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

by John Taylor

  Chamberlain, for his part, was convinced Johnston had been the problem. He wanted a coach who would stand up to him and stand up for him, like Red Auerbach. In fact, Chamberlain wished Auerbach were his coach. If Auerbach had been his coach, he felt, he’d have already won the championship, and the fact that Auerbach was coaching Russell rather than himself made him angry at Auerbach. Once, watching Auerbach charge onto the court to protest a call against the Celtics—arguing with a vehemence Neil Johnston never mustered—Chamberlain approached him and said, “That’s enough out of you.” Russell immediately materialized and told Chamberlain, “If you’re going after Red, you’ve got to go through me.” On the Celtics, Chamberlain saw, the coach defended his players and the players protected the coach.

  Auerbach, who had stood between the two men looking at them during their face-off, had followed Chamberlain closely throughout the season, and he agreed with Neil Johnston’s analysis of the Warriors’ problems. Auerbach felt that Gottlieb spoiled Wilt something fierce. A lot of times Wilt didn’t even travel with his teammates. He was out of control. Auerbach doubted that he himself would have been able to coach Wilt. Maybe if he’d gotten him straight out of college. But Wilt quit school, spent that year with the Globetrotters, tasted the big money and the stardom, and he began thinking he was more important than his coach or his teammates. Gotty, afraid of losing his big draw, let him get away with it. Chamberlain had become convinced that people came to games in order to see him and that, therefore, the point of every game was to give him an opportunity to play the star. There was a certain box-office logic to this thinking, but it made Chamberlain uncoachable, in Auerbach’s view, and as long as he was uncoachable, any team he played on would never become a real winner.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1961, Eddie Gottlieb called Frank McGuire, the basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, and asked him to take over as coach of the Philadelphia Warriors. At first, McGuire was not sure that he wanted a job in the NBA. The Knicks had tried to hire him on three separate occasions, and each time he had turned them down, even though New York was his hometown. He was a revered icon in North Carolina, where he had developed five all-Americans and had won two conference titles and a national championship when his team defeated Chamberlain and the Kansas Jayhawks in 1957. “The best public relations man we’ve ever had in North Carolina,” Governor Luther Hodges once called him. The university had appointed him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, and he had a house with a pool, three children, and one grandchild. Why give all that up for the headaches and uncertainty of the NBA?

  McGuire talked about the offer with other coaches, and some of them said it would be a mistake. The money was better, but the job security was a lot worse, and, as everyone knew, college coaches often failed to make successful transitions to the pros. On top of the difficulties every pro coach faced, McGuire would be dealing with Wilt Chamberlain, the man who’d just gotten his own coach fired after refusing to defer to Johnston’s authority. If McGuire took the job and could not bring Wilt under control, his experience would be just as disastrous as Neil Johnston’s had been. But Chamberlain had fascinated McGuire ever since the Tar Heels had beaten Chamberlain and the Jayhawks in that 1957 NCAA championship game, which was the highlight of McGuire’s career. Chamberlain was quite simply the greatest player of the game McGuire had ever seen. And McGuire’s friend Joe Lapchick, who had made a successful transition from college to the NBA, told him that Wilt Chamberlain was an irresistible coaching opportunity, a great but frustrated athlete in need of the right coach to unleash the full range of his potential.

  By then, McGuire had been at North Carolina for nine years. Two Tar Heels players had recently been implicated in a bribery scheme, and though the scandal had not touched McGuire personally, it had cast a cloud on the entire team, and administration officials had decided the time had come to de-emphasize the school’s basketball program. It seemed to McGuire like a propitious moment to take on a new challenge. The Knicks were still pursuing him, but he thought the true test, and the best avenue to championship glory, lay in coaching Wilt Chamberlain.

  McGuire’s reputation was so great that, when he decided to accept Gottlieb’s offer, it was seen as a coup not just for the Warriors but for the entire NBA. Ray Cave, a writer for Sports Illustrated, declared that “never before has the NBA gotten a coach who was as famous, esteemed, and skilled at handling athletes as Frank McGuire.” Cave thought McGuire might actually lead a wholesale transformation of the league. “His eventual effect may be to measurably change the character of professional basketball from the brawling, hustling, cigar-in-the-mouth and eye-on-the-till game it has been for decades to the major league sport it longs and deserves to be.”

  Frank McGuire was a forceful, dignified man who was also charming and politically shrewd. He had grown up in New York’s Greenwich Village in the twenties, worked as a stevedore, and played basketball in the American League. He had a blunt Irish face, spoke with a brogue, and attended mass regularly, but he was also a stylish man in a masculine, mid-century way. His drink of choice was a J&B Mist. The Barbers of America once ranked him one of the country’s ten best-groomed men. He was always freshly shaven, his white shirts starched, his silk ties crisply knotted, his suit jacket buttoned. At North Carolina, McGuire was known for his meticulous, even exhaustive preparation. He had movies taken of every game. He kept files on all his team’s opponents. Before any game, the relevant file came out and McGuire gave his team a two-hour blackboard briefing. During games, a student assistant stayed close to McGuire, taking down his observations about the opponents, and those notes also ended up in the files.

  McGuire prepared for his first meeting with Chamberlain just as thoroughly. He watched films of Chamberlain. He filled a file folder full of reports on Chamberlain, and he spent hundreds of dollars calling players, sportswriters, and coaches such as Dick Harp at the University of Kansas, who told him Chamberlain responded to leadership by someone he respected. McGuire figured Wilt was still a kid in a lot of ways, and if he was unable to control Chamberlain, it was going to be his own fault, not Chamberlain’s. The key to the relationship, he thought, was to respect Chamberlain and ensure that Chamberlain respected him. It had to be reciprocal. He would also need to get the rest of the players to accept the fact that Wilt was a unique athlete who, by the nature of things, was going to be accorded special status and special treatment.

  McGuire met Chamberlain for the first time at the Coco Inn, near the Warriors training camp in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He told Chamberlain that he was supposed to be tough to coach, but that that was probably because Wilt had never had a coach who treated him like a man. McGuire pointed out that he, McGuire, had always been a winner and said that if Chamberlain listened to him and they worked together, it would be possible to beat Boston. Chamberlain wanted to believe McGuire, but he thought Boston was unbeatable. It simply had too many good players. McGuire said it was true that Boston was better than Philadelphia when Chamberlain was scoring thirty-seven or thirty-eight points a game. But if he scored fifty points a game, McGuire said, the Warriors could beat Boston.

  “Fifty?” Chamberlain protested. “Nobody can average fifty a game in this league.”

  McGuire told Chamberlain he could do it. The other players wouldn’t be happy, he said, and he, McGuire, was going to have to put up with a lot of bitching, but that was his problem. He would have to convince them that the only way they could win was with Chamberlain shooting constantly. In McGuire’s view, Chamberlain wasn’t being selfish in taking so many shots. He just had the highest shooting percentage on the team. It made more sense to have your 50-percent shooter taking the shot than it did your 40-percent shooter, which meant that if one of Wilt’s teammates with a poorer shooting percentage did not pass to Wilt, that man was not acting in the team’s interest. “I have two goals,” McGuire told Chamberlain. “I hope we win the championship. And I hope you break every record in the book.”

  AT NORTH CA
ROLINA, the basketball team traveled in style, and when Eddie Gottlieb sent the Warriors on the road to play a series of exhibition games before the season began, McGuire could not believe how small the budget was. To begin with, the team set off without a trainer. When McGuire asked who was going to tape the players’ ankles, Gottlieb suggested he pay the home team’s trainer two dollars to do the job. McGuire, who had no assistant, also had to call for taxis and make restaurant reservations himself, checking to ensure that the places would seat his black players. The team stayed in dreary hotels, and at night after games they washed their own uniforms in the sinks in their rooms. At one point, after playing one game in North Carolina and then flying to Oregon the next day for another game that night, McGuire grew so frazzled and so disgusted by the team’s poor amenities that he called Gottlieb to quit. Gottlieb talked him out of leaving, but in return the coach was able to secure improved treatment for the team, booking his players into a better class of hotels and ending Gottlieb’s penny-saving requirement that they ride five in a cab to the arena.

  McGuire set out to redesign the Warriors offense. He moved Tom Gola from the backcourt to the front, brought in rookie Tom Meschery, and assigned second-year man Al Attles to the backcourt. The team had two simple tactics. After rebounding, they could feed the ball to Paul Arizin on the fast break and he could take a jump shot. But if the other team was in place, the Warriors had a variety of plays all with the same end: setting up and working the ball in to Wilt. McGuire had a mantra: Feed Wilt. Some of the Warriors were less than enthusiastic about being reduced to mere supporting roles, and a number of them had genuine financial concerns, since salaries in the NBA were typically pegged to statistics. They felt that if their statistics declined, this could diminish their reputations and Eddie Gottlieb might want to reduce their pay. “If my scoring average goes down, will you sit alongside me when I go to talk contract next year?” Guy Rogers asked McGuire.

  “You bet your ass I will,” McGuire said.

  The coach also charmed Chamberlain, taking him out to dinner, getting him the best room in the hotel, checking on him before going to bed. “Frank was a more soothing coach than Neil Johnston,” recalled Paul Arizin. “Wilt took to Frank’s style.” As a result, McGuire succeeded in persuading Chamberlain to change his game. Chamberlain was used to roaming around the court looking for an open spot to shoot his jumper. McGuire urged him to move into the low post near the basket, where he could take passes from his teammates, dunk, and make rebounds. McGuire also asked Chamberlain to appear at practice but made it clear that he would not have to work hard and could save his legs for the games. Finally, McGuire told him not to worry about his foul shooting. “Wilt,” he joked, “if you hit all your free throws we’d never lose. It would be too easy, and it wouldn’t be any fun.”

  With McGuire’s new system in place, Chamberlain set off on an extraordinary scoring tear once the regular season got under way. He was averaging close to forty-seven shots and fifty points per game. And, because of overtimes, he was playing an average of forty-eight and a half minutes per game even though regulation play lasted only forty-eight minutes. Chamberlain was not the only player in the NBA shooting phenomenally in the 1961–62 season. Ten years earlier, only three players—George Mikan, Ed Macauley, and Alex Groza—had averaged more than twenty points a game. By December 1961, a total of eleven players were averaging more than twenty points a game, among them Oscar Robertson and Jack Twyman of the Royals, Bob Pettit of the Hawks, Tom Heinsohn of the Celtics, and Elgin Baylor of the Lakers. The best shooters in the league were racking up fifty- and sixty-point games, and to them, the nights when they scored only twenty points were actually embarrassing.

  While Chamberlain led the league in scoring, Baylor was close behind him in second place. Early in the season, in a game against the Knicks, Baylor had set a league record for the most points scored in a single game, seventy-one, breaking the previous record of sixty-four points, which he himself had set a year ago. Then, on December 8, 1961, the Lakers faced the Warriors in Los Angeles in what became an explosive shooting duel between Baylor and Chamberlain. By the end of regulation play, with the score tied at 109–109, Chamberlain had scored fifty-three points and Baylor forty-seven. That in itself was a record; never before had the two top players in a game combined to score one hundred points. Then, in triple overtime, Chamberlain scored another twenty-five and Baylor another sixteen. With baskets by Jerry West, the Lakers ended up winning, but what made the news was Wilt’s seventy-eight points, another single-game scoring record, though the statisticians qualified the achievement with an asterisk noting that it had been accomplished with three overtime periods whereas Baylor’s seventy-one points had all been scored in regulation play. “Some day soon Chamberlain is going to score a hundred,” McGuire told reporters after the game. “He’ll do it even if five men guard him.”

  A month later, in a game against the Chicago Packers, an expansion franchise, Chamberlain ran up seventy-three points during regulation play, unequivocally taking the title for the single highest-scoring game. To everyone who followed the sport, basketball was undergoing a startling transformation. Traditionalists such as John McPhee, a writer for The New Yorker, found the change deplorable. “The game seemed to me to have lost its balance, as players became taller and more powerful, and scores increased until it was rare when a professional team hit less than a hundred points, win or lose,” he wrote. “It impressed me as a glut of scoring, with few patterns of attack and almost no defense anymore. The players, in a sense, had gotten better than the game, and the game had become uninteresting. Moreover, it attracted exhibitionists who seemed to be more intent on amazing a crowd with aimless prestidigitation than with advancing their team by giving a sound performance.”

  By contrast, the New York Post’s Milton Gross was fascinated by the developments. Professional basketball, it seemed to him, was inhabited by a new race of men, who were not just larger but also faster and more powerful and more beautiful to watch than any players in the history of the game. “Basketball, professional basketball in particular, not only has come of age, but has reached its atomic, most explosive stage,” he wrote in the middle of the season. “Individual skills have been perfected, scores are hovering in a special stratosphere. But still, the big show, the really big show, is yet to come.”

  The really big show Gross was referring to was the theoretical outer limit of scoring. As the records for individual single-game scores continued to climb, Gross began to wonder how far they could go. Eighty seemed easily within reach, and if eighty, why not ninety, and if ninety, why not, as McGuire had predicted for Chamberlain in December, one hundred points? When the Lakers were in New York to play the Knicks, Gross dropped by Baylor’s room at the Hotel Manhattan and put the question to him. Baylor, one of the game’s most astute analysts, thought it was inevitable that one day, and one day soon, somebody was going to score one hundred points in a game. There was no inevitable ceiling on scoring, he explained. The main reason it had increased was that so many players had perfected the jump shot. Just a few years earlier, the standard shot had been the two-handed set shot, which was easily blocked. But the jump shot was almost indefensible if a player’s teammate set even the slightest screen. It was a quick shot, and the top players had become incredibly accurate with it, so the number of points they scored really depended on the number of times their teammates fed them the ball.

  During a game, Baylor himself never thought about the number of points he was scoring. He considered it meaningless. He wanted to win, and if he set a record in a game but his team lost, he’d have felt that he’d accomplished nothing. Baylor thought that if anyone was going to break one hundred points it would be Chamberlain. He didn’t think he himself could do it—even if he set his mind to it—because he didn’t have Chamberlain’s height, which enabled Wilt to pull down twenty-eight or twenty-nine rebounds a game. Wilt could score forty points alone from offensive rebounds and tip-ins and another fift
y with his jump shot if he was hitting it consistently. On a night when he was that active, Baylor explained, he would be fouled more than normal, and if he made his foul shots, he could reach or exceed one hundred points. The key would be his foul shooting, which had always been Chamberlain’s big weakness. “On a hot night,” Baylor told Gross, “Wilt could make it.”

  ON MARCH 2, 1962, near the end of the regular season, the Warriors arrived in Hershey, Pennsylvania, for a neutral-court game against the Knicks. The Warriors, with only five games left to play, had secured second place in the Eastern Division, behind the Celtics, and their playoff berth was set. The Knicks, on the other hand, were in last place, and so neither team had reason to exert itself that night. The game was seen as so unimportant that none of the New York papers had deigned to send reporters along to watch it. Harvey Pollack, the public relations man for the Warriors, was covering the game for The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Associated Press. He was also assigned to keep the statistics, and he had brought his son along to take down a record of the play-by-play action.

  The arena in Hershey was dark and dank, with overlapping rafters. The air outside smelled perpetually of chocolate. Only 4,124 people bought tickets for the event, which was a doubleheader. In the first game, the Globetrotters played a team made up of professional football players, and since the Trotters all knew Chamberlain, a number of them stayed on after their game was over to watch the professional match. In the years to come, when the game would achieve legendary status, Chamberlain would say that he was exhausted that day. Averaging fifty points a game was exhausting work. Also, he would say, he had been up all the previous night entertaining a lady friend in the Manhattan apartment where he now lived, then catching the train to Philadelphia, and sleeping only a few minutes on the team bus to Hershey.