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

by John Taylor

  Later that afternoon, however, Baylor and two black teammates, Alexander “Boo” Ellis and Ed Fleming, went out to find something to eat and discovered that the only place that would serve them was the concession at the Greyhound bus station. Baylor had grown up with segregation in Washington, D.C.; his family had lived next to two public parks where black children were not allowed to play. He’d had no choice then but to accept the situation. Now, however, he had a choice—he could boycott a town that refused to regard him as equal to its white citizens—and at that point Baylor decided he was not going to play basketball in Charleston, West Virginia.

  In the locker room, while the rest of the Lakers suited up, Baylor stayed in his street clothes. “When you gonna dress?” Hundley asked. Baylor explained that he was refusing to play in a town where he could not be served in a restaurant. The Lakers were in second place at the time, and a couple of the players, afraid that Baylor’s decision could affect their chance to get into the playoffs and earn playoff bonuses, asked him to reconsider, but the coach, John Kundla, told him, “Hey, it’s your decision.”

  Hundley asked Baylor to play as a personal favor. Since he was from Charleston, Hundley explained, he would know a lot of people in the audience who were coming to the game either to see their native son or to watch Baylor himself. “Elj, you’ve got to accept some things down here,” Hundley said, “and besides, this is a kind of homecoming for me, and I’d like it to be a special night.”

  “I’m not an animal,” Baylor said. “I’m a human being and I want to be treated like one.”

  Hundley, for the first time, truly comprehended that what he was asking Baylor to endure was not simply a minor inconvenience but an assault on his essential dignity. “Elj,” Hundley said. “Don’t play.”

  While Baylor sat in the dressing room, the Lakers lost. It was, reporters noted, the first sit-down strike by a Negro in basketball or baseball. Commissioner Podoloff initially threatened to fine Baylor for breaking his contract, which required him to play, but backed off after the publicity Baylor received, which in the North was so favorable that when the team returned to Minneapolis, attendance tripled. The game in Charleston also served as a reminder to everyone on the Lakers, particularly to those who had taken issue with his decision not to play, that Baylor was not just an important member of the team, he was the player who was single-handedly transforming the Lakers into winners. “Never before had a major sport franchise depended so much on the individual effort of one player,” the sportswriter Murray Olderman observed during Baylor’s rookie year. By the end of that first year, Baylor had become so indispensable to the Lakers that when coach John Kundla left for the University of Minnesota, Short hired John Castellani, Baylor’s coach at Seattle, as his replacement. And when Baylor was called up for military service and sent to San Antonio for basic training, Short shipped the entire team down to Texas and conducted training camp on the army base to which Baylor had been assigned.

  The army, more than happy to cooperate, gave the team a barracks, and Baylor practiced with the Lakers at night when his military duties were over. The army allowed Baylor to fulfill his obligation piecemeal, and he rejoined the team for the first game of the regular season, scoring fifty-two points. Then, on November 8, 1959, one night after the first Russell-Chamberlain confrontation, the Lakers played Boston, and Baylor scored sixty-four points, breaking the record of sixty-three set by Joe Fulks in 1949. While the game was under way, Red Auerbach saw that Baylor was closing in on the record, and in the final minutes he ordered four Celtics to guard him, yelling from the sidelines not to let Baylor shoot, but in the confusion caused by the Boston players swarming over Baylor, one of them fouled him and he broke the record by tossing in a free throw.

  For all Baylor’s accomplishments, the Lakers’ attendance again dwindled, this time so drastically that Short’s other investors wanted to pull out, and to avoid seeing the team fold, Short and his partner, Frank Ryan, bought them out for what then seemed like a grand sum, $85,000. Now they had to decide what they were going to do with their investment. The Lakers didn’t even have their own arena and were moving from venue to venue. Minneapolis was also about to acquire a major-league baseball franchise, and Short had seen what happened just to the south in 1955, when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee and effectively crushed fan interest in Ben Kerner’s Hawks. Meanwhile, the migration of teams in the NBA’s Western Division had continued—the Royals moving from Rochester to Cincinnati, the Pistons from Fort Wayne to Detroit—as franchises abandoned the smaller cities associated with the league’s origins for larger metropolises with more fans and bigger arenas. After seeing the turnout for the game between the Warriors and the Lakers in the Sports Arena, Short decided to relocate his team to Los Angeles.

  He proposed the move at the 1960 meeting of NBA franchise owners. At the time, no team was farther west than St. Louis, and the other owners, concerned about the cost of flying their teams to and from California, initially voted against Short’s idea. Short, however, countered by offering to pay the difference between what any team spent to fly to Minneapolis and what it would spend to fly to Los Angeles. The owners voted again, and this time all of them approved the move except Ned Irish of the Knicks, who hoped that if the Lakers remained in Minneapolis their money problems would become so serious that Short would have no choice but to sell him Elgin Baylor.

  SHORT HAD TOLD none of his players about his plans. Baylor found out about them by reading the newspapers, but while he liked Minneapolis, the prospect of moving appealed to him, if only because of California’s weather. It had been snowing when the team left Minneapolis for that neutral-court game in Los Angeles, and when the Lakers arrived it was so warm that Baylor couldn’t wear the clothes he’d packed and had to go out and buy some sport shirts. Short also made a second decision that summer that would prove to be crucial to the fortunes of the Lakers in the decade ahead, and it came during the college draft. The draft was unusually rich that year. Cincinnati, which had the first pick, chose Oscar Robertson of the University of Cincinnati. The two other top players were Darrall Imhoff, a promising center from California, and Jerry West, a nimble outside shooter from West Virginia. The Lakers, who had the second pick, already had two tall men, Jim Krebs and Ray Felix, and so Short selected Jerry West, who had hoped to play for the Knicks.

  West was thin, undersized, and boyish looking in comparison to many of the pros, but he had a deadly line-drive jump shot and was an aggressive defender. And while he stood only six-two, he had such an incredible reach that he and Wilt Chamberlain, who was nine inches taller, wore shirts with the same sleeve length. “He has arms so long he could drive a car from the back seat,” Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times once wrote. His long arms and his quick reflexes enabled him, while guarding an opponent dribbling in front of him, to snake out a hand and steal the ball from the man, who had thought he was a safe distance away.

  Short had continued to be unhappy with the Lakers’ coaching, and not long after signing West, he hired Fred Schaus, West’s coach at West Virginia. As the season got under way, West hoped to be made a starter, the way Oscar Robertson, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Bill Russell had all immediately become starters, and since Schaus had gotten the job largely because of his connection to West, sportswriters assumed he would start him right away. But Schaus, who had played professional basketball himself, for Fort Wayne and New York, felt West needed gradual exposure to the professional level of the game. Rookies brought into the NBA with high expectations for immediate results often were not given the time to adjust to the rougher, deeper level of play, and it wreaked havoc with their confidence. Schaus believed that because West was intensely self-critical, he would be particularly vulnerable to this problem. Also, West needed to master his new position. He had played forward at West Virginia, but at six-two he simply lacked the stature to succeed in the position in the NBA, and Schaus had recast him as a guard.

  As the season progressed, how
ever, it became clear to everyone following the Lakers that West was an extraordinary basketball player. Even though he was only coming off the bench, he was outscoring starters such as Hot Rod Hundley three to two. He was also demonstrating to the rest of the league a defensive ferocity uncommon in a shooting guard, and he radiated an energy level, a joy in the game, and a competitive ferocity that raised the play of all his teammates. Everyone on the Lakers looked sharper, moved faster, worked harder, and acted bolder when West was on the floor.

  Schaus finally started him for the first time in the middle of the season, but such opportunities came intermittently, and West looked for a chance to prove he could be a key player. Then, toward the end of the season, the Warriors came out to Los Angeles for a game against the Lakers. West arrived at the arena suffering from a cold and expecting not to play, but Baylor was out with the flu, and so even though West was sick, Schaus started him. He played the entire game, cold and all, scoring thirty-eight points and getting fifteen rebounds and carrying Los Angeles to a 126–116 victory over Philadelphia, one of only two times the Lakers beat Chamberlain and the Warriors the entire season.

  The Lakers made it to the Western Division playoffs, where they faced the Hawks. Hollywood celebrities such as Dean Martin, Peter Falk, and Jim Garner had become fans of the team, regularly appearing in courtside seats, but the crowds had followed more slowly, and interest in the playoffs was presumed to be so low that no radio station was willing to broadcast them. So Bob Short bought time at KNX and hired Chick Hearn, one of the station’s announcers, to call the play-by-play. The Hawks were favored to win easily, but the Lakers fought them to a 3–3 tie in an exciting series that captured the public’s attention. KNX’s broadcast of game seven had the highest rating on the local spectrum. The Hawks ultimately won, but the Lakers, with their two stars, Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, had succeeded in establishing themselves as a genuine presence in the city. They began thinking about the next season. The Dodgers had won a championship the year after moving to Los Angeles, and the Lakers saw no reason why they could not do the same.

  12

  DURING THE SUMMER following his announcement that he was retiring after his first season in the NBA, Chamberlain went back to Europe to tour with Abe Saperstein and the Globetrotters. “He loved Saperstein,” recalled his attorney Sy Goldberg. “It was against NBA rules for a player to play for another team, but Wilt did what he wanted. Eddie Gottlieb wasn’t going to tell him what to do.” Owners around the league thought Chamberlain’s decision to quit was, as Danny Biasone of the Syracuse Nationals said, spoiled and immature. Sportswriters called him a crybaby, a quitter, and an ingrate. He was derided by players ranging from Dolph Schayes to Bob Cousy, who went around telling people he hoped Chamberlain would quit, then the rest of them could get back to playing real basketball.

  And so, unsurprisingly, by the time Chamberlain returned from Europe he had changed his mind, and when Gottlieb raised his salary to $65,000 a year he decided to continue playing in the NBA. The fact was, he loved competition and the glory that came with achievement, and the NBA was the only place to get it. But by reconsidering, he made his original decision to quit seem empty and disingenuous. Some people around the league simply dismissed him as a petulant attention-seeker who couldn’t be taken at his word. Even people inclined to have sympathy toward Chamberlain began to think he was someone who did not know what he wanted, or how to get it.

  Chamberlain’s second year in the NBA turned out to be more frustrating than his first, and the problems began almost immediately with his coach. In the late fifties, the Warriors had been coached by Al Cervi, an abrasive, snarling man with a chronic ulcer. When the Warriors finished in the cellar in the 1958–59 season, Gottlieb replaced Cervi with Neil Johnston, the team’s lanky and jut-jawed center, who had been sidelined by a knee injury the previous year. But Johnston had distinct shortcomings as a coach. “He never seemed to get over the fact that he wasn’t still playing,” recalled Joe Ruklick. For all of Al Cervi’s distemper, he knew how to run a ball club, and Johnston, an amiable but quiet fellow, lacked any air of command. The players had been his friends, and once he became coach they continued to be his friends.

  But Johnston’s biggest problem was the disadvantage he found himself at when dealing with Chamberlain. To begin with, Chamberlain had no respect for Johnston as a player. During that benefit game at Kutsher’s Country Club in the summer of 1959, Chamberlain had beaten Johnston badly, and Chamberlain believed he had nothing to learn from Johnston, who had become coach, Chamberlain felt, only because of Eddie Gottlieb’s sentimental loyalty to an athlete whose injured knee had ended his career. So Wilt ignored Johnston’s instructions to shoot hook shots and set screens and instead continued to favor his fadeaway jumper, even though it thrust him away from the basket and out of position for the rebound. When Johnston fined Chamberlain for disrespectful comments, Chamberlain simply appealed to Gottlieb, who overruled Johnston, which diminished the coach’s authority over all the players.

  By the start of Chamberlain’s second season, they were openly feuding. In an early game against St. Louis, Johnston accused Chamberlain of not guarding Clyde Lovellette—the man who’d knocked out Chamberlain’s two teeth the previous season—closely enough.

  “I’m trying to rebound and cover my man, too,” Chamberlain protested. “You never tell Arizin or Gola or anyone else they have to cover their man more closely.”

  “They’re not making sixty-five thousand a year like you are,” Johnston said.

  Chamberlain, who felt Johnston had no right to bring up his salary, particularly in front of the rest of the players, erupted, declaring that he was the one running the team, and the two men almost came to blows. After that, Chamberlain refused to play until Gottlieb interceded. “From then on, Neil and Wilt never spoke,” recalled Ruklick. Chamberlain also began skipping the team’s occasional practices. This enraged Johnston, who had a maxim he liked to cite: “Every player should be treated exactly the same—except on payday.” But Gottlieb backed up Chamberlain, who maintained that since he played so much during games, what he needed between them was rest not practice. “Chamberlain’s view was—do you want me for the game or do you want me for practice?” recalled his teammate Paul Arizin.

  Some of the Warriors, particularly shooters such as Tom Gola, resented the way the team’s game had been reconfigured around Chamberlain, who seemed to Gola to be more interested in scoring than winning. Wilt would get his forty points and his team would still lose. Chamberlain, always inordinately sensitive, picked up on the resentment of his teammates and fell into a funk, swearing at Johnston, ignoring the other Warriors, complaining about the officiating, and refusing on one occasion to play the second half of a game. His mood infected the entire team. The players who resented Chamberlain became surly and uncooperative. Sometimes during games, some of them refused to pass the ball to him if he was open under the basket, even if he was signaling for it. Johnston, for his part, had been stripped of all authority, and the players cruelly joked that his only job now was to reimburse them for their cab fares on road trips.

  The strained atmosphere in the dressing room was primarily responsible for a slump the Warriors fell into shortly after the season began, but the team’s disappointing performance was also due to the fact that Chamberlain’s foul shooting, always a weakness, had become truly atrocious, falling below 40 percent at one point. In a game against Syracuse, which the Warriors lost by one point, Chamberlain took twenty-seven free throws and made only nine. Opponents started baiting Chamberlain during games, telling him they were going to foul him just for the fun of watching him blow his free throws. When he went to the line, the other players started chanting that he was going to miss, going to miss, going to miss. The fans of opposing teams hooted as he set up, and if he actually made a shot they’d break into derisive applause.

  Chamberlain blamed the problem variously on his arthritic knees, his height, his strength, his big hands, the
English on his shot, and the illegal stickum that rubbed off players’ hands onto the ball. But he had also developed an inhibiting anxiety about free throws. Don’t let it bother you, don’t let it bother you, he told himself as he lined up a shot, knowing all the while that simply by telling himself not to let it bother him he was allowing it to do just that. Eddie Gottlieb was so exasperated that in the middle of the season he hired a free-throw tutor for Wilt named Cy Kaselman, who in the twenties had played for Gottlieb’s team, the Sphas. In his heyday he’d been arguably the greatest foul shooter in professional basketball. His intuitive sense of the basket was so strong that he could actually hit free throws wearing a blindfold. Kaselman had Chamberlain dispense with his overhand foul shot altogether and instead start shooting free throws underhanded. It was a graceless, ungainly shot, triggering its share of jeers from the fans, but Chamberlain was able to concentrate on making the basket rather than worrying about missing it, and his statistics began to improve slightly.

  As the season drew to an end, the Warriors were still in second place in the East, but they looked listless and disorganized, and the Celtics had surged far ahead. On one occasion, Eddie Gottlieb barged into the locker room and yelled, “You’re not a team! I could get ten guys off the street and they’d play together better than you guys!” Nothing helped. Syracuse knocked Philadelphia out in the preliminary round of the playoffs, and Chamberlain’s second year in the NBA came to a demoralizing end. Once the season was over, Gottlieb knew either Chamberlain or Johnston had to go, and he also knew it wasn’t going to be Chamberlain. He had no choice but to get rid of Johnston, who immediately went public with his view of the Warriors. Chamberlain was impossible, he told the local sportswriters. No one could coach a team when one player had so many privileges that he could act as if he were in charge. There was going to have to be a big change in Wilt Chamberlain, and in all the Warriors, he maintained, before the team could win the championship.