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

by John Taylor

  Alex Hannum was even more worked up than he had been in game two, leaping from the bench in his baby-blue sport jacket, his bald head gleaming, as he exhorted his players and shouted at the referees. He had only adopted the tactics Red Auerbach had pioneered and promulgated, but Auerbach himself was now consigned to the seats, and, with Russell playing full-time, the Celtics lacked a coach who was going to protest loudly and constantly to the officials. There was no one on the Boston bench to offset Hannum’s lungs. It infuriated Auerbach. By retiring as coach, he had deprived his team of an undeniably potent weapon, his own mouth, and now, sitting in the stands, he saw the 76ers commit all sorts of uncalled infractions that no one on the Celtics bench protested. Every time the Celtics started gaining some momentum, it seemed to Auerbach, one of the 76ers, Billy Cunningham or Chet Walker, called an injury time-out and Boston’s momentum faded. It was obviously phony, Auerbach thought, but no one was doing anything about it.

  As they had in game two, the Celtics closed to within a point in the final minutes, then ran out of steam. The game ended with Philadelphia up by eleven, and at the final buzzer the fans began chanting, Boston is dead! Boston is dead! A sole spectator up in the balcony ceremoniously played “Taps” on a trumpet. Auerbach pushed through the crowd, under a balcony where a Philadelphia fan was leaning over the rail shaking a fist and screaming obscenities. He took the elevator up to the Celtics locker room. Outside the door a cluster of newspaper reporters was waiting, among them Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Frank Dolson. One of the reporters asked Auerbach if he was ready to concede that the 76ers were a great team. “They haven’t won anything yet,” Auerbach said. “Wait’ll they win eight in a row. Eight years in a row. Then talk.”

  Frank Dolson always thought Auerbach was an angry, coarse, and arrogant man, and now, instead of showing some class and paying tribute to the team that had just beaten the Celtics three times in a row in the playoffs—an unprecedented occurrence—Auerbach began complaining about how the 76ers had called fake injury time-outs. “Real bush league!” Auerbach snapped. The Celtics could do it, too, he went on, but it would stretch the game to five hours and ruin basketball.

  As Dolson watched, Auerbach, striding angrily back and forth in the corridor, took out a cigar and lit it. The cigar looked like the same type of cigar Auerbach loved to light up on the bench in the final moments of a Celtics win—the notorious and despised Victory Cigar. But Auerbach had not lit up this cigar any place where the crowd might see him, and Dolson decided that was because it was a Defeat Cigar, and though it may have looked identical to a Victory Cigar, it had a much more bitter taste.

  AS THE FOURTH GAME approached, Russell’s outlook was philosophical. He continued to talk about taking it a game at a time, but he knew how unlikely it was that the Celtics could win the next four in a row, as they would have to do if they were going to come back, and he had decided that, since he had been a good winner, he could be a good loser, too, if it came to that. Until the series was over, however, he was more than happy to make sly digs about Chamberlain. At a workout two days before the game, Russell told the collected reporters that he was impressed but not surprised by how well Chamberlain had been playing. He also said it was remarkable how thoroughly Chamberlain had changed his game, emphasizing defense and playmaking. “But he’s had a good teacher,” Russell said, adding, “and I don’t mean Hannum.”

  “Then who’s the teacher?” a reporter asked.

  “Me!” Russell shouted, and gave his famous cackle.

  With the series now at 3–0, some of the 76ers fans were predicting a sweep. Their mantra was: Win in four on the Boston floor. But the players themselves were apprehensive. Wally Jones, still feeling the aftereffects of tonsillitis, was so fatigued that, except for practices, he spent the days following game three in bed. Hal Greer came down with a serious sore throat and had to take to bed as well. More significantly, the pain in Chamberlain’s knees had grown worse with each game. Now the slightest bend in either knee sent an excruciating jolt through the leg, and he was forced to go up and down stairs sideways, to avoid bending his knees. When he arrived for practice on Friday, he could barely walk. Dr. Lorber examined him and realized that Chamberlain’s knee-joint capsules had become inflamed. Lorber instructed Chamberlain to spend the entire day receiving heat treatment on his knees. He thought that if Chamberlain remained inactive, and received heat treatment that day and the next, the inflammation might subside enough for him to at least start on Sunday. Chamberlain spent several hours each day with his knees under an infrared heat lamp, but by Saturday afternoon, when the team was leaving for Boston, he was still walking stiff-legged.

  That day, Alex Hannum’s wife, who had remained for the season at the couple’s house in Los Angeles, received several threatening telephone calls. The callers warned her that because of the large sums that had been bet on the upcoming game, her husband needed to be careful. They stopped there. Alarmed, Hannum’s wife called the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which regarded the threats as more than a prank. The 76ers had been favored to win, the police reasoned, but if they swept the series they would beat the point spread, which meant gambling syndicates stood to lose large sums of money. The calls may not have represented actual threats, they may instead have been attempts to intimidate or distract Hannum, but the Los Angeles Sheriff called the Boston Police Department, which assigned five plainclothes detectives to accompany the coach from his hotel to the Garden and remain with him until the team flew out of Logan Airport after the game. “Hannum never told us what it was about,” recalled trainer Al Domenico. “We were guessing why these detectives were following him around.”

  By the time the game started, emotions in Boston Garden were raw, even ugly. ABC had planned to televise the game nationally, but the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists had declared a strike, and Chris Schenkel and Jack Twyman, who usually covered basketball for ABC, were honoring it. Chet Forte, the director, and Chuck Howard, the producer, volunteered to call the game, but the electrical workers’ union at the Garden decided that this amounted to crossing the picket line, and they threatened to cut off the arena’s power, throwing it into darkness in the middle of the game. Auerbach, however, warned them that he would take them to court, and when the electrical workers backed down, ABC was able to proceed with the broadcast.

  Although both teams were fatigued and racked with injuries, the game was fiercely physical and high scoring, and the first half ended with the Celtics up 66–60. The antagonism on the court was heightened by Celtics fans in the upper balconies who bombarded the 76ers with coins and eggs, one egg splattering onto the suit the injured Larry Costello was wearing as he sat on the bench. Another fan tossed a firecracker into a 76ers huddle. The Celtics had their own distractions. Bill Russell was suffering such severe cramps in his left leg that he called time-outs on three occasions so trainer Joe DeLauri could massage it. Sam Jones twisted his ankle in the third quarter and had to go temporarily to the dressing room. Bailey Howell’s four-year-old daughter, who was being watched by a babysitter while his wife attended the game, fell out of a second-story window as the game was going on, breaking a leg and suffering abdominal injuries, and with time still left to play, Howell had to throw a jacket over his uniform and rush to the hospital.

  The tension felt by both teams erupted late in the fourth quarter. With Boston up by three, Sam Jones set out on a fast break down the court. The only man between him and the basket was the 76ers rookie Matt Guokas, who decided to foul Jones emphatically enough to prevent him from scoring. Guokas got both arms around Jones, who, with Guokas clinging to him, was unable even to try the shot, and the two men stumbled off the court ensnared with each other. Jones thought he could have put the game away, and was so frustrated at Guokas that he swung his fist at him. Guokas swung back. The roar of the fans became deafening as both teams surged up off their benches. A general melee broke out in mid-court, eggs hurled from the upper balconies hit G
uokas, and then a Boston fan jumped out of the stands and onto the court and tried to throw a punch at one of the 76ers before the police wrestled him down.

  In the final minute of play, Luke Jackson scored to bring Philadelphia within two. Russell received the inbounds pass and Chamberlain fouled him to stop the clock. Chamberlain’s sore knees had hampered his running and jumping throughout the game, but he thought he should be able to rebound Russell’s second foul shot if Russell, who had made only three of his seven free throws that night, missed again. Russell went to the free-throw line. A hush descended over the Garden. He aimed and sent the ball arching directly into the basket, then did the same with the second shot. That put Boston up by four, and the game ended with the Garden fans screaming, We ain’t dead! We ain’t dead!

  THE 76ERS felt that they needed to finish off the Celtics in the fifth game. If Boston won again, the series would stand at 3–2, and the Celtics would return to their hometown with the momentum having shifted in their favor. One fan made the point by hanging a poster from the first tier of Convention Hall that read: “No. 4 NOW.” For their part, the Celtics were determined to set the pace of the game, to establish an early lead and to press the 76ers for the entire forty-eight minutes. Bailey Howell had rejoined the team, having been assured that his daughter, who was in traction and wearing a cast, would recover completely, and that seemed like a good omen to Boston. So did the fact that it was the Celtics who scored first, when Russell flipped the opening tip-off to Havlicek, and he raced downcourt to make a quick layup. By the end of the first quarter, they had an eleven-point lead. Jack Ramsay, the general manager of the 76ers, had issued a plea to the Philadelphia fans to refrain from retaliating for the egg attack against their team in Boston, asking them to please leave all missiles at home. Inevitably, the fans had ignored Ramsay’s request, only now, with the 76ers so far behind, it was their own team, not the Celtics, that they pelted with garbage.

  But then the 76ers found their rhythm and began outscoring Boston, and by halftime they had narrowed the Celtics’ lead to five. In the 76ers locker room during the halftime break, Billy Cunningham told Wally Jones that the reason Jones had missed several points was because he was failing to follow through on his shots. As the second half began, Jones adjusted, and the 76ers began outscoring the Celtics by a ferocious rate. In one long sequence in the third quarter, they were putting in more than three baskets for each one the Celtics managed, and Jones made eight out of nine attempted shots. Chamberlain’s knees still bothered him, but, ignoring the pain, he was everywhere, scoring, rebounding, and making assists.

  Now the crowd pelted the Celtics with eggs, oranges, and coins. In the fourth quarter, as the Boston players looked increasingly weary and ragged, the fans began chanting, Boston is dead! Boston is dead! Some of them pulled out enormous cigars and lit them. With one minute to play, Philadelphia was up by twenty points. It was such a big lead that Hannum decided to take Chamberlain out, in order to allow him to receive a standing ovation. The crowd came to its feet, roaring approval, when Chamberlain walked off the court, but he refused to acknowledge it, taking a seat on the bench and sipping water from a paper cup.

  Though clearly exhausted and hopelessly behind, Russell refused to give up, and with less than a minute left, he raced down the court to try to block a layup by Luke Jackson. Billy Cunningham, watching, thought that Russell was playing as if he didn’t believe the scoreboard, as if he were still convinced that, regardless of the evidence, the Celtics simply never lost in the playoffs. But at the final buzzer, just seconds later, the final score stood at 140–116. The Celtics’ unbroken eight-year reign, the single greatest team record in sports history, was over.

  Once the 76ers reached the locker room, Hannum locked the doors. He wanted his players to have a few minutes by themselves, to savor their accomplishment and to acknowledge to one another the teamwork that had made it possible. Then he allowed the doors to be opened, and the reporters poured in, along with Irv Kosloff and Pennsylvania governor Raymond Shafer. Basketball teams in the playoffs usually reserved the champagne for the finals. Celebrating a mere playoff victory would under normal circumstances seem premature, but the win over Boston was so momentous that earlier in the day the 76ers front office had trucked in cases of champagne. Kosloff was not by nature a demonstrative man, but when Hal Greer drenched him with champagne, he responded by picking up a bottle, shaking it, and spraying the players.

  In the midst of all the celebration, Chamberlain remained relatively subdued, sitting on the bench and smoking a cigarette. When a photographer came up to take his picture, he waved the man away. Beating the Celtics, his goal ever since he had joined the NBA eight years earlier, had left him strangely irritable and depressed. The fact was, in a situation like this, he sometimes felt he preferred losing to winning. When you lost you could put it behind you and move on, but when you won you only succeeded in ratcheting up the tension, because the thing about winning was that you had to keep doing it. Also, Chamberlain had never succumbed to the myth of Celtics invincibility. He was convinced that the defeats he and his teams had suffered in previous playoffs were due to nothing more than bad luck. If fortune had favored them ever so slightly, they might have come out ahead in two or three of those six playoff encounters, and the notion of Celtics invincibility would never have gotten started. It had taken all year for the 76ers to pierce this myth, but they had done it, had revealed that Boston was simply another team, a good team, for sure, but not a collection of godlike immortals, not invincible. By celebrating so ecstatically, however, it seemed to Chamberlain that the 76ers were in a way acknowledging that they had bought into the myth, that they believed they had toppled a dynasty, when all they had done was beat an aging team in the second round of the playoffs to clinch the Eastern Division title.

  A few minutes later, Bill Russell entered the Philadelphia locker room, his black cape draped across his shoulders. He cut a path through the celebrating players until he reached Chamberlain and extended his hand. Chamberlain took it.

  “Great,” Russell said.

  “Right, baby,” Chamberlain said.

  “Great,” Russell said again. Then he turned and made his way back through the throng and out the door.

  21

  MUHAMMAD ALI, who had been drafted by the U.S. Army, had decided to go to prison rather than serve in Vietnam, and in early June 1967, a group of ten prominent black athletes held a secret meeting with him in Cleveland, at the Negro Industrial and Economic Union, to discuss his decision. The meeting was organized by Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns fullback, and most of the athletes were football players, but Brown also invited Bill Russell, who had known Ali since 1962, back when he was still Cassius Clay. Russell went to the meeting not to persuade Ali to change his mind but to tell him that he would support him whatever course he took. Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight title, with some people denouncing him as a traitor, and Russell felt that the attacks on him were one more indication of how rapidly race relations were deteriorating. Russell saw the election of California governor Ronald Reagan as another indication. Reagan had made attacks on welfare programs—and implicitly, it was clear to Russell, on the black people who depended on them—a centerpiece of his campaign. It seemed to Russell that more and more Americans were finding socially acceptable ways of expressing racial hostility.

  That was particularly true in Boston. Russell supported the court-ordered busing program that had gone into effect there, and to his dismay the whites in South Boston and Charlestown—prototypical Celtics fans—were violently demonstrating against it. Louise Day Hicks, who was leading the fight against the desegregation of Boston’s schools, had declared her candidacy for mayor the month before Russell’s meeting with Ali. Her campaign slogan, “You know where I stand,” was a particularly powerful example of the obvious but acceptably coded bigotry that Russell saw proliferating. When Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that Hicks’s election would be a “tragedy,” she responde
d by saying, “Dr. Martin Luther King is the real tragedy of our times.”

  But Russell had to admit that the increased tensions came from the fact that the country was making undeniable progress on some racial matters. In the fall of 1967, before the start of the regular season, he took the Celtics to play an exhibition game against the St. Louis Hawks in Alexandria, Louisiana. Russell’s grandfather, who was still alive and living in Monroe, had never seen Russell play, and so Russell’s father drove all the way from California to take him to the game. Aspects of Jim Crow segregation continued to exist in the Deep South—Louisiana courthouses, for example, still had different seating sections for “white” and “colored”—but integration had begun. When Russell’s grandfather asked where the “colored” section of the Alexandria arena was, his son told him there was none; they could sit anywhere they wanted. And when, during halftime, Russell’s grandfather said he had to go to the bathroom, his son told him that the arena did not even have a colored restroom, and they went and stood at the urinals right next to white men—something that would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier.

  After the game, the two men joined Russell in the locker room. Russell’s grandfather wandered off, and Russell found him standing by the showers crying. Russell, who had never before seen his grandfather cry, became alarmed, and asked what was the matter. “Nothing, I’m happy,” Russell’s grandfather said. He gestured to the showers, where John Havlicek and Sam Jones, a white man and a black man, stood side by side soaping up and discussing the game. “I never thought I’d see anything like that,” he said.

  The Celtics’ exhibition tour also took them to Puerto Rico, and it was there that Russell called a meeting of the team’s veterans to discuss the upcoming season. During the off-season, people had kept coming up to the Celtics—on the streets, in parking lots, in stores, and while standing in ticket lines at the movies—and asking, What happened? Havlicek, for one, got pretty tired of hearing that question. A number of the players felt that what had happened—the reason why they had lost the 1967 championship—was that Russell had simply been overburdened. It was too much to expect one man to simultaneously coach the team and play most of every game. Sam Jones had been telling people that Russell should give up one of the positions, and since he was more valuable as a player, and made most of his money from playing, what he needed to do was step aside as coach. It simply hadn’t worked.