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

by John Taylor

  Selvy was the oldest player on the team. His teammates called him Pops and Rivers, as in “Ol’ Man River.” He had been considered a player of great promise when he was drafted, a reputation largely based on the fact that, while at Furman University, he had scored one hundred points in a single game. Selvy could shoot but not quickly, and was also a poor ball handler, and over the years he’d been signed and then let go by a series of NBA coaches who’d been impressed by his statistics but disillusioned by his actual on-court performance. But Lakers coach Fred Schaus thought Selvy was a good complement to West. He was slow, but he could shoot—his two-handed perimeter shot was known as the “Furman flea-flicker”—and since the aggressive West tended to draw defenders, that often let Selvy open.

  Now, in the seventh game, standing under the basket with thirty seconds left, Selvy was able to tip in a missed shot by West, tying the game. Boston’s Frank Ramsey got the ball and tried for one final shot but missed, and with five seconds left, the Lakers called a time-out. Schaus, shouting to make himself heard above the noise of the crowd, told Selvy to make the inbounds pass to Hundley, who would then pass either to West or back to Selvy if West was covered. When the play began, Hundley received the ball. K. C. Jones was all over West, so Hundley, after considering for an instant whether he should shoot the ball himself, passed back to Selvy, who was only eight feet from the basket and in the open. Selvy rose for a jumper and released.

  All the men on both teams stood watching. The Celtics had expected Baylor or West to take the last shot. West himself had wanted to take the shot, he felt he had proved in game three that he could make the clutch point, and he was sure he could do it again. But Selvy had a hot hand and had been open, standing in a spot where he made the shot eight times out of ten, the time was running down, and instead of waiting for West to try to break free, he had gone for it. As the ball arched through the air, it seemed in a perfect trajectory to drop through the hoop. Russell, watching from the paint, felt his heart seize up. Auerbach, standing by the Celtics bench, thought it was all over. The ball hit one side of the rim, then the other, rattled and teetered, and finally fell out. I missed it, Selvy thought. I missed it, I missed it. It was there for me and I missed it, and all that work is wasted. Russell leaped for the rebound, grabbed the ball with both hands and, while still up in the air, brought it protectively into his stomach, then landed, elbows flared, daring anyone to try to take it from him. The buzzer sounded and regulation play ended in a tie.

  During the break before overtime, Russell sat on a stool, winded and overheated. One of the Celtics poured a bucket of cold water over him, and that seemed to revive him. Since Heinsohn, Sanders, and Loscutoff had all fouled out, the Celtics were at a distinct disadvantage. No sooner had the overtime period begun than Frank Ramsey fouled Baylor and was out of the game. Other than Russell, the Celtics had no big players left. They would have to depend on the little guys.

  Auerbach turned to Gene Guarilia, a reserve forward who hardly ever played. Night after night, Guarilia suited up and sat on the bench. The call from Auerbach came so infrequently that he sat through each game with the expectation that he would not be called, that he’d return to the locker room with a uniform so dry he could hang it up unwashed and wear it for the next game. And when he did get sent in, it was usually because Boston was ahead by twenty points in the last half of the fourth quarter and, with the game in the bag and spectators already filing out, Auerbach wanted to rest his starters. Now, all of a sudden, it was overtime in the seventh game of the finals, the championship was at stake, he was going in absolutely cold, to be pitted against Elgin Baylor, and the thousands of Garden fans, not to mention the national television audience, were staring at him wondering if he would rise to the occasion. But Auerbach had sent Guarilia into one of the games in the series against Philadelphia when it had gone into overtime and he’d run out of players. The unexpected order had completely shaken Guarilia up at the time. He’d made up his mind he would never allow himself to get so rattled again, and he’d spent the entire game steeling himself for just this eventuality.

  Guarilia trotted onto the court. Baylor scored two points, and then the Celtics had the ball. Cousy shot and missed. Russell was trapped outside the key, unable to go for the rebound, but Guarilia, on the far side of the court, managed to slip around Baylor, and came up with the ball. Russell came charging in and Guarilia passed it to him. He rose up, clutching the ball with both hands so no one could tear it from his grasp, and dunked it. The crowd roared.

  Guarilia was so keyed up, and Baylor by now so tired, that the Celtics bench player was able to keep the league’s second-highest scorer off balance. By pressing Baylor, Guarilia forced him to make a poor shot that banged off the rim. Russell got the rebound and, setting the Celtics’ fast break in motion, fired the ball to K. C. Jones, who tore down the court, then passed across the key to Sam Jones. Rudy LaRusso was the only Laker who’d made it back to defend the basket, and when Jones went up for a layup, LaRusso fouled him but the ball went in. Sam made his free throw to put Boston up by three points. In the short time remaining, the Lakers were unable to close the gap, and suddenly it was over and the Celtics were again the champions.

  In the Celtics locker room after the game, reporters swarmed around Guarilia for the first time in anyone’s memory. One went looking for Russell and found him far from the commotion, leaning against the wall, tears running down his cheeks. The tension had been so high and now that it was over the relief was so great that the proudest, most intimidating man in basketball was actually crying. After a minute, Russell got ahold of himself. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad that’s over.”

  The Lakers dressing room was quiet. As the players walked by on their way to the shower, Frank Selvy sat on the bench in his bare feet, smoking a cigarette. He’d made the two points that brought the Lakers from behind to tie the game, but he took no consolation in that, because he’d missed the shot that would have won it. One of his teammates, trying to cheer him up, said, “Hell, think of the shots we all missed.”

  “Yeah,” Selvy said, “but I missed the big one.”

  14

  THE CELTICS’ victory in the 1962 finals was the team’s fifth championship in six years. The club had won every year since Russell joined except for 1958, when he injured his left ankle during the playoffs, and the Celtics were now in a league with the New York Yankees, who won the World Series five times between 1949 and 1953, and the Montreal Canadiens, who took home the Stanley Cup five times between 1956 and 1960. Sportswriters now commonly spoke of the “Celtic dynasty” and the “Celtic mystique” and “Celtic pride.” The Celtics home quarters, however, were hardly commensurate with their dynastic status. Unlike the Lakers, who had a flashy new arena complete with escalators and an automatic gate counter, the Celtics continued to play in the aging Boston Garden. “The Celtics conjure up the picture of a Rolls-Royce on a garbage scow,” Bob Hoobing once wrote in the Herald.

  The arena itself was a dank and drafty place. It had no air-conditioning and perpetually smelled of cigar smoke, beer, and popcorn. It had been designed, in 1928, for ice hockey, boxing, and indoor track, so the small seats were ranged in steeply banked rows that made the crowd feel closer to the action, unlike newer arenas where the seats were set farther back. John Kiley played the organ; Weldon Haire was the public address announcer. There were no mascots, no dancing cheerleaders, no rock music blaring from the loudspeakers during time-outs. The atmosphere was informal. A columnist for The New York Times once described the fans as members of the sociological subset known as Corner Boys. They had names like Whitey, Lefty, and Spike, and during the warm-ups before games they would gather along the sidelines of the court and banter with the players.

  Like the team, the arena had acquired an aura, and to many people it was inextricably associated with the Garden’s distinctive parquet floor. The floor had been constructed of Tennessee oak by the DiNatale family in the Boston suburb of Brookline in 1946, a
nd the parquet pattern had been chosen because, due to a wood shortage at the end of World War II, long boards were considerably more expensive than short pieces. There were 264 panels, each five feet square and one and a quarter inches thick, and they were held in place by 956 bolts that all had to be removed every time a hockey game was played and then replaced before each basketball game. The “bull gang,” a crew of sixty workers, was able to accomplish the job in forty minutes.

  Dolph Schayes of the Syracuse Nationals believed that playing in Boston Garden was worth at least ten points to the Celtics. It was true that both players and referees were affected by the crowds, but privately, the Celtics admitted that there was another reason for their home-court advantage, and it was literally the home court. The arena was built over North Station, and through the years the vibrations caused by the trains rumbling in and out had created cracks in the cement subflooring, and that in turn resulted in an uneven floor. When the parquet squares were laid down on top of the cement, some fit snugly, others had hollow spots and ridges beneath them. There were gaps between some of the squares, and the bull gang simply screwed the parquet into place with no system for applying uniform torque. As a result there were innumerable loose screws and dead spots in the floor, places where a bounced ball would sag as if it had suddenly been punctured. From their years of playing in the Garden, all of the Celtics carried in their minds a road map of the floor’s dead spots. They knew what places to avoid, and just as important, what places to maneuver a dribbling opponent toward. If an unsuspecting out-of-towner hit a dead spot, he could lose control of the ball or overcompensate coming off the dead spot and have the ball bounce right out of his hands.

  Over the years, visiting coaches and players also complained about conditions in the visitors’ dressing room, and while the Celtics front office always dismissed the complaints, most of them were valid and could be traced to Walter Randall, the Celtics equipment manager. Randall was an irascible, mischievous man who liked to call the players by their numbers. “Hey, Fifteen!” he’d yell at Heinsohn. He had a master key, and during games he’d use it to slip into the visitors’ dressing room to replace dry towels with wet ones, open the windows in cold weather and lock them closed when it was warm, and shut off the hot-water valve. “Johnny, I got those bastards good tonight,” he’d tell Johnny Most, the team’s radio announcer.

  For all the aura the team had acquired, its ticket sales remained flat, and some years there were unsold seats even during playoff games. The Celtics were not nearly as profitable as Walter Brown’s hockey team, the Bruins, which was not nearly as successful, and so Brown saw to it that the Celtics were always a frugal operation. Auerbach himself negotiated directly with the players about their contracts. And in fact, these sessions usually were not negotiations at all. Auerbach assessed each player and told him what he was worth based on his contribution to the team. Auerbach hated it when players tried to squeeze him for better terms by bringing up their statistics in the previous season. He’d tell them to leave the stats at home. Auerbach thought there was nothing more misleading than statistics. A player could argue that he averaged twenty points a game in the previous season, but the figure was meaningless unless Auerbach knew how many of them were scored against good teams and how many against crummy teams, how many were garbage points, when the game had been decided, and how many were clutch points, when the game hung in the balance. Auerbach measured a player’s worth only by the extent to which the man contributed to victory. He was only going to become interested in statistics when they measured intestinal fortitude, coming through in the clutch.

  With salaries that for the most part were strictly middle-class, most of the Celtics had off-season jobs. Heinsohn, one of the highest-paid Celtics, sold insurance in the Worcester office of State Mutual of America, and he made more money doing that than he did playing basketball. Gene Guarilia played guitar in a nightclub orchestra. Bob Cousy ran a basketball camp in New Hampshire. Auerbach still handled some accounts for CelluCraft, the plastics company, and had invested in a Chinese restaurant in Brookline.

  But come September, the players who did not live in and around Boston began drifting back to the city. Rookies such as John Havlicek, who’d just graduated from Ohio State and had been picked by Auerbach in the 1962 draft, were put up at the Hotel Lenox. Veterans took up quarters they often shared with other players up in the old Sherry Biltmore. Training camp was held at the Babson Institute, fifteen miles outside Boston in the town of Wellesley. There were no curfews, no supervised diets. To Havlicek, accustomed to university training camps where players were force-fed steaks and pancakes and where lights were turned out at ten o’clock, the freedom Auerbach granted the players was surprising.

  Nonetheless, the Celtics training camp was notorious as the most grueling in the league. For the Celtics to play the kind of fast-breaking game Auerbach favored, they needed to be able to run up and down the court without tiring for forty-eight minutes. Many players in the NBA hated training camp and preferred to play themselves into shape once the season began, but Auerbach liked the Celtics to start the season in peak form, beat a few out-of-shape teams, and establish an early lead. When he was in the navy during the war, he had been responsible for physical fitness on the base, and as a basketball coach he had always retained the military emphasis on conditioning. The veterans almost invariably gained weight during the off-season—Russell could put on twenty or thirty pounds, becoming, in his own words, one fat center—and so training camp consisted of drills, running, scrimmaging, more running, calisthenics such as jumping jacks and push-ups, and yet more running. To anyone not in superlative shape, Tom Heinsohn thought, it was torture pure and simple.

  Auerbach rode all the players. Are you shitting me? he’d yell. That’s false hustle! One of his tasks was to grind down the egos of the rookies. You’re nothing but a nothing! he’d shout at them. But he would also go after the veterans, forcing players who’d been injured the season before to dive after balls to prove to him, and to themselves, that they were not playing scared. Always wary of the dangers of overcoaching, Auerbach passed out no notebooks or playbooks. The Celtics had seven basic plays, each with a few variations, and during training camp he concentrated on one play a day. Auerbach also held hardly any meetings. But on the first day of camp, before the training even began, he always called the players together and gave a variation of what he called his standard speech:

  Gentlemen, you are the world champions. You’ve heard the accolades all summer long. You’ve had a good time. And now everybody’s out to knock your jocks off. So, is this the year we get lazy? Is this the year we start feeling content? Because if you want to let them get you, just try living off last year’s reputation. What we have to do is meet them head-on and say, “You’re damned right we’re the world champions, and if you want this title you’re going to have to take it from us!”

  ONCE THE 1962 PLAYOFFS were over, Chamberlain and a friend of his from the Globetrotters named Wee Willie Gardner flew to Europe. They stopped first in London, where Chamberlain took command of a custom-made, heather-colored Bentley Continental he had ordered in New York a year and a half earlier. Then they went on to Paris, and drove the Bentley down to the Riviera. While they were in Cannes, Chamberlain received a call from a friend in Philadelphia telling him that Eddie Gottlieb was selling the Warriors to a group of investors in San Francisco. Chamberlain called Gottlieb, who confirmed the news.

  Gottlieb had been coach, manager, and part owner of the Warriors since 1946, the year the team was founded as a charter member of the Basketball Association of America. His initial investment in the Warriors was $2,500, and people liked to say he borrowed $2,800 of it. In 1951, he’d bought the team outright from his partners for $25,000. Now, eleven years later, the San Francisco investors were offering him $850,000 for it. And on top of that they wanted to pay him $35,000 to move out to San Francisco for one year to oversee the transition and manage the team.

  The deal w
as contingent on Chamberlain coming with the team, and while Chamberlain liked Gottlieb, at first he refused. It was not because of any particular affection for the city of Philadelphia. Chamberlain had friends and family there, but he felt that compared to New York, where he now had an apartment, the restaurants and nightlife were second-rate. The year before, in fact, prior to Frank McGuire becoming coach, Chamberlain had told Gottlieb he would be happy to be traded to a city with more action. But then he and McGuire had their great run, and Chamberlain was now looking forward to playing for the Warriors for another season only because he thought he and McGuire could take the championship from the Celtics.

  When Chamberlain learned that McGuire would not accompany the Warriors to San Francisco—he had a son with cerebral palsy who was under treatment by doctors on the East Coast—he saw no reason to go himself and told Gottlieb he might just stay on in France. Gottlieb made numerous expensive transatlantic calls, selling Chamberlain on San Francisco and increasing the financial inducements, until finally he offered his star $85,000 a year for three years if he came west. Chamberlain agreed. He had the Bentley shipped back to the United States and at the end of the summer drove it cross-country to San Francisco.

  The investors acquiring the Warriors for San Francisco, led by business executives Matty Simmons, Len Mogul, and Franklin Mieuli, hoped to duplicate the success Bob Short had enjoyed by moving the Lakers to Los Angeles. It seemed like a promising idea. San Francisco was a thriving, vibrant city full of sports fans who passionately rooted for the football club, the 49ers, and who had welcomed the Giants when the baseball team moved there from New York in 1958. Additionally, Bill Russell’s two national championships at the University of San Francisco had created an enthusiasm in the city for basketball. The team, which would continue to be called the Warriors, would play at the Cow Palace, which had a capacity of 14,000, and the Lakers in Los Angeles would provide them with a natural rival that would boost the local rooting interest.