by John Taylor
The minutes continued to tick down as the players sat nervously in the locker room. Heinsohn had stationed a security guard outside the door with instructions to forbid anyone from entering without permission, and the guard now came in to say that Bob Short, the owner of the Lakers, was outside demanding that Jerry West and Elgin Baylor come out and talk to him. “You go tell Bob Short to fuck himself,” Baylor said.
The guard returned to the corridor. A few moments later, the players heard a noise through the wall. Short had barged into the trainer’s room next door, and he now began ranting about the betrayal by the players. All of the players, including Baylor and West, could hear him, and Short knew it. “If any of my players are in on this, they’re through!” he shouted. “Finished for life!”
Baylor and West said nothing.
At that point, Walter Kennedy went down to the locker room to try to persuade the players to go ahead with the game. Kennedy’s biggest concern was the detrimental effect a delayed game might have on the league’s chances of landing a new television contract. In 1962, NBC had canceled its contract with the NBA after an eight-year run, its executives complaining that all the high-scoring games, and the interminable interruptions that occurred when coaches quarreled with officials, had driven away the audience. Since then, its games had been carried by a syndication service, and one of Kennedy’s most important goals was to secure a new network contract. Kennedy was hoping to use the all-star game—with West, Baylor, and Chamberlain playing for the Western Division against Russell, Robertson, and Jerry Lucas on the East team—to showcase the league’s stars and attract network interest. But if the NBA proved so unreliable that it could not even have a major event like the all-star game take place on schedule, executives from all the networks would be extremely leery of making any commitment to the league.
Kennedy was accompanied by Haskell Cohen, the NBA’s publicity director, who foresaw a public relations nightmare if the players refused to take the floor. “You can’t do this,” he kept saying. “You can’t do this.” Kennedy warned the players that if they refused to play the game, they would ruin pro basketball, in Boston and across the country. By now, fans had filled the Garden. It was well past the time the players should have taken the floor to warm up, but none of them appeared. Down in the locker room, Kennedy finally yielded, telling Heinsohn that if they all went out and played the game as scheduled, he would personally guarantee that the owners would produce an acceptable pension plan.
It was just fifteen minutes before tip-off time when Heinsohn asked Kennedy to leave so they could vote again. A number of the players, particularly Oscar Robertson, felt frustrated. If it had just been a question of disappointing the fans in the Garden, they would have voted to boycott the game despite Kennedy’s promise, which seemed like just another stalling tactic, but because the game was to be televised nationally, they risked turning the nationwide audience against them if they called it off so abruptly, and they reluctantly decided to play. With five minutes remaining before tip-off time, Bob Pettit went out to tell Kennedy that the game was on, and twenty minutes later the players took the court.
Even though catastrophe had been averted, Walter Brown was still furious. He had always been loyal to his players, and he expected loyalty in return. But something seemed to be changing. The old ways, the old loyalties, the old relationships—the days when an owner could ask the players to take a pay cut if he’d had a bad year and would spontaneously give them a bonus if he’d had a good one—they were all disappearing, replaced by a new kind of self-centered assertiveness, an ingratitude and hostility that did not conform to Brown’s idea of sportsmanlike conduct. Just a couple months earlier, Bill Russell had given that one interview saying he considered basketball the most shallow thing in the world and then that second interview declaring that he owed the public nothing. This gratuitous slap at the Celtics fans upset Brown, particularly because, Brown felt, Russell did owe the public something. After all, the fans paid his salary. And they did more than that. Brown himself had given Russell permission to make an appeal to fans at the Garden to contribute to a cancer fund Russell was endorsing, and the fans had responded. If nothing else, Russell owed them for that.
And now Heinsohn—one of Brown’s own players—was the individual who had been responsible for leading this revolt and disrupting the start of the all-star game. Brown had always had a particularly warm relationship with Heinsohn, and he made it clear at every opportunity how much he valued him as a ballplayer. Just a month earlier, at a basketball luncheon, Brown had taken the microphone to single out Heinsohn for praise, saying, “Whenever we win a big game and the situation is properly analyzed, it turns out that Tom Heinsohn’s play was a big factor.” When Brown learned Heinsohn was working in insurance in the off-season, he had asked Heinsohn to help him with his estate planning, and as a result Heinsohn was privy to such intimate details as the number of shares in the Celtics that Brown intended to bequeath to Red Auerbach—something even Auerbach himself didn’t know. That was how much Brown had trusted Heinsohn. On top of everything else, Brown had always supported the players association and had even paid Heinsohn’s travel expenses to attend league meetings as the players’ representative. And Heinsohn had repaid him by embarrassing him in front of the other owners—who’d think he was unable to control his own men—and delaying a nationally televised game at a time when the league was desperate for a network contract.
The more Brown brooded about Heinsohn’s disloyalty, as he saw it, the more it upset him. A couple of days after the all-star game, Brown was still angry, and finally, when he ran into the Herald’s Joe Looney before the start of a Bruins game, he gave vent to his feelings. “Tom Heinsohn is the number one heel in my long association in sports,” Brown said when Looney asked him how he felt about his player. Looney, who knew he had the lead for his column the next day, asked Brown if he wanted to trade Heinsohn. “No, I wouldn’t trade him,” the owner said, “but if I had a team in Honolulu, I’d ship him there.”
Heinsohn had a great deal of affection for Brown, and he was deeply pained when he read the article. Auerbach did not want to see open warfare break out between Heinsohn and Brown, and he arranged for the two to get together and hopefully make amends. When Heinsohn arrived at Brown’s office in the Garden, he was surprised to find, crowded in among the stuffed brown bears that Bruins fans sent the owner, a group of photographers and reporters. Brown had turned the meeting into a public ceremony of submission on Heinsohn’s part. Once the photographs were taken and the reporters were ushered out, Heinsohn tried to explain to Brown that this was not personal, that he knew Brown had always been fair to him and all the Celtics, and had at times even gone out on a limb for him. If all the owners were as fair as Brown, Heinsohn said, none of this would have happened. But as it was, he went on, he was the president of the players association and had an obligation to act in the best interests of the group. Brown, sitting with his chin in his hand looking glumly at his desk, said nothing during the entire twenty-five-minute conversation. He was still furious. “Tom Heinsohn told me nothing I didn’t already know,” he said to reporters afterward. “I’m burned up and I’m sore about it. It was a fine way for one of my players to treat me.”
BOB SHORT, the owner of the Lakers, was furious at Elgin Baylor for participating in the near boycott the night of the all-star game, and Baylor was angry at Short for thinking he could intimidate him. But unlike Walter Brown and Tommy Heinsohn, Short and Baylor quickly put the events of that night behind them. Short needed Baylor too much, and Baylor felt he owed the owner for the good that life had brought his way. Short was paying him $50,000 a year—money that had enabled Baylor to buy the apartment building he and his wife and son lived in off Wilshire Boulevard. Short had also advised him on other investments that would ensure that when he retired he did not, like some former NBA players, end up driving a taxi to make a living.
Baylor knew he had at most a few more years left as a basketbal
l player, and in fact he was now worried that his career might even be cut short. In training camp that fall, he had begun to feel pain in his knees. At first he thought it might be caused by the slab floor of the training camp’s basketball court, but the pain continued into the regular season and then his legs simply stopped performing, even when he was injected with painkillers. He couldn’t turn the corner on the man defending him. The spring that enabled him to make his hanging jump shot was gone. His shooting touch abandoned him.
At first, none of the Lakers trainers or doctors seemed to know what was wrong. Someone told Baylor it was tendinitis. Someone else said the problem was psychological, but Baylor knew damned well that was untrue; he had never lost his confidence in himself. But the speed with which his game collapsed startled everyone who followed the team. “It’s sad to speak of Elg in the past tense,” Jim Murray wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “The average athlete sets like the sun. Baylor dropped like a rock.”
Some seven doctors examined Baylor. They eventually decided that he was suffering from calcium deposits in his knees. The years of running and even more of jumping, they believed, had led to numerous minute tears in the ligaments and muscles of both knees. The body’s own healing process created scabs on these tears. When the tears healed and the scabs came loose, they turned into small grains of free-floating calcium that grated against the knee joint every time it moved. Despite Baylor’s obvious problems, coach Fred Schaus continued to play him, and Tom Heinsohn, as head of the players association, questioned whether the Lakers management was allowing Baylor to destroy his legs game by game, for the sake of the gate. “The Lakers are ruining Baylor,” he declared. “He can’t do anything and he shouldn’t be out there.”
Schaus was infuriated by the accusation of mistreatment. The doctors had in fact told Baylor that continuing to play basketball might actually help his knees by breaking up the deposits. “What about the claim you’re ‘ruining’ the player?” a reporter asked him in the middle of the season.
“Listen,” Schaus replied. “Do you think Bob Short would let me jeopardize a quarter-of-a-million-dollar ballplayer? Don’t you think we have solid medical opinion that exercise is more liable to help his legs than to hurt them? The trouble with the Celtics and some of these other teams that are squawking so loud is that they have too many self-appointed orthopedic specialists on their squads. None of them know a piece of calcium from a watermelon—yet they can stand around and insult my intelligence and people listen to them.”
Bob Short was torn between a fear that Baylor might suffer a lasting injury and a fear that if he took Baylor off the playing roster for a long period of rest, the result could be a dramatic, even fatal, slump at the box office. In 1960, before moving to Los Angeles, the Lakers had run up losses of $100,000. Now, four years later, they had become the first club in the NBA to gross more than $1 million, in large part due to Elgin Baylor. Fans specifically came to see him. When he was on military duty and playing sporadically, they called the box office before games to ask if he would be appearing. The Lakers front office had run figures calculating Baylor’s ability to sell tickets, and they determined that in games when he did not play, the Lakers drew an average of 2,000 fewer fans. That amounted to approximately $6,000 per game, or $200,000 over the course of a season.
Finally, the Lakers arranged for Baylor to be examined by Dr. Robert Kerlan, the team physician for the Los Angeles Dodgers who had treated Sandy Koufax. Kerlan determined that the calcium deposits were located in the quadriceps group of muscles and tendons above the knee—a condition more common in football than in basketball. He decided against surgery; the harm that might be caused by cutting into Baylor’s knees would more than offset any potential benefit that would come from scraping out the calcium. Instead, he recommended continued injections of painkillers, exercise therapy, and the use of a peripheral vasculator, which applied air pressure to reduce swelling. Kerlan did not discourage Baylor from playing, and as the season progressed, Baylor remained on the active roster, but his drive had lost its power, and even his depth perception seemed off. In one game against the Hawks, he did not score a field goal for the first thirteen minutes. “Take a vacation, bum!” one Lakers fan yelled. “Do us all a favor!”
THE WARRIORS had started the season unevenly, but they improved as the months passed, taking second place in the Western Division in January and first place in February. Alex Hannum had retooled the team, drilled it incessantly, pushed and pushed. He called his style of basketball “muscle and hustle.” The Warriors were not a fast club, the fast break was not a part of their repertoire. They jogged down the court. Chamberlain moved into the low post to the left of the basket, took the pass from Guy Rogers, then paused, raising the ball above his head with one upstretched hand. When he judged the moment right, he drove forward for the dunk or, if the opponents fell back to cover him and freed up one of the other Warriors, he passed to the open man. His scoring average fell by almost 20 percent, but his teammates more than made up for it. With the team in first place, he stopped sulking, and the atmosphere in the dressing room improved remarkably. Hannum even had Chamberlain coach one game when he was ejected after disputing a call, and the Warriors won, surprising Chamberlain by their willingness to accept his authority. “I told them what I thought would work,” Chamberlain said afterward, “and I got their cooperation.”
With the team such an apparent success, Guy Rogers and Al Attles began to urge Chamberlain to acknowledge to all his teammates that Alex Hannum had been right in their dispute and that he, Wilt Chamberlain, had been wrong. Admitting he’d been mistaken was something Chamberlain was almost constitutionally incapable of doing. But Rogers and Attles persisted, and finally, in mid-March, during halftime of a game with Philadelphia that if the Warriors won would give them the Western Division title, Chamberlain made his concession speech in the dressing room.
“I want to tell you that I made a mistake, a bad one,” he began. He said he had not at first appreciated the fact that Alex Hannum knew how to win games in the NBA. But Hannum did know, and winning was what the Warriors had been doing, particularly toward the end of the season, when they had not just won but won emphatically, decisively, when they had crushed their opponents, taking the Pistons by fourteen, the Lakers by sixteen, the Bullets by twenty-three. Chamberlain ended by saying that Hannum was the best coach he’d ever seen and he was willing to do whatever Hannum asked of him. His teammates applauded, and then they went out and beat the 76ers, locking up a division title for the first time in Chamberlain’s career.
San Francisco bested St. Louis in the Western Division playoffs while Boston again took the Eastern Division, and so for the first time Chamberlain faced Russell for the championship. In the usual formulation of the rivalry, Chamberlain was described as the ultimate scoring machine and Russell as the ultimate defender. But Chamberlain was now scoring less, and some of Russell’s teammates, such as John Havlicek, thought the traditional formulation underacknowledged Russell’s offensive strengths. Russell did not shoot much, but his passing was superb. The entire Celtics offense was built around Russell’s passing. What made it stand out was his instinctive awareness of where, at any given moment, every single player on both teams was to be found. It was a rare skill in a big center, since most of them usually thought about nothing but themselves and the ball.
Havlicek loved to watch Russell and Chamberlain go at each other one-on-one. Chamberlain was bigger and more athletic, but Russell outhustled him. Russell liked to get downcourt first and box out Chamberlain’s favorite low-post position. Russell was also quicker than Chamberlain in the paint and could jump practically from a standing position, whereas Chamberlain had to bend down and thrust himself up into his jump. Since Russell was three or so inches shorter than Chamberlain, nothing seemed to give Russell more pleasure than blocking Chamberlain’s shot. Havlicek had watched during one game as Russell blocked one of Chamberlain’s shots. Chamberlain recovered the ball and drove in for
a second shot, and again Russell blocked it. Chamberlain again recovered and started in for his third shot, but at that moment Russell stepped back. “Go ahead and take it,” Russell said. Havlicek watched as Chamberlain dunked the ball and then turned to follow Russell up the court. It was a masterful psychological ploy, Havlicek thought. Russell had let Chamberlain have his two points, but he had also created the impression that Chamberlain could score only when he, Russell, was willing to let him do so.
That sort of psychological fencing had become a central part of the relationship between Russell and Chamberlain. Despite all the attention paid to their rivalry, they had become friendly off the court. In defiance of Auerbach’s ban on consorting with the players of other teams, whom he wanted the Celtics to treat as enemies, Russell socialized with Chamberlain from time to time. When the Warriors were in Boston, he periodically invited Chamberlain to eat at his house in Reading, and if Russell was in Chamberlain’s hometown, Wilt would take him out for dinner.
Some sportswriters were convinced that, even in this seemingly friendly gesture, Russell was seeking some psychological advantage. After all, Russell was considered the shrewdest and most manipulative player in the league. He prided himself on his ability to identify and then exploit an opponent’s weakness, and he had developed a virtual arsenal of psychological ploys: feigning illness or exhaustion, unexpectedly complimenting an opponent, baiting a rookie, pretending to charge a ball handler. He once wrote a cover story for Sports Illustrated called “How I Psych Them,” and some players were convinced that befriending Wilt was one more such tactic, a subtle attempt to soften by some small fraction Chamberlain’s ferocity as he drove into the basket against him.
Throughout the season, Russell had followed Chamberlain’s changing game—and read all the articles about the “new Wilt”—with some bemusement. Russell himself had never changed his game. He knew Chamberlain was always going to outscore him, sometimes by a margin of two-to-one or even three-to-one, but Russell never let himself get distracted by that, never tried to compete with Chamberlain on Chamberlain’s terms. Similarly, he knew he was a poor outside shooter, and he never gave in to the temptation to try to hit from the perimeter. What Russell always tried to do was focus on the role he needed to play if his team was to win.
