by John Taylor
In exchange for Chamberlain, Philadelphia was giving San Francisco three players: Lee Shaffer, Paul Neumann, and Connie Dierking. There was some logic to these choices. All three had played for Hannum when he was coaching the Nats, and he thought he could fit them into his system. Dierking, a center, could serve as a backup for Nate Thurmond. Neumann was a solid guard and Shaffer a big forward who Hannum thought had all-star potential. Even so, compared to Chamberlain they were an undistinguished group. In the previous year, Chamberlain had scored more points and gotten more rebounds than the three of them put together. On top of that, Dierking had an injury and had recently been suffering from fainting spells, and Shaffer, who had hurt his knee the previous season, was a holdout, working for a trucking firm in North Carolina because the 76ers had turned down his demand for a 25-percent salary increase.
Mieuli also received a cash payment from Philadelphia. The figure was never officially released, but the Warriors front office dropped hints that it was upwards of $300,000. However, owners who had acquired Chamberlain in the past had inflated his salary for the publicity value. Other sources put the figure closer to $50,000—and much of it, Chamberlain would later maintain, went to pay his back salary.
After the news about the trade broke that night, Wilt locked himself in his hotel room and refused to answer the phone. He was irritated because, although the deal had been announced, no one had as yet deigned to inform him officially about it. The one reporter he did talk to was his friend Milton Gross, who was also in St. Louis.
“What would it take for Ike to persuade you to play for the 76ers beyond this year?” Gross asked.
“More than he can offer,” Chamberlain said. “I got to play for them for the rest of this season because my contract says so, but that’s up at the end of the year and I’m through.”
Gross had his doubts about that, but he kept them to himself. Gross also doubted that the 76ers had paid much if any money for Chamberlain. They would have been foolish to do so if he was going to leave at the end of the season. Also, if big money had changed hands, Chamberlain would have wanted a considerable portion of it in exchange for an agreement to play the following season. Richman, Gross believed, had picked up Chamberlain cheap, but would have to cough up a huge sum to get him to come back. But Gross, and many of his colleagues, were pretty sure that he would. “At midpoint, the pro-basketball season has a familiar look,” Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated after the trade. “The Celtics are running away from the rest of the league; the East won the all-star game, and Wilt Chamberlain is threatening to quit.”
Most sportswriters felt that the trade, purely in terms of talent exchanged, was an insult to Chamberlain. Writing in Sport magazine, Leonard Shecter called it “one of the weirdest deals in the history of professional sports.” Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times said, “The San Francisco Warriors did everything but list him in the Yellow Pages. It was a situation unique in sport. Man O’War was being dropped in a claimer. Jim Brown was going to be dealt off for a fifth-round draft choice. Babe Ruth was being put up for two relief pitchers and an old scorebook.”
But for Franklin Mieuli, Chamberlain had become more a burden than an asset. Mieuli was happy to have the 76ers take Chamberlain simply to see them assume the financial responsibility of paying his enormous salary for the rest of the season. By making the deal now, the Warriors could depreciate Wilt’s value for income-tax purposes. Without attracting a single new fan, Mieuli would see his team’s revenues shoot up some 25 percent.
18
IKE RICHMAN realized he needed to restore Chamberlain’s enthusiasm for basketball, and he set out to make his new player feel welcome and appreciated back in his hometown. When Chamberlain arrived in Philadelphia, Richman made sure that he was greeted at the airport by reporters, photographers, and camera crews. He invited Chamberlain to stay with him and his family in their sprawling house in the affluent suburb of Elkins Park, and even lent Chamberlain his Cadillac. “Don’t let any of the neighbors see you, Wilt,” Richman joked. “I don’t want them to know we’ve integrated Elkins Park.”
Because a bowling tournament was taking place in Convention Hall, Chamberlain’s first game with the 76ers had long before been scheduled to be held in the Arena, a small alternative forum in West Philadelphia considered more than adequate for a typical 76ers game since, at the time, the team was drawing fewer than 4,000 fans per game. But hours before the game began, spectators were lining up outside the Arena and the traffic on Market Street was completely backed up.
The small arena sold a record number of tickets. “My sales went up four hundred percent,” ticket manager Mike Ianarella told an acquaintance. “I am selling tickets to guys who haven’t been here since 1961.” Richman wanted a big crowd, and for days in advance he’d had kids out on the streets giving away free tickets. Once the seats were full, the manager closed the entrances and fans still waiting outside charged the gates trying to get in. The fans sitting in the stands held signs saying BIG WILT IS BACK! and ANOTHER DIPPER DUNK. Down in the dressing room, the 76ers could feel the crowd’s enthusiasm. One of the players had brought a record player, and he put on a forty-five-rpm single. It was Chamberlain singing, “By the river . . . ’Neath a shady tree . . . Just my baby . . . Just my baby and me.” As the music played, Chamberlain, dressed only in plaid undershorts, demonstrated a new dance craze, the jerk.
So many spectators were trying to get to their seats that the start of the game had to be delayed. When the crowd had finally settled, the players were introduced one by one. “And now,” announcer Dave Zinkoff boomed over the public address system, “Philadelphia’s own Wilt Chamberlain!” Chamberlain stepped onto the court and into the glow of the spotlight. The crowd roared and roared, and then people began climbing to their feet, and soon everyone in the arena was standing cheering as Chamberlain turned around acknowledging the applause—a full-throated standing ovation that went on for thirty seconds. He’d never seen a crowd react to him, or to anyone, this way before. Finally, Zinkoff had to cut off the applause. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there are two more ballplayers.”
Coincidentally, their opponents that night were the Warriors, and before stepping out of the spotlight Chamberlain looked over at Alex Hannum. The two men remained friends despite the trade, and when Chamberlain smiled, Hannum smiled back in a proprietary fashion. The Warriors were then on a thirteen-game losing streak, and Chamberlain, who was still wearing his plastic mask—“as ferocious as something out of Dr. Strangelove,” the Bulletin’s Sandy Grady commented—tied them up under the boards, freeing his teammates Hal Greer and Larry Costello to score. When Chamberlain rebounded, he fired the ball out for fast breaks. Every time he scored, and particularly when he dunked, the crowd roared again.
Once they had beaten the Warriors, the 76ers set out on an East Coast road trip that included a match with the Celtics, who were then enjoying a sixteen-game winning streak. If the Celtics beat the 76ers, they would tie the NBA record of seventeen straight victories, but Chamberlain played brilliantly against Russell, who took fifteen shots without making a single one, and Philadelphia won. After the road trip, the Celtics came down to play the 76ers again, this time in Convention Hall. The stands were crammed with over 10,000 fans, more than double the number who usually showed up, and Chamberlain again outplayed Russell, scoring and rebounding but also creating opportunities for his teammates. The 76ers handed Boston another defeat, which made them the only team that year to beat the Celtics twice in a row.
THE TWO GAMES against the Celtics were part of a nine-out-of-eleven streak the 76ers went on once Chamberlain joined the team, a dramatic turnaround considering that until then they had been winning only about half their games. Instead of the limelight-seeking ball hog some of the 76ers expected, Chamberlain proved to be a true team player. He passed out from under the basket, protected his teammates on defense, and allowed Hal Greer and Larry Costello to rack up solid shooting scores. Still, some of the
players found it difficult to accommodate him. Greer, the team leader, had trouble adjusting to both the attention focused on Chamberlain and the consequent neglect of the rest of the players, and to the fact that Chamberlain, by playing in the middle under the basket, clogged up the lane and prevented Greer from driving. But the primary conflict that soon emerged was between Chamberlain and the team’s coach, Dolph Schayes.
One reason Chamberlain had been reluctant to return to Philadelphia was Schayes. Schayes was a big, dark-eyed, easygoing Jewish guy from the Bronx known around the NBA for his signature gesture as a player: pumping his fist victoriously in the air as he ran down the court after making a basket. Before becoming a coach in 1963, he had been the Nats’ star, leading the team into the playoffs every year for fourteen years. Schayes had played against Chamberlain for four years, and he had found it a horrifying experience. With the encouragement of Alex Hannum, who was then coach of the Nats, Schayes had tried to throw Chamberlain off his stride. Schayes would make fun of Chamberlain by leaning against him like he was a lamppost. He pulled at his shirt and his shorts and tried to trip him up. And then at the end of Chamberlain’s rookie year, when the new star had written an article in Look complaining about precisely that sort of behavior and threatening to quit the NBA, Schayes, like a lot of people in the NBA, had been annoyed by Wilt’s self-pitying tone, and he’d responded by writing a mocking article in Sport calling him a lazy, immature, stubborn, pampered crybaby.
Schayes now felt somewhat chagrined to have aired those opinions. While it was at times tempting to sound off about other players, it was a small league and the comments often came back to haunt you. And Schayes knew that Chamberlain was morbidly sensitive to criticism. It surprised people that a man so large and strong and accomplished, and with such a dominant personality, could be so sensitive, but that was Wilt. He never forgot a slight, and Schayes knew Wilt had never forgotten Schayes’s tongue-in-cheek comments.
While Schayes had tried to be lighthearted in that article, the truth was, he’d always felt that Chamberlain was egotistical and that he insisted on dominating every team and every coach he played for. Wilt refused to abide by the rules imposed on the other players, which inevitably led to dissension, and on all his teams his teammates forgot how to work the ball themselves. Chamberlain was always the king, Schayes thought, and his teammates were always the serfs and pawns. That had changed somewhat when Hannum joined the Warriors, but even so, Chamberlain always seemed to Schayes to be fighting the temptation to take over. Schayes had also always thought Chamberlain was not worth his enormous salary. How much talent did it take to work your way in close to the basket and then dunk the ball? In fact, Schayes didn’t even consider it real basketball.
This was not the most ideal baggage to be bringing to a coach-player relationship, but Schayes hoped they could put the past behind them, and, keeping his private views to himself, he officially welcomed Chamberlain to the team and declared himself capable of handling his temperamental new player. But privately, he worried that he would become one more coach who tangled with Chamberlain and lost, particularly given the ill will that Chamberlain harbored toward him. “Why did this have to happen to me?” he asked an acquaintance.
Schayes would later decide that becoming a coach was the worst decision he ever made. But he’d done so at the end of the 1962–63 season, when he’d played badly all year, had had an operation on a troublesome knee, and began to think his career as a player was over. In 1963, when the team was sold to Kosloff and Richman and moved to Philadelphia, Alex Hannum had quit as coach and returned to California. Frank McGuire had been interested in the job, but since everyone on the team knew and liked Schayes, and since he had been one of the league’s best players, Richman offered it to him.
While the older players considered Schayes a pal, the younger ones tended to treat him dismissively, and after joining the team, Chamberlain was unable to develop any respect for him. Schayes seemed unable to communicate his thoughts on strategy, and above all he seemed to Chamberlain to be in over his head. He was simply not tough enough. He was a decent, generous, soft-spoken, well-dressed man who was kind to children but was being eaten alive by hard-boiled NBA veterans. Still, just as Schayes had professed his admiration for Chamberlain ever since he’d joined the team, Chamberlain for the time being kept his feelings about his coach to himself.
Then, toward the end of the season, Chamberlain was approached by Bob Ottum, an editor for Sports Illustrated. It had been a tumultuous year for Chamberlain, even by his own unusually high standards in that department, and Ottum hoped he would want to get a few things off his chest about his pancreatitis, Mieuli’s decision to trade him, his triumphant return to Philadelphia, and his possible retirement. Ottum told Chamberlain that the two of them could talk and then he, Ottum, would write a piece in Chamberlain’s own words and Chamberlain could read it and sign it.
Chamberlain, who could never resist the opportunity to ventilate his opinions, liked the idea. Ottum, the quintessential nebbishy little-white-guy sportswriter—his chin was level with Chamberlain’s elbow—began spending time with the athlete. He accompanied him on the train from New York down to Philadelphia for practice and games. They spent evenings in nightclubs, Chamberlain drinking orange juice and Ottum ordering screwdrivers, and in Chamberlain’s apartment on Central Park West. Ottum found Chamberlain fascinating. He wore imported silk shirts but carried his money in a brown envelope. He spoke in a bebop vocabulary but was capable of sudden displays of erudition. He also ate in amazing quantities. On their first trip down to Philadelphia he consumed a dozen sweet rolls and a barbecued chicken and drank two cartons of milk and a container of orange juice. Ottum found himself eating more when he was around Chamberlain, and by the time he’d finished interviewing him he’d put on six pounds, which was a lot for a little white guy who weighed only 130 to begin with.
AFTER THAT GREAT eleven-game run when Chamberlain first joined the 76ers, Greer and Costello were injured, then Chamberlain’s pancreatitis flared up, and Philadelphia lost hope of catching the Celtics. In one game at the end of the season, Chamberlain’s pain became so unbearable that he had to stop playing. His internist, Dr. Lorber, was unable to diagnose the problem, and Ike Richman suggested he see a hypnotist. By this time, every player and fan in the country was familiar with Chamberlain’s pancreas troubles, and jokes about it were common. Before the playoffs began, Cincinnati coach Jack McMahon, whose team was facing the 76ers in the first round, was telling reporters that his players might try hitting Wilt in the pancreas only no one knew where in the hell Wilt’s pancreas was.
At the outset of the playoffs, the 76ers, who finished the regular season in third place in the East, were considered the weakest team to make it in, but Oscar Robertson had a strained tendon in his left foot, and Philadelphia beat the Royals three games out of four. In the locker room afterward, some of the jubilant players shouted, “Bring on the Celtics!” The Philadelphia fans, after ignoring the 76ers the previous year, were just as keyed up. Their football and baseball teams had disappointed them, but Chamberlain, back in his hometown, looked to have a chance to take the 76ers all the way to the championship, and the spectators who filled Philadelphia’s Convention Hall were in a raucous mood.
Red Auerbach liked to call Convention Hall “a snakepit,” and all the Celtics hated playing there, no one more than John Havlicek. The balconies extended practically out over the court, which created an incredible level of noise and a claustrophobic atmosphere and made it easy for the fans to hurl garbage onto the floor: flashlight batteries, the half-quart containers of orange drink they sold there, all kinds of weird stuff. In one game, when Havlicek was lining up a free throw, a rock-like object smashed into the backboard. It turned out to be a raw potato. What kind of fan, Havlicek wondered, brought a raw potato to a basketball game? The Philadelphia fans particularly hated Auerbach. Once, one of them tried to choke him by jerking on his necktie, and during the playoffs Auerbach got
into a scuffle with another one of the 76ers fans, a guy who always sat near the visitors’ bench. Russell and other players were convinced the heckler was a management plant, put there by Philadelphia for the specific purpose of harassing the team. Auerbach would have paid ten bucks just to punch him in the mouth.
The series was rough as well. The players fed off their fans, and each team won its first two home-court games, Boston using the full-court press on defense, the 76ers countering with long clothesline passes. Dolph Schayes thought Chamberlain was playing the best basketball of his career, and Russell felt exhausted trying to keep up with him, but the sense of camaraderie and purpose that the fans and Chamberlain’s inspiring play instilled in the 76ers collapsed after game four, when the next Sports Illustrated hit the stands. The cover line read “My Life in a Bush League.” In the cover photograph, Chamberlain, his goatee divided into a mustache and a separate chin tuft, glared up at the camera, which was placed above a basketball hoop, in a photograph with a curious pink background. Inside, he was pictured strumming moodily on an electric guitar. “Oh, man, this is going to be better than psychiatry,” Chamberlain declared in the first sentence of the article, which was headlined, in the style of the New Journalism just then coming into vogue, I’M PUNCHY FROM BASKETBALL, BABY, AND TIRED OF BEING A VILLAIN.
The article was written entirely in the first person, and in it Chamberlain complained about biased officials, ignorant owners, and incompetent coaches. “Frankly, I doubt if Mieuli knows very much about basketball. But he wants to speak up about it, and now that he is an owner, now he can. Oh, man!” He described Dolph Schayes as “soft-hearted” and suffering from a “woolly look.” “Schayes is so tender-hearted that someone sitting on the bench can look over at him with those big wet eyes and he’ll put them into the game—even if the man replaced is having a big night.”
