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

by John Taylor

  Announcer Johnny Most had completely lost his head. Most, who chain-smoked English Oval cigarettes throughout his broadcasts—they contributed to his gravelly rasp—was such an emotional announcer that he was said to have three voices. Voice One was his normal voice and Voice Two his excited mode. Voice Three was the voice that overtook him at the sight of wildly thrilling, game-altering plays, and he was now in full-throated Voice Three mode. “Havlicek stole the ball!” he screamed over and over. “It’s all over! . . . It’s all over! . . . Havlicek stole the ball! . . . Johnny Havlicek stole the ball!”

  The 76ers were stunned, none of them more than Chamberlain. Four times in the last six years, Chamberlain and his team had made it either to the divisional finals or to the championship series, only to be defeated by the Celtics, more often than not in games just like this one, games that could have gone either way. There seemed to be no justice in it. As the 76ers made their way stonily through the celebrating Celtics fans and off the court, some of the spectators, recognizing Chamberlain’s astonishing performance throughout the series, clapped him on the back.

  “You were great, Wilt,” one said.

  “Simply great,” another added.

  Chamberlain nodded slightly, but he did not smile.

  A Boston Garden work crew took down the guy wires two days after the game in which Havlicek stole the ball. They were never used again. Even without the wires as a reminder, the moment embedded itself in the city’s consciousness. Schoolboys on street corners, imitating Johnny Most’s rasp, repeated the announcer’s phrase endlessly. Havlicek stole the ball! Later that year, Most put out a record of his broadcasts during the highlights of memorable Celtics games. Not only did the record include Most’s hysterical outburst during the final seconds of game seven of the Eastern Division playoffs, it was actually titled Havlicek Stole the Ball! The moment became so iconic, so central to Celtics mythology, that it acquired an almost religious significance. A few years later a woman at a party showed Havlicek a brooch that contained, as if it were some sort of saint’s relic, a piece of the material from the jersey that the fans had torn from his back that night.

  In the years to come, Havlicek would emerge as the second most important player on the team after Russell, a position emphasized when he replaced Russell as captain. If Russell was the heart of the team, as Milton Gross once put it, Havlicek was the motor. In the years to come, sportswriters such as Gross would consider Havlicek the best all-around basketball player in the league, not the most beautiful shooter or the quickest on his feet, but unparalleled in his combination of raw power, inspirational play, and sheer stamina. But that was in the years to come. What sealed Havlicek’s reputation in Boston and established him as Cousy’s successor to the title of hometown favorite in 1965, was that one hoarse, hysterically shouted, irresistibly imitated phrase: Havlicek stole the ball!

  IN MID-WINTER, in a game in Cleveland, Elgin Baylor had fallen on his left knee. The hardwood playing surface of the Cleveland court was supported by a cement foundation, and the fall gave Baylor’s knee a painful jolt. Then he banged it a second time a few days later in a collision with another player. Baylor, accustomed to painful knees, took no particular notice of these blows when they occurred, but then in Los Angeles in April, during the Lakers’ first game in the Western Division finals, against Baltimore, Baylor went up for a twisting shot and lost his balance. When he crashed to the floor, a loud bone-crack could be heard across the court. With thousands of people watching, Baylor rose and tried to take a step, but the moment he put weight on his foot he fell to the floor again, writhing in pain.

  The trainer, Frank O’Neill, helped Baylor up, but to O’Neill’s disbelief, Baylor made it by himself to the dressing room. Dr. Robert Kerlan, the team physician, had him taken to the hospital. X-rays showed his kneecap had actually split in two. Kerlan decided that Baylor had probably first cracked it on the cement subflooring in that game in Cleveland. Early the next day, in an operation at Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood, Kerlan removed the broken fragment of the kneecap—the top eighth of it—rounded off the remaining section of the patella, drilled tiny holes, to which he attached the torn ligaments, and scraped out the calcium. He then placed Baylor’s entire leg, from hip to ankle, in a plaster cast.

  The following day, Kerlan gave Baylor the piece of calcium he had removed. It was the size of a quarter and had jagged edges. Kerlan explained that it had been floating around in Baylor’s knee, which was why the pain would come and go. Baylor’s knee seemed so badly and permanently damaged that Kerlan was almost certain Baylor would never again be the outstanding player he had once been. Kerlan believed that if Baylor was lucky, he might be able to play for another two or three years, most likely in some supporting role, but Kerlan was fairly pessimistic about the athlete’s chances of a real recovery. Even after rehabilitation, he thought, Baylor might end up with a permanent limp.

  Lying in his hospital bed, Baylor tried to remain optimistic, tried to summon his self-confidence and take it a day at a time. But newspaper articles were predicting the end of his career, and he had to face the fact that he might never play again. Lou Mohs, the Lakers general manager, talked to five other doctors who had operated on broken kneecaps, and they all told him that the chances for Baylor’s complete recovery were one in a hundred.

  Without Baylor, the Lakers seemed to stand almost no chance in the playoffs, and the responsibility for carrying the team fell on Jerry West. West had broken his nose during the regular season, but otherwise had escaped serious injury. Unlike most other seasons in his career, when some sort of injury benched him for at least a short spell, he had played all seventy-four regular-season games, and had amassed more playing time—3,066 minutes—than anyone else on the team.

  Now, through sheer determination and force of will, West almost single-handedly carried his team through the Western Division finals with Baltimore. In the six games it took for the Lakers to win the series, he scored 277 points, an average of 46 points a game. It was a playoff record. Dan Hafner of the Los Angeles Times thought it was a particularly amazing feat because someone was hanging on him while he took most of his shots. “They used to say that pound-for-pound and inch-for-inch he was the best in the game,” he wrote. “Right now the experts are beginning to believe he is the best, period.”

  Normally, it would never have occurred to West to take that many shots. Baylor wouldn’t have put up with it, for one thing. But Baylor’s injury had provided West with a unique opportunity—or challenge—and he felt he had risen to it. At the same time, the intensity of effort had exhausted him. Between the games, he’d scarcely been able to move, and once the series was over, he felt utterly drained.

  For the third time in four years, the Lakers faced Boston in the finals. By now Fred Schaus, the Lakers coach, had become obsessed with beating Auerbach. The grudge he bore was so personal that he tended to think of the matchup not as the Lakers against the Celtics but as Schaus against Auerbach. It seemed unjust to Schaus that Auerbach had collected so many championship trophies, especially because Boston had won more than a few of them not by decisively outplaying the other team but because the other team blew a point or two in the final seconds.

  But that was not the reason Schaus despised Auerbach. Boston’s coach, Schaus thought, had perfected the art of baiting officials. Auerbach knew just how far to push it to intimidate them without getting thrown out of the game. And that, Schaus felt, brought out the worst in other coaches, who had to start beefing every call if they didn’t want to cede the advantage to Auerbach. Red’s behavior dragged the whole league down. What particularly irritated Schaus was that he knew everything Auerbach did was calculated. When Auerbach was screaming on the sidelines, it wasn’t because he was momentarily frustrated, it was because he wanted to make the officials hesitate. And since Auerbach wasn’t actually losing his temper at all, he got away with twice as much as any other coach. Schaus could become so irritated and distracted by thoughts of
Auerbach that in talks with his team before games with the Celtics, he often found himself bitching about the Boston coach instead of discussing strategy.

  Elgin Baylor accompanied his team to Boston for the first game of the finals wearing his cast and hobbling on crutches. There were injuries among the Celtics as well. Heinsohn had an arch injury that required he wear a sponge taped to the bottom of his foot, and doctors had drained John Havlicek’s knee—he’d torn the cartilage in it the previous summer during an exhibition tour in Africa—for the seventh time that season. Both Heinsohn and Havlicek were playing, however, and Boston won the first game by a thirty-two-point margin. The teams split the next two games, but in game four, West went cold, missing twenty-one out of twenty-four shots, and the Lakers lost by thirteen.

  In game five, back in the Garden, West accidentally jammed a finger into Bill Russell’s eye, and Russell collapsed to the floor in pain. Boston trainer Buddy LeRoux examined him. Russell’s vision was blurry, and the eye was becoming bloodshot from a hemorrhage. But, as Auerbach liked to say, during the playoffs there were no such things as injuries, and Russell insisted on going back into the game. When he did, the Celtics surged. By the end of the third quarter, they had pushed their lead to sixteen, and at that point they went on a run, ringing up twenty consecutive points while holding the Lakers scoreless, Russell rebounding their missed shots and firing the ball to his fast-breaking guards. The crowd was wild over it. Auerbach, who had lit up one of his monogrammed cigars early in the period, turned around, pulled out a big handful of them, and threw them into the stands.

  It was Tommy Heinsohn’s final game. He had played in the first half, but Auerbach had taken him out in the third quarter, and as the Celtics’ incredible surge began, he was sitting on the bench. He had told Auerbach that he had been offered a good job training recruits at the insurance company where he’d been working summers, and, worn down after nine years as a Celtic, he was pretty sure he would take it. A couple of fans in section 88 were holding up a banner that read, DON’T LEAVE US, HEINIE, and in the fourth quarter other fans started shouting, “We want Heinsohn! We want Heinsohn!” But Auerbach felt the momentum of the men on the court was too strong for him to risk interrupting it for the sake of a sentimental gesture to Heinsohn. In any event, Heinsohn had done his job, helping put the team solidly in the lead. Auerbach didn’t care what the fans thought. He kept Heinsohn out until the final minute, when he turned to him and said, “Do you want to go in?”

  Since it was probably his last game, Heinsohn had desperately wanted to go back in ever since Auerbach had taken him out. He had also not entirely made up his mind to quit. Although he had said he probably would, he’d continued to cling to the idea that he was necessary to the team, that they couldn’t win without him, but he now realized that that was obviously a fantasy. He had scored only six points but the Celtics were ahead by thirty-six. They didn’t need him. And to go in at the last moment, in a token gesture—like a second-stringer trotting sheepishly onto the court once the game was safely in hand—would have been humiliating. The whole thing hurt Heinsohn’s pride. He had been a clutch player in so many of the team’s great championship games, but he’d never been truly appreciated, scoring thirty-five or more points or nailing crucial free throws in the final seconds only to end up with one line of ink at the tail end of the next day’s game story. And now, unlike Cousy, who’d closed out his career with a series of Bob Cousy Days and ended his last game with the ball in his hands, here Heinsohn was sitting on the bench. Auerbach hadn’t even told him to go in, he’d asked, as if he was doing Heinsohn a favor. “No, I don’t want to go in,” he said to Auerbach.

  When it was all over, the Celtics had won 129–96, a devastating thirty-three point margin. Fred Schaus was amazed at the way the Celtics had kept coming on against his Lakers in the fourth quarter. The Celtics had now won seven straight world championships, and Schaus was forced to accept the cold, hard fact that they had no equal in the league. No one was ever going to beat Auerbach, Schaus thought, and that was a bitter thing to accept because any sense of justice required that the man be taken down a peg.

  The Celtics dressing room was thronged with shouting players and excited sportswriters. Auerbach’s team had, following the Celtics tradition, thrown him into the shower, and he was soaking, his tie was off, and his white shirt was unbuttoned. “I just wish Walter Brown was here to see this team,” he told the reporters, and that reminded him of something. Without telling anyone, he had carried Brown’s St. Christopher’s medal—the one Brown’s wife, Marjorie, had given him after Brown’s death last September—with him throughout the playoffs. He’d put it in his pocket that morning, as he had every day, but in the excitement of the game he’d forgotten about it until now. “You want to know a secret?” he asked the reporters. He pulled the medal out and held it up in his hand. “Here’s our good-luck charm.”

  19

  AFTER WALTER BROWN’S DEATH, Marjorie Brown and the Celtics minority owner Lou Pieri had held onto the team through the 1964–65 season. But Pieri had always been a silent partner who had no interest in assuming Brown’s role in running the team, and Walter Brown’s estate owed the federal government so much in estate taxes that it was hard for Marjorie to see how she could afford to keep the team. And so, in the summer of 1965, she and Pieri sold the Boston Celtics to the Ruppert Knickerbocker Brewery, based in New York.

  Auerbach’s inclination at the time was to retire as coach. Brown had bequeathed him 11.6 percent of the stock of the Celtics, and when the team was sold he made more than $300,000, so he could consider himself a prosperous man. More important, his workload in the year since Brown’s death had taken its toll. Toward the end of the 1965 season, he happened to see a photograph of himself in a newspaper, balding and gray, his face bloated, his eyes haggard, a dead cigar butt in his mouth, and he thought, My God, do I look that bad? More significant, he felt old. His inner fire—the competitive instinct, the naked desire to dominate—was flagging, and he became afraid that if he didn’t feel motivated, he’d be unable to motivate his players. The truth was, in the past season, he had not been getting himself pumped for games the way he needed to.

  John Waldron, a former Fordham football player who was the president of Ruppert Knickerbocker, convinced Auerbach to remain on as coach for one more year while a successor was found. At first, Auerbach kept quiet about the decision, but then he decided that it would motivate the Celtics’ opponents—and therefore the Celtics themselves—if everyone knew. Before the season began, he told the Boston sportswriters that he would step down the following spring. “I’m announcing it now so no one can ever say I quit while I was ahead,” he explained. “I’m telling everyone right now—Los Angeles, Philadelphia, everyone—that this will be my last season. You’ve got one more shot at Auerbach!”

  The challenge succeeded, as Auerbach intended, in provoking the fans, players, coaches, and owners of every other team in the league, all of whom wanted nothing more than to see his last year in the league become one of ignominious defeat for the Celtics. “They want them to lose because they detest Auerbach,” The Saturday Evening Post observed. “Auerbach has predicted he would depart a champion and they want him to go out a loser.” In every game the Celtics played, it seemed, the fans went out of their way to bait Auerbach. In Cincinnati, when the Royals had a solid lead, hundreds of fans lit up cigars and, in the final seconds of the game, a woman in maroon stretch pants and a white angora sweater skipped from the seats and stood in front of Auerbach, sucking on a mammoth cigar, then blew the smoke right into his face. Auerbach snatched the cigar from her mouth and scattered her with ashes.

  No fans were more virulent in their detestation of Auerbach than those of Boston’s great rival, Philadelphia. With the 76ers well ahead in one game, not only did hundreds of fans light mocking cigars, but they pelted Auerbach with peanut bags and empty beer cans, and as the game ended one fan ran down to the Celtics bench and threw a lit cigar in Aue
rbach’s face. Auerbach complained to the local reporters—“What a bush town!”—and a few days later, the guilty fan wrote the Philadelphia Bulletin to confess to hurling the cigar, but he added, “It did not hit him. That so-called smudge he showed on his fat head was probably from his dirty hands.” Shortly thereafter, when Auerbach appeared at a sportswriters’ banquet in Philadelphia, he was greeted by persistent boos. “Do me a favor and shut up, will ya?” he said when he took the microphone. “The only time I’ve ever heard you people quiet was during ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

  ON DECEMBER 3, 1965, Ike Richman was in the Boston Garden, sitting at the press table next to the 76ers bench, watching his team play the Celtics. Richman loved nothing in his life so much as being part owner and front man for the 76ers; unlike most owners, he even accompanied the team on routine road trips. And he was feeling good, vindicated in his decision to acquire Chamberlain, who, as Richman had predicted, had decided to return to the team instead of retiring when Richman offered him a three-year contract at $100,000 a year. 16*

  Despite the strains between Chamberlain and Schayes, the 76ers had come within two points of beating Boston in the playoffs the previous season. This season, with the team just a game or two out of first place in the Eastern Division, they were looking even better. Chamberlain and Schayes hardly spoke, but the rest of the team ignored that matter and it no longer affected anyone’s performance. Two new players, rookie Billy Cunningham and Wally Jones from Baltimore, gave the 76ers mobility and speed to complement the strength of Chamberlain and the big forwards, Luke Jackson and Chet Walker. The team appeared to have a solid shot at the championship, Convention Hall was drawing record numbers of fans, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, which used to condescend only to publish the 76ers’ box scores, now had a reporter, Gordon Forbes, regularly covering the team.