was no pressure to win, the fans were uniformly adoring, and the team hardly ever practiced. Even so, Chamberlain was looking forward to testing himself in the genuinely competitive game played in the NBA. But he had become adept at playing suitors off each other, and as April approached and his contract with the Globetrotters came to an end, he hinted publicly that he might renew it, since Saperstein was offering him more than he could make in the NBA. The prospect filled Eddie Gottlieb with desperation. He had waited for four years for Chamberlain and was afraid that the Warriors might fold without him.

  Gottlieb, known as the Mogul, was a small, overweight, balding man with a deeply creased face and sad eyes offset by a snappy bow tie. Red Smith once described him as “a wonderful little guy about the size and shape of a half-keg of beer.” He’d been born in Kiev, Russia, in 1898, but when he was still small his parents migrated to New York, and as a boy he hitched rides on the backs of ice trucks to watch the baseball Giants at the Polo Grounds. His family moved to Philadelphia when he was nine, and he transferred his affections to that city’s teams. He was athletic and, despite his small size, he set a scoring record at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, but his true talents were intellectual rather than physical. He had an almost photographic memory and later could recall not just the scores of games—all games, baseball and football as well as basketball—but the box office, the size of the crowd, and, if the game was played outdoors, the weather.

  Gottlieb had been involved in basketball since 1918, the year he started a team of Jewish players called the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, or Sphas, which later accepted gentiles and became part of the loose association of professional basketball teams in the twenties. Spectators coming to see the Sp
has in the thirties climbed a marble staircase up to the third-floor ballroom of the Broadwood Hotel on Saturday nights and, after buying a ticket (thirty-five cents for women, sixty-five cents for men), sat on plush upholstered seats to watch a game that almost invariably included a fistfight between the Sphas’ Chickie Passion and one of the opponents. Gottlieb all but guaranteed a fight. When the game was over, the spectators took to the floor to dance while Gil Fitch, another Sphas player, swapped his basketball uniform for a tuxedo and led the band.

  After World War II, what remained of the Sphas became the nucleus for the Philadelphia Warriors, one of the original members of the Basketball Association of America. Gottlieb never married and, unlike a number of the early owners, had no source of income outside his team. He was manager and coach, sold tickets, and even drove the team to exhibition games. He understood the rules, and then, as the game evolved with the arrival of new generations of talent, he understood how they had to be changed. He appreciated ability, he saw how a limited player might fill a narrow but useful role on a team, and he knew how to motivate. Even after he stopped coaching, he would sit on the bench during games, indiscreetly second-guessing the coach he had hired and getting into arguments with the referees that often ended with him tearing off his suit coat and hurling it on the floor.

  Gottlieb was notoriously tightfisted. But it was an understandable trait in those uncertain early days and one that helped the Warriors survive when many other franchises folded. Despite doling out taxi money and meal money reluctantly, despite haggling endlessly with his players over contract terms, he was loyal and could be generous, and most of his players not only respected him but came to consider him a lifelong friend. Gottlieb also had a gift for promotion. “He pumped the house and carried tickets in his pocket,” recalled Joe Ruklick, who joined the Warriors in 1959. Gottlieb hired local sportswriters such as Herb Goode of the Philadelphia Record and Harvey Pollack of the Bulletin to handle public relations for his team. He sensed early on what would draw fans to the game. It was not so much violence, though occasional outbreaks of it provided an undeniable thrill. It was not mere victory in itself, which if acquired by the stalling tactics common before the use of the twenty-four-second clock could be nothing more than an exercise in tedium. What would draw fans, he realized, was the excitement provided by high-scoring stars. He signed a string of them, first Jumpin’ Joe Fulks, who in 1949 set a scoring record of sixty-three points in a single game, then Paul Arizin.

  Despite Gottlieb’s talents, the Warriors franchise for years had such poor attendance that while the league allowed a ten-man roster, he could at times afford to hire only nine players. During one season in the early fifties, the team played 80 percent of its home games on neutral courts such as Raleigh, Providence, and Iowa City, where the guarantee Gottlieb received from local promoters was greater than what he could expect to take in at the gate in Philadelphia. Ever since Chamberlain was in high school, Gottlieb had believed he would be the team’s salvation. When Chamberlain returned from his year in Europe with the Globetrotters and began hinting he might be tempted by Saperstein’s offer to sign for another year with the team, Gottlieb appealed to the NBA’s board of governors. The NBA had a cap of $25,000 on player salaries, and only a few top players such as Bob Cousy and Bob Pettit earned it. Gottlieb persuaded his fellow owners to raise the cap, and offered Chamberlain roughly $27,000, but still Wilt refused to commit. One night that spring, during a doubleheader at Madison Square Garden, sportswriter Irv Goodman asked Gottlieb if Chamberlain was actually going to join the NBA. “What can I tell you,” Gottlieb said plaintively. “I’m waiting for him, that’s all.”

  9

  YOU DUMB SCHVARTZEH! You big schvartzeh sonofabitch! It was during training camp at the start of Bill Russell’s second season and Red Auerbach was yelling at him. Russell hated to practice, and Auerbach felt from time to time that he had to lean on him. He also felt he had to show the rest of the players that no one, not even Bill Russell, was allowed to slack off or got the kid-gloves treatment when Auerbach was around. Before the start of training camp, Auerbach had explained to Russell why from time to time he was going to have to scream at him. “If I can’t yell at you, then I can’t yell at anybody,” he said. “So I’m going to yell like hell tomorrow and throughout the week, but don’t pay any attention to it, okay? You know you’re going to make the team.”

  Russell agreed. And so when Auerbach screamed schvartzeh! he said nothing. Auerbach was not an outright bigot, Russell understood. Schvartzeh was simply the word New York Jews had used for decades to refer to blacks. Auerbach was also trying to get the racial issue out in front of everyone, so the Celtics wouldn’t feel they all had to tiptoe around a taboo subject. Nothing spoiled the dressing-room atmosphere like a bunch of overly sensitive big jocks. Still, the word had an undertone of contempt, and Russell got a little annoyed when he heard it, as he did over some of Auerbach’s other racial assumptions. At the end of the previous season, Auerbach had called Russell to tell him he was thinking of drafting Sam Jones from North Carolina Central.

  “Do you think he can go good for us?” Auerbach asked.

  “Who the hell is Sam Jones?” Russell asked in reply.

  “He’s a schvartzeh who plays for North Carolina. I thought you’d know him.”

  In other words, Russell realized, Auerbach assumed because both he and Jones were black that he would have heard of him. Russell wanted to ask Auerbach if he knew every damned Jewish player in the country. Auerbach, despite being known for drafting the first black player in the NBA, was not exactly a model of progressive racial etiquette. But he did eventually realize that while the use of schvartzeh may have been socially acceptable on the streets of Brooklyn in the 1930s, Russell and the other black players considered it a borderline slur. “Russell, what do we call you guys?” Auerbach asked one day. “I can use colored, or Negro, or African American. Is it black or what?” Russell replied that the preferred word was black.

  Russell had to put up with far worse language from some of the Celtics fans. “Coon!,” “Nigger!,” and “Chocolate boy!” were a few of the words shouted at him from the stands of Boston Garden. He would later tell his daughter, Karen, that he never listened to the boos or the insults, because he never listened to the cheers. But the attitude of the Celtics fans was one of many reasons that Russell never developed much affection for the city of Boston, which despite its reputation as a bastion of liberal thinking seemed to Russell to be as racist, in its own way, as any city he’d ever seen. For all the phenomenal success of his rookie year, he’d had trouble finding a job in Boston during the off-season. While he and Bob Cousy were not particularly close, they did enjoy playing golf together, but Cousy, who lived in Worcester, was unable to invite him to the Worcester Country Club. No one at the club had ever come out and said so, nonetheless Cousy knew it was out of the question. And Russell was coolly rebuffed in the first suburb in which he tried to buy a house.

  Eventually, Russell and his wife found a handsome but unimposing ranch house in suburban Reading. He could have moved into Roxbury, the black section of Boston, but by then he had a young son, and he wanted his children to go to good schools. The Russells were the first black family to move to Reading, their house was in a largely Irish Catholic neighborhood, and, initially, their relations with their neighbors were stiff. The first year in their new home, it was broken into twice.

  But Russell liked the house itself. It was large and comfortable, with a finished basement big enough for an elaborate electric train set. When Russell was growing up, he’d wanted a train set, but his parents could never afford one, and now he acquired a huge one, actually fourteen different sets joined together, with engines, cars, lakes, tunnels, depots, towers, bridges, switches, signals, and crossing gates. He bought a $2,100 hi-fi set and amassed a collection of 1,500 records, leaning toward jazz and protest-folk but including Broadway musicals such as Kismet and the soundtrack to the movie Exodus. He could afford
an expensive car, but since he considered the sight of a black man in a Cadillac to be a racial cliché, he drove a Lincoln Continental. His jersey number was six, and so he ordered a license plate that read CELTICS 6.

  The Celtics’ first black players from the early fifties, such as Chuck Cooper and Don Barksdale, had moved on by the time Russell arrived, and when he joined the team he was the sole black on the roster. It seemed obvious to him that the NBA had a quota on black players. It was not as if all the owners had sat down and worked out a secret agreement to restrict black players. There was no need to actually discuss it, just as there was no need for the members of the Worcester Country Club to tell Bob Cousy he couldn’t invite Bill Russell out to play golf. Everyone knew what the situation was. No team in the league had more than two or at the most three blacks.

  In the early fifties, when there were few black players in the NBA, they were almost all forwards and they would be assigned to guard each other, which in effect meant they canceled each other out, leaving the game to be played by the four white players on each team, who often refused to pass the ball to the black players. By the late fifties, blacks were playing all positions and black representation on teams had increased, but a de facto quota system was still in place. What that meant was that when a black tried out for a team, he felt he was competing not only for one of the twelve spots on the team but for one of the two or three black spots, which meant that if he made the team, the owner would drop one of the other black players.

  When Sam Jones joined the team in 1957, the Celtics reached what Russell thought of as the outer limit of the quota. Then the following year Auerbach signed K. C. Jones and drafted a fourth black player, Ben Swain of Texas State. “The Celtics will not keep four Negroes,” one sportswriter declared. “The crowds won’t stand for it, and neither will the owners.” Russell confronted Walter Brown, who denied the existence of a quota. “I look for players, black, white, vermillion,” he told Russell. “I couldn’t care less.” Russell didn’t believe him. The facts spoke for themselves, and he was not prepared to silently accept indignities at a time when the civil rights movement was quickening its stride. Two years earlier, in 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr., had successfully led the boycott of the bus system in Montgomery, Alabama. He’d been featured on the cover of Time the following year, and in the process became, as one historian pointed out, “a permanent fixture of American mass culture.” By 1958, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had voter-registration drives going on in some twelve Southern cities. In June, King became the first Negro leader to formally meet with President Dwight Eisenhower in the White House, though three months later he was arrested in Montgomery on charges of loitering in a courthouse.