by John Taylor
Many Boston sportswriters still disliked Auerbach, but Colonel Dave Egan of the Record remained a fan until his death, at age fifty-seven, in 1958. Egan particularly admired Auerbach’s courtside tirades. “He guarantees the integrity of the sport,” Egan once wrote in defense of Auerbach’s behavior. “He stands outspokenly for his men. He fights for them, as he goes around the country playing wide-open, spectator-appealing, aggressive basketball.” Auerbach had also won the admiration and support of Milton Gross of the New York Post. “No coach is so violently disliked by the other coaches in the NBA,” Gross reported in an apt summation of the prevailing view of Auerbach. “No coach has been slapped so consistently with fines so large by Maurice Podoloff. No coach has cast himself as such a general nuisance to the league’s head man. None beefs more with referees, tangles with spectators or ignores propriety more by shouting instructions louder from a seat in the stands after he has been banished from the floor. And none is more appreciated by his players than Auerbach.”
Auerbach had spent almost a decade assembling his team. What set it apart was that each of the men he had brought to the Celtics had a defined role, and each of them understood what it was, excelled at it, and accepted the limitations that accompanied it. No other team in the league had so many men who were so capable at executing their specific assignments. Cousy led the fast break and set the play in motion; Russell controlled the backboard; Heinsohn shot and, if Russell was out of position, rebounded; Sharman and Sam Jones scored; K. C. Jones played defense; Loscutoff provided muscle; Frank Ramsey came off the bench to lead the rally. In 1976 Jeff Greenfield was to write a book making the argument—one that had been heard for years in Boston saloons—that given the record they would eventually set, the Celtics of this era were not just the greatest basketball team ever assembled, but the best in the history of professional team sports or, as Greenfield put it, “The World’s Greatest Team.”
Be that as it may, none of the Celtics, including Russell, was a dominant player who carried the team in the way that, a few years later, Oscar Robertson would carry the Royals, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would carry the Milwaukee Bucks, or Magic Johnson the Lakers, or Michael Jordan the Bulls. And in the fall of 1959, the attention of the basketball world was focused on Wilt Chamberlain, the man expected to become the greatest franchise player of all time. “He will dominate the game,” Irv Goodman wrote in Sport as the season got under way. “He will be the mighty drawing card that will jack up the NBA to full status as a major league. He will save the weaker franchises. He will rush league expansion. He will raise players’ salaries. He will force changes in the rules which may well alter the very character of the game. For a professional sport that has come close but hasn’t quite made it yet, he will be Babe Ruth.”
CHAMBERLAIN’S DEBUT took place on October 24, 1959, at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was a Saturday night, and 15,000 fans turned out to watch him lead the Warriors to a 118–109 victory over the Knicks. The final score underrepresented the magnitude of the defeat for the Knicks. They were stunned by how devastating Chamberlain was. By the time the game was over, he had scored forty-three points and pulled down twenty-eight rebounds. He completely shut down the Knicks offense, stifling anyone who drove to the basket and consigning the New York players to perimeter shots. And when the shots missed, Chamberlain raked in the rebound and even before his feet touched the ground had rifled the ball out to a teammate to set up the fast break. The Times called his performance “both beautiful and frightening,” and the Herald-Tribune declared it “the finest debut in league history.” “The Age of Wilt has arrived,” Jack Kiser wrote in the Philadelphia Daily News. “The NBA will never be the same again.”
So many people wanted to be able to say they had met Chamberlain on the night of his NBA debut that, after the game, a huge crowd gathered outside Madison Square Garden on the corner of Forty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue, spilling into the street and blocking traffic. When Chamberlain finally appeared, he happily spent half an hour shaking hands and signing autographs. In the days to come, crowds lined up at arenas throughout the league to watch the new phenomenon. Haskell Cohen, director of publicity for the NBA, estimated that attendance league-wide was up 23 percent over the previous year, and he attributed 19 percent of that increase directly to Chamberlain. In fact, ticket sales at other arenas that hosted the Warriors surged so much when Philadelphia came to town that Eddie Gottlieb asked the other franchise owners to change the NBA rules to allow the visiting team to receive a cut of the home team’s gate. Gottlieb argued that since the crowds were coming to see Chamberlain, and since he was the one paying Chamberlain’s astronomical salary, he should be able to share in the windfall profits his star was creating for the other owners. The owners, who had already changed league rules once at Gottlieb’s request because of Chamberlain—to allow Gottlieb to draft him while he was still in high school—refused.
As the season got under way, the rest of the teams in the NBA quickly discovered that it was almost impossible to contain Chamberlain. He scored fifty-eight points in a second game against the Knicks and another fifty-eight against the Detroit Pistons. Other teams started telling jokes such as: How do you defend against Chamberlain? Lock the door of the dressing room, and if that doesn’t work, use an ax. There were other players in the league as tall or almost as tall as Chamberlain, among them Ray Felix, Walter Dukes, and Clyde Lovellette. But Chamberlain seemed taller. That was because none of the other men had Chamberlain’s athletic ability. Indeed, until then, the NBA’s tall men had been considered relatively graceless and unathletic. The less charitable sportswriters bluntly referred to them as “goons.” Chamberlain was not without his limitations as a basketball player. He was said to have hard hands, big cinderblock-like mitts that made it difficult for him to receive a vigorously thrown pass or allow the ball to roll gracefully off his fingers into the basket. And his strength was said to deprive him of finesse, which was why his outside shots often lacked the arc to drop in all-net.
But unlike the other tall men, Chamberlain had the grace and stamina of the track-and-field star that he was. In fact, the presumption that his athletic accomplishments were due to his height infuriated him, and he sometimes wished he were six inches shorter just so his talents could get the respect they deserved. His body was capable of what were essentially superhuman feats. On the track field, he could clear six-ten in the high jump and put a sixteen-pound shot fifty-five feet. He ran a quarter mile in forty-seven seconds. His stride on the run was nine feet. He could easily play an entire forty-eight-minute basketball game without ever being relieved, and in fact preferred to play the whole game because he lost his rhythm and his muscles stiffened up if he sat on the bench.
Chamberlain had been rail-thin when he went to Kansas, but had started lifting weights at the recommendation of some of the members of the track team, and now, while he still had a thirty-inch waist, he weighed 240 pounds and could shoulder-press 400 pounds. Sports Illustrated once called him “probably the greatest athletic construction ever formed of flesh and blood.” He sweated off eight to ten pounds during every game, and to restore his strength, he needed to consume some 6,000 calories a day—twice the intake of the average man. Every day, he ate two large meals and one huge one—the huge meal consisting of, for example, a tall glass of juice, three soft-boiled eggs, a two-pound T-bone steak, vegetables, salad, six pieces of bread, two desserts, and a quart and a half of milk.
With his height, his strength, and his athleticism, Chamberlain was able to score and rebound virtually at will, and so, partly out of frustration and partly as a deliberate tactic, his opponents began to challenge him physically. This was more than simply the veteran players putting the question to a rookie in the league’s ritual hazing. Chamberlain was pulled, shoved, elbowed, grabbed, tripped, held, jabbed, and jostled like no player before him. The abuse he took astonished his teammates and even his opponents. Tommy Heinsohn decided he would never have wanted to trade places w
ith Chamberlain, because the poor guy was subjected to an unprecedented amount of manhandling.
There was little downside to the tactics. If a player was called for fouling Chamberlain, it only meant that Chamberlain got a free throw, and his foul shooting was so bad that he was embarrassed to go to the foul line. But often, the fouls were not even called. The referees for the most part were of average height. Like most men that size, they found Chamberlain physically intimidating, and since many fouls were judgment calls, they tended to favor the smaller men playing against Wilt, either because the fouls against Wilt seemed less significant given his size or because they identified with the smaller players. After all, Chamberlain was so tall that he needed only to walk up to the basket, catch a pass thrown high enough so that none of the defenders could reach it, then dunk. It didn’t seem fair. “If we let Wilt stand under the basket, he’ll ruin the game,” one official privately complained.
The harassment infuriated Chamberlain, who regarded it as a failure in officiating. He felt that his coach, Neil Johnston, was not doing enough to protest the referees’ double standards, and that encouraged them to overlook all but the most egregious fouls against him. Johnston, however, felt that it was up to Chamberlain himself to make it clear to his opponents that he would not tolerate rough treatment. “They’re getting away with murder,” Johnston told an acquaintance. “It would help if he would bop a few.” Joe Ruklick, Chamberlain’s white backup, felt there was clearly an element of racism in the harassment. Even some of Chamberlain’s own white teammates referred to him as a “nigger” behind his back. They seemed to Ruklick to regard Wilt as a freak of nature who would be gone sooner or later, at which point they could return to playing basketball the way it had been played before.
Since Chamberlain did nothing about the harassment, opposing players pushed him further and further, waiting to see where he would draw the line. Then, with the season less than two weeks old, Philadelphia played St. Louis, and Clyde Lovellette, the Hawks center, proved how dangerous it had been for Chamberlain to fail to retaliate immediately. Lovellette, by reputation one of the dirtiest players in the league, was a massive man who wore cowboy hats, had a gun collection, and took pistols with him on the road. He was popular with his teammates; John Havlicek, his friend and roommate when Lovellette later joined the Celtics, regarded him as a thirty-three-year-old juvenile delinquent. But opponents hated taking the court against him. He rarely used his fists; instead he knocked players down with an elbow to the face, with a knee to the groin, or by sticking out his foot to trip them, usually apologizing and pretending it was an accident, only to do it again.
In the locker room before the game between the Warriors and the Hawks, Lovellette and some of his teammates discussed their plans for Chamberlain. “Clyde said he was going to get Wilt,” recalled Cal Ramsey, a black player who had joined the team that year. Ramsey, concerned for Chamberlain’s safety, went up to Wilt before the start of the game. “Be careful,” Ramsey said. “They’re out to get you.” The warning did no good. During the game, Wilt was running up the court when Lovellette came running toward him from the opposite direction and, as they passed, let fly an elbow at Chamberlain’s face. The blow, heightened by the momentum of the two big men hurtling toward each other, landed on Chamberlain’s chin and drove his jaw upward. Two of his lower front teeth were knocked back and punctured the roof of his mouth. “It really killed him,” Ramsey recalled.
The next day, an infection set in, and Wilt’s face became so swollen that he had difficulty both eating and sleeping that night. The Warriors, however, needed to leave for Detroit for a game against the Pistons, and Chamberlain was unable to get to a doctor. Philadelphia was in second place, trailing Boston, and coach Neil Johnston was afraid of falling too far behind, so that night he started Chamberlain, who wore a large mask to protect his face. He played the entire game, despite the fact that his head hurt and was swelling up. Afterward, unable to eat solid food, he consumed quantities of orange juice and 7-Up.
The next night, in New York, Chamberlain was hit in the mouth again, this time by Willie Naulls. The team physician, Dr. Si Ball, realized Chamberlain had blood poisoning so acute that Ball was surprised that he had been able to remain on his feet. Furthermore, the infection in his mouth had become so bad that he needed immediate treatment, and an ambulance took him to the hospital. Dental surgery was performed, and by the end of the procedure he had lost a total of four teeth, and was out for three games.
Ike Gellis, sports editor of the New York Post, had befriended Chamberlain early in the season, and like Johnston he encouraged Chamberlain to fight back against players such as Lovellette. Gellis told Chamberlain the story of how, when Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton had first joined the Knicks, he had been pushed around by white players until one day he coldcocked Bob Harris of the Celtics. The intimidation stopped. But Chamberlain, for all his size, had never been a rough player, as Blinky Brown had noticed when he was teaching Wilt to play basketball at the Haddington Recreational Center. The idea of resorting to violence as a calculated solution to violence simply puzzled him. “If I punch someone in the face, what does that prove?” Chamberlain asked Gellis.
It seemed to Gellis that on some level Chamberlain simply didn’t understand what the NBA was all about. The fact of the matter was that, although basketball was officially a noncontact sport, players were expected to both inflict and endure an enormous amount of pain. In the middle of Chamberlain’s rookie year, Sport magazine surveyed all eighty of the league’s players and found that, in a given week, thirty-three of them—a little short of 50 percent—were nursing injuries or ailments of one sort or another. To begin with, many were sick. The constant travel weakened the resistance of the players, who were always coming down with colds and the flu, and more often than not these illnesses spread through the team. In addition, players suffered from sprained ankles, pulled ligaments, strained tendons, hairline kneecap fractures, muscle strains, charley horses, blisters, bruises, and infected feet. Many of these injuries occurred in fights for the ball, or blocks made against a driving player, or scuffles for position under the boards, and many of them were inflicted intentionally by players such as Clyde Lovellette.
Players were trained to view their own injuries with Spartan disdain. Because the teams were so small, every player had a function, and the coaches could rarely afford to take an injured man off the active roster. And even if the coaches were willing to let a player sit out a game, the player worried about what it might do to his career. “There were less than a hundred players in the league back then, which meant every one of them was good,” recalled Al Domenico, the first trainer hired by the Philadelphia 76ers. “No one wanted to miss a game, because if you did the person who replaced you might turn out to be better than you were and you’d lose your spot.” So virtually all of them continued to play. “There are days when the NBA looks like a dance marathon of the twenties,” Steve Gelman wrote in the article in Sport, which was titled “Walking Wounded Everywhere.”
THE TEAM Chamberlain had joined had finished in last place in the Eastern Division the year before. The Warriors were not without talent. Forward Paul Arizin had one of the best jump shots in the league. In the backcourt there was Guy Rogers, a fast-moving ball handler, and Tom Gola, whose strength was defense. But neither Gola nor Rogers was a particularly effective scorer, and the Warriors bench was weak. Once Chamberlain joined the team, however, the Warriors had become contenders, and they spent the season chasing the Celtics for the lead in the Eastern Division. Twice they came within two games, but each time the Celtics pulled ahead, and Boston finished the regular season ten games in front. But the performance of the Warriors as a team seemed almost beside the point. Chamberlain was an act unto himself. By the end of the season, he had run up a total of 2,707 points, exceeding by more than 600 points the record set by Bob Pettit, and pulled down a total of 1,941 rebounds, exceeding the record of 1,612 set by Russell. The New York Metropolitan Basket
ball Writers Association voted him Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player—making him the first player ever to receive both awards at once.
The only player in the league who had given Chamberlain any trouble was Bill Russell. Russell did not completely shut Chamberlain down—Wilt was always going to get his points—but he was able to contain him to the degree that Boston was the only club in the league that did not feel it necessary to double-team Chamberlain, which meant the other four Celtics were free to concentrate on the rest of the Warriors, who were simply no match for them man-to-man. When Philadelphia beat Syracuse in round one of the playoffs and faced Boston for the Eastern Division crown, the entire nation was riveted by the prospect of Chamberlain and Russell battling each other in a title series that had an almost ideological character, pitting as it did individual genius against team effort. Would Chamberlain rise to the occasion and single-handedly score enough to take the series, or would Russell and his fellow Celtics, working together, be able to contain the greatest individual athlete the sport had produced? “Suddenly, housewives and college coeds who generally avoid athletic events with a passion are taking sides in this battle between the giants,” Sport magazine observed that spring. “The names of Russell and Chamberlain have given new life to the game, perhaps even to the world of sport.”
