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

by John Taylor

  Even before leaving the hospital, Chamberlain started working out, but he flew back to San Francisco in a terrible mood. After his four-week stay in two different hospitals, he was thirty-five pounds underweight and his muscle tone had deteriorated. He had missed training camp and the exhibition games, and he felt weak. He was irritated at the San Francisco doctors who had failed to diagnose his condition, and he was irritated at the Warriors management for failing to find a doctor who could make the diagnosis.

  Chamberlain was greeted at the airport by Franklin Mieuli. Eddie Gottlieb had returned to Philadelphia to live, where he became the league’s schedule maker, and Mieuli was now taking an active role in the running of the team. Mieuli, a flashy young entrepreneur who wore a beard and drove a motorcycle, had first made his fortune in billboard advertising and was one of the original investors in the San Francisco 49ers. When the Warriors had won the divisional title the previous season, Chamberlain suggested to Mieuli that he give the players diamond stickpins instead of the traditional rings. Mieuli had ignored the suggestion then, but now, at the airport, he presented Chamberlain with a diamond stickpin. Chamberlain—who felt that Mieuli, instead of helping him when he was in the hospital, had left him on his own, and as a result Chamberlain was now going to have to start the season late and in poor condition—looked at the stickpin and said, “What’s this piece of shit?”

  Mieuli was shocked and humiliated. He had never particularly liked Chamberlain, whom he considered ungracious and uncooperative. The idea of a professional basketball team in San Francisco had once seemed like a stroke of brilliance to Mieuli, but the Warriors, now in their third year, were still not drawing fans, and the investors were losing money despite the fact that the team had won the Western title, had gone all the way to the finals, and had the most famous player in the league. Chamberlain was aware of the team’s financial straits, but he seemed not to care and dismissed requests by Bob Dean, the Warriors publicist, to promote the team by making appearances. And now he had personally insulted Mieuli himself. At that moment, Alex Hannum later decided, Wilt Chamberlain was finished with the Warriors.

  CHAMBERLAIN, dressed in an Italian silk suit, sat on the bench for the Warriors’ opening game in San Francisco, which they lost to Los Angeles. In addition to Chamberlain, a number of the other Warriors were ill or injured. Tom Meschery had a broken hand and a sore ankle. Gary Phillips was recovering from an ankle operation. Guy Rogers came down with the flu. Al Attles had been playing with an excruciating charley horse. “At times,” Stu Herman wrote in the Chronicle, “the Warriors look like out-clinic patients at St. Mary’s hospital.”

  Most of the hurt Warriors were playing, but not well, and by the time Chamberlain was eligible to be taken off the injured-reserve list, the team’s record was a dismal 1–4. Hannum felt so dejected and helpless that he would have been happy if the team had been able to win two games out of five. But still, it was early in the season, and the coach and the sportswriters thought that once Chamberlain rejoined the team, it would return to its division-winning form. “Look Out, NBA! Wilt Is Back” was the headline in the Chronicle at the end of October, just before Chamberlain’s season debut.

  Although Wilt had not yet fully recovered, Hannum started him immediately and worked him hard. He played thirty-three minutes and scored sixteen points in his first game, but his moves were tentative and his legs looked shaky. Chamberlain, however, was nothing if not a physical phenomenon, and he managed to get back into shape extraordinarily quickly. In his second game, he played a full forty-eight minutes and scored thirty-seven points, and he scored fifty or more points six times in his first six weeks. But even with Chamberlain in the lineup, the Warriors weren’t winning. “Wilt’s 53 Not Enough; Warriors Bow” ran a mid-November headline. A week later another headline declared “63 for Wilt but Warriors Still Lose.”

  One problem was that with Wilt out for so much of the beginning of the season, the team had adjusted to playing with Nate Thurmond at center. The young Thurmond was promising; Hannum went around saying he wouldn’t trade him for any other center in the league. And unlike the moody, withdrawn Chamberlain, Thurmond was outgoing, buoyant, and eager to do anything that publicity director Bob Dean asked. He liked to talk to the sportswriters, to whom he described himself as a “playboy bachelor,” and he was a figure on the North Beach nightclub circuit, dancing the frug, the twist, and the Watusi at his favorite spot, the Playpen, and throwing around mid-sixties slang like “dig,” “cat,” and “baby.”

  But Thurmond was also an extremely talented and serious basketball player, popular with his teammates, versatile, agile, long-armed, better at defense than Chamberlain in the view of some sportswriters, and better at offense than Russell. He was, however, only in his second year, and he still had a lot to learn. He often started a game excitedly keyed up, burned too much energy in the first half, and ran out of gas in the stretch. And he lacked Chamberlain’s inimitable scoring ability. Still, the team had drilled with him and adjusted to him, and now with Chamberlain back, they had to readjust, and Thurmond wound up back at forward, the position he’d played in his rookie year. It threw everybody off.

  Another troublesome fact was that the other teams had responded to Hannum’s slow-paced offense by speeding up their own game. What worked against San Francisco, opposing coaches had discovered, was the fast break. The Warriors, with their injuries, their ragged defense, and their unrehearsed offense, could neither contain it nor counter it. There were other problems as well. Dick Friendlich, who covered the team for the Chronicle, recognized two trends: the Warriors would play fantastically for three quarters and then fold in the fourth; and while they had won every game on the road so far in the season, they had not won a single game at home.

  One of the ironies of Chamberlain’s career was that, as Eddie Gottlieb had first learned six years ago, Chamberlain was a bigger draw for the fans of the teams he played against than he was for his own team’s fans. The novelty of seeing him brought out other opposing fans, as did the pleasure of rooting against a player whose size and dominance made him easy to hate. Chamberlain had taken to comparing himself to Goliath and was fond of saying that nobody rooted for Goliath. While the crowds who arrived to boo Chamberlain on the road seemed to fire up the Warriors, the quiet, sparsely filled stands in San Francisco had a depressing effect. The team, Friendlich decided, had acquired that rare and paradoxical stigma in sports: the home-court jinx.

  With the Warriors sinking to last place, everyone on the team felt demoralized and frustrated, but no one’s mood was bleaker than Chamberlain’s. Racial tension had invaded San Francisco, that haven of liberal secularism, the previous summer when the Republicans held their national convention at the Cow Palace and nominated Barry Goldwater. All but a handful of black delegates had been excluded from participating, and those who did were shoved, spit on, and cursed. Jackie Robinson, attending as an observer, said, “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” Then in November, California voters approved Proposition 14, repealing the California Fair Housing Act, which the legislature had created the preceding year to prohibit racial discrimination in selling or renting residential dwellings. Overall, the measure was approved by the voters by a margin of two to one, and it even passed in San Francisco. Chamberlain enjoyed life in San Francisco, where he had taken up sailing and waterskiing and ate out at smart restaurants such as the Blue Fox and La Bourgogne, and where, from his apartment in Pacific Heights, he could see the bay and watch the fog envelop the Golden Gate Bridge. But he took the passage of the proposition as a personal insult. It was as if his neighbors had stood up and declared that they did not want people like him living in Pacific Heights and they reserved the right to refuse to allow him to do so.

  Chamberlain’s mood turned absolutely poisonous on December 4, in a game against the Celtics in which once again violence broke out. Physical contact, and its consequences, was by now an even bigger issue in the NBA than it ha
d been the previous season. Just three days earlier, the Warriors’ Wayne Hightower had broken his nose while diving for a free ball. Bob Pettit of the Hawks suffered fractures of the lumbar transverse processes on his back that month after colliding with Laker Rudy LaRusso. The same week, Arlen Bockhorn of the Royals was knocked down by Gus Johnson of the Baltimore Bullets and had to be sent to the hospital for a knee operation; it looked like he might never play again.

  Some people, including Bob Feerick, who had moved over to become general manager of the Warriors, took the position that players in the NBA had simply become bigger. That development, together with the new emphasis on defense and the full-court press, had produced a more physical game, which, as a matter of course, led to more injuries. But others felt that play in the NBA had become dangerously rough, that players were pushing the envelope and officials were letting them get away with it. Ben Kerner, owner of the Hawks, demanded a meeting with Commissioner Walter Kennedy to investigate the league’s officiating standards. Afterward, he told reporters that the state of play in the NBA was the roughest he had seen in his eighteen years in professional ball. Oscar Robertson also thought that loose officiating had led to a dangerous environment, but he felt the Celtics were primarily responsible for creating a physical game that other teams had been forced to imitate. “Boston plays all over you,” he told an acquaintance. “But all the teams are doing it now. The guys pick you up high. You make a move, they grab and hold you. But they do it because they can get away with it.”

  When the Celtics had visited the Warriors a month earlier, they had handed the team a devastating 110–84 defeat. But the December 4 game at first looked to be the Warriors’ best so far that season. They took a quick lead and steadily widened it until late in the second quarter they were ahead by an astounding thirty points. Even though the first half was not yet over, Red Auerbach realized the cause was hopeless. Instead of wearing down his top players trying to come back from that far behind, he decided to rest them, and began sending in replacements.

  One of the first was John Thompson, a rookie who stood six-ten and weighed 230 pounds (and who later became well known as coach at Georgetown). Muscled and aggressive, but very green, Thompson was charged up, determined to seize this opportunity to prove himself. Trying to tear a rebound out of Chamberlain’s hands under the San Francisco basket, Thompson swung an elbow wildly. It struck Chamberlain square in the face, shattering his nose. Wilt was rushed to the hospital—his third hospital stay in four months—and underwent surgery. In the week it took him to recuperate, his mood became so ugly—with his swollen, throbbing nose, his team in the cellar, the people in his city denying him the right to live where he chose—that he decided to do something different, something defiant. He grew a goatee.

  When Chamberlain returned, he had to protect his nose by wearing a plastic mask. The mask, together with his new goatee, gave him a frightening, savage appearance. Wayne Hightower, who’d broken his nose that same week as Wilt, was also wearing a mask, and the press naturally had a field day with them. There were references to the “masked Warriors,” to the “grotesque masks,” and to how the players looked “like something on the Late, Late Show” and “out of central casting for a Hollywood horror movie.” Even Hannum called them his “wild spacemen.”

  Chamberlain didn’t think it was funny. The masks were uncomfortable and they interfered with breathing and peripheral vision. Chamberlain was also worried that opposing players might think they could take advantage of the fact that he and Hightower had facial injuries—or try to compound them. In a game in mid-December, he felt that Bob Boozer of the Knicks had swung an elbow at Hightower while coming down after a rebound. He turned on Boozer, who had played with him at Kansas and considered him a friend, and Boozer backed off while his teammate Len Chappell rushed onto the court and grabbed Chamberlain’s arms from behind. “Let me go!” Chamberlain shouted, and he broke Chappell’s grip by jerking his elbows away. In the locker room after the game, a reporter asked Boozer what had happened. “Poor Wilt,” Boozer said. “He used to be a happy guy, and easygoing. Now he’s tense and irritable and real aggravated.”

  RED AUERBACH had no apologies for the way the Celtics played against Chamberlain, and he felt no sympathy for the man. “I’ve heard enough about his troubles,” he told an acquaintance. “I’d like to be so healthy!” Indeed, Auerbach himself, while not injured, felt extremely worn out. His workload, particularly since Walter Brown died, was enormous. He was coach and general manager and scout. He traveled with the team, looked after travel arrangements, conducted practices, was on the bench at every game, attended meetings of the board of governors, and negotiated contracts with players, radio stations, and the directors of the Garden. “It’s questionable how much longer Auerbach can go on,” Bill McSweeney observed in the Boston Record. “He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. And he takes the losses much harder than his players.”

  McSweeney was wrong about Auerbach not eating. He ate constantly, but his diet was atrocious. He drank Coca-Cola and ate cream puffs or doughnuts or hot dogs for breakfast. For lunch he liked deli meat: salami or corned beef. Throughout the day he drank upwards of ten Cokes and snacked constantly on nuts: pistachios, Indian nuts, almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds. Auerbach could be disciplined about food. The day of a game, he’d have a light sandwich around two, then eat nothing until the game was over. The slight hunger, he felt, gave him an edge. It was an idea he got from Ted Williams, who once told Auerbach that he liked to go into a game just a little bit hungry. Once the game was over, Auerbach ate Chinese, a habit he got into because the food—always steamed, no fried dishes—could be digested easily and he could hit the sack. He favored lobster in meat sauce, steamed fish in wine sauce, chicken wings in oyster sauce. He rarely drank liquor, maybe a single cocktail at a party, and made a point of touching nothing—no beer, no wine, certainly no booze—on a game day. He didn’t want a player or referee smelling booze on his breath and putting around the word that his courtside behavior was influenced by alcohol.

  Cigars were Auerbach’s one notorious vice. It was a habit he’d picked up in the navy. Most days, he lit his first one after breakfast, and while he claimed to smoke only seven or eight a day, his players felt he smoked ten times that number. He smoked in his office, he smoked in his car, he smoked in the dressing room, he smoked during practice, and he smoked on the bench, at the end of the game, once he was confident the Celtics had put it away. Other coaches hated the arrogance of this particular gesture, as did some of the Celtics themselves, since it enraged the fans rooting against them and ratcheted up the intensity of the opponents. It also provided other teams’ fans a moment of gleeful triumph when the Celtics, as even the best teams regularly did, lost a game. “Hey, Red, where’s the cigar, skinhead?” they shouted when that happened. Once, Commissioner Podoloff actually wrote him to request that he stop smoking cigars during games. It made the entire league seem shady, carnivalesque—in a word, bush. Auerbach pointed out to Podoloff that other coaches such as Joe Lapchick of the Knicks smoked cigarettes on the bench and said that as long as they were allowed to do so he would smoke cigars.

  By 1964, in his eighteenth year as a coach, Auerbach’s cigars were not just a smelly indulgence but a key component of his identity—of his ongoing disregard for and defiance of the world at large—and he acted as if he had a prerogative to smoke them whenever and wherever he wished. In the middle of the season, Irv Goodman, a writer for Sport magazine, accompanied Auerbach on a flight from New York to Boston after the Celtics had lost to the Knicks. Against flight regulations, Auerbach lit up a cigar, and a stewardess walking down the aisle noticed it.

  “You’ll have to put out that cigar,” she told Auerbach.

  “Honey,” he said, “that sign doesn’t say no smoking cigars.”

  “Sorry, but for the comfort of all passengers, we don’t permit cigar smoking.”

  “So why don’t you ask the passengers if my cigar s
moking bothers them?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m afraid I’ll have to insist.”

  “Don’t be afraid, honey, and don’t insist.”

  Eventually, the stewardess just gave up.

  THE DAY AFTER the Warriors returned from the game in New York during which Chamberlain and Bob Boozer almost came to blows, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Lakers had offered the Warriors $500,000 for Wilt Chamberlain. Frank Mieuli, who had accompanied the team on the road trip, scoffed at the report, but while the $500,000 figure was exaggerated, it was true that the Lakers management had been in discussions with Mieuli about a possible trade.

  The fact of the matter was that, less than three months into the season, Mieuli had become desperate to get rid of Chamberlain. His main concern was money. Chamberlain was making $85,000 a year, an astronomical sum at the time. When the team had drawn big crowds during its run at the championship the previous year, the additional revenue Chamberlain had been able to generate for the club had more than offset the cost of paying for him to play. But now, with the team in last place, attendance had slumped down below even what it had been during the team’s first year in San Francisco. Some nights barely a thousand people bothered to show up, giving the Warriors the worst attendance figures in the league. As a result, almost one-third of the team’s gate revenue was going to pay Chamberlain’s salary. Chamberlain was still a big draw on the road, but the NBA stipulated that all gate revenue went to the home team, so Mieuli got nothing from his star player’s out-of-town appeal.

  By December, gate revenue at home in San Francisco was suffering so badly that Mieuli had actually been unable to pay Chamberlain on time—there were the salaries of all the other players to consider as well as front-office costs—and Chamberlain had begun hassling him about the money. The Warriors were in such poor financial condition that some of the investors had talked of moving the team to Oakland, where it might find a more hospitable fan base, or of cashing out of their investments altogether. But Mieuli pointed out that the San Francisco 49ers—Mieuli’s first sports investment—had endured a long climb to their eventual popularity, and he convinced his partners to be patient. After all, the value of NBA franchises was continuing to rise—the Baltimore team had been sold that very month for $1.1 million—and Mieuli had no doubt that, over the long term, the Warriors were a good investment.