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

by John Taylor

  Russell was not about to do that. Resigning would have been an open acknowledgment that he had been a failure. But he had spent the off-season reviewing his performance. He decided that, because he had been overly aware of his own inexperience, and overly sensitive about it, he’d been too preoccupied with establishing his authority. Unwilling to appear indecisive, he’d failed to ask the other players for their suggestions and had paid little notice when they’d been made unsolicited. At times, while on the court, he’d also become so caught up in playing the game that he stopped paying attention to things that, as a coach, he should have noticed, such as whether one of his teammates needed a rest.

  The six veterans that Russell had invited to his room in Puerto Rico for the private meeting were John Havlicek, Satch Sanders, Sam Jones, Bailey Howell, Don Nelson, and Wayne Embry. He told the players that this room at the moment contained a century’s worth of basketball experience. He asked if they would let him tap into that knowledge and told them to feel free to criticize his own play if he deserved it. When the season got under way, the players began taking Russell up on his suggestion, particularly Havlicek, the team captain, who also served as a sort of assistant coach, there being no actual assistant coaches. As Russell had aged, he had developed a tendency, after rebounding the ball and passing it out, to jog up to half-court and watch the action unfold rather than hustling all the way down and plunging into it himself. If Havlicek was on the bench on such occasions, he began yelling, Get down there, Russ! and Russell would give a start and then move on downcourt.

  JERRY WEST had broken his hand in the opening minutes of the first round of the Western Division playoffs in 1967, and the Lakers had been swept by the Warriors, who also beat the Hawks to win the Western Division title. The Warriors were now coached by former Celtic Bill Sharman and had, in Rick Barry and Nate Thurmond, the top scorer and the best young center in the NBA. The 76ers had beaten them easily in the finals, however, and Chamberlain had become, for the first time since he was in high school, a champion. The Sporting News named him Player of the Year, declaring, “The greatest point producer in basketball history, Chamberlain deliberately sacrificed what could have been his eighth straight scoring title in the interest of team play.”

  Despite the victory and the acclaim, Chamberlain became discontented in the summer of 1967. He always maintained that, in return for signing with the 76ers, Ike Richman had promised to give him an equity position in the team when he left the league. Such an arrangement would have violated NBA rules, but Richman was a shrewd and creative attorney who knew how to structure any deal so it satisfied all the legal technicalities. To circumvent the rules, Richman had never committed any such agreement to writing, and when he died, Irv Kosloff said he had no knowledge of an agreement, did not consider it legally enforceable, and would not honor it. “I know nothing about it and I can’t do anything about it,” he told Chamberlain. Kosloff also told Chamberlain that Richman’s share in some harness horses that Chamberlain and Richman had bought together was actually the property of the 76ers. Kosloff’s position infuriated Chamberlain, and although he still had one year to go on his existing contract, he refused to appear at training camp until it was renegotiated.

  In the end, Kosloff agreed to give Chamberlain a lump sum for his putative share in the 76ers, throw out his current contract, and sign a one-year deal for $250,000. But by the time the deal was announced, Chamberlain had missed training camp and all but the final exhibition game. Alex Hannum declared himself pleased with the outcome, telling reporters he’d rather have Wilt report a month late and come satisfied than arrive on time but unhappy. Hannum was afraid, however, that Chamberlain’s eagerness to pick a quarrel with Kosloff meant that the commitment to the team he’d shown the previous year had faded. When Chamberlain finally did catch up with the 76ers, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where they were playing the final exhibition match, the scheduled start of the game was only minutes away and the locker room was deserted.

  “Where is everybody?” Chamberlain asked Hannum.

  “You’ve been away,” Hannum replied dryly, “but basketball teams usually go onto the court to warm up before a game.”

  The huge size of Chamberlain’s deal had already provoked some complaints among his teammates, who felt they had all contributed to the championship and that the rewards should have been distributed more equitably. One player joked that Chamberlain should present each member of the team with a check for $10,000, and Hal Greer demanded that his salary be raised from $25,000 a year to close to $40,000. The championship the 76ers had won the previous season, instead of uniting a tight team even further, was pulling it apart. Chamberlain himself remained annoyed with Irv Kosloff despite the settlement, and this undercut his enthusiasm on the court. Also, once the regular season began, Chamberlain felt that he had no particular goal with which to motivate himself. Repeating as national champion seemed insufficiently challenging; the Celtics had been easily beatable the year before, and it was hard to see how, since they were all now even older and slower, they could prove more difficult this year. And anyway, simply winning games was not that rewarding to Chamberlain. Track and field had been his first sport, and he had always retained the track star’s passion for setting records. Since Chamberlain had already set records in scoring and rebounding, there didn’t seem to be much left to do, and so he decided he’d try to lead the league in assists.

  Never before had anyone other than a guard set the record for assists. Guards brought the ball up the court, established the pace of the game, and determined who got the ball for what play. As a result, one of a team’s two guards usually controlled the ball for 90 percent or more of the team’s time of possession. A center typically had the ball for little more than 5 percent of the time. Chamberlain felt that if he could lead the league in assists, in setting up other players to score, while controlling the ball for such a short period of time, it would be the least predictable and therefore the most impressive of his records. As the season progressed, Chamberlain stopped going to the basket very often and instead concentrated on passing off to his teammates, even if he was in position to make the shot himself. He became angry if teammates to whom he passed the ball then passed it to someone else, since that meant he would not get an assist on the shot taken, and he favored Billy Cunningham and Wally Jones, players who tended to shoot as soon as they got the ball. In one game, against San Francisco, Chamberlain did not take a single shot through all four quarters. He began to seem bored by basketball, and his play at times became almost criminally sloppy. In December, he set a league record by missing twenty-two free throws in a single game.

  The 76ers were leading the Eastern Division, but not by the same margin as last year, and the Philadelphia press began to complain that Chamberlain needed to score more often if the team was going to win a second championship. Hannum had not endorsed Chamberlain’s goal of leading the league in assists. To the contrary, he wanted Chamberlain to go to the basket consistently, but Wilt was ignoring his instructions. So Hannum decided he had to embarrass Chamberlain into shooting. In December, after a game with St. Louis, Hannum told a reporter he was afraid that since Wilt no longer used some of his old moves, he might actually have lost them for good. Wilt read the quote in the paper the next day, and on a plane to Chicago, he sat down beside Hannum and showed him the article. “Did you see this?” he asked.

  Hannum said he had seen it.

  “Did you say this?” he asked.

  “If it’s there, I guess I did,” Hannum replied.

  The next night, as Hannum had anticipated, Chamberlain made it his mission to prove Hannum wrong, and he scored sixty-eight points against the Bulls. He also ran up scores of forty-seven and fifty-three in the two following games. But Chamberlain was nonetheless irritated with his coach. He felt that, by pressing him to score, Hannum was thwarting his plan to lead the league in assists, and that turned him against the one coach who had led him to a championship. In mid-season, on a flight
home after losing to the Celtics in Boston, Hannum tried to give the team a pep talk about the importance of winning, but Chamberlain interrupted him. “I think there are more important things than winning,” he declared. “I think you have to learn how to lose, too.”

  Chamberlain went on to tell Hannum he disagreed with the coach’s priorities and values. What particularly pissed him off, he said, was the fact that Hannum shook the hand of every player in the locker room after a game if the team won, but did not do so if the team lost. Chamberlain told Hannum he felt that, in doing this, Hannum failed to take into account individual effort. What if one player had a great night but the team lost? What if one player had a lousy night but the team won? Chamberlain said he didn’t feel like he deserved a handshake if the team won but he had a lousy night. “It makes me feel like a hypocrite,” Chamberlain said. “I think you’re a hypocrite when you do it.”

  The atmosphere in the cabin turned frigid. “I have to place a premium on winning,” Hannum explained. He said he was sorry that Chamberlain did not like shaking hands, but that he would go on extending his hand to Wilt after a win and Wilt could take it or not as he chose. The Bulletin’s George Kiseda, who was on the plane, witnessed the exchange and felt that after such open hostility it was going to be almost impossible for Hannum and Chamberlain ever to repair their relationship.

  AT NINE O’CLOCK in the evening of Thursday, April 4, 1968, a gang of young black men stopped a car driven by a white man on Blue Hill Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated while standing on the balcony of a Memphis hotel an hour earlier, and the radios in the stores along Blue Hill Avenue were full of the news. As bystanders watched, the young black men pulled the white man from his car and beat him senseless; then, as he lay on the sidewalk, they began rocking his car back and forth, trying to overturn it.

  That night and the following day, similar acts of violence broke out in forty-six cities across the country, a wave of shooting, rock throwing, assault, arson, vandalism, and looting that left fourteen people dead. Police set curfews, ordered liquor stores closed, and used tear gas to disperse rioting gangs. In Washington, D.C., alone, more than 350 people were injured and more than 800 people were arrested. Amid all the outpourings of grief and rage, the blanket news coverage, and the grim television images, most people forgot that the first game in the playoff series between Boston and Philadelphia was scheduled for that night.

  For all the friction between Wilt Chamberlain and Alex Hannum, the 76ers had finished in first place in the Eastern Division. They had taken an early lead, had never been truly challenged by any other team, and had finished eight games ahead of the second-place Celtics. Chamberlain had led the league in both assists and rebounds, and since no other player had ever done so simultaneously, that in itself was another record. The 76ers had beaten the Knicks in the first round, the Celtics had done the same to the Pistons, and now, the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, they were supposed to begin the series to determine the Eastern Division winner.

  Bill Russell was at home in Reading when he heard the news of King’s murder, and he was so shocked by it that he was unable to sleep that night. He had known King. He and his wife had worked for the Boston chapter of the NAACP. He had been there when King gave his speech on the Boston Common, and he had been in Washington, D.C., when King gave his “I have a dream” speech. Russell had not agreed with King on everything, particularly his policy of nonviolence. The way Russell saw it, if the apostles of nonviolence were being gunned down in the streets, nonviolence didn’t seem to be getting them very much. Still, Russell had a great deal of respect for King. It was as if King had been the last buffer holding back all the black rage, and now his death had unleashed it, and it looked like the whole country was going to go up in flames. Everything he had been saying all these years, it seemed to Russell, all the things that had earned him the label the Angry Negro, were coming true.

  Auerbach called an emergency meeting of the Celtics early in the afternoon, before their plane left for Philadelphia for the opening game, to discuss whether the team should play that night. Downtown, in Post Office Square, a rally of 10,000 people protesting King’s death snarled traffic, and the Celtics had difficulty getting to the Garden. Once they arrived they found that their reactions to the killing varied. While Russell and the other blacks were still in shock, Bailey Howell, who was white and from Louisiana, saw no reason to cancel the game. What was the big deal about Martin Luther King? he wanted to know. The man was just another minister. Would they cancel the game if Billy Graham or, for that matter, if the Pope died? Howell said he just didn’t get it. Russell himself was in no mood to play, but he thought that with rioting still going on in Philadelphia and elsewhere, if they postponed the game at this late time, the 12,000 unruly fans might use that as an excuse to take to the streets. The other blacks on the team agreed, and the Celtics decided they would play.

  Fog rolled through the streets of Philadelphia that afternoon, bringing traffic almost to a halt and hiding the signs of the sporadic rioting the city had endured. In the middle of the afternoon, Chamberlain had called the 76ers general manager, Jack Ramsay, to say he didn’t want to play, but Ramsay pointed out that tickets had been sold, all the players had a contractual obligation to play, and if the game was canceled the crowd could turn ugly. Later in the afternoon, Chamberlain received a call from Russell saying the Celtics had decided to play, and the two men agreed that it would be a bad idea to risk angering the fans.

  But unlike Red Auerbach, Alex Hannum did not call a special meeting to discuss the assassination. The 76ers had had no meeting or practice scheduled for the day—they were just supposed to show up before game time—and so when Hannum heard that the Celtics had voted to play, he decided on his own that the 76ers would play as well. Chamberlain learned how his teammates felt only when they all drifted in separately before the game. The Celtics also arrived, and when the members of the two teams discussed what to do, racial divisions cropped up. Bailey Howell pointed out that Martin Luther King wasn’t the president of the United States. He wanted to know why King’s death merited the cancellation of an NBA playoff game.

  The remark incensed the black players. Seven of the twelve Celtics were black, and so were six of the nine 76ers. Both teams had fielded all-black lineups. The NBA was more integrated than any league in professional sports, and unlike eight years ago, in Southern cities its black athletes could now sleep in the same hotels as their white teammates. Those advances were in part the result of the civil rights movement that King had led. Maybe this game should be canceled out of respect to King or played as a testament to the fulfillment of his dreams, but either way, the black players felt, the matter should be deliberated.

  Chamberlain became increasingly agitated. The Celtics, he felt, had had an opportunity to come together and decide as a team what to do, but the 76ers had had no such opportunity. And so, twenty minutes before game time, Chamberlain declared that the 76ers were going to put it to a vote, and ordered everyone except his teammates out of the dressing room. Once the staff people left, the atmosphere in the room turned dispirited. No one said much. None of the black starters wanted to play. But Hal Greer thought it was too late to call off the game, and Chet Walker, who was too depressed to consider the vote anything more than a charade, abstained. With only Chamberlain and Wally Jones actually voting against playing, the team decided to take the floor and silently filed through the door and out into the corridor.

  Philadelphia was still under the limited state of emergency declared by Mayor James Tate, and there were nearly one thousand empty seats that night at the 76ers’ new arena, the Spectrum Center. The fans who did appear gave the 76ers a standing ovation when they came onto the court, grateful to them simply for showing up, but once play began they were subdued, and more than half of them left before the end of the game. The 76ers, unable to muster any enthusiasm, put up almost no fight, and Boston defeated
them solidly.

  The second game was delayed for three days in honor of King, and both Russell and Chamberlain flew to Atlanta and joined the somber funeral cortege that followed the mule-drawn wagon carrying the body of the slain civil rights leader through the city’s streets. When the series resumed on Wednesday night, the two centers were emotionally drained, and other players such as Chet Walker were still bitter about playing the opening game the day after the murder. King’s death had made Walker feel enraged and helpless, and being forced to play a basketball game on the day when blacks across the country were grieving for their lost leader had only compounded it.

  Despite the emotional turmoil of its black players, the 76ers were favored to win the series, and they did beat Boston in the next three games, creating an apparently unsurpassable 3–1 lead. No team in playoff history had come back from a 3–1 deficit, and a consensus existed among Boston sportswriters that the series was all but over. “The Celtics have seen the Garden for the last time until October,” Cliff Keane wrote in the Globe. “When the Celtics fell three behind,” said Tim Horgan in the Herald-Traveler, “I filed them under the W’s for ‘Wait ’til next year’ and took myself off to Fenway Park.”