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

by John Taylor

  Then Cousy went to the toilet to urinate. It was a trip he made with increasing frequency before a big game, as all the world now knew, because he’d been on the Mike Wallace show a while back and when Wallace asked him how he coped with the pressure of the playoffs, he’d said without thinking, “Well, I go to the toilet much more often.” Finally, twenty minutes before the Celtics were to take the floor, the celebrities cleared out, Russell hurried into the bathroom to throw up, and Auerbach summoned his players, who pulled up chairs and sat in a semicircle around him. “Has everyone gone to the head?” Auerbach asked. “Has everyone been taped? Has everyone taken care of all their problems so we can get this meeting started?”

  The players would have considered a pep talk an unprofessional embarrassment—except maybe at halftime when they were behind in a close game—and Auerbach focused instead on each player’s assignment. Heinsohn needed to box out Rudy LaRusso. Russell needed to double-team Baylor when he was bulling in on Satch Sanders. Everyone needed to pressure Gene Wiley and LeRoy Ellis, the Lakers’ two rookie centers. Cousy, as team captain, then spoke up. The key to winning, he said, was to run and to keep running, to avoid at all costs sitting on any lead they did acquire. And then it was time to take the floor. “Okay,” Auerbach said. “This is for all the marbles.”

  A record of 15,521 fans turned out for the game. The Sports Arena had the greatest number of seats—and the most expensive tickets—in the league, but it couldn’t fit everyone, and another 6,000 had to be turned away. The Los Angeles fans were more sedate and prosperous than the typical East Coast fan, and most of the men sitting quietly in the cushioned seats wore jackets and ties. “You don’t have fans here, you’ve got spectators,” Nats coach Alex Hannum once told Fred Schaus. Doris Day was there, directly across from the Celtics bench, drinking soda and eating popcorn. Pat Boone was there as well, wearing a yellow shirt and red pants and looking virtuous and mild.

  Despite the fear that had gripped him back in the motel, once the game started, Cousy felt himself shooting with a nice loose wrist, shooting so smoothly he scarcely felt the ball leave his hands, as if instead of popping out of his grip it simply evaporated. Cousy was the playmaker—he brought the ball down, called the play, and then set it in motion, if all went well, with some moves that threw the defense out of position. As a rule Cousy himself shot only to get the respect of the man guarding him, to keep him honest, but now he was feeling so good about his shooting that he was banging away at the rim like a gunner, and he had to tell himself to calm down, to stay focused on his assignment.

  The Lakers could not contain Boston, and trailed at the half by fourteen points. In the locker room during the break, the statistician brought in the sheet with the Celtics’ first-half stats, which Auerbach always checked in order to see who was in foul trouble. The sheet showed that the Celtics had shot 55 percent in the first half. It was a startling figure. The players sensed victory, and Cousy had to keep reminding them that they couldn’t afford to sit on the lead, that they had to keep running. The Lakers, by contrast, wanted to slow the pace, and in the second half they finally succeeded in doing so, shutting down the Celtics’ fast break by rebounding aggressively against Bill Russell, who was so fatigued from the endless playoff games that his legs had gone numb. The game slowed so much that Cousy even found himself walking up the court at one point, and all the while the Lakers chipped away at Boston’s lead. In a time-out Cousy lashed out at his teammates. We’ve got to run. Nobody’s moving out there. Nobody!

  Just after the start of the fourth quarter, with West bringing the ball up the court, Cousy backed up to cover Dick Barnett. When Barnett cut, Cousy tried to cut with him, but his ankle gave way, and he collapsed on the floor in agony. Jim Loscutoff and Buddy LeRoux, the Celtics trainer, helped him limp to the bench, where Dr. Ernie Vanderweghe examined him and decided that even though the ankle now felt numb, he had a bad sprain. Vanderweghe told Cousy that while he had not broken anything, he was out for the night.

  Cousy’s injury seemed to give the Lakers the break they needed, because once he went out they began playing with a new lift. As soon as he sat down, the Lakers scored two consecutive baskets, reducing Boston’s lead to seven. Three more minutes passed, and the Celtics’ lead shrank to one point. Cousy asked LeRoux if it would be possible to freeze his ankle. The trainer warned Cousy that he could hurt himself, but Cousy insisted. He was afraid that if he did not go in and the Celtics lost, his ankle would become so tender by the following day that he might not be able to play at all if the series had to go to a seventh game, and that could make the difference between winning and losing.

  Finally, LeRoux sprayed Cousy’s ankle with a numbing spray and bound it as tightly as he could. Cousy tested the ankle and decided it could accept his weight. With four minutes left on the clock, Cousy signaled to Auerbach that he wanted to go back in the game.

  “How does it feel?” Auerbach asked.

  “I think I can go,” Cousy said.

  Cousy’s return immediately restored the confidence and rhythm of the Celtics. Satch Sanders, who rarely shot, threw the ball up just to unload it when Baylor started pressing him, and it went in. But Baylor and Barnett were shooting well, too, and with thirty seconds left, the Lakers were behind by just one point. Then a pair of foul shots by Heinsohn, a jump ball that went Boston’s way, and two more foul shots by Heinsohn put the Celtics solidly ahead, and although Baylor managed one last dunk, everyone knew the game was over.

  Cousy got the inbounds pass as the final seconds ran out, and he finished his career not just as a champion but as the man in possession of the ball. He had been limping when he first returned to the game, but now he had forgotten about his ankle altogether. He took a few long strides to build momentum, then hurled the ball high into the rafters. The fans looked upward to follow its arc, but Cousy turned and, without watching to see where it would land, trotted off the court for the last time.

  The next day, both the Boston press and national sportswriters abandoned irony and their fixation with process and instead wrote about Cousy’s last game the way Grantland Rice, the sports poet of the thirties, might have done, as if composing odes to a storied warrior retiring in all his glory from the battlefield. “With a farewell performance of supreme virtuosity, Cooz, the Magnificent, had led his Boston Celtics to the fifth straight championship,” the normally reserved Arthur Daley wrote in The New York Times. “Thus did the Celtic captain complete his playing days on the triumphant note he deserved, still a champion among champions.”

  15

  AT THE END of the Warriors’ first year in San Francisco, the team not only finished in second-to-last place, it had lost $1 million, and the investors who had acquired it were frustrated and disappointed. Eddie Gottlieb, who agreed to stay on for an additional season as general manager because the team was doing so badly, accepted the fact that Bob Feerick lacked the temperament to coach professional athletes and began looking for a replacement. At the top of his list was Alex Hannum. That year, the Syracuse Nationals had moved to Philadelphia and become the 76ers, but Hannum, their coach, decided not to accompany the team. He and his wife were both from the West and they missed it, and so he chose to return to his hometown, Los Angeles, to become a building contractor.

  Hannum was unquestionably one of the best coaches in the NBA. Under his guidance the Nats had regularly made it into the playoffs. He had enjoyed the distinction of coaching the St. Louis Hawks when they came within two points of beating the Celtics in the 1957 finals and then when they did beat them in 1958. Gottlieb had known Hannum for years, and respected him as both athlete and coach. In the summer of 1963, Gottlieb flew down to Los Angeles and asked Hannum to take over Feerick’s job. The offer intrigued Hannum. He had of course heard all the stories about how impossible Chamberlain was to coach, but he thought that the critics overlooked a single significant fact: all of Chamberlain’s coaches had lacked professional experience. Dick Harp at Kansas had been an assistant coac
h when he took over the Jayhawks in Chamberlain’s sophomore year. Neil Johnston, Chamberlain’s first coach on the Warriors, was a former player who had never coached before. Bob Feerick came from a college, and so had Frank McGuire, the one coach who’d had any success with him.

  Chamberlain, Hannum thought, had never worked with a seasoned NBA coach, one who had handled professional players for years and who knew how to motivate them, how to earn their respect, and how to respect them for the grown men they were. Much less had Chamberlain ever worked with a coach who had taken a team not just to the playoffs but to a championship. There were only two such men around in the league—Auerbach and Hannum himself. So Hannum thought he was the right man for the job, but he had followed the travails of the Warriors in San Francisco and had become convinced that Chamberlain was out of control, playing for his own statistical glory rather than for the good of the team, as if he were being paid by the point. If the Warriors were going to make it to the playoffs, Chamberlain would need to change his game, to share some of the scoring and the playing time, and Hannum was not sure if that was possible.

  “Does Chamberlain demand to play the full forty-eight minutes of every game?” he asked Gottlieb.

  “Absolutely not,” Gottlieb replied.

  “Is Chamberlain going after points to insure his high salary?”

  “Absolutely not.” Gottlieb explained that while Chamberlain was entitled to a bonus, it was based on the performance of the team, not on his own statistics.

  “Okay, you’ve got yourself a coach,” Hannum said.

  Alex Hannum had been a big, tough basketball player, and he remained intense, enthusiastic, loud, and aggressive, a beer-drinking brawler who could be so stubborn that he was known as Old Iron Head. He was tall, at six-seven, and big, at 230 pounds, barrel-chested, muscular, with piercing blue eyes and a strong jaw. He kept his receding hair in a sharp crew cut that made him look like a drill sergeant, and in fact he was also sometimes called “the Sarge” in honor of his wartime service in the army. Hannum was the first to admit he had never been anything more than a journeyman player. He’d averaged six points per game, shooting one for three from the field, and had rarely started. Still, he loved it like nothing else, both the sport itself and the league camaraderie. There were only eight teams back in the days when he was playing, which meant that if there was a doubleheader at Madison Square Garden, half the NBA was in town, and after the games they’d all go out beer drinking, like a company of soldiers on the town with Saturday-night passes, prowling for action, ready to mix it up with anyone who crossed their path.

  Hannum had started playing professional ball in 1948, first for the Oshkosh All-Stars of the National League, then for Anderson, Syracuse, Baltimore, Rochester, Milwaukee, Fort Wayne, and St. Louis. In 1954, after Les Harrison had dropped him from the Rochester Royals, he’d been called by Ben Kerner, who’d acquired the rights to him for $500 and who wanted him to play for the Milwaukee Hawks, as his team was at the time designated. Since the season was by then almost halfway over, Kerner said all he could offer Hannum was a day rate of forty dollars. When Hannum reached the team, the man he was replacing handed him a bag containing his uniform. Hannum asked if it was clean. No, the man said, and told Hannum he would have to clean it himself. At the end of the season, Kerner dropped Hannum, and Fred Zollner of the Fort Wayne Pistons picked him up but then put him on waivers. Kerner, who had in the meantime moved the Hawks to St. Louis, picked him up again, this time for nothing.

  Kerner was known for getting rid of coaches on practically an annual basis, and midway through that season, he fired Red Holzman and made Slater Martin, Hannum’s roommate, the player-coach. But Martin was more interested in playing than coaching, and since Hannum spent most of his time on the bench, he had Hannum making substitutions and calling time-outs, and once, on a trip out of town when Kerner was not around, Martin turned everything over to Hannum. “What the hell,” Martin said. “We’re on the road. Who’ll know who’s coaching?” Pretty soon, Hannum had taken over the job full-time, and discovered he was a natural at it. He knew the levels of the game, had a sense for what a given critical moment required, and understood how to motivate and direct players. He had a young, talented team, and they’d managed to get themselves into the playoffs and then to the 1957 finals where, despite the fact that they were the underdogs, they had taken the Celtics to seven games—the last being the one in which, with two seconds left, Hannum threw the ball the length of the court and off the far backboard to Bob Pettit. The following year, when Russell was sidelined with an injury, the Hawks had actually beaten the Celtics. Even with Chamberlain in the league, no one else had done so since.

  When Hannum arrived for training camp in Santa Cruz, California, he held a scrimmage between the veterans and the rookies trying out for the team. Chamberlain had not yet arrived, and to Hannum’s astonishment, the rookies—raw college kids, most of whom wouldn’t even make the cut—beat the veterans. The Warriors, he thought, had become so completely dependent on Chamberlain it was as if they had forgotten how to play the game. Chamberlain reached the camp two days late. He was a good forty pounds over his playing weight, and in a bad frame of mind. He had not been pleased to hear that Hannum would be his new coach. When Hannum coached the Nationals, he was always baiting Chamberlain from the sidelines, and he had urged Dolph Schayes, his top player, to harass Chamberlain on the court. Chamberlain knew that Hannum and Schayes had simply been trying to rattle him, to undermine his game, but even so the taunting seemed to him to involve a meanness of spirit that was demoralizing and unsportsmanlike. Also, Chamberlain did not like what he’d heard about Hannum’s plans to change his style of play and get him to score less. During his best season with the Warriors, when Frank McGuire had coached the team, they had won 80 percent of the games in which he scored at least fifty points. If he scored less, it seemed clear to Chamberlain, they were less likely to win.

  Hannum knew he and Schayes had made Chamberlain’s life miserable on some nights. But as far as he was concerned, that was Chamberlain’s fault. Despite his size—“You don’t raise your eyes to him,” one sportswriter noted that year, “you tilt back your head.”—Chamberlain allowed opponents to push him around. Hannum felt Wilt needed to become more aggressive. He was also determined that Chamberlain play a complete game. In the previous year, without the influence of Frank McGuire, Chamberlain had reverted to his old habit of favoring his fadeaway jump shot. Hannum wanted him to move into the basket, where he could shoot or feed off and be in position for the rebound. There was no point, it seemed to him, in having a seven-foot athlete on the team if the man wasn’t going to rebound.

  But Chamberlain made it clear that he did not like to be told what to do. He complained to reporters about Hannum’s strategy, and Hannum insisted to the same men that Chamberlain was going to have to change. The tension built until one night in Vancouver, British Columbia, shortly before the opening game of the regular season, Hannum and Chamberlain got into a violent locker-room argument and avoided coming to blows only when the other players intervened. Hannum, deciding a showdown was necessary, ordered the other players out, then took off his jacket.

  “You’ve been fighting me as a coach all the way,” Hannum said. “Now fight me as a man.”

  Chamberlain glared at Hannum for a long moment and then folded, saying, “Aw, I can’t fight you, Alex.”

  Hannum felt that his approach was vindicated when, in the opening game of the season, against Baltimore, the Warriors won easily although Wilt scored only twenty-three points. In the second game, against St. Louis, the Warriors won again with Wilt scoring only twenty-two. As the team continued to win, sportswriters began talking about the “new Chamberlain” and the “new Warriors.” One article was headlined, “The Fight to Remodel Wilt Chamberlain.”

  This emphasis irritated Chamberlain, suggesting as it did that he had previously been an immature and selfish player who was responsible for the failures of his teams.
Despite grudgingly yielding to Hannum’s authority, he still resented the coach, and complained about him to Guy Rogers, one of his closest friends on the team. But Rogers thought Hannum’s strategy was obviously paying off. Rogers wanted to see the Warriors win, and it vexed him that Chamberlain seemed willing to put his own pride ahead of the best interests of the team. “You’ve got to bow down, Wilt,” Rogers told Chamberlain. “Admit it, cat, that we’re a much better club with you feeding us part of the time and then getting back to protect our basket.”

  BY THE FALL of 1963, Bill Russell was no longer the stiff, awkward, overgrown postadolescent he’d been when he first joined the Celtics. The six championships, the years of playing night after night to crowds of thousands of people who either cheered him or booed him, the national television exposure, the second-guessing and criticism from sportswriters, who also sought out his opinions on everything from politics to music—all of it had given him an imposing, even lordly presence. Russell was of course aware of his presence, and in fact took a great deal of satisfaction in it, doing whatever he could to heighten its effect. He had grown back his goatee, which he’d agreed to cut after his first championship season, and he wore tailored three-piece suits, white shirts with cuff links, and narrow black ties.