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

by John Taylor

  When Sam got the pass from K.C., he did not know exactly how much time remained on the clock, but he knew there was less than twenty seconds. Time was almost out and he was open and everyone on the Celtics bench was screaming, Go! The club rule was that when the bench was shouting like that, the man with the ball was supposed to take the shot, so Jones jumped up and let go with a one-hander. The shot felt off, and as he released the ball he wriggled his shoulders, creating a little body English that he hoped would spin the ball into the basket. As it arched through the air, there was a huge gasp in the arena from the simultaneous intake of almost 14,000 breaths, but then it dropped through cleanly, and on the court the swish of the snapping net was drowned out by an enormous roar.

  When the ball fell in, three seconds remained on the clock. The Warriors immediately called a time-out, but once the clock actually stopped, only one second remained. On the sidelines, Frank McGuire was enraged. He was convinced the timekeeper, a Celtics employee, had let two crucial seconds run down, and he demanded that referee Rich Powers restore them to the clock. Powers refused. The Warriors tried an inbounds pass to Chamberlain, who was under the basket, but Russell deflected the ball to Sam Jones, and when the final second expired the score stood at 109–107. 12*

  McGuire was so infuriated over the lost seconds, which he blamed on the biased referees, that he slammed his fist through the door of the officials’ dressing room. A little while later, Bud Collins of the Herald found him sitting in the visitors’ dressing room.

  “Who beat you?” Collins asked. “Jones? Russell? Cousy?”

  “The referees,” McGuire said bitterly. “Did you ever see such homers?”

  Chamberlain, however, was elated. The seventh game could have gone either way, and he felt it proved that McGuire had been right when, at the beginning of the season, the coach had argued that Boston was not invincible. “You remember, at the beginning of the season, when you said we could beat Boston and I said we couldn’t?” Chamberlain asked McGuire after the game. “Well, you were right, and I was wrong. We can beat them—and next year, we will!”

  THE LAKERS had already clinched the Western Division, beating the Pistons in six games, and Jerry West had flown into Boston to watch the final game between the Celtics and the Warriors. He thought it was the single greatest basketball game he had ever seen, an opinion supported by the sportswriters, one of whom called Boston’s victory “the hardest earned and most exciting in the Celtics’ glorious history,” while another declared, “If it were baseball, Sam [Jones] couldn’t be more of a hero with a homer in the bottom half of the ninth and the score tied in the seventh game of the World Series.”

  Both teams had been playing at their peak, West thought, but what it came down to was that Boston could prevent the Warriors from doing what they did best—scoring—while the Warriors could not prevent the Celtics from doing what they did best—defending. The Celtics were not nearly as good a team offensively as the Warriors, but they were so superior defensively that they were better overall, and ended up with the higher score. The Lakers were an offensive team—West and Baylor together scored an average of seventy points a game that season—and West wondered how well the Celtics would be able to contain them when the finals began two days later.

  West was one of the new breed of players who made professional basketball a game increasingly played “off the floor,” in the air around the baskets. As that had happened, scoring had increased and consequently so had the amount of physical contact from defenders trying to prevent it. To avoid interrupting the flow of the game, however, owners, coaches, and players all pressured the officials to interpret the rules on contact liberally. Some people actually argued that a degree of physical contact should be allowed in order to counter the excessive scoring. As a result, referees often ignored fouls as the game was getting under way and also tended to overlook the least egregious of them if they were unintentional or did not affect the outcome of the play.

  While this unofficial policy gave players more flexibility in defending the basket, particularly against the increasing number of big men, it also made the game more dangerous. And no athlete seemed to expose himself to physical injury more than West. Now at the end of his second season, West was one of the smaller, lighter players in the league, a stripling compared to, say, Chamberlain, who was ten inches taller and seventy pounds heavier. But he had become the third-leading scorer in the league, after Chamberlain and Baylor, because unlike most light guards—who confined themselves to bringing the ball upcourt, passing off, and shooting from the perimeter—he drove for the basket and rebounded against men several inches taller and dozens of pounds heavier than he was.

  And he paid a price for it with constant injuries. West had already had his nose broken four times on the basketball court by then, and it was permanently crooked, but most of his injuries were to his feet and legs. In one grim stretch that season, he sprained his right ankle in a rebound rumble, and was still hobbling when he sprained it again a week later, a sprain so excruciating that when he was resting his foot up on a chair at home and his wife accidentally brushed against it, the pain made him shout out. Two days later, playing with his ankle taped, he injured it a third time stealing a pass. Three days later, in Syracuse, he limped off the court after falling on his right hand and left foot. Then the next night he twisted his right ankle once again, this time so badly he was almost sobbing with pain.

  Arnold Hano, a writer for Sport magazine, was afraid West was going to literally destroy his body. Whenever Hano watched West play, he did so with a sense of impending disaster, fighting the temptation to cover his eyes with his hands as West drove in against some rock-like monster such as Clyde Lovellette, who weighed 240, and came crashing down on the hardwood. And every time West went down on the court, his coach Fred Schaus either turned white or buried his head in his hands. But both Hano and Schaus knew that the injuries West suffered were the direct result of his unparalleled desire to win, and that because of it the Lakers were, for the first time since the days of George Mikan, contending for the championship.

  Jerry West was a pale man with hooded blue eyes whose wide cheekbones, flat head, and narrow chin made his face appear triangular. His features, together with his long arms and thin legs, gave the impression that he was composed of lines and angles. He had a high-pitched reedy voice—his teammates on the Lakers called him Tweety Bird—cracked his knuckles, and spoke in an Appalachian accent so thick that his Olympic coach, Pete Newell, once irritably told him to speak English. Awkward off the court, West was the embodiment of physical grace once the game began. Despite his modest height, when he jumped up to the backboard, he could reach his hand sixteen inches above the rim of the basket. But what set him apart was his determination, which was arguably unmatched in the league. West was brooding and introspective, a loner, even something of a hermit, someone who was intensely self-critical but also extremely sensitive to criticism from others. He was born a good player and had made himself a great one, practicing endlessly, constantly dissatisfied with himself and always striving to improve his game. A natural shooter who decided while still a teenager that shooting was overrated, that the world of basketball was full of players who thought the game consisted of nothing more than putting the ball through the hoop, he willed himself to become a ferocious defender, someone who could pressure, harry, steal balls, and anticipate his man.

  West came from the tiny hamlet of Cheylan, south of Charleston in central West Virginia, but since the family’s mail came through the post office in nearby Cabin Creek, many people assumed that was his hometown. His father worked as an electrician in a coal mine. He was inordinately shy as a child, and basketball attracted him not because it was a team sport but because he could practice it in solitude, shooting baskets hour after hour on an outdoor hoop in a neighbor’s dirt yard. He also listened on the radio to the basketball games played by the West Virginia University Mountaineers, though reception in Cheylan was so poor that he could f
ollow the team only sporadically. By the time West joined the basketball team at East Bank High School, he had already developed his line-drive jump shot. He led his team to its first state championship, and the school’s students were so proud of the victory that, as a joke, they proposed changing the school’s name to West Bank High.

  Out of state loyalty and a devotion to the Mountaineers nurtured by those radio broadcasts that wafted unevenly up into the hollows, West never intended to go anywhere but WVU. Many of the team’s players came, like West, from tiny hill towns, and the people in coal country followed its fortunes with revival-tent enthusiasm, driving in caravans across the state and through mountain snowstorms to watch it play. Elmer David Bruner, a convict on West Virginia’s death row, was such a passionate Mountaineers fan that he once offered to donate one of his eyeballs to Bucky Bolyard, a teammate of West’s who was almost completely blind in one eye. Bolyard, who had a shooting accuracy higher than 50 percent with his one good eye, turned him down. When West became a freshman at West Virginia, it was Bolyard who nicknamed him “the hick from Cabin Creek”—the heeick fr’m Cab’n Creeik. At the time, Hot Rod Hundley was the varsity team’s reigning star and the state’s first real basketball hero, leading West Virginia to three straight Southern Conference titles. Hundley was the polar opposite of West in temperament, a flashy, hard-drinking, gregarious prankster—the son of a pool shark—who treated basketball more as an entertainment than a sport. He passed the ball behind his back and between his legs. He shot free throws with his back to the rim or from his knees. He liked to spin the ball on his finger and punch it toward the basket. The crowds loved Hundley’s antics, but it pained the coach, Fred Schaus, to think that with Hundley the Mountaineers were known more as hijinksing hillbillies than serious basketball players.

  Hundley was a senior when West was a freshman, and since freshmen were then prohibited from joining the varsity, the two did not play on the same college team, and many West Virginians speculated that if they had, the Mountaineers would have won a national title. In West’s sophomore year, when he became part of the varsity squad, Hundley was drafted by the Lakers, and West followed his career intently. Despite Hundley’s exceptional talent—many regarded him as a better ball handler than West—he failed to distinguish himself in the NBA, and West decided it was because Hundley treated the game as a lark. Hundley didn’t particularly care about winning, liked to head out on the town after a game then sleep late, and never attended voluntary practice sessions. Talent without the requisite drive, West realized, simply did not take you very far.

  Fred Schaus, the Mountaineers coach, was a big burly man with a warm sympathetic manner that appealed to the painfully shy West. Schaus was also an ardent believer in team spirit and team pride as motivating forces. Wanting his team to look cleaner and sharper than other teams, he insisted that all his players shave their armpits, and while West thought the policy was strange, he complied. Many college coaches played with a rigid system, penalizing their players for improvisation even if they succeeded in scoring, but Schaus emphasized a free-floating, high-scoring game, grounding his players in the fundamentals and then setting them free to follow their instincts on the court. West’s fast, jump-shooting style was perfectly adapted to this approach, and in his junior year West Virginia went all the way to the NCAA finals. While they lost the championship by one point to California, West was voted the tournament’s Most Valuable Player.

  What made West so extraordinary was that he played much better against good teams (averaging thirty points in close games) than against poor ones (twenty-two points in easy games). Indeed, fourteen of the Mountaineers’ twenty-nine wins in West’s senior year were the result of second-half rallies he had inspired. West was named to the 1960 U.S. Olympic team, along with future NBA stars Oscar Robertson, Darrall Imhoff, Walter Bellamy, and Jerry Lucas. 13* The team went undefeated in Rome, and when West returned to East Bank with his gold medal, the townspeople, in his honor, did actually rename it “West Bank” for a day.

  The year West joined the Lakers, the team was considered talented but uneven. Baylor was brilliant—strong, driving, almost unstoppable—and he played up front with the tough, defensively aggressive Rudy LaRusso. But the Lakers were weak at center, where Ray Felix alternated with Jim Krebs. Neither was able to contain the league’s great centers, and the Lakers backcourt alternated Bob Leonard, Rod Hundley, and Frank Selvy, all of whom had been great college players but lacked the talent or the motivation to achieve true distinction as pros. In West’s second season, the team’s profile improved considerably once West beat out Hundley for a starting position. Coach Schaus began using Hundley more and more as the equivalent of a house jester, bringing him into the game only when the Lakers had a comfortable twenty-point lead and allowing him to entertain the crowd with his antics. Hundley came to hate the role—his wife found it embarrassing as well—but it was what the fans wanted to see and what paid for his expensive Malibu house. Unwilling earlier in his life to take his considerable talent seriously, he now had no choice but to play the clown.

  With Baylor at forward, driving into the lane, and West at guard, drilling his jump shot from the perimeter, the two men developed their formidable one-from-the-inside-one-from-the-outside double threat. But then the Communist regime in East Germany erected the Berlin Wall, and in response President John F. Kennedy called up units of the National Guard and the Army Reserve. Among those ordered to report for duty was Baylor, whose National Guard unit was sent to Fort Lewis, Washington. Baylor was able to play when he got occasional weekend passes, but he missed many games, and in his absence, West became the Lakers’ primary shooter. With each game, his confidence improved and his scores began to climb, and in mid-season in his second year he began a great scoring run, hitting sixty-three points in January against New York—a record for a guard—and running up subsequent tallies of fifty, forty-five, and forty-six.

  West also emerged as the team leader, someone who both inspired the other players and carried them all at critical moments. Many of basketball’s shooters, while desperate for the ball during most of a game, wanted to avoid it in the final seconds if the game was on the line. No one wanted to be responsible for a defeat by shooting and missing. West, however, almost perversely did want the ball when there were ten seconds left on the clock and the Lakers were down by one. And more often than not, he could make the shot. Many perfectionists are troubled by self-doubt, but West had an almost preternatural poise when the pressure was the most intense. It was a remarkable trait. West had concentration, determination, discipline, and singleness of purpose, but his poise was arguably the greatest of his mental assets. Chick Hearn, whom Bob Short had hired to call all the Lakers games for the radio, was trying to build fan interest in Los Angeles by creating stars. West was one of Hearn’s potential stars, and the broadcaster came up with, and used over and over, the nickname that would stay with West throughout his career. Hearn called him “Mr. Clutch.”

  THE ARMY had released Baylor for the playoffs, and in the first two games of the final series, which were played in Boston, the teams seemed evenly matched, each winning once before flying to Los Angeles for the second two games. It was the first time a basketball championship game had been played in Los Angeles, and 15,000 fans packed into the L.A. Sports Arena, a spanking new building on the campus of the University of Southern California where escalators ferried spectators up to the stands, a fan made the flag flutter when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played, and an automatic attendance counter posted the crowd size on the scoreboard.

  The third game was tight and wild through all four quarters, the two teams swapping the lead with almost every basket. With a minute to go, Boston was up by four points, but West scored with a jump shot and then, when the Celtics missed a shot, dropped in another jumper to tie the game. There were three seconds left. The Celtics, who had possession, called time-out to set up their final play. Sam Jones took the ball out, and West figured it would go t
o Bob Cousy, their playmaker. Just as Jones was throwing in the ball, West darted in front of Cousy, intercepted the ball, and tore down the court dribbling. Afraid at any moment he would hear the sound of the buzzer, he pulled up and released, and the ball swished through the net at the very instant the buzzer went off. West had scored his team’s last six points in the final minute of the game and hit the winning basket at the bell. It was, he decided lying in bed that night, the ultimate trophy moment.

  The two teams continued to trade victories, however, and at the end of six games, they were tied 3–3. Game seven was to be played in Boston, but the Celtics’ traditional home-court advantage had not prevailed during the series; the Lakers had won two of the three games played so far in the Garden, and victory certainly seemed within their grasp. They had the superior shooters in West and Baylor, who had scored a playoff record of sixty-one points in game five. The problem was that neither Jim Krebs nor Ray Felix, the Lakers’ alternating centers, could compete with Russell. And so, while Baylor and West shot marvelously, the Celtics, with Russell outrebounding Krebs and Felix, had been able to keep pace.

  The day after the sixth game, more than 10,000 fans swamped the Garden demanding tickets, which were sold out by 11:00 a.m. Both the Celtics and the Lakers, drained from the long round of playoffs, felt the pressure, and the result was an exciting but error-prone and physically punishing game. West found it hard to find his rhythm, and Baylor, so hot earlier in the series, went cold, missing almost three out of every four shots. Russell, summoning his final reserves of energy, played ferociously, blocking shots, intimidating Krebs and Felix, even scoring thirty-five points. But neither team was able to establish a commanding lead, and with thirty seconds left, Boston was ahead 100–98, when Frank Selvy, who filled out the Lakers backcourt with West, found himself standing under the basket.