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

by John Taylor

  “What would you have done if you had lost the game?” Gross asked.

  “I don’t know,” Auerbach said. “I would really be down, but a lot would have depended on how we lost. If we went down swinging, it wouldn’t be so bad. I wouldn’t have said anything to the team. Certainly not about choking in the clutch. How could I have said anything after all these years?” He paused. “Where the hell’s that food?”

  “Before the game,” Gross asked, “did you say anything to the team about this being your last game?”

  “You mean, ‘Win it for me’?” Auerbach asked. “Are you crazy? They’re pros. I never mentioned myself and I never would.”

  Auerbach thought back on the long season he’d just completed, on all the coaches like Fred Schaus who had pursued him as if in some sort of vendetta and all the jeering, booing, Celtics-hating fans around the league who had prayed for his defeat. “If they were going to beat me, this was their shot,” he said. “And they couldn’t.”

  20

  IN THE DRESSING ROOM after the 76ers’ final playoff loss to Boston, Chamberlain had crossed the floor to Dolph Schayes and extended his hand.

  “Great year,” Schayes said.

  “Great year for you, too,” Chamberlain said.

  And it was. At the end of the season, Dolph Schayes was voted Coach of the Year for winning fifty-five games and leading the 76ers, one of the worst teams in the league two years earlier, to their first-place finish in the Eastern Division. A few weeks later, however, Irv Kosloff fired him. Many sportswriters assumed that Chamberlain had had Schayes fired; one columnist, noting that Chamberlain had gone through five coaches in seven years, declared that he was “devouring them like aspirin tablets.” Chamberlain’s dissatisfaction was certainly a factor. “Wilt thought I was a rotten coach,” Schayes recalled years later. Schayes always felt that his biggest problem was his failure to communicate with Wilt. But Chamberlain’s dissatisfaction aside, Irv Kosloff also felt that, under Schayes, the 76ers were not going to become the championship team that, given their talent, they should be. And for whatever reason, Schayes had been unable to establish his authority over the team’s star player.

  Shortly afterward, Kosloff called Alex Hannum. Franklin Mieuli had fired Hannum because the year Mieuli had traded Chamberlain, against Hannum’s advice, the Warriors had ended the season in last place in their division—in fact, the sixty-three games lost by the Warriors in 1964–65 set an NBA record for worst team performance—and followed that up with a second losing year. Still, Hannum had coached Chamberlain successfully once, and he was still the only coach in the league who had beaten Auerbach in a championship series in the last ten years. But Hannum considered Schayes a friend, since he had played with him and coached him on the Nationals, and he was uncomfortable talking about taking over a friend’s job behind that friend’s back. “Listen, he’s gone,” Kosloff said. “Either you’re going to coach this team or someone else will.”

  Although Hannum realized that nothing short of a championship would satisfy Kosloff, he believed the team had the talent to win one, and he took the job. Chamberlain was, of course, the key to the team’s championship ambitions, and since he had worked productively with Hannum three years earlier in San Francisco, both Hannum and Kosloff expected that he would look forward to renewing the relationship. But Chamberlain was unhappy with the contract he’d signed just the previous year. Bill Russell, who had been given a raise when named player-coach, was now earning substantially more than Chamberlain, and Wilt wanted a raise. Then, two weeks before the start of the 76ers training camp, a fire destroyed Chamberlain’s San Francisco duplex, where he still stayed during the off-season. Distraught, he had gone down to live with his parents in Villa Chamberlain, the Los Angeles apartment building he’d built, and when the 76ers front office couldn’t find him, the press reported that he was missing. Chamberlain eventually showed up in the middle of an exhibition match against the Knicks, overweight and unrepentant. “I wasn’t missing,” he said. “I knew where I was.”

  Chamberlain had just turned thirty and was at his peak as an athlete. He was also wealthy and independent. He had shrewdly invested in real estate and mutual funds, and had bought a Harlem nightclub, Small’s Paradise, where he could be seen in the company of people such as the writer James Baldwin. He was perpetually dissatisfied and never seemed to go out with the same woman more than twice, but was also usually generous with fans, willing to spend time talking to sick children, and remained loyal and close to his childhood friends from Haddington, getting one of them, Vince Miller, a job as an assistant on the 76ers.

  In 1959, when Chamberlain first joined the league, he had been willowy and graceful. But he had now filled out, entirely with muscle—his neck thicker, his shoulders and chest broader, his thighs and calves more muscular—and the impression he gave was not of an extraordinarily tall man but of a massive physical presence, a true giant who had the proportions of normal well-built men but loomed far above them. Chamberlain’s exact height was a question of some dispute. He always maintained while a pro that he was seven feet one and one-sixteenth inches tall. As a freshman at the University of Kansas, the athletic department had listed him as seven feet two. But the fact was that he had never allowed anyone to measure him since high school, and some of the people in the NBA swore he was taller than seven-three. They pointed out that the entrance to the shower in the Detroit dressing room was seven feet three inches high, and Chamberlain had to duck to go through it. They noted that center Mel Counts, then with Baltimore, was seven feet tall and when Chamberlain played against him, he appeared several inches taller. They observed that while Chamberlain loved to bet spontaneously on just about anything—the number of birds on a wire, the number of miles from one arena to the next—he’d always refused any bets, and there had been plenty, that he was taller than seven feet one and one-sixteenth. 17* His weight was a similar mystery. He was officially listed at 250 pounds, but he conceded he was closer to 290, and many people felt he weighed considerably more than 300. “I don’t even know how much he weighs,” Hannum confessed to an acquaintance. “He won’t get on a scale for me.”

  Most people who met Chamberlain felt intimidated, and that was how he had come to expect them to feel. Anyone challenging him seemed to be violating the natural order. That, however, was exactly what Hannum knew he needed to do. Since the 76ers had essentially the same team as the year before, it was the players, and particularly Chamberlain himself, who were going to have to change if they were to beat the Celtics. Hannum wanted Chamberlain to return, once again, to playing a team-oriented game, and Chamberlain said he was happy to comply. “You know, I can pass the ball as well as anyone in basketball,” he told Hannum.

  “Fine,” Hannum said. “Let’s see it.”

  But Chamberlain was less receptive to Hannum’s idea that he play less than a full game. The coach, however, insisted. This team was more talented than the teams Chamberlain had played with earlier in his career, Hannum explained. The other players all wanted and deserved their minutes, and it was good offensive strategy to give the team a different rhythm from time to time. Chamberlain disagreed—a contest of wills with Hannum, at some point over something, seemed almost inevitable given Chamberlain’s personality—and when the exhibition schedule got under way, he became surly and uncooperative. Hannum realized that, although he’d actually gone so far as to challenge Chamberlain to a fight in 1963 to get the man’s respect, he was going to have to earn it again. Before an exhibition game in Sacramento, when Chamberlain was bad-tempered, Hannum ordered the other players out of the locker room and gave him a blistering lecture, and by the time they emerged, it was obvious to the other players that Hannum had asserted, and Chamberlain had accepted, his authority.

  The team’s first game of the season, against the Knicks, drew the biggest crowd the 76ers had ever enjoyed on opening night. They beat the Knicks decisively, in part because Chamberlain, who had to be taken out for a spell in the s
econd period after the Knicks’ Howie Komives gouged him in the left eye, checked his scoring and concentrated on passing. The 76ers also won their second and third games. They looked good, but they had not yet been seriously tested. Then in late October the Celtics, who were also undefeated, came to Philadelphia for the first matchup of the season between the two archrivals.

  WHEN BILL RUSSELL was named player-coach back in the spring, his new contract provided him a salary of $125,000 a year, making him one of the highest-paid athletes and one of the richest black men in the country. His manner by then had become commensurately regal, suave, and even theatrical. In the summer he flew off to Liberia to oversee his rubber plantation and hunt in the jungle. Around Boston, he dressed in his impeccably tailored suits and wore a flowing dark cape that made him look, in the words of one sportswriter, “like the Phantom of the Opera.” That year he published his memoir, Go Up for Glory, which Leonard Koppett, in his review in The New York Times, described as “heartfelt, angry, sometimes disquieting—and frequently instructive . . . a book that is only incidentally about basketball. Essentially it is about being a Negro in America in this generation.”

  For Russell, the central challenge of being a Negro in America was dealing with what he referred to as “white thinking.” It was prevalent, he felt, in and around Boston and was the reason why, although he had been there for eleven years now, he continued to dislike the city. In fact, he’d decided Boston was probably the most rigidly segregated city in the country. Russell and his wife and three children still lived in Reading but had moved to a new house. It was in a more secluded area, on Haverhill Street, surrounded by open fields and trees, but Russell still felt threatened there. He bought his wife a pistol and installed floodlights on the grounds. Once, when he returned from a road trip in the middle of the night, he found Rose sitting up in the kitchen with the gun, frightened by strange noises she thought might be intruders.

  After Russell was named coach, he began encountering even more examples of white thinking. Some sportswriters continued to go to Auerbach with their questions, as if he were still the one running the team. And if sportswriters did come to Russell, they often asked the stupidest questions. At his first press conference, one of them asked him if he thought he could judge white players purely on the basis of their ability. Russell treated the questioner politely, as if he had raised a legitimate point, but he was appalled. Other questions he started getting that season were just as bad. Did he become coach to help race relations? If he failed, would this reflect badly on the Negro race? And he continued to be asked about the ability of blacks to coach whites. Bill, the Celtics all know you, but could a Negro go in cold and manage an unfamiliar team that’s three-quarters white?

  In fact, unlike other players who were hired to coach their old teammates, Russell had very little trouble exerting his authority over the Celtics. His cold, remote manner helped. After Russell had taken the job, Auerbach had told him that he was going to be in the difficult position of coaching people who had once been his teammates, that they all knew he liked some of them better than others, that the ones he disliked would expect to be treated unfairly and the ones he liked might think they could take advantage of the friendship. It was therefore essential, Auerbach had said, that Russell treat all the players equally. And so at the breakup dinner at the end of the 1965–66 season, when Russell had had his first chance to address the entire team in his new capacity as coach, he had said that he intended to cut all his ties to the other players. From then on, he intended to act as a coach rather than a teammate.

  In September, on the first day of training camp, one of the players decided it would be funny to hide the new coach’s sneakers. Russell ordered the team to spend the day running, excusing himself from the exercise because he had no sneakers. As the season began, Russell found other opportunities to assert his authority. He fined one player for wearing a turtleneck sweater to a game and another for leaving gear in the locker room and a third for missing a team plane.

  His on-court transition to the role of player-coach was more difficult. Russell had developed such intense concentration as a player that he sometimes was unaware that other players were tiring. On one occasion he simply forgot to relieve K. C. Jones, who ended up playing the entire game despite the fact that, at the age of thirty-four, he was simply too old to stay in for a full forty-eight minutes. Another time, playing the Knicks, Russell forgot he had taken out Havlicek and Sam Jones until someone asked him during a time-out why the team’s two top shooters were sitting on the bench in the final minutes of a close game. “I thought you were in all along,” Russell said to Sam Jones.

  Red would have known, the players told one another on such occasions. But Russell was unfazed. All coaches made minor mistakes, and in any event the team won its first four games by an average of almost twenty points. Auerbach had always liked to start the season strong, build a rapid lead, and then hold it, and in their first year under Russell, the Celtics seemed on the verge of doing this. Then they flew down to Philadelphia for the opening encounter with the team they all knew would be their primary challenger that year.

  “THERE’S NO BIG DEAL ABOUT THIS GAME,” Hannum had insisted beforehand, but everyone knew that was not true. “This is THE game,” Jack Kiser wrote in the Philadelphia Daily News. Almost 12,000 fans showed up, setting another attendance record for the 76ers. When the game started, the two teams at first kept pace with each other, but then, beginning in the second quarter, the 76ers for the first time revealed their true potential and went on a scoring rampage that stunned the Celtics, amazed the sportswriters, and stirred the Philadelphia fans into an unprecedented bloodlust. Everyone was scoring except Chamberlain, who devoted himself to rebounding and assists and ended the game with only thirteen points. When the 76ers’ lead reached twenty, the crowd screamed for thirty, and when it reached thirty they screamed for forty. Red Auerbach, now the Celtics general manager and no longer entitled to sit on the bench, was in the stands among the Philadelphia fans he had always detested. He had never heard them louder or more charged up. The 76ers, he thought, were driving them into a literal frenzy.

  Kill! the crowd screamed as the 76ers’ lead continued to grow and the flummoxed Celtics trotted helplessly up and down the court. Kill! Kill! Kill! The Celtics’ performance was so awful that Auerbach finally couldn’t take it anymore, and left the hall before the game was over. The final score was 138–96, the margin of victory for the 76ers an astonishing forty-two points. As Russell walked off the court he glanced at the scoreboard and shook his head in disbelief. It was the single worst defeat in the history of the Celtics franchise, and none of the Boston players could really explain why it had happened. “We just got beat,” Russell said after the game. “Beat bad. Beat every way you can get beat.”

  The 76ers won their next two games as well, which allowed them to argue that, counted with the eleven straight games they had won at the end of the previous season, they had now won eighteen consecutive regular-season games, a league record, although the Celtics and the defunct Washington Capitols, joint holders of the previous record of seventeen straight games, had both done so in a single season. Hannum, however, was more interested in the total number of victories the team was going to amass over the course of the season now under way. The league record at the time, set by the Celtics in the season that ended in 1965, was sixty-two. Hannum wrote a series of ascending numbers up the side of the wall of the Philadelphia clubhouse, ending with the number seventy. That was the goal for the season total, he explained, and each time the team won another game, he checked off the appropriate number.

  Boston later took a game from Philadelphia, but no sooner had the 76ers had their streak broken than they took off on another, going nine games before their second defeat of the season, and then twelve before their third, and then another twelve before their fourth. They went on to win forty-six of their first fifty games, setting another record, and putting them ten games ahead of the Celtic
s.

  Russell thought the 76ers this season were unlike any of the other teams Chamberlain had played on. Until now, Chamberlain had always dominated his teammates in scoring. As a result, the Celtics had always played Wilt’s teams by allowing him to get his points and containing his teammates. In the years past it had worked. But they could no longer do that, because now the 76ers had four players—Wilt Chamberlain, Billy Cunningham, Hal Greer, and Chet Walker—who could score consistently. That gave them a diversified game, since one of the four was always bound to have a hot hand.

  Indeed, the 76ers called one aspect of their game “milk it,” which meant everyone on the team fed the ball to the player with the hot hand. A hot hand could last not just for a run of a few minutes or for a quarter, but for an entire game or even for more than one game. In February, Chamberlain began a game against Baltimore having hit thirteen consecutive baskets at the end of the previous game. As the game progressed, Chamberlain made another sixteen field goals without a miss, which put him within three baskets of the all-time record of thirty-two consecutive field goals. With four minutes left to play, Hannum, unaware that Chamberlain was so close to breaking the record, took him out to rest him. The players informed their coach of what was at stake, however, and he immediately sent Chamberlain back in.

  This raised the suspicions of Baltimore’s new coach, Gene Shue, who leaped off the bench. “What’s up here?” he shouted. “What are they trying to prove?”

  A reporter at the press table told Shue how close Chamberlain was to breaking the record for consecutive field goals.

  “Well,” Shue said loudly, “that asshole isn’t going to get any more records tonight!”