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

by John Taylor

  The games were played back-to-back in a grueling schedule designed to pack as many of them as possible into weekend television slots. Halftime was also cut to six minutes to enable the games to finish at the designated hour. The league seemed unprepared for the spotlight, with hysterical fans packed into seats directly above the benches heaping abuse on the opposing teams, with eggs and garbage splattering on the courts, and with Auerbach and Gottlieb screaming at the referees and exchanging insults and bickering in the press about the officiating. So many sportswriters used the word bush to describe the atmosphere that Mrs. Maurice Podoloff asked one of them, “What do they mean by the term bush I keep reading?”

  Everyone expected the series to be rough. Back during the regular season, in a game against the Hawks, Chamberlain had finally snapped. Feeling that he was being guarded too closely by Bob Pettit, he let fly with an elbow to Pettit’s face, and the Hawks forward had to leave the game to receive two stitches. But this had done little to dissuade Chamberlain’s opponents, who still felt that if they were not going to let him run away with the game, they had little choice but to foul him. And Boston was known as one of the most physically aggressive teams in the league. Jungle Jim Loscutoff was the team’s official enforcer, and it had earned him such hatred from the fans of rival teams that women had run out of the stands during halftime and attacked him with their purses and umbrellas. But Auerbach also gave Tommy Heinsohn assignments involving physical confrontation. Heinsohn was utterly fearless. Growing up a German American in Jersey City during World War II, he had been taunted as being a Nazi by the neighborhood’s kids until one day when his father, who worked for the National Biscuit Company, rounded them all up and had him fight them one by one. On the basketball court, Heinsohn showed such little hesitation in using his elbows or hands that to players on other teams it seemed as if he simply did not care if he hurt someone.

  Boston won game one, but Chamberlain proved himself a force at both ends of the court. And so, during game two in Philadelphia, Auerbach told Heinsohn to stand in Chamberlain’s way whenever the Warriors scored, thereby preventing Chamberlain from getting back to defend his basket while Russell rushed down to take an open shot. The first time Heinsohn did this, Chamberlain was astonished that an opponent would actually try to hamper him from moving when he didn’t even have the ball. But, to Chamberlain’s amazement, Heinsohn did it again and again, cutting in front of him each time the Warriors scored. The guy was blocking him blind.

  “You do that again and I’ll knock you on your ass,” Chamberlain warned.

  “Bring your lunch,” Heinsohn replied.

  The two men ended up elbowing each other under the basket—the area sometimes referred to as “the butcher shop”—on almost every possession. Chamberlain thought he was being fouled, but none of the referees saw any hands used and nothing was called. After one particularly sharp exchange, Chamberlain lost his temper and shoved Heinsohn, who fell and slid twenty feet across the floor. Chamberlain went after him, fists clenched, arms flailing. The crowd roared, and players from both the Celtics and the Warriors charged onto the court. In the melee, Chamberlain struck out with his fists for the first time in his career, swinging a roundhouse right at Heinsohn, but missing Heinsohn’s chin by inches and landing the punch squarely on the head of his own teammate Tom Gola. “Believe it or not, the Stilt’s punches are even less accurate than his free-throw shooting,” Celtics radio announcer Johnny Most told his listeners. “He just decked his own teammate!”

  By halftime, Chamberlain’s knuckles and hand had swollen up painfully. The team doctor packed the hand in ice and Chamberlain kept playing, but he scored only nine points during the rest of the game. After the virtual riot on the arena floor, both teams turned sloppy, missing passes and acting hesitant on defense, but the Warriors pulled ahead to win, tying the series. The following day, when the third game was to be played in Boston, Chamberlain could barely move his fingers. He played so badly that he managed to score only twelve points, and Neil Johnston took him out in the third quarter. When the game was over, he went to Massachusetts General Hospital. X-rays showed that while none of the bones in his hand had been broken, the joints on the second and third fingers were severely bruised. Chamberlain’s hand continued to hamper his play during the fourth game, which the Warriors lost, but then, with the series at 3–1 and the championship on the line, he pulled himself together for the fifth game, in the Garden, and delivered an incredible performance. Although his hand was far from healed, he scored fifty points, a record for an opponent in the Garden, and led the team to a startling 128–107 victory before a crowd of Celtics fans stunned to silence.

  The commanding win put the series at 3–2 and made the Warriors feel they could take it. “They have momentum now,” the Celtics’ Frank Ramsey told Leonard Koppett of the New York Post, who wrote, “The Boston-Philadelphia series now reaches the hysteria-level anticipated ever since Wilt Chamberlain came into the NBA last fall.” The intensity brought out the best in both teams in the sixth game, played two days later in Philadelphia. Chamberlain and Russell effectively neutralized each other, the shooters on both teams found their range, and with eleven seconds left, the score stood tied 117–117. Then Philadelphia’s Guy Rogers, who with thirty-one points was the game’s leading scorer, missed two free throws, and Boston recovered the ball. Bill Sharman took a jump shot and missed, but then Tommy Heinsohn leaped up for the ball. He had jumped short, but as he fell back he was able to swat the ball with his fingertips, and it popped up and into the basket for the winning points just as the buzzer sounded.

  Chamberlain was stunned. In the locker room, dripping with sweat, he sat down on the bench exhausted and embittered, his taped hand throbbing. Ike Gellis came over to talk to him. Chamberlain was the most spectacular basketball player Gellis had ever seen. The number of records Chamberlain had broken in his rookie year, Gellis thought, was in itself an astonishing record. Wilt had taken more shots, scored more points, gotten more rebounds, taken more free throws, and played more minutes than anyone else in the history of the game. Gellis, however, knew that none of the accolades had made Chamberlain happy. He had left Kansas in part because he was frustrated with the way his opponents played him, but he had found the NBA even more frustrating than college. He had complained all season about the officials’ double standards, the way he was double- and triple-teamed in defiance of the man-to-man rule, and most of all about the violence, hinting that if the situation didn’t improve he might just quit playing. Like all sportswriters, Gellis was aware of Chamberlain’s frustrations, and he wondered if now, with this bitter defeat, Chamberlain might actually go ahead and leave the NBA.

  “Is it true, Wilt?” Gellis asked. “Are you going to leave?”

  Chamberlain nodded. “This is my last game,” he said. “This is it.”

  Gellis asked him why he was quitting.

  “If I come back next year and score less points than I did this year, I may have to punch eight or nine guys in the face,” Chamberlain said. “I may lose my poise. I don’t want to. The pressure is too great.”

  Gellis asked him what he intended to do.

  “Hibernate.”

  11

  BY THE SUMMER of 1960, the eight teams in the National Basketball Association had stabilized, although many of them remained financially troubled. While no one realized it at the time, the league was about to embark on the first leg of the expansion that by the end of the century would result in a total—quite literally unimaginable in 1960 even to the game’s most enthusiastic supporters—of thirty teams. Two factors were now in place that made the growth of the league possible. The first was television. In 1950, when Red Auerbach initially joined the Celtics, only three million Americans owned televisions, and the first coast-to-coast broadcast—Harry Truman speaking to the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco—would not come for another year. By 1960, the number of American families with televisions had risen to forty million, or 88 perce
nt of the population. In the basketball season that had just ended, executives at NBC, anticipating the excitement that Chamberlain’s debut and the rivalry with Russell would bring, had doubled its coverage of the league, featuring games on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons. There was no doubt that, if the competition was exciting enough, the national television audience for sports programming was vast. Slightly more than a year earlier, the first nationally televised NFL championship game, between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, had drawn viewers in 10.8 million homes. That 1958 game, which Tex Maule, the football columnist for Sports Illustrated, called “the best football game ever played,” amply rewarded those who tuned in to watch, going into a sudden-death overtime but also causing agonizing suspense among the television audience when, as Johnny Unitas was leading the Colts on their final drive to victory, a power cable in the stadium came loose and for two and a half minutes television sets across the country were filled with static, the reception being restored just in time for them to watch Alan “The Horse” Ameche carry the ball across the Giants’ goal line.

  The second factor that would facilitate the growth of professional basketball was commercial jet travel. Even in the late fifties, many NBA teams traveled by train and bus. But at the end of 1958, the first commercial jet route, from New York to Miami, went into operation. Jet routes spread quickly across the country, and within five years the number of passenger miles on jets would exceed passenger miles on trains by a ratio of three to one. The advent of television and commercial jet travel would make possible one of the greatest franchises in basketball history, a third team that would play a central role in the struggle for league dominance in the sixties, and that would become crucial to the final phase of the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. In 1960, it was one more financially troubled franchise. But the team was about to acquire a new home, and that would be followed by new stars, and then a new owner. Everything about it in fact would change except its name, which made absolutely no sense in the city to which it relocated. But the name, when coupled with that of the new hometown, would have such a pleasingly alliterative quality that everyone quickly forgot how inappropriate it was, and in no time at all it became impossible to imagine the Los Angeles Lakers in any other city, with any other name.

  During the winter of the 1959–60 season, Chamberlain and the Warriors had played the Minneapolis Lakers in a neutral-court game in Los Angeles’s Sports Arena. The game was a milestone, not for its outcome or on-court feats but because it was the first professional basketball game played in Los Angeles. To Bob Short, the owner of the Lakers, what was most remarkable about it was that 10,202 fans attended. Two baseball teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, had moved to California with great success in the fifties, but despite the fact that the state had a strong college basketball program, had two major cities, and was prosperous and rapidly growing, it did not have a professional basketball team.

  Short knew he needed to try to do something different with the Lakers. Minneapolis had dominated the NBA in the late forties and early fifties, winning the championship five times in six years. But its big, lumbering center, George Mikan, retired in 1954, and the advent of the twenty-four-second clock gave the advantage to faster, nimbler teams such as the Celtics. The Lakers went into a tailspin. Mikan tried to make a comeback in the 1955–56 season, but he was unable to adapt to the rapidly evolving game, averaging only ten points a game, and he appeared, in the words of one sportswriter, “an overweight ghost.” Halfway through the season, frustrated and embarrassed, Mikan quit again, this time for good.

  The Lakers struggled for a few years, with attendance steadily dwindling. In the 1957–58 season, they won only nineteen games out of seventy-two, and lost $38,000. Bob Short, a snappily dressed man with large ears and a gregarious manner, ran a Midwest trucking business and was the head of a group of Minneapolis investors who had acquired the team for $250,000 in 1957, more out of civic pride than any intense love for or knowledge of basketball. He and his partners realized they had three options: fold the franchise, sell it, or revitalize it. They could find no buyers, and if they folded the team they would lose their investment, so even though Short knew it was what he called a lousy risk, he decided to try to revive it. The Lakers had flourished with a star, center George Mikan, and it was obvious to all that if the team was to survive, it needed another star.

  Since Minneapolis had finished with the worst team record in 1958, it had first choice in the college draft. 9* Short briefly considered Archie Dees of Indiana, but then John Kundla, the Lakers coach, scouted Elgin Baylor, the astonishingly athletic and acrobatic forward at Seattle University. “By far the best player,” Kundla wrote in his report. “Could we use him!” Baylor was eligible, since his entering class graduated that spring, but he was a transfer student at Seattle, with one more year to go before earning his degree, and under the encouragement of his coach, John Castellani, who maintained he was looking out for his player’s interest but who also hoped to get one more year of college play out of him, Baylor had announced that he was going to complete his studies.

  Short, undaunted, told Baylor that if he moved to Minneapolis, the Lakers would see to it that he completed his degree at St. Thomas College. Baylor came from Washington, D.C., where his father was a custodian in a public high school. A family friend named Curtis Jackson served as his adviser, and, mustering the same reasoning that Wilt Chamberlain had used to decide to drop out of college, Jackson pointed out that right now Baylor might well be playing the best basketball of his career, that he could command one of the top salaries in the league, and that it made no economic sense to turn down that money, especially since he could complete his education in Minnesota. Persuaded, Baylor signed with the Lakers for $20,000, only slightly less than the $22,500 Bill Russell was then earning. “If he had turned me down,” Short said later, “the club would have gone bankrupt.”

  Baylor, who had led his college team to a number-two rank in the NCAA that spring, was six-five and weighed only 225 pounds, but he had fearsome strength and was so quick that he could bounce a ball off an opponent’s head, then spin around him and go to the hoop before the man had recovered. He could jump higher than Joe Fulks, who had set the league’s scoring record in 1949, or Bill Russell, and he stayed in the air so long that one sportswriter wrote, “He never broke the law of gravity, but he’s awfully slow about obeying it.”

  Like Russell, Baylor was a serious student of basketball, with an analytic approach to the game; he thoughtfully evaluated his own moves and their shortcomings, and he developed mental files on everyone he played with and against. His one idiosyncrasy was a tic that he’d developed in high school, an involuntary jerk of his head toward his shoulders when he became nervous. The press had harped on it after his Madison Square Garden debut in the 1957 National Invitational Tournament, and Baylor consulted a neurologist, who told him that since it only occurred during moments of stress like games, he had nothing to worry about. It was later diagnosed as a form of ataxia. While Baylor simply ignored the tic, his Laker teammates would kid him that he was the only man in the league with a built-in head fake, and in fact, it often did throw his defender out of position.

  But what really set Baylor apart was the fact that he was the most inventive player the game of basketball had yet produced. He used reverse English, spins, and the aforementioned head fakes. He dribbled going backward almost as fast as going forward. He would jump, and then, while seeming to hang suspended, he could make several moves—a pump, a body fake, and then an off-balance shot. He ricocheted the ball off the backboard and then dashed across the lane to rebound his own shot. He rebounded, passed out, and then raced down the court on the fast break to catch the return pass.

  In the opening seconds of Baylor’s first game, on October 22, 1958, the Lakers center, Jim Krebs, tipped the opening jump ball toward him, and he swung down the court, swept passed Cincinnati’s Jack Twyman guarding the basket, and dro
pped in his first two points as a pro. Bob Short leaned over to the Lakers coach, John Kundla, and held up his hand, his thumb and forefinger forming a circle. After Baylor’s arrival, the Lakers sold out some games in the drafty old Minneapolis Auditorium and Bob Short optimistically raised ticket prices from $2.50 to $4.50. Baylor quickly became an indispensable franchise player. He was intelligent and congenial, neither haughty nor self-aggrandizing. With sportswriters and fans he tended to be reserved and serious to the point of formality, an impression enhanced by the expensive tailored suits and English shoes he took to wearing after he joined the NBA. But in the locker room, among his teammates, he was a joking prankster, forever bumming cigarettes, who talked so much he had earned the nickname “Motormouth.”

  Baylor also had the distinction of becoming—some months before Bill Russell walked away from that exhibition game in Dallas—the first black basketball player to boycott a game. He had already established himself as the league’s third-highest scorer when the Lakers arrived in Charleston, West Virginia, to play a neutral-court game against the Royals. Once they reached their hotel, Vern Mikkelsen, one of the veterans, went to the desk to register the team.

  “You can stay, but the colored fellows can’t stay here,” the clerk said.

  “We have reservations for the whole team,” Mikkelsen said.

  “Then take the team somewhere else,” the clerk told him.

  When Baylor tried to intercede, the clerk utterly ignored him, which enraged Baylor, and then his teammate Rod Hundley, who came from Charleston, got involved, telling the clerk that Baylor was wealthier and more successful and famous than he, the clerk, would ever be, but the clerk refused to bend the policy. Hundley called two other hotels but was told they too did not accommodate Negroes, so the entire team then checked into a Negro hotel called Edna’s Retirement Hotel. Baylor could tell that some of his white teammates were not exactly delighted to be staying at Edna’s Retirement Hotel, but the team did support him, so he was committed to playing the game that night.