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

by John Taylor

  Mieuli believed that if he traded Chamberlain, he could reduce overhead enough for the team to survive until it developed a fan base, and he had begun talking to the other team owners. With the exception of Boston, every team in the league was theoretically interested. But many of them had reservations. Wilt was difficult, demanding, and expensive. He could so overshadow the team’s other players that he’d end up alienating them, and the team could fall apart. And he had proved both in Philadelphia and in San Francisco that once the novelty wore off, he was no guarantee at the gate.

  But the other owners also knew that it was not necessarily Chamberlain’s fault that the Warriors were unable to draw a crowd in San Francisco. If a team with some marketing savvy and a big arena acquired Chamberlain and he re-energized it, and if the city had a true passion for basketball and showed up to watch, and if the major media turned it all into a national story, Chamberlain could generate an additional $300,000 a year at the gate. So Ned Irish of the perennially losing Knicks, Ike Richman of the Philadelphia 76ers, Ben Kerner of the Hawks, and Lou Mohs, the general manager of the Lakers, were all in discussions with Mieuli about acquiring Chamberlain. Mieuli hoped to keep the discussions secret, but on Christmas Eve, Kerner told reporters that he had been in trade talks for Chamberlain, that Chamberlain was available and almost certainly would be traded, but that the deal involved such a large amount of money that he had dropped out. Even though his arena in St. Louis had 9,000 seats and the Hawks had the highest attendance in the league in the early sixties, it lacked the seating capacity to draw the size crowd that could justify Chamberlain’s salary.

  By that point, Mieuli had already received one solid offer for Chamberlain. Earlier in the month, during a road trip by the Warriors that took them back to Philadelphia, Ike Richman, one of the principal owners of the 76ers and a personal friend of Chamberlain’s, made a formal bid for him on the condition that Mieuli accept or reject it by January 13, the day of the all-star game, which also functioned as the mid-season break. The 76ers at that point were in second place, but their aging center, thirty-two-year-old Johnny Kerr, had begun to fade. Richman felt that to make the playoffs, his team required a new center, and if he couldn’t get Chamberlain he needed the time to find someone else before Kerr collapsed altogether and the team fell out of playoff contention.

  Richman was a gregarious, balding man who wore thick-framed black glasses and smoked enormous cigars. A well-connected attorney, he counted Eddie Gottlieb among his clients, and through Gottlieb he had begun to represent Chamberlain. It was Richman who had been instrumental in persuading Chamberlain back in 1959—during that nighttime meeting in Chamberlain’s Eldorado—to join the NBA rather than return to the Globetrotters. Richman had helped Gottlieb arrange the sale of the Warriors, but he had at the same time always felt that Philadelphia deserved and would support another pro team. After all, there were solid college basketball programs at La Salle, Temple, Penn, St. Joseph’s, and Villanova that drew as many as 15,000 spectators to the doubleheaders in their annual post-Christmas tournaments. The city also had its tradition of professional basketball dating back to Gottlieb’s Sphas in the twenties. And so, in 1963, when Gottlieb, then working for the Warriors in San Francisco, had told Richman that Danny Biasone wanted to sell the Syracuse Nationals, Richman decided to try to buy the team.

  The Nats were at that time the last team in the league still playing in one of the small cities that had nurtured professional basketball in its early days. They averaged only about 4,500 fans at home games, some 2,000 less than needed to make a profit. Tickets cost five dollars apiece, and the gate was the team’s only source of revenue. At the same time, with two teams on the West Coast and teams flying to games instead of taking the train, as the Nats had done just a few years earlier, travel had become much more expensive. Danny Biasone accepted the fact that an NBA franchise in Syracuse, New York, was no longer a viable financial proposition.

  Although Richman was a successful attorney, he did not have the upwards of half a million dollars it would take to purchase the Nats, so he brought in Irv Kosloff, who had founded the Roosevelt Paper Company, a successful supplier of printing paper for magazines. Kosloff and Richman paid Danny Biasone between $500,000 and $600,000 for the franchise he’d bought for $6,000 seventeen years earlier. Since the name Nationals sounded dated and evoked an old rival, their first order of business was to rename the team. As a publicity gimmick, they held a contest, and among the more than four thousand entries were nine proposals to call the team the 76ers. Richman liked the name. It had a snappy ring. It spoke to the city’s identity, and because the recently completed Schuylkill Expressway had just been named Interstate 76, it even seemed propitious.

  The front office that Richman set up was, by today’s standards, an astonishingly small operation. It was housed in the office that Eddie Gottlieb had rented when he was running the Warriors, one carved out of a former VIP parking garage in the Sheraton Hotel at Eighteenth Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard. Ike Richman served as the general manager, Mike Ianarelli sold tickets, the trainer, Al Domenico, made travel arrangements, and Richman’s son Michael, then a college student, handled payroll. Eddie Gottlieb had returned from San Francisco, and from five o’clock until seven he and announcer Dave Zinkoff could usually be found holding court in the tiny office with other old-timers from the early days of basketball.

  The renamed team had stumbled through its first season, losing more than half its games and falling to Cincinnati in the 1964 playoffs, but initially its most serious problem was attendance. Richman estimated that the 76ers’ core of loyal fans stood at only 1,000. One of the most publicized games of the year—Wilt Chamberlain’s return with the Warriors to play the team that had replaced them—drew only 5,800 fans. In fact, local turnout was so dismal that sportswriters estimated the new team cost its owners as much as $50,000 that first year. There were so few fans at some games, and the rows of seats were so empty, that the smack of the bouncing ball, the sneakers slapping on the hardwood court, and the occasional smattering of applause all had a hollow, echoing sound. Spectators in the upper reaches of the stands could hear the point guard calling out the plays. “Plenty of times it was so deserted you could sit anywhere you wanted,” recalled Michael Richman.

  One reason for the poor attendance was that, because of the fierce rivalry that had existed between the Syracuse Nationals and the Philadelphia Warriors, the city’s basketball fans had for years regarded Dolph Schayes, Hal Greer, Larry Costello, and the other Nats with virulent hatred. They were the players the fans had jeered, screamed at, pelted with garbage, and attacked, and the idea of now rooting for them, Ike Richman acknowledged, needed to be accepted over time. Richman was also convinced that another reason for poor attendance was that the city’s two biggest newspapers, the Daily News and the Inquirer, were ignoring the team. “It was a blackout,” recalled Michael Richman. “All they printed was box scores.”

  Indeed, after each game, since no paper deigned to send a reporter to cover them, the 76ers publicity director, Harvey Pollack, and trainer Al Domenico would go into the locker room and call the papers and give them the box scores. The publisher Walter Annenberg owned both the Daily News and the Inquirer, but when Richman called to try to find out the reason for the blackout, Annenberg refused to see him. Richman never was able to get to the bottom of the blackout. Annenberg may have been punishing him for trying to hire one of Annenberg’s employees, as Richman sometimes speculated, or for helping to sell the Warriors, which had angered Philadelphia’s fans, or he may not have considered the struggling team newsworthy.

  In any event, as the 76ers began their second season, Richman realized that the key to the team’s success would be to bring in a certifiable star, one who would draw fans and whom the working press would find it impossible to ignore. And it was that same fall that he and Kosloff heard the rumors that Wilt Chamberlain, the biggest star in the game, a hometown boy and someone who just happened to be a fri
end of Richman’s, was on the market.

  Unable all season to develop any momentum, the Warriors went into a truly dreadful tailspin in January, losing eleven straight games—going three weeks without a win—and bringing their record to 10–34. The system Alex Hannum had put together for the Warriors the previous season had long since collapsed. Chamberlain, in his bad mood, had abandoned the habits of teamwork Hannum had inculcated, and the “new Wilt Chamberlain” of a year ago had been replaced by the “old Wilt Chamberlain,” who ignored his teammates and shot whenever he had the ball. He continued to post high scores, but as had happened in Philadelphia, his scoring streak had the perverse effect of undermining his teammates, who lost their heart for the game. “He can do one thing well—score,” Jim Murray wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “He turns his own team into a congress of butlers whose principal function is to get the ball in to him under a basket. Their skills atrophy, their desires wane. Crack players like Willie Naulls get on the Warriors and they start dropping notes out of the window or in bottles which they cast adrift. They contain one word, ‘help.’ ”

  On top of that, the unending trade rumors distracted the team. Since the Warriors management discussed nothing with the players, they were forced to try to act as if the rumors did not exist, but that was difficult. The most recent rumor had it that a deal would be made by January 13, the day of the all-star game, and they all knew that in a short time they would be playing on a radically reconfigured team. It was hard, under those circumstances, to work up any motivation, and Hannum felt as anxious as his players. Nate Thurmond was particularly frustrated, not just by the team’s performance but also by the fact that, after stepping in at center and playing admirably when Wilt was sick, he was now once again relegated to forward. In fact, Thurmond was so discouraged that he told Hannum he wanted to be traded. Hannum thought that between Chamberlain and Thurmond, the Warriors had the best and the third-best centers in the league, but what that meant, strangely enough, was that the team had too much talent, at least in a given area. With Wilt playing almost forty-eight minutes a game, Thurmond could either sit on the bench or play forward, and he didn’t want to do either.

  As the all-star game and mid-season break approached, Hannum felt the Warriors had three options. One was to stand pat, keeping both Chamberlain and Thurmond, but that made no sense with so much money going out and so little coming in. Either Chamberlain or Thurmond should go. The question was whether the Warriors should trade Thurmond for a top-notch shooter and hope that once the team’s injuries healed, they could recover their fire and bring home a championship this year, jump-starting ticket sales for the following year. Otherwise, the Warriors could accept the fact that Chamberlain was simply not drawing a large enough gate to justify his salary, trade him, and rebuild the team around Thurmond, who was earning approximately $13,000, less than one-quarter of Chamberlain’s salary. That was the financially prudent move, but it meant accepting as well that it would be a few years before the Warriors became championship contenders.

  Hannum personally felt the team should not trade Chamberlain, who was, after all, the leading scorer in the history of the game and the man who had gotten the team to the finals the year before. But the decision was not his to make. It was up to Franklin Mieuli, the man Chamberlain had publicly insulted at the beginning of the season.

  THE WEEK the all-star game was to be held, Martin Luther King, Jr., who had received the Nobel Peace Prize the previous month, had returned to Selma, Alabama, to lead a voter-registration drive. He urged the city’s blacks to act on the federal civil rights legislation passed the previous year by applying for whites-only jobs and trying to register in Selma’s white hotels and eat in its white restaurants. The issue of race was embroiling major-league sports as well. In baseball, some teams, such as the St. Louis Cardinals, had embraced integration, but their opponents in the World Series that fall, the New York Yankees of Mantle and Maris, still refused to sign more than the single black player on their roster, Elston Howard, fearing that white fans might turn against the team. “I don’t want you sneaking around down any back alleys and signing any niggers,” Yankees president George Weiss had told his scouts. And during the same week in which the NBA’s all-star game was to take place, black players on the American Football League’s all-star team had voted to boycott the game, after arriving in New Orleans, where it was scheduled to take place, and encountering cab drivers who refused to serve them, nightclub owners who denied them entry, and white hotel guests who insulted them.

  Professional basketball, by contrast, was so far ahead of other major-league sports on the matter of accommodating black athletes that the issue was almost moot. The NBA was now dominated by black stars, and while white players such as Jerry West and John Havlicek and Bob Pettit remained sentimental favorites, white fans now largely accepted and rooted for the league’s pace-setting black players. And for weeks they had talked of little except an impending Chamberlain trade, the teams in contention for him, and how it would affect the playoffs.

  On January 12, 1965, the day before the all-star game, Ike Richman flew into St. Louis, where it was to be held. That night he went to see Chamberlain at the Hotel Chase and told his friend and occasional client that he hoped to acquire him. “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” Chamberlain asked. Chamberlain was once again considering retiring at the end of the season. Dr. Lorber, after diagnosing his pancreatitis, had advised him to take a few months off to recuperate. Chamberlain had been entitled to do that, and under his contract with the Warriors, Mieuli would still have had to pay his salary. But he had felt that the Warriors needed him, and so he had returned to the team, only to endure a miserable losing season, a broken nose, and weeks of reading that Mieuli intended to trade him, without Mieuli himself once showing him the courtesy of coming to discuss any of the plans with him. Chamberlain had other interests—he’d invested in restaurants, apartment buildings and real estate, and trotting horses—and by now he was so fed up that he was not sure what he was going to do once the season was over. He told Richman he was worried that if he did decide to quit, the 76ers would have spent a lot of money or traded away good players simply to acquire his services for three months. “Don’t do it, Ike,” Chamberlain said. “You’ll be making a mistake.”

  Richman was not concerned. He had seen Chamberlain in these moods before and had heard Chamberlain make the same threats before. Three times, to be precise: while at Kansas, then after his rookie year, and then when the Warriors moved to San Francisco. Chamberlain always worked himself out of the moods, and he always signed up again. Richman was confident that, at the end of the summer, when it came time to talk about a contract, they could work things out because, as much as he complained about it, for Chamberlain nothing in life could compare to playing professional basketball. All Chamberlain needed, Richman thought, was a good year and some enthusiastic fans, and he’d be back. Philadelphia was thirsting for a sports hero, he told Chamberlain. The Eagles had had a losing season. Going into the last week of the baseball season, the Phillies had been out in front of the Eastern Division by six and a half games, the National League pennant within their grasp, but then they tanked. If Chamberlain fired up the 76ers, as Richman fully expected him to do, they’d have every sports fan in the city cheering them on.

  Franklin Mieuli hoped he could get a better deal than the one Ike Richman had offered him in December, but he had already decided that if he could not do that, he would go ahead and trade Chamberlain to Philadelphia. “I’m not leaving St. Louis until I get rid of that son of a bitch,” Mieuli told Alex Hannum on the flight in from San Francisco. “He’ll be traded before I go home.”

  When Mieuli arrived in St. Louis, Richman repeated his standing offer. Mieuli reacted noncommittally and then spent the rest of the day negotiating with other owners. The Lakers’ Bob Short made a cash offer of upwards of $200,000, but Mieuli also wanted players, and Short refused to part with any of his stars, afraid that if he di
d, the fans would turn against the team. In any case, Mieuli preferred to trade Chamberlain to an Eastern Division team, where he would not stand in the way of the Warriors’ advancing in the playoffs. He had hoped Ned Irish of the Knicks would top the standing offer from Ike Richman, but Irish turned out to be more interested in acquiring Nate Thurmond, and by the end of the day, Mieuli had still failed to nail down a deal.

  Speculation about a trade completely eclipsed the all-star game itself, and that evening, once it was over, the players, owners, officials, and sportswriters all trooped over to Stan Musial’s restaurant for a postgame celebration, where the negotiations continued. As the midnight deadline approached, Richman still had not heard back from Mieuli. He became convinced that the Warriors were trading Chamberlain to another team, and he prepared to leave the restaurant. Then, at two minutes before midnight, Mieuli stopped him on the staircase and said, “You’ve got a deal.”

  One of the referees, Joe Gushue, was on the way to the bathroom and overheard the conversation. He rushed back to his table. “Chamberlain’s been traded!” he shouted. “Wilt’s been traded to Philadelphia!” Word spread throughout the restaurant, and Chamberlain heard about it only when a reporter came over to ask what he thought. Mieuli and Richman had planned to hold an official press conference the following day to announce the deal, but the reporters were hectoring them for statements—they wouldn’t let Richman leave the restaurant without one—and so the two men stood up in the middle of the dining room and made the announcement then and there.