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

by John Taylor

  The other 76ers were appalled by the article, not just because Chamberlain attacked Schayes, whom many of them considered a friend, but because he had chosen to do so in an article appearing in the middle of the playoffs. Ike Richman was also puzzled and disturbed. Since Richman was both Chamberlain’s attorney and part owner of the 76ers, the article put him in a delicate position. He gamely tried to shift the controversy onto the magazine and had the front office issue a statement by Chamberlain declaring that Sports Illustrated “interjected many unauthorized thoughts into my story without my consent.” Chamberlain also insisted that the editors had promised him the piece would not come out until the season was over. He even threatened to take legal action against the magazine, but no one believed he was the aggrieved party. Commissioner Kennedy was so mortified that he fined Chamberlain. Gordon Forbes of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “It appeared that Wilt had stuffed one in the wrong basket.”

  Schayes, for his part, refused to even read the article. He knew it would only upset and distract him. He had just seen Séance on a Wet Afternoon, this great British movie starring Kim Stanley about a crazed medium, and he decided that, like the characters in the film holding the séances, he needed to empty his mind of everything unrelated to the purpose at hand, which was winning the series against Boston. And so he dismissed Chamberlain’s article when reporters asked him about it and did not raise it in team meetings, but as Chamberlain sat slouching in his seat while the coach talked, the other players could only wonder what Wilt had been thinking. The article was embarrassing; the spectators would watch them jumping off the bench and taking orders from the coach whom their star center had essentially declared to be a fool. It fouled the atmosphere in the locker room, particularly when combined with the fact that Chamberlain flew by himself up to Boston for game five instead of traveling with the team and then skipped the practice session everyone else was required to attend.

  Most of the 76ers were too upset about the article to respond to reporters asking for comment. Chet Walker felt that a lot of what Wilt had said had a certain legitimacy, but still his timing was terrible, and it did not exactly endear him to the rest of the team. Several players, including Johnny Kerr, Larry Costello, and Hal Greer, denounced Wilt and his article to reporters, which only exacerbated tensions and spread a feeling that no team carrying baggage like this could prevail in the playoffs. Angry, depressed, confused, and disunited, the 76ers lost game five, but then, as if to show their faith in Dolph Schayes, they rallied to take game six, tying the series, then prepared for the trip up to Boston for the seventh and final game. It was held on April 17, 1965, and was a game that would, justifiably, become one of the most famous in basketball history.

  The Celtics had by then won seven championships in the preceding eight years, and three times the final series had gone to seven games, which had led to the saying The Celtics always win the seventh game. That ominous legend, and Boston’s well-known home-court advantage—it won four out of five home-court games—had succeeded in intimidating some of the 76ers, who had lost eleven straight games to Boston in the Garden. As game seven approached, a reporter asked Schayes why his team seemed to do badly in that arena. “Pressure! Pressure!” Schayes barked. “Some of our younger players still haven’t gotten over the fear of the Boston floor. They see how tough it is for us up there, and in their minds it becomes even tougher. But it’s only a floor, ninety-four feet by fifty feet, just like ours, and we can win there.”

  Schayes had put his finger on it. The fear of the Boston floor. It was always there, and the Celtics and their fans—or so everyone on the 76ers was convinced—resorted to all manner of tactics to heighten it. What this meant was that while the Celtics hated playing in Convention Hall, the 76ers positively loathed playing in the Garden. “You never knew what you were going to get,” recalled their trainer, Al Domenico. “It was tough to get out alive.” The team would arrive at the visitors’ dressing room to find the heat not working or else turned up so high it felt to Domenico like it was 110 degrees. He’d run around to find an engineer to turn it down, but the guy would say the Garden’s old furnaces couldn’t be adjusted, and so in the end their only choice was to open the windows and let in the snow or rain. The pipes groaned and rattled so loudly the players could hardly hear each other talk. Rats and roaches scuttled along the corridors. There was that damned parquet floor with all the dead spots that the Celtics had memorized. Before the game, the Garden’s floor crews loosened the screws to the baskets so the ball would simply drop into Russell’s hands for the rebound. 15* Sam Jones climbed up on a ladder and used a piece of soap to mark the spot on the board he needed to hit to make his angled jumper. The fans arrived with eggs, oranges, lightbulbs, anything they could get their hands on. They were blood-crazed, those Celtics fans. After one game, the 76ers got into their bus out in the parking lot when it was suddenly surrounded by upwards of three hundred shouting Celtics fans, who began rocking the bus back and forth, trying to overturn it. The bus driver seemed uncertain about what to do, so Domenico shouted, “Run ’em over, for Chrissake! Let’s get out of here!”

  A light rain was falling when the 76ers arrived in Boston after taking the Eastern Airlines flight from Philadelphia. The streets were filled with dirty slush. The cab drivers, who recognized them, always ragged them on the trip into the city. Russell rules the boards. Havlicek’ll run you dizzy. Satch is gonna shut down Walker. Even Chamberlain now sez you got a bush-league coach. The pedestrians who saw the 76ers outside the hotel jeered. And once they’d changed into their uniforms in the Garden’s cold, clammy, filthy dressing room and jogged up the concrete ramp that led to the court, the fans in the steeply banked seats pelted them with coins and toilet paper and rotten eggs. Chet Walker felt like Daniel heading into the lion’s den.

  In the pregame huddle, after they’d warmed up, the 76ers assured one another that they were not going to allow the Celtics and their fans to intimidate them, that they were not going to succumb to the fear of the Boston floor, that they had one final chance, now, to show the world that they were capable of playing basketball in Boston Garden, ending the jinx, and taking the game away from the home team. Then they broke huddle, and the starters walked onto the parquet floor, toward the tip-off circle where Chamberlain would face Russell.

  Red Auerbach had a saying: The guys who finish the game are more important than the guys who start it. He’d repeated it any number of times this past season to John Havlicek, who was now in his third year with the team. Havlicek rarely started, but more and more often he found Auerbach sending him into the game at crucial moments. He had become one of the closers, and now, with five seconds left in the seventh game of the 1965 Eastern Division finals with Philadelphia, he was on the floor, waiting for Bill Russell to throw in the ball.

  Havlicek was another one of Auerbach’s discoveries. Auerbach, forced to draft last because the Celtics were perennial champions and prevented by the flat box office from spending large sums to trade for players, had continued to search for overlooked college players to fill the holes in his roster left by retiring veterans. In 1961, he had discovered Satch Sanders, a shy, self-conscious NYU forward who found the NBA so intimidating that he’d decided to go to work for the Tuck Tape Company until Auerbach talked him into trying out for the Celtics. The year Cousy retired, he’d come across Havlicek, the son of a Czech grocery-store owner from a small town in Ohio. At Ohio State—where teammates gave him the nickname Hondo, after a John Wayne movie, because they couldn’t pronounce Havlicek—he was a low-scoring defender completely overshadowed by the university’s reigning star, Jerry Lucas. The broadcaster Curt Gowdy, however, had noticed his drive, and he told Auerbach, “There’s this guy Havlicek who runs around like he’s got a motor up his ass.”

  While Havlicek was passed over by all the other teams in the draft, Auerbach always had an eye out for what he called “our type of kid,” and sensed that he was teachable. Some of the Boston sportswriters thought Auer
bach was wasting the pick. “Have you ever seen Havlicek?” asked Cliff Keane of the Globe. “A strong breeze could knock him to the ground.” The rookie did not exactly exude virile glamour. He wore horn-rimmed glasses off the court, and had jug ears, narrow, squinting eyes, and a crew cut that emphasized the blockiness of his head. He was so shy and awkward that Russell sometimes called him Country Boy. But Russell, who’d been shy and awkward himself as a young man, saw resemblances in Havlicek—they both had games that depended primarily on hard work rather than flash—and he had befriended the rookie, helping him buy a stereo and going out of his way to praise him to the Boston reporters.

  At Ohio State, the team’s game had revolved around feeding the ball to Jerry Lucas, and Auerbach initially saw Havlicek—and Havlicek saw himself—as a defensive player. But then he surprised everyone with his ability to score, a capacity for sudden hot streaks that bumped his scoring average up into double digits. This had less to do with an innate shooting eye than with the fact that, because he was always on the move—the Celtics man in motion, as he came to be known—he was open more than the other players. Auerbach’s rule for all players was If you’ve got the shot, take it, and the coach began to urge his rookie to shoot more often.

  Frank Ramsey, who was nearing the end of his career, also took Havlicek under his wing. He taught him defensive tricks, like how to draw fouls. Since Havlicek was not a starting player, Ramsey encouraged him to sit on the bench near Auerbach without wearing his warm-up clothes, radiating an eagerness to get into the game. Havlicek would work up a head of adrenaline waiting to be sent in, growing itchier and itchier, and Auerbach, aware of it, would sometimes keep him out just a little longer, holding him back like a racehorse, and then send him charging in totally revved up. Havlicek began to think of himself as Ramsey’s successor in the role of the sixth man, the one who could come in off the bench to energize the game, the money player taking the big shot and making the key play.

  The guys who finish the game are more important than the guys who start it. It was true. And now, with five seconds left in the final game against Philadelphia, Havlicek was standing at Boston’s end of the court facing Bill Russell, who was under the basket, waiting for the official to give him the ball. It had been a fierce, relentless game. The Celtics, typically, had surged to an early lead, but the 76ers had come back to overtake them and were a point up at the half. The two teams stayed close in the second half, but with one minute to play, Boston had found itself up by three points. The Celtics tried to run down the shot clock, but no one was open when time expired, and once the 76ers took over, Chamberlain, who’d scored their last four points and was having a stupendous game, quickly scored again. His field goal reduced Boston’s lead to one point, but now only five seconds remained on the clock, and it was the Celtics’ ball. All Russell had to do was throw it into one of his quickest players—Sam Jones or Havlicek—who only needed to avoid being fouled while he dribbled out those final seconds.

  Russell stepped behind the line to make the inbounds pass. The referee handed him the ball under the basket. Chet Walker, who was guarding Russell, took up a position, hands raised, right in front of him. Russell hoisted the ball over his head and looked for an open man.

  Just above Russell was one of the backboard guy wires. At the time, the backboards at Boston Garden were stabilized by guy wires. An upper pair of cables ran from the board up toward the ceiling, while a lower pair ran out toward the box-seat sections. Players had always worried about the possibility of the ball hitting one of the lower wires on an inbounds pass from under the board, but it had never happened.

  Now, however, with five seconds left in the game, Russell was concentrating so intently on the deployment of the players on the court that he forgot about the guy wires. He leaped up to throw the ball in over Walker’s raised hands, and when he let go, it hit one of the wires and bounced back off the court. Earl Strom, the referee, decided that what Russell had done was equivalent to throwing the ball out of bounds. He blew his whistle and called a turnover.

  Pandemonium erupted. The Boston bench flooded onto the court, and practically every single person in the building—players, coaches, fans—was screaming something. Russell was stunned. Those damn guy wires—another attempt by Garden management to save money—weren’t even supposed to be there. He dropped to one knee, pounding the floor with his fist in frustration, and shouting, “Oh my God, oh my God, it’s their ball!”

  Auerbach ran up to Earl Strom, hysterically arguing that Chet Walker had been guarding Russell so closely that Walker had stepped out of bounds, forcing Russell to hit the guy wire. Strom was a tough official. He’d had everything from eggs to scotch bottles thrown at him by angry fans and was, in fact, officiating the game with his hand in a cast because he had broken his thumb in a fight with a fan a few nights earlier in Baltimore. Strom also had a core belief—the players decide the game—and he was not about to change the course of a playoff final because of some minor, ambiguous infraction. He ignored Auerbach. Russell, like Auerbach, started arguing that it should be Boston’s ball because Walker had been out of bounds, but Strom refused to budge. Meanwhile, Johnny Most, the Celtics broadcaster, was in a frenzy, screaming into his microphone, “He hit the wire! He hit the wire! By God, he hit the wire!”

  Dolph Schayes immediately called a time-out. The noise was deafening, every fan in the building chanting Defense! Defense! Defense! In the huddle, the 76ers, who could hardly hear one another, were compounding the noise by shouting their suggestions for the crucial play. “Hold it!” Schayes yelled. “Let me talk.” Schayes’s face was rigid with the tension. The 76ers, who were behind by only one point, would take possession at Boston’s end of the court. They had five seconds, time enough to execute one play, score two points, take the lead, and win the title. But it had to be the right play. Some of the 76ers were urging that the ball be given to Chamberlain. It was a natural call, but Schayes thought that the Celtics, who were huddling around Auerbach, would assume the pass would go to Chamberlain, and he would in all likelihood be heavily guarded. Also, Chamberlain himself did not want the ball. Some of the players wondered if he was afraid of taking the clutch shot. But he pointed out that if he got the ball, he’d immediately be fouled. He’d go to the foul line—where his problems were legendary—under enormous pressure, and if he missed, Russell would in all likelihood get the rebound for Boston and that would be the game.

  Schayes decided he needed a counterintuitive play. He told Greer to make the inbounds pass to Chet Walker, while Johnny Kerr set a screen. But Walker, instead of shooting, would fire the ball back to Greer, who was to duck behind the screen Kerr set. Greer, who was the best outside shot on the team, would take the last shot while Chamberlain took up a position under the basket to guide the ball in if necessary. The team had used the play almost a hundred times during the year, and it seemed to everyone like a good plan. “Let’s make the play work for Hal,” Schayes said.

  Meanwhile, the Celtics were gathered in a semicircle around Auerbach. Since Elgin Baylor was injured, the Lakers, who had won the Western Division, posed no real threat in the finals. This Eastern Division title match was in effect the championship. All the Celtics knew that, with five seconds left, the 76ers had plenty of time to get off a shot before the buzzer rang. Russell was starting to feel sick at the thought of what his error could cost his team. “I blew it,” he told his teammates. “Somebody bail me out. I don’t want to be wearing these horns.”

  Auerbach seemed at a loss. The series had been a particularly grueling one for him. He’d been suffering from asthma and chest congestion ever since it began. That fan had attacked him in Philadelphia, and even the public address announcer down there, the Zink, had been mocking him, urging the crowd to light up cigars after the 76ers’ wins. He was exhausted and out of ideas. “So what do we do now?” he asked. No answers were forthcoming from any of his players. Unable to think of anything better to say, Auerbach told the team, “Play defens
e but don’t foul.” And, he added, “Watch Wilt, of course.”

  Hal Greer took the ball out of bounds for the 76ers, and Russell assumed a position just behind Chamberlain. Russell was certain that Greer would pass it in to one of his teammates, who would either feed it to Chamberlain for a dunk or pass the ball back to Greer, who would have moved into position for a set shot.

  Philadelphia’s Chet Walker, standing near the pivot, held up his hands for the ball for the pass from Greer. Neither Greer nor Walker was paying attention to John Havlicek, who was standing off to Walker’s side. The inbounds passer had five seconds to throw the ball in, and when the referee gave it to Greer, Havlicek started counting down the seconds in his head. He had been facing Walker, but when he was at one-thousand-four, he looked back at Greer. Havlicek could tell from the way Greer had set up that he was going to make a soft, high pass. That surprised him; he expected a low hard throw to Chamberlain. Greer lobbed the ball at Walker, thinking to keep it from the Celtics with height rather than speed. A moment before the ball left Greer’s hands, Havlicek took two steps and leaped high into the air, raising his hands in the hope that he could somehow deflect the ball.

  The pass was slightly short. The ball hit Havlicek’s arm and bounced into the hands of Sam Jones, who started dribbling upcourt as the final seconds ran down, and the buzzer sounded and the thundering, roaring crowd poured onto the floor in utter delirium, shoving and trampling players, tearing at Havlicek’s jersey, ripping the shoulder straps to pieces and giving him rope burns on his collarbone, pushing Auerbach onto people’s shoulders and then pulling him off and forcing him up onto other people’s shoulders.