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

by John Taylor

  Richman liked having the reporters around, and he was always available for a quote or a joke. He had once been part owner of a summer resort in the Poconos, South Mountain Manor, where Joey Bishop and other comedians performed, and he loved kidding around with them; Richman’s partner, Irv Kosloff, always thought that Richman himself could have become a stand-up comic if he had so chosen. Richman liked to set up gags for the sportswriters and his team, playing each group against the other, making everyone aware it was all for laughs. The previous year, after a game in which the 76ers had been badly beaten by the Royals, Richman had kept the reporters outside the dressing room while he talked to his team. “Can’t you give me a good game once in a while?” he asked loudly. “I’m not kidding you, any more of this stuff and I’m going to shuffle the deck!” He ducked outside and with a grin asked the reporters, “You guys got all that?”

  At breakfast on the morning of December 3, Richman had told Schayes and the team’s trainer, Al Domenico, that he wasn’t feeling well, but when they suggested he return to Philadelphia, he insisted on coming to the game. Richman had wanted to play basketball back when he was a student at Philadelphia’s Southern High School, but at five-seven he lacked the height and any compensating talent, and he had instead become Southern High’s biggest rooter, a presence at every game, making loud jokes, urging on his team, jeering at the opponents, berating officials. He considered that to be his role with the 76ers as well, and this night in Boston he was behaving the way he always did at his team’s games, yelling nonstop at the officials: Havlicek was traveling! Russell touched the ball! Cunningham was fouled! Yelling at his own players, too: Handsup, handsup . . . lotsa hands, lotsa hands—get those handsup!

  Suddenly, five minutes into the game with the score tied 13–13, Richman made a choking noise and slumped over onto the shoulder of Al Bianchi, the player sitting at the end of the bench. Bianchi caught him, held him in his arms and then, realizing he was unconscious, lowered him to the floor. Dolph Schayes saw that his boss was down and shouted for a doctor. Auerbach and Celtics trainer Buddy LeRoux ran from the other end of the court and helped carry Richman behind the 76ers bench. The players crowded around while Al Domenico felt his pulse, tore open his shirt, and began pounding on his chest.

  Dr. John Doherty, the Celtics team physician, hurried from his seat and quickly checked Richman’s vital signs. There was no heartbeat, no pulse, no blood pressure. Doherty placed an oxygen mask over Richman’s face and gave him an injection of adrenaline, but the vital signs remained flat. The Philadelphia players watched in stunned silence as medics arrived, lifted Richman onto a stretcher, and carried him off the court.

  Domenico accompanied Richman to the hospital, where he was officially declared dead. He was only fifty-two. The trainer called Richman’s wife, Clare. She had been watching the game on television at their home in Philadelphia and had seen her husband collapse beside the court but had no idea what had happened. It fell to Domenico to inform her that he had died. “Tell the team, ‘Win this game for Ike, win it for him,’ ” she said.

  When Domenico returned to the Garden, it was halftime and the 76ers were sitting in the locker room in a state of distracted worry, waiting for word. The players all liked Richman, who was generous as well as enthusiastic; both Chamberlain and Wally Jones had lived for a while with him and his family on Heather Road in Elkins Park when they needed a place to stay. Domenico told them Richman had had a heart attack; the doctors figured he was dead by the time he hit the floor. The players and Schayes discussed whether or not they should call off the game. To go back out and finish it as if nothing had happened seemed unthinkable. But Domenico told the team that Richman’s wife had asked them to win in memory of her husband. Domenico also told them that Richman would have wanted them to play on, that they could honor him best by playing, and by winning.

  At the end of halftime, the players returned to the floor and halfheartedly took some warm-up shots. No one felt like playing. What they had all just witnessed—the death of their boss—was too shocking and upsetting. On top of that, the 76ers had continued their losing streak at the Garden and now, at nineteen straight games, the jinx had acquired almost mystical proportions.

  Then the second half started and a strange thing happened. The Philadelphia players developed an unexpected momentum. It was as if by playing—and playing well, playing hard, lotsa hands—they could work through or give expression to the grief they were feeling. And as their momentum developed, they went on a scoring spree, racking up basket after basket and ending the game ahead by sixteen points. It was the first time the Celtics had lost a home game since the previous March, and it was the first time in the three-year history of the 76ers that they had beaten Boston in the Garden. For the 76ers, it suddenly began to seem that, this season, anything might be possible.

  THAT FALL Howard Cosell interviewed Wilt Chamberlain, and there was one particular subject that Cosell wanted to explore. He was just beginning to develop his reputation as a distinctively sardonic and opinionated broadcaster. He had by then been appearing for a year on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, but he had started in radio, and he continued to provide a syndicated broadcast for ABC Radio. At the start of his career, he had witnessed the influx of black athletes into major-league sports and had anticipated, as he once put it, the “whole new set of smoldering problems that would emerge.” But Cosell had gone into sports broadcasting wanting to move it away from the rip-and-read wire-service summations of games and toward all of the issues that surrounded the actual competition: personality conflicts, strategy, political intrigue, money and ambition, racial tensions. While he appeared at times to have contentious relationships with black athletes such as Muhammad Ali and Wilt Chamberlain, he was actually sympathetic toward them; his forceful questions were merely designed to elicit the most provocative and newsworthy answers. That fall, in his interview with Chamberlain, he asked, “Bluntly put to you, a Negro player, are we reaching the point . . . where perhaps there are too many Negro players in the National Basketball Association for box-office appeal?”

  “I definitely think that probably we have,” Chamberlain replied. “I think that [there] has been sort of like a stagnant box-office attraction due to the fact that we are somewhat overpopulated with . . . first-class and star Negro players.”

  It was certainly true that the number of black players had dramatically increased. In the 1955–56 season, the league had eighty players but only six were black, and Maurice Stokes was the sole black all-star. Ten years later, at the start of the 1965–66 season, forty-seven of the ninety-nine players were black. More important, thirty-one of the forty-five starters were black, as were fourteen of the twenty all-stars, which meant that not only were blacks more prevalent, they were dominating the game.

  But in fact, the NBA’s box office was not stagnant during this period. Overall, ticket sales had grown by 50 percent since 1960, an annual increase of 10 percent—equivalent to the rate at which attendance was growing in professional football, and double the growth rate for baseball. If anything, the rate of growth for basketball seemed to be increasing. Ticket sales the previous year were up 12 percent from the year before. And in the first month of the 1965–66 season, they were up 30 percent.

  Nonetheless, the issue of race in the NBA, long confined to bitter asides by players such as Russell, had now become a subject of open debate, as Cosell’s interview with Chamberlain indicated. John Devaney began preparing an article for Sport magazine to appear in mid-winter that would be titled “Pro Basketball’s Hidden Fear: Too Many Negroes in the NBA? It’s the Great Concern Among the Owners, But Is It Justified?” Devaney found that, while owners would rather win with a team featuring blacks than lose with a white team, they recognized that it was white players who were the true crowd-pleasers among the fans, almost all of whom were white, and they did what they could to emphasize the presence of whites on their teams. Sometimes they started a game with several white players, but by the end o
f the first quarter shifted to an all-black lineup. To balance their black starters, they signed white bench players, which meant that once black players aged or slowed, they were more likely to be dropped than turned into substitutes. Roone Arledge had been pleasantly surprised the year before, when the seventeen NBA games he paid $650,000 for ABC to broadcast had attracted 20 percent of the viewing audience, but some producers felt that with white stars the programs would have done considerably better. “I’m only being realistic,” one broadcaster told Devaney, “when I say that if a white center were to come along to challenge Chamberlain or Russell, the ratings for those games would jump at least fifty percent.”

  These tensions remained unresolved. If anything, it seemed clear that they would intensify since the college players of the day who seemed most likely to form the new crop of NBA superstars—Lew Alcindor of UCLA (later to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Louisville’s Westley Unseld, Michigan’s Cazzie Russell—were uniformly black. Black basketball players were now in the strange position of feeling that they had become the dominant force in a league that was not entirely happy with their presence, and this fostered a more militant outlook.

  While overall attendance throughout the league was growing, it varied from city to city, and in his interview with Cosell, Chamberlain pointed out that box-office receipts for the Celtics, despite their unparalleled string of championships, had been more or less flat for the last five years. In 1960, when the team had white stars such as Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman playing alongside Russell, average game attendance had been 7,448. In 1965, by which time Cousy and Sharman had been replaced in the backcourt by black players Sam Jones and K. C. Jones, average attendance was only 8,779—meaning ticket sales had grown by less than 5 percent a year. Chamberlain asked Cosell why a team with a record like the Celtics’ did not draw a capacity crowd every night whereas the Bruins, who had finished in last place for the last five years, virtually filled the house whenever they played.

  “Are you saying to me,” Cosell asked, “that one of the reasons hockey plays to ninety-four percent attendance capacity is because it is all white?”

  “I definitely believe that,” Chamberlain said.

  It was true that fewer than 10,000 fans showed up for the average Celtics game. The team’s racial composition may have been a factor, but another factor was that, in the mid-sixties, basketball in Boston still lacked the tradition of the city’s baseball and hockey teams. The middling attendance also reflected less a dislike of basketball or the Celtics than it did frustration with the curious architecture of the Boston Garden. The Garden had been designed as a hockey arena. When the basketball court was set up, almost half its seats wound up beyond the two ends of the court, and many had partially obstructed views. In fact, the view of the basketball court was excellent from only 7,500 seats. Any time attendance rose above that, it indicated that the game was such a strong draw that some fans were prepared to put up with bad seats to watch it.

  The presence of black players had certainly not driven away white fans, as owners once feared they might. The previous year, Tommy Heinsohn had been injured for much of the season, and in his place Auerbach had often started Willie Naulls, the veteran black player he had signed in 1963. That meant the team was sometimes starting five blacks: Naulls, Russell, Satch Sanders, and Sam and K. C. Jones, referred to collectively by fans as the Jones boys. Although it was a historic moment—the first time any franchise in the NBA had started an all-black team—the development caused muttering among some fans but provoked no public outcry or even much formal acknowledgment.

  In fact, some people tried to hold the Celtics up as a model of integration in a city increasingly divided along racial lines. Back in April, an advisory committee to the state’s secretary of education had released a report detailing racial imbalance in the city’s schools—sixteen of them were 96 percent black and received a disproportionately small amount of funding—but Louise Day Hicks, chairwoman of the School Committee, had rejected the report and refused to consider remedies such as busing, a position that had led to a strike by black students. “The [Celtics team] offers a lesson in human relations in the midst of the school imbalance controversy,” Bob Hoobing wrote in the Herald. “No group ever exposed the racial bigots so quickly and decisively. The writer vividly recalls a conversation last year in which one citizen said: ‘The Celtics wouldn’t dare put five Negroes on the court at the same time. Nobody would come to see ’em.’ ” Hoobing added, “Not one customer has yet been heard calculating the ratio of skin color on the squad before buying his ticket.”

  THE CELTICS had named no replacement for Auerbach when he announced his retirement plans, and speculation began immediately about who would succeed him. The decision was essentially Auerbach’s, and it was an extremely vexing one. The team, while aging, was still a perfectly tuned machine. Whenever a player retired, Auerbach always managed to find a new player—often a player discarded by some other club, such as Willie Naulls—whom he was able to integrate into the team without ever changing its fundamental character. Any new coach, hired from outside the team, would bring his own values and experiences with him, and even if he insisted that his job was simply to carry on the Celtics tradition, he could not help but tinker with the machine, and that could destroy its exquisite calibration. Also, the team’s best players—with the exception of the relatively young Havlicek—were all experienced, and were even by now somewhat weather-beaten veterans who knew each other so intimately that their on-court interaction was reflexive and almost unthinking. They might get prickly if a stranger started ordering them around.

  Particularly Russell. When Auerbach thought about it, he could not imagine anyone else in the league coaching Russell. Or, to put it another way, he could not imagine Russell allowing himself to be coached—to be ordered around, to be criticized and second-guessed—by anyone else. Auerbach himself had been able to do it because he’d been working with Russell since Russell was a twenty-two-year-old rookie. But Russell was now thirty-one. He had won seven championships. He was proud, independent, testy, and acutely sensitive to criticism. No stranger coming in out of the cold could possibly have the authority to tell Russell what to do, and that meant the new coach would have to come from the ranks of former Celtics.

  Auerbach thought Frank Ramsey, who’d retired in 1964, would make a good coach. Ramsey had not been the best player on the team, but the truly good coaches, like Alex Hannum and like Auerbach himself, were rarely the top players. Instead they were often the journeymen, whose supporting roles gave them an appreciation for the function of all positions and required them to get along with all types of players. Auerbach called Ramsey, who’d returned to his hometown of Madisonville, Kentucky, and become a prosperous businessman, running, among other interests, three nursing homes. Ramsey was willing to take over the team on an interim basis, until Auerbach found a permanent replacement, but he felt that his various businesses were too lucrative for him to give them up, even to coach a championship basketball team.

  Next, Auerbach talked to Bob Cousy about the job, but Cousy seemed to Auerbach to have his hands full coaching Boston College, which played only twenty-six games a season, and Auerbach wondered if he’d be up to the demands of an eighty-game schedule. Cousy, for his part, said he thought it would be a bad idea for him to try to coach his former teammates. He also feared that the pressure of coaching a pro team, without the relief provided by actually playing, might be too intense. College was bad enough; at one point when he’d started coaching Boston College, his anxiety had caused his large intestine literally to twist itself into knots.

  Tommy Heinsohn, despite his reputation as the team clown, had a forceful personality, a bright mind, and leadership qualities—as he had demonstrated in bringing the players together to stand up to the owners in the threatened walkout in 1964—and Auerbach considered him as a possible replacement. But he told Auerbach he didn’t think he could handle Russell. Heinsohn in fact didn’t think anybody could h
andle Russell. He was too proud and too moody, and he was acutely aware of how indispensable he was. It seemed inconceivable to Heinsohn that Russell would allow some former teammate, much less a stranger, to tell him what to do. “Why don’t you make Russell the coach?” Heinsohn told Auerbach. “He’s got so much damn pride he’ll handle himself.”

  Russell was an obvious possibility. But, as Auerbach knew, Russell had always said he would never want to coach. Sitting on the bench or pacing up and down the sidelines yelling at his team while unable to play himself seemed impossibly frustrating. If he was playing at the same time he was coaching, however, that wouldn’t be a problem. There was also the question of whether Russell could be effective as a coach, if he was capable of critiquing all the other players and planning strategy at the same time that he was playing himself. And what if his own performance was subpar? Who was going to call him on it?

  Still, with none of Auerbach’s other possibilities panning out, Russell led the list simply by default. Auerbach didn’t broach the matter directly with him until March, when the Celtics were in Detroit to play the Pistons. Before the game, he invited Russell to his hotel room and said, “How would you like the job?”

  “What job?” Russell asked.

  “My coaching job,” Auerbach said.

  “You putting me on?” Russell asked.

  “No, I’m serious,” Auerbach said. “I think you can handle it.”

  “Let me think about it,” Russell said.

  AFTER THE OPERATION on his broken kneecap during the previous year’s playoffs, Elgin Baylor had spent six weeks getting about on crutches in his hip-to-ankle cast. Once his physician, Dr. Kerlan, removed the cast, the knee felt sore and stiff, and was difficult to bend. Kerlan at first confined Baylor to walking, then started him riding a bicycle and jogging laps around a track. From there he went on to running up and down bleacher stairs, then Kerlan attached weights to his ankle and had him do leg lifts. But the stiffness and soreness seemed, if anything, worse.