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

by John Taylor

  Strangely enough, the size of the gap between the two teams became a source of inspiration for the Celtics, who became determined that if they were going to lose, it would at least be by a smaller margin. Before game five, Havlicek wrote the word PRIDE on the blackboard in the dressing room. Auerbach had never been one for inspirational talks before a game, and Russell was even more laconic, but before the game he told his team, “We’ve come so far, and I don’t want to go home now.” Then he turned to Don Nelson, whose hometown was Moline, Illinois. “Don, you don’t want to go back to Moline yet, do you?” he asked.

  The joke loosened up the Celtics, who were aware that the 76ers were not as invincible as the sportswriters seemed to think. Billy Cunningham was out, having broken his wrist in three places after colliding with Knicks rookie Phil Jackson in the first round of the playoffs. Luke Jackson, who had torn a hamstring muscle in that same series, had reinjured it against the Celtics. Wally Jones had an injured knee. Chamberlain had bruised his right big toe, the one he used to turn in the pivot. And he was also suffering from shin splints, as he did at the end of almost every season, the result of the cumulative pounding that his immense body gave his lower legs over the course of some one hundred games. On top of that, he was playing with his right knee wrapped after pulling his calf muscle in the opening tip-off of game three.

  Boston, led by Havlicek, overcame the odds, outhustling the tired 76ers, and when game five was over they were out in front by a startling eighteen points. They had won after convincing themselves the Boston Celtics simply could never lose a playoff series by a margin of 4–1. The Celtics were taking it one game at a time, of course, but they had managed to find a logical imperative for victory in game five, and now they found a different logical imperative for game six. Game six was played in the Garden, and while they had lost both games played in the home arena so far, they felt they were destined to win at least one there. They pressed the faltering 76ers, who missed three out of every four field goals and lost by eight points. That evened the series and brought it to the seventh game, and the logical imperative to victory that now applied for the Celtics was that they never lost the seventh game.

  In a long, exhausting series such as this, determination was critical, and the Celtics, having dug themselves out of the hole, also knew by now that they were simply more determined than the 76ers. The match took place in the Spectrum, where a banner hanging from the balcony said, Boston is dead, and it was close, but the Celtics were playing evenly and consistently, everybody contributing, while on the 76ers Chamberlain took only one shot from the field in the second half, and missed. Boston won by four, and when it was over, some of the team’s fans who had come down for the game raised a green banner that said, Celtics Rule Again.

  For the rest of his life, Alex Hannum blamed himself for the defeat. The 76ers had the better team, he thought, and they should have beaten the Celtics as easily as they had the previous year. Instead, they were thrown off by the King assassination, and then angered by being told they were going to go ahead and play game one. Hannum felt that if he had called a meeting like Auerbach had done, his team would have had a chance to collect itself and could have taken game one and possibly swept the series instead of losing it.

  Sportswriters would later consider Boston’s come-from-behind triumph over Philadelphia to be one of the greatest accomplishments of the Celtics dynasty. In the Herald-Traveler, Tim Horgan called it “more surprising than an American winning the [Boston] marathon; more amazing than the Bruins making the playoffs; more astounding than four successive Red Sox pitchers going the route at Fenway Park.” 18* But the series was overshadowed by the upheavals of that tumultuous year—war, assassinations, riots, protests, the presidential election—and when the Celtics flew home from Los Angeles the following month after winning their tenth championship in twelve years, only seventy-five fans showed up at Logan Airport to greet them.

  22

  TEN DAYS after the season ended for the 76ers, Alex Hannum announced that he was leaving the team and soon after that signed on to coach the American Basketball Association’s new franchise in Oakland. Irving Kosloff needed to find a new coach, and Chamberlain, aware of the increased stature Bill Russell had acquired as player-coach of the Celtics, offered his services. He also wanted more money, a three-year contract, and some form of equity in the team. Kosloff turned him down and named Jack Ramsay, the general manager and former coach of St. Joseph’s University, to be the coach as well. Chamberlain’s one-year contract had expired, and even if he wasn’t going to become coach, he wanted more money. But both Ramsay and Kosloff felt that Chamberlain had been overpaid as it was, and had no intention of raising his salary. In fact, as had Franklin Mieuli when Chamberlain was with the Warriors in San Francisco, Kosloff had come to the conclusion that regardless of the man’s talent, he could not consistently produce championships, and what he brought in at the gate was not worth the aggravation and expense of keeping him on the roster. “You’re free to go make any deal with any team you want,” Kosloff told him.

  Not only did Kosloff release Chamberlain, he actively tried to find him a new home. The year before, when he was planning to renegotiate his contract with the 76ers, Chamberlain had told the sportswriter Merv Harris that he might be interested in playing for the Los Angeles Lakers, and Harris, who knew the Lakers’ new owner, Jack Kent Cooke, had passed this information along. Cooke had called Kosloff for his permission to approach Chamberlain, but Kosloff had said Chamberlain was not available. Now, a year later, Cooke was in his hotel room during a business trip to New York when he received a call from Kosloff, asking him if he’d be interested in acquiring Chamberlain.

  Cooke had wanted to bring Chamberlain to the Lakers ever since he’d bought the team from Bob Short in 1965. In Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, Cooke felt, the Lakers had two of the most outstanding players the league had ever seen, but the team continued to be frustrated in its quest for a championship, at times by just a mere two points, because it lacked an outstanding center. Darrall Imhoff, the personable Lakers center for the last four years, played only a supporting role on offense but was good on defense and more than adequate during the regular season. What it came down to was that he did not have the firepower to take on Bill Russell in the finals. Now the greatest center ever to have played the game, the one man who’d beaten Russell, was being offered to Cooke, and not only that, his availability came at a most propitious time for the owner.

  The Lakers’ new arena, the Forum, which Cooke had spent $16.5 million to build, had opened in suburban Inglewood in the beginning of the year. It had bars and restaurants, elevators and air-conditioning, and space for 4,000 cars and 16,602 basketball fans. Some architecture critics thought that the building, with its arches and its columns and its circular shape, intended to evoke a Roman amphitheater, was in extremely bad taste, but Cooke was immensely proud of the place. “Never call it an arena,” he wrote in a memo to his staff. “It’s the Fabulous Forum or sports theater.” The Forum was on the way to attracting more than two million spectators and grossing some $15 million by the end of its first year, featuring auto racing, boxing, hockey, tennis, ice skating, horse shows, the circus, concerts—Cooke had made a standing offer of $200,000 to the Beatles, who had stopped performing, for a three-night engagement—and of course basketball. The Lakers had gone to the finals five times in the last seven years, and season tickets were selling at unprecedented levels. If the arena was only two-thirds filled for the Lakers’ forty home games, Cooke stood to gross some $2.5 million in basketball revenues from ticket sales alone. That did not count television revenue, nor the revenue from the additional fifteen to twenty playoff games if the Lakers, as they almost undoubtedly would, went all the way to the finals. Those games, which would be close to sold out, could bring in upwards of an additional $1 million. The way Cooke saw it, Chamberlain could be a big draw in what was now among the largest arenas in the league.

  With his side-vent suits and b
lack knit ties, his booming voice and florid vocabulary and the relentless belief in himself that irritated people less singularly driven, Jack Kent Cooke had presence. Originally from Canada, he had started out selling encyclopedias, began buying and selling radio stations for the publisher Roy Thomson, and became a master at identifying undervalued assets, then revitalizing and flipping them. By the time he was in his mid-thirties he was worth a reported $20 million. One of the first investors to sense the huge growth potential in professional sports, Cooke in 1961 had bought a 25-percent interest in the Washington Redskins for $350,000 that would be worth $4 million ten years later. By the mid-sixties, the price of basketball franchises was rising exponentially. Ike Richman and Irv Kosloff had paid some $500,000 for the Nats in 1963; a year later the Baltimore franchise sold for $1.2 million; and in 1965 the Celtics had been sold by Marjorie Brown and Lou Pieri for $3 million. A few months later, on September 15, 1965, Cooke paid a record $5.175 million to acquire the Lakers. He had at that point never seen a live professional basketball game.

  For all his buoyant optimism, Cooke was an unforgiving perfectionist, and turnover within his organization was constant. At the press conference announcing his acquisition of the Lakers, he had glanced purposefully at coach Fred Schaus and said, “I have never been able to announce why a pro basketball or baseball team cannot win every game.” The message was clear: the new owner had a huge amount of money, and was willing to spend it, but he wanted—or demanded—a winning team. Though he knew virtually nothing about basketball when he bought the team, Cooke and his wife and his entourage of friends watched from courtside seats directly across from the Lakers bench, and they all cheered the players when they were ahead and castigated them when they fell behind. Cooke himself actually yelled more loudly and more angrily than Schaus, and also got into the habit of paying visits to the dressing room afterward, critiquing a player’s game in front of other players. The players hated it. So did Coach Schaus. They all felt the pressure and got frantic about winning every single game. They could never just go out and play. But none of them dared criticize Cooke publicly until Rudy LaRusso spoke up, and he did so only after he was traded.

  Cooke had since become more adept at handling his athletes, but he was still an interventionist, and instead of delegating the job of courting Chamberlain to his coach or general manager, he took it on himself, inviting the player to his Bel Air mansion, where they discussed their shared passion for English cars. Five other teams were interested in acquiring Chamberlain, and Seymour Goldberg, a Los Angeles attorney who had been recommended to Wilt by Ike Richman, handled the negotiations. Sam Schulman, the owner of the Seattle SuperSonics, made Chamberlain an offer 35 percent higher than Cooke’s initial offer, but Chamberlain preferred Los Angeles to Seattle. He owned his apartment complex, the thirty-two-unit Villa Chamberlain in central Los Angeles, where his parents stayed part of each year. His father had cancer, and if he lived in Los Angeles he could spend time with him, so when Cooke agreed to match Schulman’s offer, Chamberlain told Goldberg to take it.

  But before the contract could be drawn up, Chamberlain received a call from Bill Sharman, who had become coach of the Los Angeles Stars, one of the teams in the new American Basketball Association. Attendance was dismal at the young league, but it had recently begun stealing players from the NBA—Rookie of the Year Rick Barry of the San Francisco Warriors was one—and some of the owners and coaches thought that if the ABA could attract Wilt Chamberlain, he might, all on his own, provide the star power to make the league a success. Since Wilt had no real desire to play in the new league, which was desperate enough to hire players who had been banned from the NBA, Goldberg advised him to consider it only if its owners agreed to pay him an exorbitant amount of money. “Wilt, I’m going to get you a million bucks,” Goldberg told Chamberlain. The basketball player, stretched out on the floor in his living room, kicked his bare feet in the air with glee.

  Chamberlain and Goldberg met with Jim Kirst, the owner of the Stars, and George Mikan, the commissioner of the ABA, at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Goldberg said that Chamberlain would not consider leaving the NBA for less than $1 million. If that was too large a sum for the Stars to shoulder alone, he said, the league’s wealthy team owners could each contribute to a pool to make it up, since the entire league would benefit from Chamberlain’s presence. “You’ll make it back in no time,” Goldberg said.

  Mikan found the idea appealing, but before a formal offer could be made, all the owners in the new league would have to vote on the proposed $1 million pool. As Mikan was polling the owners to find out if they’d be willing to contribute to the pool, one of the owners opposed to the idea leaked the story, and on July 4, 1968, an article in the Los Angeles Times described the hitherto secret negotiations. That angered the other owners, disrupting the negotiations, and also jeopardized Chamberlain’s unsigned deal with the Lakers. Jim Hardy, the manager of the Stars, later insisted that Wilt had made a handshake agreement to join the ABA but that when the story of the discussions broke, the NBA threatened to take him to court because the league’s reserve clause prevented him from playing for any other professional basketball team, not just those in the NBA. Whether or not the clause was legally valid, the litigation would have been long and costly, and a court order might have kept Chamberlain from playing until it was resolved. Once the story broke, Hardy told the Los Angeles Times, “Chamberlain obviously was intimidated into believing his signing with us would have been extremely costly to him.”

  Chamberlain denied that he had made a handshake agreement with the ABA, and Cooke insisted no pressure had been brought to bear by the NBA, but they both moved quickly to complete their own deal and three days later announced it during a press conference at the Forum. Television cameras and news photographers surrounded Cooke and Chamberlain as they stood behind a podium set up beneath a basket on the court. Chamberlain looked snappy in an electric-blue suit and a matching tie and handkerchief. “The Celtics have been a team of specialists, and for the last three or four years the Lakers have been the same type of team,” he said. “All they needed was a little more firepower at center.”

  In return for Chamberlain, the 76ers were receiving Darrall Imhoff, Archie Clark, and Jerry Chambers, three players who had certain talents but were not stars, and the consensus held that, as had happened when Frank Mieuli traded Chamberlain from the San Francisco Warriors in 1965, the new owner had gotten him for next to nothing in terms of basketball talent. “It is as if the Niblets people traded the Jolly Green Giant to Heinz for a soup recipe and two vats of pickles,” Joe Jares wrote in Sports Illustrated.

  The terms of the deal were not announced, but it was widely reported to be $250,000 a year for four years. Subsequent litigation revealed that Chamberlain had signed a contract to play for three seasons at $200,000 a season. In addition, Cooke gave him a loan at 4 percent to acquire a $100,000 interest in Cooke’s cable television company, and a second loan to make investments in certain tax shelters. Over the long run, Wilt’s attorney, Sy Goldberg, realized, these investments would prove much more lucrative for Chamberlain than the $1 million in cash he would have received from the ABA.

  Chamberlain took great satisfaction in claiming that the contract made him the highest-paid athlete in the world. “It’s for plenty of bucks, baby, plenty of bucks,” he told his friend Milton Gross. Chamberlain’s critics argued that he was overpaid and that his huge salary would create resentment among the other Lakers, particularly Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, but Chamberlain argued that his record-setting contract created a precedent that would allow all athletes to demand better salaries. “What I’ve done has been good for the other guys,” he told Gross.

  The deal did in fact make Chamberlain one of the three highest-paid athletes in the country. (The other two were Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts and John Brodie of the San Francisco 49ers, both of whom had long-term contracts valued at $1 million.) It also meant the Lakers now had the
biggest payroll in the history of the NBA. In addition to the approximately $250,000 Chamberlain was earning, Cooke was paying Elgin Baylor and Jerry West both $100,000. Rookie Bill Hewitt had received a $25,000 signing bonus and a three-year contract at $25,000 a year. “The payroll is a little scary,” commented Los Angeles Times columnist John Hall.

  But Cooke had also now assembled a team whose combined talent had no equal anywhere in the league. In fact, some sportswriters felt that the Lakers were now so manifestly superior that no other team could hope to truly challenge them. “The Los Angeles Lakers may be the first team to clinch the National Basketball Assn. championship five days after the fourth of July,” George Kiseda wrote in the Philadelphia Bulletin. “With Wilt Chamberlain joining Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, Ronald Reagan and Doris Day could play the other two positions for them.” But Jim Murray, the archly sardonic columnist for the Los Angeles Times, predicted trouble. “The only thing Wilt can’t do is get along with his fellow players, owners, coaches, fans, and writers,” he wrote. “That’s why the Philadelphia 76ers are putting him out on a ‘make-offer’ basis. It’s nothing personal with Wilt. It’s just that his presence overwhelms everybody within a radius of fifteen miles. The rest of the act become spear carriers.”

  CHAMBERLAIN was joining a team with one of the most passionate, heroic, and admired players in the league, Jerry West. No one in the NBA was more dedicated or self-sacrificing. West had shown these qualities time and again, perhaps most spectacularly in a game more than a year earlier, on March 7, 1967. That day, against the Knicks, Willis Reed’s elbow caught West in the nose, breaking it, and he was led off the court feeling dizzy and bleeding profusely. West refused to go to the dressing room, however, and the trainer put packing in his nose. “You swallow some blood and get nauseous,” West said later. “That’s the hardest part of it.”