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

by John Taylor

  Shue ran along the side of the court. The 76ers were ahead of the Bullets by some thirty points—a humiliating margin—and Shue did not want to compound the humiliation by having Chamberlain break yet another record at the expense of his team. “Foul him!” Shue shouted at his players. “Foul the big guy! Don’t let him stop to get a shot up! We’ve got to stop him from getting more baskets!”

  Whenever the ball was passed to Chamberlain, the Bullets crowded around him, arms raised, but nonetheless he managed to score twice more before the game was over. Still, Shue had managed to deprive him, by only two baskets, of the satisfaction of setting a new record for consecutive field goals. When reporters gathered around Shue after the game, the coach was in a defiant mood. “He didn’t get the record, did he?” he asked. “He needed four and he only got two because we wouldn’t let him get four. Nobody but nobody is going to set a record against us if I can help it.”

  The foul line still plagued Chamberlain. In the beginning of the season, he had come up with yet another shot, moving from the center of the free-throw line to the side, and trying to drill the ball straight in, almost like a line drive. But the first game in which he attempted this, he made fewer than half of his free throws, and he soon returned to the cumbersome, childish underhand shot. His shooting percentage on free throws was so bad that other coaches ordered their players to foul him immediately if he got the ball, realizing that the 76ers were much less likely to score points with Chamberlain shooting fouls than field goals. Grab him! Grab him! went the shout from the opposing bench as soon as he received a pass.

  Inconsistency with free throws, however, was a minor nuisance because Chamberlain, having submitted however reluctantly to Hannum’s guidance, was playing team ball and playing it even more effectively than he had the year that he and the Warriors and Hannum had gone to the finals. Instead of moving into the low post, where he often clogged up the lanes and prevented his teammates from driving to the basket, he took up the high post, by the foul line, where he could pass off to teammates. Since he could easily hold the ball with one hand, he used ruses that resembled old Globetrotter gags, tucking the ball into one teammate’s stomach like a quarterback faking a handoff, only to pass it to another. He took one-third as many shots as he’d taken the year he averaged fifty points a game, but he was hitting slightly more than 68 percent of his shots, a league record. And while he was not, for the first time in his career, leading the league in scoring, he had a record number of assists for a center.

  One Sport magazine headline referred, inevitably, to “The Startling Change in Wilt Chamberlain,” but this story, the “new new Wilt,” was such a familiar one by now in Chamberlain’s career that the writer, Leonard Shecter, tartly observed, “If there had been as many new Wilts in the past eight years as everybody said there were, there would now be a whole basketball team of Wilts—five to play, one to coach. That is, if the five playing Wilts could get along with the coaching Wilt. There is some doubt.”

  The main effect of Chamberlain’s new style was to allow his teammates to put their considerable talents to use. With Chamberlain, Chet Walker, and Luke Jackson, the 76ers had a massive, muscular front line that no other team in the league could match. Jackson, arguably the most valuable player after Chamberlain and certainly the strongest, set picks for the shooters and handled rebounds if Chamberlain was out of position. Walker, a quiet, self-contained man off the court, became startlingly aggressive once the game began, and could take a pass at the baseline, then drive into the lane or swerve up the court to get open. Hal Greer, who had a superb mid-range jump shot and ran the fast break, provided what Hannum thought was a perfect backcourt pairing with veteran Larry Costello, whom sportswriters were fond of referring to as “the last of the two-handed set shooters.” Billy Cunningham and Wally Jones came off the bench to contribute energy.

  Sportswriters praised the 76ers for their diversified scoring, for their teamwork, for the willingness of players to make winning the game a greater priority than running up their individual statistics. Those had always been the hallmarks of the Celtics, the very qualities that had led sportswriters to argue that the Celtics of, say, the 1961 championship were the greatest team ever to play in the NBA. But as the 1966–67 season reached its midpoint, people were now beginning to say the very same thing about the 76ers. Bill Russell was asked by a reporter if he thought the 76ers were the best team ever to play the game. “They might be,” he acknowledged. Others were less equivocal. “This was the best basketball team I ever saw and probably the best of all time,” argued Merv Harris, a California sportswriter who had been covering basketball since the early fifties.

  The 76ers were also an exceptionally close and harmonious team, by far the most harmonious team Chamberlain had ever played on. “Don’t be afraid to praise your teammates,” Hannum had told him shortly after arriving. He did, and his teammates, for the first time, felt appreciated and essential. They were no longer simply porters bringing the ball to Chamberlain. When Chamberlain had first joined the 76ers, it had, like most teams in the league, two racially distinct cliques. Whites such as Al Bianchi and Johnny Kerr formed one group, and the blacks—Hal Greer, Chet Walker, Luke Jackson—formed another. But now it became much more integrated, and Billy Cunningham, an Irish New Yorker, ended up as one of Chamberlain’s best friends.

  Members of other teams rarely saw one another between games—most of the Celtics went their separate ways—but the 76ers became a gang, heading over to Pagano’s, an Italian restaurant on Chester Street, after most games, and inviting one another to their houses. Whites and blacks went to the movies together, pulled pranks, played golf, drank beer, and helped one another pick up women. A couple of days after that annihilating victory over Boston in late October, Chamberlain held a Halloween party at the Philadelphia apartment Hannum had persuaded him to occupy for the season. He dressed as an Arab sheikh. Hannum showed up wearing a ballerina’s tutu.

  IN JANUARY, during a game with Baltimore, Larry Costello, the veteran 76ers guard, wrenched the ligaments in one of his knees, and after the game the team’s doctor placed him in a cast that ran all the way from his ankle to his thigh. Wally Jones, who’d played irregularly until then, began filling in for Costello. Jones, known as Wally Wonder, was a colorful player who liked to swing his arms windmill-style on defense and wave his hands after foul shots. During his distinctive jump shot, his legs scissored so far out in front of him that Andy Musser, who called the 76ers games for radio, referred to the move as “the jackknife.” Jones, who would later convert to Islam and change his first name to Wali, was considered a crowd-pleasing substitute, capable of hot streaks but not entirely reliable, and Hannum at first feared that without the experienced Costello the team might begin to falter. Jones, however, surprised those who considered him little more than a court clown by running up remarkable scoring totals (thirty-three points in one game, twenty-one in another), and after beating Baltimore the night Costello was injured, the 76ers won their next eight games for another ten-game streak.

  Philadelphia ended the regular season with sixty-eight wins and thirteen losses. That record was not only the best record in the league, it was the best in NBA history. It represented a winning percentage of .840, beating a record set by the defunct Washington Capitols back in the forties, before the modern game had evolved. And that was only one of many NBA records the 76ers broke that year. The 10,143 points they scored also set a new record. So did their field-goal percentage of 48.3. So did the fact that in all but one of the eighty-one games they played, they scored 100 or more points.

  Because the league had expanded, the board of governors had changed the rules to allow four teams from each division to make it into the playoffs, which meant that the first-place team, instead of resting during the opening round, played the third-place team. Philadelphia faced Cincinnati, and after losing the first game, the team roared back to win the next three and take the series. Boston, meanwhile, polished off the Knicks, and t
he two great rival teams prepared to meet each other once again. The 76ers, feeling that overconfidence may have been in part responsible for their playoff loss to the Celtics the previous year, approached the series with grim determination. Despite leading Boston by eight games at the end of the regular season, Philadelphia had good reason for caution. The Celtics had proved that they were the only team in the league capable of containing the 76ers, winning five of the nine games the two teams played during the regular season. Both of the two home games the 76ers had lost had been to the Celtics. The one game in which they scored less than one hundred points had been against the Celtics.

  Boston had by now won eight consecutive championships. In six of those years, before claiming the title, Russell and the Celtics had needed to get past Chamberlain and one of his teams, and each time, whether from luck or talent, from psychology or coaching or divine intervention, the Celtics seemed ordained to win. And so, as the series began, the one question for sportswriters and basketball fans was: Will they do it again? After all, things were different now. The Celtics still had Sam and K. C. Jones, Havlicek, and Satch Sanders, but the average age on the team was thirty-one. Most important, Auerbach, for the first time, would not be coaching. Russell had so far proved he could handle the job, but it was admittedly a disadvantage to simultaneously take part in the game, concentrating on the execution of your particular tasks, and study the moves of all the players on both teams, the way a coach sitting on the bench can do. At a crucial moment in a critical game, Russell might fail to notice a teammate’s slight fatigue, or an opponent traveling, or a defender drifting out of position and freeing up the lane—the sort of details to which Auerbach had always been alert and which could lead to a substitution or complaint that could shift the balance of the game.

  THE OPENING MATCH was played in Philadelphia at the Palestra because a circus had been booked into Convention Hall. In the first quarter, Chet Walker unintentionally hit Russell in the stomach when Russell closed in to stop his jump shot. Russell crumpled to the floor, vomited, and lay prone for four minutes before he rose, staggered to the bench, still retching, and wrapped a towel around his head. He returned at the start of the second quarter, but never completely recovered, and for every rebound he came up with, Chamberlain had two. Working from the high post, Chamberlain shot infrequently, instead feeding the ball out to the guards for jump shots or passing in to the forwards breaking across the lane. And when one of his teammates missed a shot, he moved in to grab the rebound and dunk. In the third quarter, the 76ers put together a twenty-five-point lead, and while the Celtics managed to narrow it to fourteen points, the outcome never really seemed in doubt.

  That first game not only put Philadelphia up by one, it reversed the customary dynamic between the teams. In previous years, every time Chamberlain and one of his teams had met the Celtics in the playoffs, Boston won the first game, establishing a lead that it never relinquished. Now, for the first time, it was the Celtics who would have to come from behind. People had felt Boston had the psychological edge going into the series, but the edge now seemed to shift to Philadelphia.

  The second game took place on the parquet floor of the Boston Garden. Chamberlain was playing with sore legs, the hard floor of the Palestra, with no give, having aggravated a case of shin splints. He continued to concentrate on defense while Chet Walker and Wally Jones did most of the scoring. The first half was close, but then Philadelphia surged in the third quarter. Hannum, who could taste victory, was up off the bench, holding his hands together in a gesture of prayer and imploring his players to maintain the momentum, shouting, Get back! . . . Keep the pressure on ’em! . . . Run! . . . Control it! On the Celtics, Sam Jones was cold, hitting only three for sixteen. Bailey Howell, a veteran shooting guard who’d joined the team that year, had scored twenty-two points, but he had run up five fouls. So Russell took Jones and Howell out in the fourth quarter and replaced them with what he thought of as his little guys, Larry Siegfried and rookie Jim Barnett. The substitution of the Tiny Tots—as sportswriters called them—drew boos from the Garden crowd, but with less than five minutes left to play, Siegfried and Barnett helped the Celtics narrow the 76ers’ lead from fourteen to one. At that point Hannum expected Russell to send Jones back in, but Russell decided to stick with his second string, which was fine with Hannum, since neither of the substitutes could score the way Sam Jones could if he recovered his shot.

  The 76ers surged a second time, and the Celtics missed their last five shots. With Boston down by five and seven seconds left, Chamberlain blocked a desperate Celtics pass, punching the ball with his right fist so hard that it rose fifty feet up into the air, almost reaching the rows of Celtics championship banners dangling from the ceiling, before falling back to the floor. It was the first time a Philadelphia team had won a playoff game in the Garden since 1960. It also meant that the Celtics were now down by two games and needed to win the next game in Philadelphia or face the almost impossible challenge of taking all of the following four games.

  After the game, Russell shut the door to the Celtics dressing room, and it remained shut for nearly half an hour as the team allowed the loss to sink in. When he finally unlocked the door, some two dozen reporters packed into the small room. Most of the Celtics were still in their sweat-soaked white-and-green uniforms. The atmosphere was grim. Don Nelson studied a stat sheet with a stony expression. Bailey Howell, saying nothing, pressed an ice pack to his right ankle. Sam Jones sat on the lip of the whirlpool bath, dangling his feet in the churning water. Wayne Embry, Russell’s enormous backup center, slumped on a bench with his head in his hands. He seemed to be on the verge of tears. Auerbach sat next to Embry, holding his head in his hands as well.

  “Realistically, Red,” one reporter said to Auerbach, “what chance do you have, what chance of winning four out of five?”

  “It’s not over yet,” Auerbach said. “Wednesday in Philly is the key game. We win that and we’ll have momentum.”

  The sportswriters blamed Russell for the back-to-back defeats. Under pressure from Chamberlain, he seemed to have found it so challenging just to play his position that he had forgotten he was coach. During that Philadelphia surge in the third quarter, both John Havlicek and Bailey Howell had been shouting at Russell to call a time-out so the team could regroup, but Russell had failed to act. And although Howell had the best shooting hand that night, dropping in eleven out of fifteen shots, Russell had taken him out of the game so he wouldn’t foul out before he was really needed, but then Russell left him on the bench, even when, at the end, Boston had drawn within one point of Philadelphia. It was a mistake, the sportswriters agreed, that Auerbach would never have made.

  “Celtics Learn, Sadly, That Russell Is No Auerbach,” ran the headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “For eight years, the Celtics have avoided mistakes in the key games,” Jack Chevalier wrote in the paper. “They played like the Green Bay Packers and let the other team ruin its own chances. Now they look like the Yankees—a group of champions getting old. The Celtics dribbled on their toes, stepped on the out-of-bounds line, and missed lay-ups. They griped to the referees. Their fans walked out the door muttering excuses—just like race track losers.” The Boston newspapers were just as harsh. “The Celtics do not deserve to win the playoffs for the ninth year in succession because in cold-blooded premeditation they handicapped themselves by making Russell, their meal ticket, handle two big jobs,” wrote Globe columnist Harold Kaese. “The Celtics undoubtedly would have won Sunday’s game if Auerbach had been coaching them.” A radio announcer in Washington, D.C., speaking the morning after the game, summed up the general feeling: “The Celtics are dead.”

  WALLY JONES had been afflicted with tonsillitis and swollen glands since February, and on Tuesday after game two he woke up with a fever and a sore throat. When he went to practice that afternoon at Convention Hall, the 76ers trainer, Al Domenico, took his temperature. He had a fever of 102 degrees. Stanley Lorber, the team physician, determ
ined that Jones had a respiratory infection and sent him home to bed. Jones’s status for game three the following night, Lorber told Hannum, was questionable.

  This was troubling news for Hannum. The 76ers had a number of minor injuries. Chet Walker was playing with a bruised hip bone and Chamberlain still suffered from the shin splints he’d picked up in game one from the rock-hard Palestra floor. But Walker and Chamberlain were playing magnificently, particularly Chamberlain, who since the series began had been labeled the Great Intimidator by one sportswriter and Captain Marvel by another. Larry Costello was still sidelined by his bad knees. Without Costello, if Wally Jones got sick the only players Hannum had left were Matty Guokas, a promising but raw rookie who played a total of only twenty minutes in the first two playoff games and scored only four points, and Bob Weiss, who’d been added to the team late in the season and had not had a minute of playoff time. Hannum knew he needed Jones. Wally was a streak shooter who could get a hot hand at crucial moments, and he had become a critical part of the team. In game one he proved decisive, driving in on Russell three times at a turning point to score three baskets in a row.

  Jones stayed in bed for almost twenty-four hours, getting out at four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, about an hour after the line started forming outside Convention Hall. When he reached the dressing room, Dr. Lorber decided he could play, and Hannum put him in the lineup. At the tip-off Jones felt extremely tired and looked it as well, but Hannum kept him in. In the fourth quarter he found his second wind, and he stopped a late Celtics surge by firing in successive jump shots that put the 76ers solidly back in the lead. It was a star-making performance—the reason that Jones had been nicknamed Wally Wonder and that basketball fans in Philadelphia had taken to wearing buttons that said “Wally Wonder for Mayor.”