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

by John Taylor

  Once West came out of the game, the Lakers’ lead dwindled, and then, with six minutes left, they were on the verge of losing it altogether. Coach Fred Schaus looked over at West. Back when he was a senior at West Virginia, West had broken his nose in a game against Kentucky—he broke his nose four times in college alone—but had had it packed in ice, and when Schaus sent him back into the game he had scored nineteen points. Now, just as he had done that day in the game against Kentucky eight years earlier, Schaus asked West if he was capable of playing. West nodded, stripped off his warm-up jacket, went into the game with padding on his broken nose, scored two quick field goals, and the Lakers won.

  Even with efforts like that, the Lakers finished the 1966–67 season with a 36–45 record, their worst since moving to Los Angeles. Schaus was by nature one of the most restrained coaches in the league—he made suggestions rather than give orders and would protest an official’s call by stamping his foot—and as he had gotten older, he had lost the ability, or the inclination, to drive his men. The Lakers had become a static team, content to coast on the natural gifts of West and Baylor, and by the 1966–67 season they had been overtaken in the Western Division by the Warriors. That year, they barely made it into the playoffs, and after West broke his hand, the Warriors took the series in three straight games. For Jack Kent Cooke, who was in his second year of ownership of the Lakers and also in the midst of building the Forum to showcase his new team, its dismal performance that year had been unacceptable. He decided he needed a new coach.

  Cooke wanted to go outside the NBA, to find a fresh talent instead of signing a fired coach or some assistant. Cooke had retained his respect for Schaus, making him general manager, and when he saw a copy of Sports Illustrated with Bill Bradley’s face on the cover, he asked Schaus who had coached Bradley at Princeton. Schaus told him the man was named Bill van Breda Kolff. Schaus, in fact, knew van Breda Kolff, who had played for the Knicks in the earliest days of the NBA, and he thought he would make a superb coach for the Lakers.

  The son of a Dutch American stockbroker who had played on Holland’s 1912 Olympic soccer team—which won a bronze medal—van Breda Kolff was an uncouth, fun-loving, beer-drinking former drill sergeant with big ears, a thick chin, and a bullhorn voice. He’d enrolled in Princeton, then flunked out and joined the marines. After the war, he returned to Princeton, but flunked out again, played for the Knicks, then coached basketball for eleven years at Lafayette and Hofstra before returning to Princeton for a third time, but now as basketball coach. Under his leadership Princeton became a basketball powerhouse, and in 1967 it was ranked the fifth-best basketball team in the country, becoming the first Ivy League school ever to make it into the top ten.

  When van Breda Kolff joined the Lakers in the fall of 1967, sportswriters thought that with the same starting lineup and a new coach with no pro experience, the team would show little immediate improvement. But van Breda Kolff retooled the club, restoring discipline and emphasizing team ball. During games, Butch, as everyone called him, stood on the sidelines in a sport coat, his tie clipped to his white shirt, tugging up his pants and bellowing at the referees. For Chrissakes, Manny! Can’t you call one right just once in your life? “Butch earns his technicals,” Schaus became fond of saying. Van Breda Kolff was not particularly reflective. “All I care about is my family and the guys,” he once said. “You play the game, you have a few beers, and you go home, that’s it, that’s life.” But he was emotional and fair and honest. He did not play favorites or act the courtier to his stars. In fact, he had no hesitation about yelling at them, calling Baylor a “dum-dum” in front of the other players, who nicknamed him Fang and Crazy Horse. Nonetheless, van Breda Kolff was popular with his players, who appreciated his loyalty and enthusiasm, and the fact that he left his anger on the court; after cursing at them during a game, he was happy to go out for a beer afterward.

  By mid-season, players and coach had jelled, and the Lakers had become a unified and cohesive squad relying on all five men. They passed sharply, set crisp screens, and moved smoothly from offense to defense in a rolling, fast-paced game that made the Forum fans delirious with joy. West thought they were the equal of any team in the league, particularly on defense, and in a nationally televised game against the Celtics in the Garden, they proved it. The Lakers led by thirty points at the half, built the lead to forty, and won by thirty-seven—handing the Celtics their worst defeat in two years.

  The Lakers beat Chicago in the first round of the 1968 playoffs and then routed the Warriors 4–0, avenging the humiliating sweep of the previous year. Going into the finals against the Celtics in the spring of 1968, the Lakers felt they had the younger, stronger, quicker team. They figured the Celtics had to be exhausted from the grueling series with Philadelphia. But Boston proved unexpectedly strong, taking two of the first three games, and then West, diving for a loose ball in the final seconds of game four, even though the Lakers were ahead by thirteen points, collided with John Havlicek.

  West had been absolutely bedeviled with injuries throughout the season. He’d been kneed in the thigh and hit in the face with a karate chop, had broken his left hand, bruised his hip, broken his nose twice, and pulled a groin muscle. Now, in the collision with Havlicek, he sprained his left ankle. Van Breda Kolff decided West was capable of playing, and sent him in bandaged, but the ankle was swollen and sore and he played awkwardly. With West limping, Baylor favoring his fragile knees, and Russell dominating the backboards, the Celtics could not be contained. They won the fifth game, and then, by a shocking score of 124–109, they won the sixth and final game.

  After the game, van Breda Kolff kept the press out of the Lakers dressing room while the team absorbed the defeat. The players all sat for a while in silence, and then someone said, “When do we get our playoff checks?” West was appalled. It was as if the man had been playing only for money and didn’t care whether the team won or lost. That was the difference between the Lakers and the Celtics, West decided, the determination to win. There were determined players on the Lakers, and West himself was one of the most driven, determined players in the league, but as a team they were not as determined as the Celtics. The Celtics no longer seemed the most talented team in the league, simply the most determined.

  Butch van Breda Kolff was excited about bringing Wilt Chamberlain to the Lakers. For the longest time, the team had been in the market for a player who could stand up to Bill Russell, but because the Lakers always finished so well, they rarely had a shot at the top draft picks, and in any event, players with the potential to stand up to Russell were few and far between. In fact, throughout the league, the only player who had demonstrated the ability to do so consistently was Chamberlain. The team was less enthusiastic than the coach. Jerry West thought Chamberlain was incredibly talented, clearly the biggest, most talented center in the league. But if West could have had his pick of any player in the league, he’d have taken Bill Russell, even given Russell’s advanced age. Chamberlain was stronger than Russell, in West’s view, but he lacked Russell’s flexibility and, more important, Russell’s dedication to winning and ability to rise to the occasion when the occasion demanded greatness.

  Some of the Lakers thought the acquisition of Chamberlain made little sense. It might give the team too much talent. After all, they told one another, there was only one ball. Darrall Imhoff, the Lakers’ departing center, believed chemistry could become a problem. “I don’t know if you can have any happiness with three superstars on a team,” he told an acquaintance. A few of Imhoff’s teammates worried that they were going to miss him. Imhoff was not a great rebounder, but he had worked smoothly with Baylor, setting up the pick-and-roll that allowed Elg to execute his favorite play, the drive in from the left wing. They also thought they were going to miss Archie Clark, an all-star guard who, if West was injured or fatigued, could take over and run up thirty points. This was a team that had dominated the Western Division and gone six rounds with Boston in the finals. But without Cla
rk, and without Gail Goodrich, whom the Lakers had lost to Phoenix in the expansion draft, the team had much less bench strength, particularly in the backcourt.

  “We just broke up a great team,” one of the veteran Lakers complained to van Breda Kolff after the trade was announced. “We’d been to the finals. Why make a deal like that?”

  “Look, we’ll build another great team,” van Breda Kolff said.

  Despite his profane manner, van Breda Kolff had an almost poetic appreciation for basketball. He loved the movement of the game, the rhythm, the passing, the ingenuity and improvisation, the finesse, the explosion of a fast break, the moments of inspiration, the ballet of it all. It was what he called the fluid game, and he felt the fans instinctively appreciated it, too. That was what they came to see, that was what roused them so much more than mere scoring, particularly scoring by the big men—whom van Breda Kolff called the big bulls—when they simply overpowered smaller players by driving, or bulling, their way to the basket for a dunk.

  Like Auerbach, another basketball aesthete, van Breda Kolff found the dunk an intrinsically ugly move. He felt that the dunk and the big bulls executing it were ruining basketball, and he had actually proposed that the NBA raise the basket and expand the court size so that they would reacquire the proportions they’d had to players when the league was started. But it was not merely the size of the athletes that dismayed van Breda Kolff. He also felt their attitude toward the game had changed. The good players, he thought, were interested only in their statistics—points, rebounds, assists—because that was what determined their salary. They had no motivation to play team ball. He felt that the owners, under the misguided impression that fans wanted scoring, had instructed referees to favor the big bulls in their calls, and as a result it had become almost impossible in the NBA to play defensive ball without being charged with fouling.

  Van Breda Kolff had no hesitation about airing his opinions in public, and the year before, he had given an interview to a California newspaperman who wrote an article saying that in van Breda Kolff’s view, “the officiating is ridiculous.” Commissioner Kennedy fined van Breda Kolff $250 for abusing officials in public, but that had no deterrent effect on van Breda Kolff, who also criticized players, singling out Chamberlain as particularly lazy. “He can pass well if he wants to,” he had told one reporter the previous season. “If he wants to he can play defense better than anybody in the league. If he wanted to he could be two Bill Russells on defense. But Wilt’s always been celebrated; he doesn’t know the word work. It’s not his fault. That’s just the way things are with him.”

  Now, in August, a few months after making that remark, van Breda Kolff flew out to New York and drove up to Kutsher’s Country Club for a league-wide meeting of coaches and referees to discuss rule changes. The Maurice Stokes charity game was scheduled to coincide with the meeting, and Chamberlain was playing in it. Van Breda Kolff brought a Lakers jersey with him and asked Chamberlain to put it on for the photographer. But Chamberlain had been insulted by van Breda Kolff’s comments, and, deciding to give the coach a taste of what it was like to try to handle him, he refused to put on the jersey. They went back and forth about it. Van Breda Kolff felt that Chamberlain was seeing what he could get away with, and Chamberlain felt the coach was trying to boss him around. He continued to refuse, and finally van Breda Kolff, insulted himself, had to give up. It was an inauspicious beginning.

  THE LAKERS started their training camp in late September at the Loyola University gym. After a photo day, van Breda Kolff closed the workouts, explaining that the twelve players, including Chamberlain and four rookies trying to land positions, needed to become acquainted in private. That was a logical move, but with the heightened curiosity over Chamberlain, it inevitably led to speculation that van Breda Kolff was trying to hide something. According to one rumor circulated by reporters, he and Chamberlain were hardly on speaking terms. It was true that Chamberlain remained just as uncooperative as he’d been the previous month at Kutsher’s. By the third day of practice, he had stopped running with the team, saying he needed to spare his knees. Van Breda Kolff felt it would be unfair, and create serious problems, if he allowed Chamberlain to loaf while forcing Baylor and West to work hard, but Chamberlain was so obviously unenthusiastic that the other players said they preferred to practice without him, and the coach gave up.

  He had other concerns. It was obvious to everyone in the league that without Gail Goodrich and Archie Clark, the Lakers lacked bench strength, particularly in the backcourt. “The Lakers better shore up their backcourt or the glamour boys are going to have trouble,” Auerbach told a friend. Schaus began calling other coaches to discuss the availability of their guards. One of those Schaus called was Bill Russell, to ask about Larry Siegfried, and Russell gleefully recounted the call to a Los Angeles sportswriter, explaining that he’d said he was willing to trade Siegfried for Chamberlain. “I told him I needed a backup center. He said, ‘You can’t have [Mel] Counts. He’s not for sale.’ I told him I didn’t want him, I wanted the other center he had, Whatsisname, the one you got from Philadelphia. He’d make a good backup center.”

  At the end of training camp, van Breda Kolff formally added rookie Bill Hewitt to the roster. Hewitt was a gangly, imperturbable six-seven forward who could alternate with Mel Counts playing opposite Baylor in the frontcourt. Van Breda Kolff also acquired Keith Erickson, a large, quick-handed guard from Chicago, and Johnny Egan, a ballhandling backcourt man from the Milwaukee Bucks. At six feet tall, Egan had the distinction of being the shortest man in the league, and sportswriters almost invariably described him as “little Johnny Egan.” But Egan could press and scramble. He used his small stature to advantage, darting around taller but slower men, and van Breda Kolff figured that all Chamberlain needed to do was pick up rebounds and get them out to Egan or West or Baylor—the three of them could run the fast break as well as anyone in the league.

  With all the additions to the roster and the reconfiguring of existing players, the Lakers felt to Jerry West more or less like an entirely new team. And they were as awkward as colts. In their first game of the season, in Philadelphia, the 76ers destroyed them, running up a lead that for a spell exceeded thirty points because the way Chamberlain was playing, under the basket, impeded his teammates from scoring. When van Breda Kolff benched him, the Lakers rallied but failed to win, then went on to lose three of their first four games. The team was still out of shape and disorganized, but the main problem was the difficulty the other players were having in adjusting to Chamberlain’s presence.

  To the less important players such as Mel Counts, Chamberlain seemed moody, intimidating, and distant, but that was in large part due to the fact that Chamberlain’s father was dying of cancer. In late October, his father finally passed away, and Chamberlain became even more depressed. The depression exacerbated the usual problems he had with insomnia on road trips, slowed him a step or two on the court, and made him irritable around the dressing room. Chamberlain did get along with Jerry West, whose skills complemented his, but even so, West thought the Lakers were not ideally suited to Chamberlain, who seemed to work best on a team that played a slower game and had good outside shooters who could score from the perimeter and leave the paint to him. Chamberlain liked to set up in the low post on the left side, but when he did this he blocked Baylor’s drive from the left wing to the basket, and that threw Baylor’s entire game off.

  Also, Chamberlain was used to being regarded by his teammates as the central figure in the dressing room, the dominant personality, the one the others turned to for validation and the final word in a crisis, and in Elgin Baylor he was facing a man who had for the last ten years been regarded as the leader of the Lakers. Baylor and Chamberlain quickly developed a competitive relationship marked by sarcasm and hostile humor. Baylor would tell Chamberlain he had hands like a blacksmith’s and Chamberlain would taunt Baylor with his superior statistics. To make matters worse, they had political differences in a yea
r of intense political polarization and upheaval. The 1968 presidential election campaign had begun in earnest after Labor Day, and Chamberlain supported Richard Nixon—he had been at the Republican convention in Miami—while Baylor was out campaigning for Hubert Humphrey. Van Breda Kolff, trying to make light of the matter, told an acquaintance, “If Jerry comes out for George Wallace, we’ll be in trouble.”

  But Chamberlain’s egotistical jockeying with Baylor was nothing compared to his mounting conflict with van Breda Kolff. The tension and suspicion that first surfaced at Kutsher’s Country Club had increased during training camp, and once the season began, the two men were constantly at odds. The coach instructed Chamberlain to play the high post out by the free-throw line on offense, to free up the lane and make it easier for Baylor to drive. Chamberlain argued that this took him out of position for rebounding, and since he had readjusted his style of play away from heavy scoring, this was one of his key contributions in any game. Chamberlain also felt that, seeing as this was now his ninth season in the NBA and only van Breda Kolff’s second, he simply had more experience than his coach and did not like being told what to do. During one practice, when van Breda Kolff criticized one of Chamberlain’s moves, the player waved his hand dismissively at the coach and said, “I know what’s best.”

  “Forget it!” van Breda Kolff shouted back. “Just forget I said anything!”

  Instead of finding a means to demand Chamberlain’s respect, as Alex Hannum had managed to do on two different teams, or of charming him and pretending to defer to him while actually guiding him, as Frank McGuire had done, van Breda Kolff continued with his futile confrontational approach, giving Chamberlain orders and then, when Chamberlain ignored them, acting disgusted but helpless. Van Breda Kolff’s task, however, was complicated by the fact that Chamberlain now had no particular motive to cooperate with his coach. He was no longer desperate to prove he could beat Bill Russell and win a championship, since he’d already done that, and he was now making so much more money than his coach, and was so much more celebrated, that the idea of deferring to him seemed illogical.