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

by John Taylor

  It seemed to Russell that Chamberlain, by changing his game as often as he did, didn’t know what it was he wanted to accomplish in his career. Chamberlain wanted to win, but he seemed just as interested, and maybe even more interested, in statistical glory, press attention, and the bragging rights that came with his huge salary—in being known as the best, though Russell did wonder from time to time if Chamberlain put such an emphasis on these other accomplishments because he didn’t have the championships to brag about. Russell’s game, on the other hand, remained fundamentally the same throughout his career because his goal remained the same: to win.

  But going into the finals in 1964, Russell was even more tired than he had been at this point the previous year. His hamstrings had become strained so often that he loosened them up with a heating pad before each game. His Achilles tendon bothered him constantly. His knees, which had troubled him since college, had gotten so bad that the trainer had to rub them down before each game. He hated the travel more than ever, but when he returned home he felt like he had nothing to say to his wife, Rose. The civil rights protests in the South were inspiring, but the violence they’d incited—the German shepherds loosed on young black demonstrators, the beatings, the murders, the bombings—were terrifying. He didn’t feel safe in his own home. He also was suffering from insomnia and felt like he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and so, a few days before the series began, he announced he was thinking of retiring.

  The sportswriters were soon speculating that Russell’s complaints of exhaustion amounted to nothing more than another attempt to psych out the opposition, and one that succeeded, because Russell played magnificent defense in the first game, holding Chamberlain to a mere two points through the second and third quarters, and the Celtics won by fourteen. In the second game, the defensive battle intensified, as both Russell and K. C. Jones worked to force Chamberlain out of his position. They pushed and elbowed him from behind, their hands always on his back, and blocked him out with their legs and hips. As teams around the league began imitating the Celtics’ emphasis on aggressive defense, the level of contact had increased, and Hannum had pushed Chamberlain to respond more vigorously to physical challenges. It frustrated the coach. Hannum would watch Wilt go up for a dunk and then, when a defender put his hand up to stop the ball, pull back because he was afraid he might hurt the man. “You know,” Hannum told Chamberlain, “maybe if you came down once and maybe broke somebody’s finger, people wouldn’t be so anxious to try to stop you like that anymore.” But Chamberlain, for the most part, could not bring himself to inflict pain, not out of fear but as if he thought it would be unfair—or make him look ridiculous—to actually tussle with someone smaller.

  Now, however, in the third quarter of game two, Red Auerbach started yelling at Chamberlain from the sidelines, and Chamberlain, already agitated by the Celtics’ physical tactics, rushed over to confront him. A distance of four feet separated the two men, and Russell tried to push them apart. “Get back, Red, you’re about six inches too close,” he told Auerbach. Russell had put a hand on Chamberlain’s arm, and Chamberlain knocked it away. Russell and Chamberlain had never gotten rough with each other, but Russell, who considered Chamberlain probably the strongest man alive, had never seen him so angry, and he thought they were now, for the first time, actually going to come to blows.

  Chamberlain backed off but remained agitated. Then, near the end of the game, with the Celtics safely ahead, Auerbach decided to rest Russell and sent in Clyde Lovellette, the player who had elbowed Chamberlain in the mouth in his rookie year, knocking out two teeth. Auerbach had acquired him from the Hawks the year before. Known as “The Great White Whale,” Lovellette by now weighed upwards of 290 pounds, much of it around his waist. He liked to play the cut-up and, deciding to get a rise out of the Boston fans in the final minutes of the game, began bumping and tripping Chamberlain and pulling at his pants. All of that added to Chamberlain’s agitation. With twenty-five seconds left, when Chamberlain caught the ball in the pivot, Lovellette threw an elbow at him. Chamberlain, finally losing it, turned and punched Lovellette in the jaw, dropping him to his knees.

  The Boston players swarmed off the bench and onto the court, and that brought out the Warriors, requiring the police to separate the two teams. Auerbach was screaming, “I want Wilt out of the game!” Officials Norm Drucker and Earl Strom had seen the exchange, and they both felt Chamberlain had clearly been provoked. Also, with only twenty-five seconds left and the game no longer in doubt, they simply wanted to get it over, so they only called a technical. Meanwhile, Lovellette was woozily climbing to his feet.

  “Clyde, take the eight count, don’t get up!” one of the Warriors yelled.

  “Red,” Strom said, “get this stiff out of here so we can finish the game.”

  But Auerbach continued to argue that Chamberlain should be ejected, and finally Chamberlain himself had had enough. “Red, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to put you down there with Clyde,” he said.

  “Wilt’s right cross was about the best scoring effort by the Warriors,” Joe Looney wrote in the Herald. If nothing else, it epitomized the brutal defensive warfare that defined the series and created an extensive casualties list. By game five, with San Francisco down 3–1, Tom Meschery had dislocated a thumb, Guy Rogers had twisted his ankle, and Chamberlain’s hand was bleeding after he gouged it on a basket rim. On the Celtics, Russell’s knees were killing him and Tommy Heinsohn was playing with a white bandage over one eye. The series came to an end when, with Boston up by two in the final seconds, Heinsohn tossed a left-handed hook shot over Chamberlain’s head, hoping that if it missed, Russell could tip it in. The ball bounced off the rim, but Russell jumped up past Chamberlain, grabbed it with both hands, and emphatically shoved it into the basket just as the buzzer sounded.

  At the Celtics’ breakup dinner the next day, Walter Brown paid tribute to Frank Ramsey, Jim Loscutoff, and Clyde Lovellette, who were all retiring. And then he turned to Tommy Heinsohn. Brown had not spoken a word to Heinsohn since mid-January, when Heinsohn had come to his office to try to clear the air after the averted strike at the all-star game. He had ignored Heinsohn when he went into the dressing room. If Heinsohn sat down to watch the opening game of a doubleheader in the row of seats reserved for the team, Brown got up and left. After beating the Warriors for the championship—capping a year in which Heinsohn thought he’d played the best basketball of his career—Brown had come into the dressing room and congratulated everyone on the team, all the way down to the ball boys, except Heinsohn.

  But the owners were finally putting together a pension package, and with the season over, Brown had decided the moment was ripe for a public reconciliation. At the breakup dinner, he made no mention of the strike or their disagreement, but he thanked Heinsohn for his effort that year, for his hard work on the court, and for his contribution to the team’s success. “I would like to say a kind word, for a change, about Tom Heinsohn,” he said. “I never saw a horse, a dog, or a man put out as much for us as Tom Heinsohn did this season.”

  But Heinsohn’s biggest contribution that year was not to the Celtics but to the players association. By persuading the other players to stand up to the owners on the day of the all-star game back in January, he had made the association viable. Within a decade, the NBA Players Association became the most powerful such organization in professional sports, and it negotiated an end to the reserve clause, which potentially bound a player to one team for the duration of his career, leading to free agency.

  17

  ROONE ARLEDGE, the vice president of sports at ABC, had been closely following the rivalry between Russell and Chamberlain. He realized that it even attracted viewers who did not find either man particularly sympathetic; the rivalry made each of them seem involved in a mythic contest greater than himself. Arledge was also aware that professional basketball was proving increasingly popular. During the previous season, overall attendance at NBA games had risen by 20 perce
nt. And then there was the simple fact that, in Arledge’s mind, basketball made for great television. It was both intimate and dramatic, both beautiful and violent. It had constant motion, which meant the viewer’s eye was always engaged, and involved continuous decisions by all ten players, which meant there was always something for the commentators to discuss. It was stocked with theatrical personalities. And unlike baseball, it had a field of play small enough for a single camera to capture all the action in a crucial overview shot.

  Since 1961, when he launched ABC’s Wide World of Sports, the ambitious young Arledge had been on a controversial mission to make sports coverage more intimate, human, and entertaining. He put cameras on risers and in helicopters and Jeeps, and created a “creepie-peepie” roaming mini-camera for close-up reaction shots. “We will utilize every production technique that has been learned in producing variety shows, in covering political conventions, in shooting travel and adventure series to heighten the viewer’s feeling of actually sitting in the stand,” he wrote in an early memo.

  The NFL and the major golf tournaments already had television contracts with NBC and CBS, and with ABC the perennially third-ranked network, Arledge had had to start small. He first used his techniques on track meets and soccer matches, cliff diving and barrel jumping on ice skates. But by 1964, the program had established itself, and Arledge, with ABC still locked out of the NFL, saw in the NBA an opportunity for a scrappy but growing network to ally itself with a scrappy but growing professional sport. That summer, he negotiated a deal with Walter Kennedy, for three years at $650,000 a year, that would allow ABC’s Wide World of Sports to broadcast an NBA game every Sunday afternoon. “ABC Sports gained a franchise that, thanks to the amazing rivalry of Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, was about to take off,” he later recalled.

  Arledge planned to install cameras throughout the arenas and to produce sixty-second mini-biographies of players that would allow the fans to connect to them as individuals. He also wanted to explain the game’s strategy to the viewers, to allow them to understand that basketball had an intellectual dimension as well as a physical one. To do this he hired Bob Cousy, one of the most famous names in the game, without even meeting him. When they did meet, Arledge was surprised to find out that Cousy spoke with a French accent and, like many French speakers, substituted w’s for r’s. Instead of saying “Roone,” Cousy said “Woone.” Arledge told Chris Schenkel, who would be calling the games with Cousy, to have Cousy spend time repeating, as quickly as possible, “Russell and Robertson rebound rapidly.”

  ON LABOR DAY, Walter Brown was with his family at his summer home on Cape Cod when he suffered a massive coronary. His family rushed him to Cape Cod Hospital, but he died that night at the age of fifty-nine. Brown was one of the most popular and well-known figures in Boston, a big, generous, hot-tempered, forgiving man admired for his charity work as well as his sports teams; he allowed groups such as the Jimmy Fund free use of the Boston Garden to hold benefits. While his first love was hockey, his greatest accomplishment was the creation of the Celtics. “The Celtics—the very name implies basketball supremacy around the world—stand as the most towering monument to a man who thought he had dedicated his life to hockey,” wrote Jerry Nason in The Boston Globe.

  Tributes arrived from basketball players, hockey players, Olympic Committee members, Boston mayor John Collins, and Senator Edward Kennedy. His funeral, despite the rain that day, was one of the largest ever seen in Boston. Cardinal Cushing eulogized him as “the personification of personal integrity” before an overflow crowd at St. Ignatius Church in Chestnut Hill. After the funeral, Brown’s wife, Marjorie, gave Red Auerbach her husband’s St. Christopher’s medal. She told him she hoped it would bring the team good luck in the coming season. In memory of Brown, the Celtics had small black patches sewn into the shoulder straps of their basketball jerseys, and Auerbach promised to reporters that the team would win the championship that season as a way of honoring its late owner.

  UNLIKE THE YEAR BEFORE, when he’d loafed off and arrived at training camp weighing more than three hundred pounds, Chamberlain in the summer of 1964 was determined to remain in shape during the off-season. He spent part of the summer in Europe with the Globetrotters, but he still had his apartment in New York, and from time to time showed up at outdoor courts in Harlem for pickup games that, once word sped through the neighborhood, drew up to 1,000 spectators. As the summer wore on, however, Chamberlain began to be bothered by recurrent stomach and chest pains. He initially suspected his diet was the cause. He ate hot dogs constantly, as many as four or six at a time, and he decided to eliminate them from his diet, but the stomach pains continued to plague him.

  In late September, back in San Francisco, Chamberlain was paged at the airport just as the Warriors were about to board a plane to fly to an exhibition game. It was the team physician, Dr. Dudley Fournier, who had given him his routine physical the previous week. Fournier asked Chamberlain to come immediately to St. Mary’s Hospital, and when Chamberlain arrived, the doctor said his electrocardiogram indicated he had a heart problem. Chamberlain described the stomach pains, and Fournier said they might be connected. He ordered Chamberlain hospitalized for a complete physical examination.

  The specialists at St. Mary’s were unable to explain either the stomach pains or the heart irregularity. Several days passed, then a week, then a second week, without any diagnosis. When Dick Friendlich, a sports reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, visited him in the hospital, Chamberlain told him he had three types of doctors: Dr. Good News, Dr. Bad News, and Dr. No News. “Dr. Good News comes in,” Chamberlain said, “and he says, ‘Don’t worry, Wilt, you’ll be skiing next week.’ Then Dr. Bad News comes in and he says, ‘Wilt, you might as well make up your mind, you’re going to be here for a while.’ Then Dr. No News comes in. He just shakes his head and says nothing.”

  Chamberlain’s mysterious medical condition made headlines across the country. One widely published report claimed that he was a “heart patient.” A rumor expanding on this notion speculated that because Chamberlain was so big, with so many more miles of blood vessels than the average man, his heart had given out trying to keep his massive body supplied with blood. All the speculation further dismayed Chamberlain, who was fielding constant phone calls from reporters. “The only heart attack will be the one my mother gets when she reads a story like that,” he told one San Francisco sportswriter who called to inquire about the latest rumor.

  After three weeks in the hospital, with the San Francisco doctors still unable to diagnose his condition, Chamberlain called Dr. Stanley Lorber, a Philadelphia gastroenterologist who had treated him before. Lorber told Chamberlain that he’d always had an irregular EKG, that it was common among black athletes, and that white doctors unfamiliar with the condition frequently misdiagnosed it. Chamberlain decided to check out of St. Mary’s and fly to Philadelphia. Before he left, a small crowd of reporters and television camera crews gathered in the hospital’s conference room to talk to him and Dr. Fournier. The team physician admitted that he and the other doctors had been unable to find any signs of a tumor, ulcer, or gallbladder problem that might explain Chamberlain’s stomach pains. “It’s a little strange,” he said.

  Chamberlain, who had lost weight, was weak, irritable, and depressed, with no sign of the humor he had shown when he’d first entered the hospital.

  “How long will it take you to get into shape once you’ve been given permission to play?” a reporter asked.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  Alex Hannum and Franklin Mieuli, who had become chairman of the Warriors board, were genuinely concerned about their star. Chamberlain, Mieuli thought, complained about a lot of things but not about pain. For a man who put up with such physical punishment during games to stay in a hospital for three weeks, he had to be in serious pain. But Mieuli also fretted about the impact of Chamberlain’s illness on the team’s finances. Sick or well, Chamberlain had to be paid. His huge sa
lary absorbed a good portion of the team’s earnings, and if the illness turned out to be debilitating, the team could face serious financial problems.

  For his part, Hannum worried about the team’s lineup. By the time Chamberlain checked out of St. Mary’s, the opening game of the season was a little more than a week away. Chamberlain had provided the Warriors with thirty-seven points a game the previous season and now was on the injured-reserve list for some indeterminate period of time. During the exhibition games, Hannum had used Nate Thurmond at center. Thurmond, who was six-eleven and in his second year as a pro, had actually played center at Bowling Green, but Hannum had recast him as a forward after drafting him since the Warriors already had Chamberlain. Thurmond couldn’t score like Wilt, but he had defensive potential, and if the Warriors could maintain the low-scoring game Hannum had developed the previous season, he might succeed at the job.

  In Philadelphia, Dr. Lorber had Chamberlain check into Temple University Hospital. After a week of tests, he and his associates determined that what Chamberlain was actually suffering from was pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas caused by a malfunction of the parathyroid glands which had resulted in the stomach pains. It was this double-blind between the presenting symptoms and the actual cause of the condition that had bewildered the doctors in San Francisco. Dr. Lorber placed Wilt on a special diet and prescribed medication, but decided that he was essentially healthy and could rejoin the Warriors.