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

by John Taylor

  Russell had what Tom Heinsohn once called “a neurotic need to win,” but that was not to be confused with any need for anyone’s approval. In the locker room, with his teammates, Russell talked and joked and laughed his shrill, cackling laugh, but on the court and out in public he was cold and self-contained. People who pestered him or asked foolish or obvious questions were treated to the Russell Glower—an icily contemptuous stare accompanied by a long silence. He refused to sign autographs and usually ignored the people, whether kids or old ladies, who asked for them. Tim Horgan of the Herald considered Russell the most selfish, surly, and uncooperative athlete he’d ever met. Russell did have his admirers, but one of the central ironies of his career is that while he was the key to the Celtics dynasty, he was also one of the reasons the team was not, during those years, a bigger draw in Boston.

  At this point in his life, Russell had become determined to seize every opportunity he could find to protest racial inequity. The previous spring, the Celtics had gone to Lexington, Kentucky, to play an exhibition game with the Hawks. It was a symbolically important game because it would be the first time the stands at the University of Kentucky were to be integrated. Until then, black fans could sit only in the less desirable upper tiers. Before the game, however, Satch Sanders and Sam Jones were refused service by the manager at the hotel lunch counter, who told them they could eat there with the rest of the team but not by themselves. Sanders and Jones decided to boycott the game, and as soon as Russell heard about the incident, he told Auerbach he was leaving. The black players on the Hawks also decided to boycott the match, and as a result the first game played before an integrated audience at the University of Kentucky was played by two all-white teams.

  That same year, the town of Reading finally felt good enough about its celebrated local hero to hold a testimonial benefit in his honor. Russell, who welcomed the acknowledgment after years in which he felt he’d been slighted by neighbors and harassed by the cops, took the microphone at the testimonial and joked, “I thought the only people who knew me in this town were the police.” A month later, however, word got out in Reading that Russell was planning to move to a more affluent neighborhood, and the people who lived there circulated a petition to dissuade the seller from proceeding. When that failed, a group of the neighbors joined forces and tried to buy the house to prevent Russell from buying it. It infuriated Russell that while his neighbors were happy to celebrate him as a great athlete, they still refused to accept him as a human equal. And then, in the summer, Russell took his children down to visit his grandfather in Louisiana. He was the winner of five world championships, but although he was driving a nice car and had plenty of cash, from Virginia to Louisiana he could not find a place where he and his children could eat and sleep. And the worst part was that he had no idea how to explain it to them.

  Like other black Americans of the time, Russell thought he might feel more at home in Africa. After touring Liberia twice during the off-season, he and a friend, Clarence Holder, together paid a reported $100,000 for 200,000 acres of land on which they built a rubber plantation that eventually employed more than one hundred laborers at a rate of fifty cents a day. Since it took rubber trees ten years to mature, their intent was to plant a new crop every year for the next ten years, at which point the plantation would be self-sustaining, able to produce an annual harvest of rubber. Holder actually went so far as to become a Liberian citizen, and Russell began thinking that when he retired, he might move there himself.

  By the summer of 1963, the civil rights movement and the segregationist backlash had reached a crisis in the South. That spring, police had set dogs on black demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, and Greenwood, Mississippi. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been jailed in Birmingham and had written his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” repudiating white ministers who were urging patience and caution on civil rights leaders. The black demonstrators, while not sufficiently patient for the white clerics, had nonetheless been following King’s creed of nonviolence, and Bill Russell had been tempted to join them, except he was certain that if a white man spit on him, he was not going to remain nonviolent.

  In June, Alabama governor George Wallace promised to prevent integration “by standing in the schoolhouse door,” and President John Kennedy gave a televised address announcing plans for federal civil rights legislation. On the very night of Kennedy’s speech, NAACP field director Medgar Evers was shot and killed while walking from his car to his house in Jackson, Mississippi. After Evers’s murder, Jackson was, as its mayor, Allen Thompson, told President Kennedy, an “explosive situation,” and to help defuse matters, Evers’s brother, Charlie, called Bill Russell and invited him to come to the city and hold basketball clinics. Two days later, Russell flew to Jackson, where armed white men were openly displaying their weapons to activists and outsiders—including Russell himself—and for the next three days conducted the first interracial basketball clinics ever held in the Jackson Auditorium. Russell also attended the historic march on Washington that August and was present when King gave his “I have a dream” speech, a moment of apparent racial promise that was violently undercut less than three weeks later with the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young black girls.

  Russell’s experiences that summer, and the country’s overall racial tumult, had made him increasingly angry and radical. More than ever, basketball seemed a trivial occupation unworthy of a black American male at a time of such crisis, when black men, women, and even children were being taunted, arrested, beaten, and killed simply because they were black. “I consider playing professional basketball as marking time, the most shallow thing in the world,” he told Gilbert Rogin of Sports Illustrated that fall. He was more interested in discussing the country’s racism. “The Muslims say . . . the white man is evil. I wonder about that in the sense that I wonder whether all men are evil. I dislike most white people because they are people. As opposed to dislike, I like most black people because I am black.”

  Frank Ramsey, a Kentuckian and the white player with whom Russell was perhaps the closest, read the article shortly after it appeared, and was sitting in the locker room when Russell walked in. “Hey Russell, I’m white,” Ramsey said. “You hate me?”

  The two men looked at each other for a moment. “I was misquoted, Frank,” Russell said.

  Ramsey let the matter go. But no one actually believed that Russell had been misquoted. If there were any doubts, Russell made similar points in a second interview that fall, with Ed Linn of The Saturday Evening Post, who described him sitting at home in Reading with his three young children and wife, Rose, while she discussed her work for the Boston chapter of the NAACP and her near arrest during a sit-in over de facto segregation in the city’s schools. She said a local politician had told her that he liked black musicians because “all darkies have rhythm.” “Isn’t that sweet,” Russell interjected with a sarcastic laugh. “Those darkies, they sure do cheer things up nights around the plantation.”

  Russell also gave vent to his bitterness about racism in the NBA and his disdain for Celtics fans. “I’m of the opinion that most of the teams in this league have a quota,” he told Linn. “In order for any sport to be really successful, two or three of the top guys have to be white. Most sports, even these days, are looking for the White Hope. . . . The first thing we [as Negroes in sport] have to get rid of is the idea that this is a popularity contest. I don’t work for acceptance. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether the fans like me or not. . . . What I’m resentful of, you know, is when they say you owe the public this and you owe the public that. You owe the public the same thing it owes you. Nothing! . . . I refuse to smile and be nice to the kiddies.”

  No prominent black athlete had made such controversial, provocative, and blatantly hostile statements in public before, neither Jackie Robinson, nor Willie Mays, nor Jim Brown, nor Muhammad Ali, who in the fall of 1963 still called himself Cassius Clay an
d was known more for his egotistical boasting; he had recently released a record of his poems and monologues, which included the line “I’m so great, I impress even myself.” Since Russell’s middle name was Felton, some sportswriters began referring to him as Felton X. The Russell family received so many threatening letters at their Reading home that Russell notified the FBI, and years later, when he requested his FBI file after Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act, he found that he was described as “an arrogant Negro who won’t sign autographs for white children.”

  When the Russells returned from a three-day road trip, they found that their house had been vandalized. The furniture had been overturned and destroyed, and the felt on the pool table ripped up. Russell’s trophy case had been broken into, and the trophies themselves beaten and disfigured. The walls were spray-painted with the word NIGGA. Russell was enraged, his wife shocked, his children terrified. He called the police, who came and catalogued the destruction, and then when they left and the Russells had restored some order to the house and were preparing to go to sleep, Russell and his wife pulled back the sheets of their bed to discover that the intruders had defecated in it.

  16

  ON JANUARY 13, 1964, the biggest storm of the winter swept across the Northeast, dumping twelve inches of snow from New York to Boston. Gale-force winds of fifty miles an hour created drifts five feet deep. The NBA all-star game was to be held in Boston on January 14, with most of the players planning to arrive the day before for a pregame party thrown by Walter Brown at the Sheraton Plaza. But flights into New England from all over the country were canceled, and twenty-six of the players scheduled for the game, including Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, and Wilt Chamberlain, were stranded elsewhere. The weather cleared by the following morning, and throughout the day players and owners straggled into the city.

  The all-star game was one of the regular occasions when all the owners gathered together, and they were eager to meet at the luncheon arranged the afternoon before the game. The league was changing rapidly. Teams had relocated, the Syracuse Nationals moving to Philadelphia and becoming the 76ers and the Chicago Zephyrs relocating to Baltimore and becoming the Bullets. Franchises that were worth less than a hundred thousand dollars a few years ago were now selling for upwards of a million, and the owners were no longer regarded as bush-league hustlers but as successful executives in the increasingly lucrative business of sport.

  While the owners were meeting, Tommy Heinsohn, who had become the head of the NBA Players Association, was trying to get the all-stars together to discuss a possible boycott of the game that night. The association had been started back in 1953 by Bob Cousy in an effort to limit excessive fines, reduce the number of exhibition games, and ease the demanding schedule that often had a team traveling to one city and playing a game and then traveling to a second city all in the same day. Cousy had polled the other teams back in the early fifties and all were in favor of a union except for the Fort Wayne Pistons, who were afraid that their owner, Fred Zollner, an archetypal industrialist with a virulent hatred of organized labor, might actually fold his team if it tried to unionize. At the 1955 all-star game in New York, Cousy had tried to persuade Zollner that a union would be good for the entire league, but the owner refused to consider it. “I’ve never had a union in my shops and I won’t have a union in my ball club,” he told Cousy.

  Eventually, Cousy was able to form an association in which the Pistons declined to participate. For years, the NBA’s board of governors ignored it, trying to accommodate the players’ grievances without acknowledging the association, but finally, in 1957, the board agreed to meet with it once a year and to make a handful of minor concessions, such as guaranteeing players seven dollars a day in expense money while on the road. The players themselves were only slightly more enthusiastic about the association. Cousy had written every player in the league to ask for dues, but two-thirds of them simply ignored the letters. Cousy became frustrated, and in 1958 he asked Heinsohn, who had a degree in economics, to take over as president. Heinsohn had a reputation as a clowning prankster—Leigh Montville of The Boston Globe once described him as “the kid forever in the back of the room, making funny noises while the teacher is declining Latin words on the blackboard”—but he took his new responsibilities seriously, holding organizational meetings with all of the teams when they came to Boston and venturing into their dressing rooms before games to demand twenty-five dollars from players who’d avoided paying their dues.

  The association remained weak compared with the baseball players’ union, but Heinsohn had managed to extract a few more concessions from the owners, such as a minimum salary for rookies of $7,500 and agreements on playoff schedules. On other matters he was less successful. The players had asked the NBA to require all teams to have full-time, traveling trainers, primarily to treat injuries, but the owners had refused, arguing that teams could not afford the additional $30,000, including transportation, it would add to team budgets. They wanted to continue to hire trainers part-time, on a game-by-game basis, to come in and tape up the players of both teams, then sit on the sidelines in case of injuries.

  For years, Heinsohn had also been pressing the owners about a pension plan for the players. The association wanted the owners to contribute $500 a year for each player, which would be matched by $500 from the player himself. As they had done when Cousy tried to form the players’ association, the owners simply stalled. Two months before the all-star game, when the board of governors gathered at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York, Heinsohn and some of the other representatives—including Oscar Robertson, Bob Pettit, and Jerry West—flew in at their own expense to discuss the pension issue with the board, but the owners refused to see them. “We sat cooling our heels in the lobby the whole afternoon,” Heinsohn recalled.

  At that point, Heinsohn told the other players it was time to give the owners an ultimatum. He suggested that if the owners had not agreed to a pension plan by the time of the all-star game, the players should refuse to play. Heinsohn knew Walter Brown would be upset by a boycott, and felt that out of loyalty he had to warn him of the possibility. A few weeks before the game he told the owner the players might not play. Brown did not understand why the players had become so confrontational. “I don’t even have a pension,” he told Heinsohn. “Why do you guys need one?”

  When Walter Kennedy, who’d replaced Maurice Podoloff as commissioner, arrived in Boston for the all-star game, he learned about the possibility of a strike. He met with Heinsohn to explain that there had been a misunderstanding and that the owners would vote on the pension plan by the summer. Larry Fleisher, a young graduate of Harvard Law School working with the players, suspected that this was yet another stall tactic. He thought that with all the owners assembled in one place, the time to force them to act was now. He persuaded Heinsohn that the players needed to be prepared to go on strike, that only by threatening the cancellation of a nationally televised game could they force the owners to address the issue. Heinsohn had scheduled a meeting of all the players at 3:00 p.m. to discuss their course of action, but because of the snowstorm some of them were still arriving. When each player reached the Garden, Heinsohn had him sign a statement declaring that none of the players would take the court and play the game until the owners officially agreed to move forward with the pension. If the whole thing backfired, Heinsohn didn’t want the other players trying to put the blame for it all on him.

  By five o’clock, Oscar Robertson, Bob Pettit, and Elgin Baylor had all finally arrived. The three were strong backers of the association. Robertson was particularly outspoken about how he was willing to lead a revolt by the players next season if the owners continued to be uncooperative. Shortly before six o’clock, Heinsohn, Fleisher, Pettit, Bill Russell, and Lenny Wilkins of the St. Louis Hawks went to see Walter Kennedy in his room at the Sheraton. Kennedy, getting ready for a dinner engagement, was wearing a dressing gown. Heinsohn told him that before the all-star game could take place
, all the owners needed to meet with the twenty players who’d come to Boston and sign a paper promising to put into effect the pension plan. Kennedy agreed to call all the owners individually, and they unanimously refused to meet. They would not be ordered around by their employees, and when the players left the hotel, a walkout seemed imminent.

  The idea of a strike instigated by his own player made Walter Brown wild with fury. He told Auerbach that he might call off the game himself, forfeiting the $30,000 he’d spent on promotion. He also said he might fire Heinsohn, Russell, and Sam Jones, the three Celtics who’d been named to the all-star team, and try to persuade the board of governors to banish the seventeen other players if they participated in a boycott. Auerbach had maintained a position of neutrality about the association, but he felt that Heinsohn was betraying Brown, who was one of the pension plan’s biggest advocates, and he sought him out in the hallways of the Garden.

  “You can’t do this to your own boss,” Auerbach said.

  “I’m sorry, Red,” Heinsohn said. “I’m the players’ representative and I have no choice.”

  “Don’t show me how much guts you got, you idiot,” Auerbach told him. “I know how much guts you’ve got. Think about what you’re doing to Walter.”

  Heinsohn refused to reconsider. Thirty minutes before the game, he invited the players on the Western Division team to join the Eastern players in the Celtics locker room. He told them that all together they were the best and most powerful players in the league. If they could not stand up now for the poorer, weaker players, they never would. The players took a vote. It was 11–9 against a boycott. They took a second vote and this time it was 11–9 in favor of one. 14* Heinsohn went out to deliver the verdict to Walter Brown.