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

by John Taylor

  A month into the season, Chamberlain’s lack of respect for van Breda Kolff had deepened into contempt, and he began complaining publicly about him to reporters. “I would think,” he told one, “that with the experience a Wilt Chamberlain, an Elgin Baylor, or a Jerry West has in this league, a coach who has a lot less experience would want to take advantage of it and talk things over.” But van Breda Kolff was just as outspoken, and he retaliated by hinting to reporters that the real problem was that Chamberlain was uncoachable. “They say when he wandered into the Palestra, in Philadelphia, back in the ninth grade, people asked him for autographs,” van Breda Kolff told one sportswriter. “All the attention spoiled him.” Once the two men began denigrating each other publicly, their personality clash became an open feud, and Chamberlain progressed from ignoring the coach’s instructions to seeking opportunities to challenge him. Van Breda Kolff had a rule forbidding food in the locker room before a game, but Chamberlain, in open defiance, brought in chicken or hot dogs, and van Breda Kolff had no choice but to appeal to general manager Fred Schaus. In close quarters on road trips, tensions between the two became so high that on one occasion in November, Schaus had to fly in to effect a temporary reconciliation.

  Jerry West found the whole situation demoralizing. He could understand how Chamberlain, with all his years of experience, would not like to be told to change his game. West himself would resent being told to change the way he shot. But at a certain point, he felt, a player needed to accept the fact that he was a player and not a coach and should surrender to the guidance of the coach. Why, he wondered, had Chamberlain started thinking no one had the right to tell him what to do? The merits of the argument aside, it seemed to West that both Chamberlain and van Breda Kolff had put their need to prevail in their feud over the interests of the team. The feud had created a palpable tension in the locker room. All the other players were drawn up into it, even those such as West himself who tried to avoid taking sides. For the first time in West’s nine years with the Lakers, they were not a happy team, and it was affecting West’s performance. All West wanted to do was play good basketball. Instead he went into one of the worst shooting slumps of his career, missing more than half of his field goals in one twelve-game stretch.

  By December, the Lakers were leading the Western Division, but their 18–9 record was hardly impressive. While Chamberlain dominated the opposition on rebounds, he did not get the ball out quickly enough to set up the fast break. He also did not move out of the key to set screens for his teammates, and that encouraged them to simply pass to him and then stand around waiting for him to do something. The quickness and fluid harmony that was the trademark of the Lakers had disappeared, and their on-court efforts showed such a lack of enthusiasm and coordination that the hometown crowd began to boo them. Van Breda Kolff started taking Chamberlain out if he seemed cold and substituting Mel Counts, and when that happened, the fans cheered.

  The team proved that it could play well when it felt like it. Before a packed house at the Forum, the Lakers trounced the Celtics 116–106, with Johnny Egan coming off the bench in the third quarter to lead a fast-breaking streak that gave his team thirty-one points. In Boston ten days later, the Lakers again beat the Celtics. But then, as if to prove that their problems were entirely the product of attitude, they lost to Chicago, the second-worst team in the Western Division, by a dismal score of 90–81. As the year wound down, the Lakers were having a tougher time with the bad teams than with the good ones. A big part of the problem, van Breda Kolff thought, was that his players were not thinking on court. It was as if the problems caused by Chamberlain’s presence had deprived them of their intelligence. They ignored his instructions, forgot their assignments, and did—or tried to do—whatever they wanted.

  Van Breda Kolff became so discouraged that he took to sitting on the bench in glum silence. The entire team was dispirited, which was ironic, van Breda Kolff thought, because it was in first place. At this time last year, the team had been in third place, yet everything had been sweetness and light. Van Breda Kolff did have several private conversations with Chamberlain in which he tried to reach an understanding. “There are three things we can do,” he told Chamberlain on one occasion in early December. “One, we can have a fistfight, and I’m not about to do that, because you’re bigger and stronger and could kill me. Two, we can take the whole thing to Cooke and tell him it’s you or me and let him decide. Or, three, we can work this out together like gentlemen and do what’s best for the team.” But by that time, Chamberlain had become so deeply entrenched in his sullenness and pride that he had become unreachable. So van Breda Kolff decided to go public about the dispute, hoping that he could somehow bring the issue to a resolution. “I’ve reached the point where I don’t give a blank,” he told Los Angeles Times writer John Hall, one of his allies in the press. “It’s coming to a head,” he went on, adding, “it can’t keep going on this way.”

  The open warfare between van Breda Kolff and Chamberlain was so alarming to the Lakers front office that the day Hall’s column appeared, Fred Schaus held what was called a “peace conference.” The one-hour meeting was more in the nature of a stern lecture. Schaus told the players and the coach that all teams had personality clashes, but most of those teams managed to confine their disagreements to the locker room. Because of the presence of the great stars on the Lakers, these inevitable conflicts were of considerable interest to the press, which picked up on them, and magnified and distorted them. Schaus said he was tired of hearing about the Lakers’ problems from other general managers and of reading newspaper stories in which his players took shots at one another and their coach. He was not going to name names, he continued, but several people were responsible, and they knew who they were. From now on, he said, he wanted the Lakers’ problems kept within the Lakers family.

  Schaus also said that these problems were not insurmountable but that they did need to be addressed immediately. One of them seemed to be that certain players were not accepting van Breda Kolff’s authority, and he wanted it understood that the coach’s authority was final. Schaus said that when he was coach, neither the owner nor the general manager had interfered, and now that van Breda Kolff was coach, neither he—Schaus—nor Jack Kent Cooke would interfere with him. Although the team was leading the division by four games, Schaus said, it was simply not playing good basketball. Each player was expected to play as hard as he could, and the team needed to run. The fans deserved a hustling team that played interesting ball. The Lakers had spent nine years building from scratch an excited following for basketball in Los Angeles, and he didn’t want to see that ruined in one season by a listless, overpaid, bickering team.

  When he finished with his lecture, Schaus had no idea what effect it would have. The atmosphere in the room was grim and unforgiving. But there was one positive sign. Chamberlain, who had skipped the Tuesday and Wednesday practice sessions, practiced afterward with his team for the first time all week.

  All the peace conference did was establish a temporary truce, one that fell apart again on February 3, 1969, after a game in Seattle. With the floundering SuperSonics in second-to-last place, it was not an important game—the Los Angeles Times had not even sent a reporter to cover it—but the Lakers had lost 114–107, and van Breda Kolff felt the defeat at the hands of such a patently inferior team was inexcusable. Chamberlain had contributed virtually nothing, and after the game, in the hallway on the way to the locker room, van Breda Kolff began complaining loudly about Chamberlain’s bad attitude and lack of hustle. Chamberlain responded by complaining loudly about van Breda Kolff’s poor judgment in substitutions, and then he called him the dumbest coach he had ever played for. Van Breda Kolff told Chamberlain to shut up, and Chamberlain replied that no one talked to him that way. The words got angrier, and the rest of the Lakers, listening to their coach and their star center attack each other with such savage language, felt mortified and humiliated. Suddenly, van Breda Kolff made a menacing advance on Cham
berlain, who then stepped toward his coach ready for a fistfight, but at that point Baylor moved between the two and pushed them apart.

  Fred Schaus was called, and he met the team plane at the airport. Many of the players who resented Chamberlain’s overall attitude sided with van Breda Kolff, and that only further angered Chamberlain, who was saying he would refuse to play as long as van Breda Kolff was coach. Van Breda Kolff, for his part, was saying he was going to force Chamberlain to sit on the bench. Jack Kent Cooke, furious about the row, called the two men into his office and dressed them down. The fight had taken place out of the public eye, and Schaus told the players that anyone who discussed the matter with reporters would be fined $500.

  23

  BILL RUSSELL had spent the summer of 1968 in Hollywood, living at Jim Brown’s house and hanging out on the set of a movie Brown was shooting. He was there when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and Kennedy’s death, along with the riots in Chicago and the intensifying war in Vietnam, reinforced his view that American society, no longer able to sustain its own internal contradictions, was imploding. At the same time, Russell’s marriage was breaking down. He had grown so distant from his wife, Rose, that the two of them no longer seemed to be able to have a conversation. Otherwise preoccupied, Russell didn’t bother showing up at the league-wide meeting of coaches and referees at Kutsher’s Country Club in August to discuss the rules. He was the only coach who failed to attend, and Commissioner Kennedy fined him $500.

  But he did appear the following month at the Dome Room on the second floor of the Hotel Lenox to announce the signing of his new contract, which at $400,000 for two years represented a substantial raise but was still less than Chamberlain was making. To underscore the importance the team attached to the ceremony, all the Celtics were there, as was Auerbach and Celtics president Jack Waldron. Russell, however, seemed bored. He wore a black mohair suit with flared trousers and gold trim, sandals, and a large peace medallion, but he was fifteen pounds overweight, and as Auerbach and Waldron joked with reporters, he sat at the table eating a dish of ice cream. When one sportswriter asked what he thought of the contract, he shrugged and said, “It ain’t no big thing.”

  The Celtics by then had the oldest team in the league. Russell—the only player from the Celtics’ first championship season thirteen years ago who was still on the team—was thirty-four. Sam Jones was even older at thirty-five, while Bailey Howell was almost thirty-two, Satch Sanders thirty, and John Havlicek twenty-eight. Their age was offset by the fact that they had all played together for so many years. They all knew one another’s idiosyncrasies and needed virtually no coaching. As usual, they started the season well, going up eleven and three. But then the other teams played themselves into shape, and adjusted to new teammates and coaches, and the Celtics began to slide. They were capable of brilliant nights—beating the 76ers 130–98—but they also seemed creaky and inconsistent, particularly Russell.

  With the season only a month old, Russell already felt fatigued, not just physically but mentally. It was a new and different fatigue from any he had experienced before, and he could not shake it with bench time or a few days off and a good night’s sleep. Nothing seemed to restore him, and he was playing mechanically and without fire. “His shooting touch is only a little better than a robot’s,” Dan Hafner noted in the Los Angeles Times. “He gives the appearance of being just too tired to continue.” As the months went by, the feeling of fatigue deepened until it began to seem perpetual and bottomless. Russell felt almost like he was drowning in it. Then in early February, the day before Chamberlain and van Breda Kolff came to blows in Seattle, Russell was knocked to the floor in the final seconds of a game against the Knicks at Boston Garden. His right knee took the impact. It was his third game in forty-two hours, his thirty-fifth birthday was less than a month away, he’d been suffering from a heavy cold for two weeks, and he’d managed only five hours of sleep the night before. He tried to raise his head but then fell back, his teeth clenched, his hand covering his face as play continued around him.

  Joe DeLauri, the Celtics trainer, was watching from the sidelines. He knew Russell had a high tolerance for pain—DeLauri had seen him stand impassive while DeLauri shoved a dislocated finger back into its socket—and he had never seen Russell in such pain before. DeLauri called for a stretcher while the team physician, Thomas Silva, hurried onto the court and knelt by Russell, who was lying on his back, his arms spread in a sacrificial position. When Silva tried to touch his knee, Russell jerked in agony, and the doctor had him carried on the stretcher into the dressing room and then taken by ambulance to Boston’s University Hospital. Later that evening, Silva told the team that X-rays revealed Russell had not suffered any broken bones. Instead, he had acutely strained knee ligaments. “Plus,” the doctor added, “complete physical exhaustion.”

  But even though he was old and worn out, Russell was still the key to the Celtics game. After his knee injury, Russell had to take himself out of the lineup, and Boston lost its next five games—its worst losing streak in two decades. Even though the injury was far from healed, Russell rejoined the team for the next game. Wearing a knee brace and limping, he scored the tying basket at the end of regulation play, and the Celtics won in overtime.

  In late February, Auerbach and the Celtics arrived in Los Angeles to play the Lakers. Two days before the game, Auerbach, dressed in a striped sport coat and mint-green shirt, held a lunch for reporters at the Forum Club. He was sitting at the table smoking a cigar when Jack Kent Cooke joined the group.

  “It’s good to see you in your decline,” Cooke said. The Lakers, despite their internal turmoil, were in first place in the Western Division while the Celtics were in fourth place in the East, trailing even the Knicks.

  “No comment,” Auerbach replied.

  “The declining Celtics are still good for a sellout,” Cooke said. “They tell me that our game Friday with you guys is sold out already.”

  “We’re still magic,” Auerbach said. “Not even Los Angeles can say that.” Auerbach could not resist taking a dig at Cooke. “A few years ago someone said that Los Angeles was the basketball capital of the world,” he went on. “Someone undoubtedly who had been sniffing brandy.”

  “I wouldn’t be guilty of such a redundancy,” Cooke said. “I assume that everyone knows it.”

  One of the reporters asked Auerbach what he thought of Chamberlain.

  “I don’t know what goes through his mind,” Auerbach said. “He can be as good as he wants to be. But nobody can tell him what to do at this stage. All you can do is ask him. Now Bill Russell—you can talk to him and he’ll listen.”

  “How many points does Russell score?” Cooke asked.

  “We don’t depend on him to score,” Auerbach replied. “Defense is his game. That and getting the ball downcourt. He does that consistently well.”

  Cooke felt Auerbach was disparaging Chamberlain. “Wilt Chamberlain is the most intelligent athlete I’ve ever known,” he said. “We’ve all seen Ted Williams go oh-for-five. Some nights it goes in, some nights it doesn’t. I think that right now Chamberlain is playing as well as he’s ever played for anyone. We’re going to win it all.”

  “You’re going to win it all if you don’t play us,” Auerbach said.

  “Revenge,” Cooke said and smiled.

  “You’ll be an old man before you get that,” Auerbach replied. “Russell will be walking around the court on a cane. Chamberlain never could beat Russell.” Auerbach stood to leave. “See you in the playoffs,” he said.

  We’re still magic, Auerbach had said to Cooke. There was something about the phrase, and one of the reporters at the lunch had jotted it down. It seemed particularly apt two nights later, when Boston took to the court of the Forum for the game it had flown into town to play, because the fourth-place Celtics, who were trying to keep the fifth-place Royals from squeezing them out of the playoffs altogether, crushed the Lakers 124–102. Chamberlain scored thirty-five points, but Jerry
West, once again injured—this time with a pulled hamstring—sat out the game, and it was the Lakers who seemed leaden and clueless. They had worked to within two points in the third quarter, but then Boston went on a 21–7 scoring spree that lasted into the fourth quarter and turned the game into an utter rout.

  AS THE REGULAR SEASON drew to an end, the Lakers continued to hold on to their lead over the second-place Hawks while also continuing to play listlessly. Van Breda Kolff still had not decided on a consistent starting lineup, and Chamberlain was playing a different type of game almost every night. Those stories about the “new Wilts” used to come out every couple of years, but now his teammates never knew from game to game when a new “new Wilt” would appear. Chamberlain’s main problem, it seemed to Jerry West, was that he had never made up his mind about the kind of basketball he wanted to play. In one match against the Royals, he scored only two points and took only three shots, devoting himself entirely to defense, and the Lakers won. But then, in another game against the Royals, he stunned the crowd and his teammates by scoring sixty points, even though he had not scored more than thirty-five in the previous fifty games. Van Breda Kolff, however, continued to take him out of the lineup if he was inconsistent, and when that happened, the Lakers tended to play better.

  Mel Counts, Chamberlain’s substitute at center, was a lanky young white guy from Oregon who, at seven feet, was almost Chamberlain’s height, and while Counts lacked Chamberlain’s strength and jumping ability, he was for a center an extremely talented outside shooter. He had played for the Celtics for two years, as Russell’s backup, but saw little action, and then was traded briefly to Baltimore before winding up in Los Angeles, where he again played backup, this time to Darrall Imhoff. At the beginning of the year, van Breda Kolff, anticipating that Chamberlain would play a full forty-eight minutes, moved Counts to forward, where, with his shooting ability, he could add sixteen to twenty-four points to the team’s total. When van Breda Kolff took Chamberlain out, he switched Counts to center, and by playing the pivot Counts freed up the middle, allowing Baylor to return to his trademark driving game. The substitution made the entire team click, all five men playing in the zone, and they suddenly resembled the fluid, rhythmic Lakers of previous years. In late-season games, with Chamberlain on the bench and Counts in the pivot, the Lakers managed to make up eighteen points against Phoenix and fifteen points against Baltimore. The players loved it and so did the fans.