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

by John Taylor

  But one aspect of Chamberlain’s inconsistency was that he could prove, in any particular game, matchless. In one late-season game against the Celtics, he dominated Russell under the boards, bringing down forty-two rebounds, a league-wide season record, even though he was playing with a thick bandage on his bruised left hand. What helped power Chamberlain’s performance that night was his anger at the ongoing criticism of his performance. No matter what he did, he felt, he could not get a break. When he concentrated on defense, the sportswriters took him to task for not scoring enough. And when he did score a lot, they accused him of being selfish. They also constantly complained that he was impeding the Lakers’ celebrated running game, but Chamberlain did not feel that, despite the team’s reputation, it was a running team any longer. The primary starters—Tom Hawkins, Johnny Egan, Baylor, West, and himself—were all over thirty years old, and could not hope to keep up with the twenty-five- and twenty-six-year-olds on the younger teams they played. They needed to slow the game and set up, Chamberlain felt, and that was the pace at which he played.

  Chamberlain had also maintained throughout the season that the turbulence on the team was inevitable given the great difficulty the other players would have in adjusting to him, but that once they had done so the turbulence would fade, and as the regular season came to an end, that seemed to happen. After the incident in Seattle, Schaus had held another peace conference, and since then Chamberlain and van Breda Kolff had made a point of being civil. Then the players had held a meeting at which Chamberlain’s teammates told him that ever since joining the Lakers he’d been aloof and irritable and none of them felt they had gotten to know him. Chamberlain had responded by trying to open up, kidding with the bench players, making nice to Baylor. To complete the turnaround, West recovered from his injuries and pulled out of his second shooting slump of the season. In one of the final games of the regular season, the Lakers beat Boston again, this time by thirty-five points, a humiliating drubbing for the Celtics that had fans in the Garden jeering and prompted Russell to administer a twenty-minute tongue-lashing to his team during which he threatened them with fines if they played so poorly again. It was now spring, but the Lakers at last looked alert, powerful, and integrated, Chamberlain and Baylor finally playing as if they knew each other’s moves. Usually they set up, sometimes they ran the ball, but both offenses were finally working for them, and what before had seemed like inconsistency was now regarded as variety. They had won ten of their last thirteen games and ended the season in first place in the Western Division for the first time since 1966, with the best won-loss record (55–27) in their history.

  Attendance at Lakers games was also the best on the record books. A total of 465,695 fans had bought tickets for Lakers games during the regular season. More than 11,000 spectators had showed up at each of the forty-one home games. In the upcoming playoff games, ten of which would take place at the Forum, they would sell another 160,958 tickets, which meant an average attendance of more than 16,000. For all the turmoil and dissension it had caused, Jack Kent Cooke’s decision to sign Chamberlain had not only given the Lakers the best team they’d ever had, it had proven to be financially shrewd.

  Boston, meanwhile, barely made it into the playoffs, finishing the season in fourth place with a 48–34 record—their worst finish since 1950, the year before Auerbach took over. The problem for the Celtics was that their fast break had fallen apart, and the fault was in good measure Russell’s. Still feeling utterly fatigued, Russell was not rebounding enough, and other members of the team hung back to help him recover the ball rather than break down the court. That gave the defense time to get in position and forced the Celtics to try to grind out a set play. But after that last nationally televised defeat at the hands of the Lakers, Russell started hustling—Move it, Russ! Havlicek would shout if Russell showed signs of slacking off—and at the tail end of the season the team was able to return to the fast break.

  Still, they all looked weary. It was widely believed, even among Boston fans, that the Celtics dynasty had peaked in 1966, that in 1967 it had succumbed to a superior team, that the 1968 championship had been a fluke due to the effect of the King assassination on the 76ers, and that by 1969 the team was an aging, fading shadow of its once glorious self. Sportswriters had taken to referring to Russell, who was now thirty-five, as “the old man.” Sam Jones had turned thirty-six and announced he would retire at the end of the season. “As all schoolchildren know,” Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated as the 1969 playoffs began, “the Celtics are too old. Too old. Too old. This is a recording.”

  Age had certainly contributed to the Celtics’ fourth-place finish in the Eastern Division. Back in the fall, just a few weeks into the regular season, Havlicek had realized that they clearly were not the strongest team in the division. Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia were all younger, faster, and more powerful. Philadelphia, now coached by Jack Ramsay, still had the core of the team that had won the 1967 championship except for Chamberlain, plus Darral Imhoff and Archie Clark, who’d helped the Lakers get to the finals the previous year. In Baltimore, which had been in last place only two seasons earlier, rookie Wes Unseld had teamed up with Earl Monroe to create a formidable fast break that made the Bullets the most exciting team in the division, though at the end of the season they were plagued with injuries. “Four guards and not two good legs among us,” Monroe complained. The Knicks, who now included Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, Willis Reed, and Dave DeBusschere, were the most promising team in the East, the team of the future, though in 1969 they still lacked experience.

  During the long grind of the regular season, the Celtics simply could not keep pace with these younger, stronger teams. Russell’s only goal had been to make it into the playoffs. Boston’s rank at the end of the regular season did not matter as long as it was in the top four. Once the Celtics had clinched that spot, Russell allowed the team to coast, conserving its energy for the postseason and hoping to avoid any injuries that might ruin its chances there. The Celtics had enough championship experience to know that if they did make it to the playoffs, anything could happen.

  TO PROTECT HIS KNEES, Bill Russell had played less than usual during the last couple of weeks of the regular season, so when the playoffs began he felt rested, as did his teammates, and they beat Philadelphia 4–1 in the opening round, then took on New York. The Knicks had beaten the Celtics in all but one of their seven games during the regular season, and they entered the series as five-point favorites. In the first game, the Knicks looked unbeatable and the Celtics were floundering, but then in the third quarter Russell called time-out and delivered a blistering lecture—“You’d have to write it all in exclamation points,” Sam Jones said later—and Boston won by eight.

  In game two in Boston Garden, the Knicks, who’d been dismissive of the Celtics prior to the series, became so unnerved by Boston’s pressing defense—and particularly by Russell; under the basket they all had one eye on Russell’s telescopic arms—that in one stretch they took thirty-three shots and made only three. It was such an embarrassing spectacle, with some of the Knicks’ balls missing the hoop completely and some even missing the backboard, that at moments the Celtics fans literally erupted in laughter. The final score, 112–97, actually understated the magnitude of the disaster for the Knicks; Dave DeBusschere, normally a brilliant shooter, took nine shots and missed every single one. It was, he felt, the worst game he’d ever played in his life, and the only consolation he took from it was the certainty that he could never again play as badly. After that debacle, the outcome of the series was never in doubt. Boston won it in six and became, for the twelfth time in thirteen years, Eastern Division champions.

  The Lakers had faced the Warriors in the first round. Chamberlain considered their center, his friend Nate Thurmond, more challenging than any other center in the league, including Russell. Thurmond was as tall as Russell, but stronger, and more of a threat on offense. Thurmond had been on crutches when the Lakers met
the Warriors in last year’s playoffs, but this time around he was healthy and playing well. The Warriors also had Jeff Mullins, an outstanding shooting guard and playmaker who served as his team’s Jerry West. When the Lakers lost the first two games, van Breda Kolff adjusted the starting lineup yet again, taking out the veteran Tom Hawkins and installing rookie Bill Hewitt opposite Baylor in the front court. The team came roaring back for four straight victories, their fortunes helped when, just thirty-seven seconds into the third game, Jeff Mullins was floored with a crippling knee injury.

  For the Western Division championship, the Lakers took on the Hawks, who had been sold by Ben Kerner to a group of Atlanta investors the previous summer. The Hawks were a strong, balanced team, well coached by Richie Guerin, an astute strategist of the game. But while they played physically bruising defense—it harked back to the NBA of the late forties—they lacked both a big center and a scoring superstar. The Lakers took the first two closely contested games, but with both West and Baylor in curious slumps, they lost the third. West, who was suffering from migraine headaches so intense they blurred his vision, took two shots that actually missed the basket altogether in one game, something he could never remember doing before. Afterward, van Breda Kolff asked Chamberlain, who’d been concentrating on defense, to revert to the high-scoring style that the coach had spent the season insisting he abandon. Chamberlain had been averaging only fourteen points in the post-season, but he racked up twenty-five in the next game, and the Lakers easily won it and the game that followed, taking the Western Division title. After the fifth game, someone wrote on the blackboard in the Lakers dressing room, Boston Here We Come.

  24

  AT THE OUTSET of the finals, oddsmakers in Las Vegas rated the Lakers nine-to-five favorites over the Celtics. They had the better regular-season record and, since they had won eight of the nine playoff games they’d just completed, momentum was on their side. They had the home-court advantage. They were younger and stronger and faster and more talented—West, Baylor, and Chamberlain having all averaged more than twenty points per game during the regular season and Chamberlain having led the league in rebounds. The only factor keeping the odds from favoring the Lakers even more heavily was that since 1959 the two teams had met six times for the championship, and the Celtics had won every time.

  Elgin Baylor had been in a slump for most of the playoffs, but he had hit fourteen of eighteen shots from the field in the last game against Atlanta, and that streak had given him a psychic jolt that he felt carrying him into the showdown with Boston. Baylor had never doubted that the Lakers would make it to the finals, nor had he ever doubted that the Celtics would also make it. Baylor knew one thing about Boston: when it had to win, it won. Nonetheless, Baylor was convinced that this was the year the Lakers not only could but would finally beat the Celtics. A championship was the one goal that had eluded Baylor in basketball, and he desperately wanted to win. For one thing, he wanted revenge for that long string of losses to the Celtics in the finals. Also, he was thirty-four, and while his knees had recovered, he could feel his speed and strength and agility ebbing. He was afraid he might never get another shot at a title.

  At a team meeting prior to the first game, Baylor told the other players that the one great advantage the Lakers now had over the Celtics was Chamberlain and the effect he would have on Bill Russell. No one could prevent Russell from performing brilliantly on defense, but where Baylor felt that Russell made a real difference—and one that was often overlooked by the writers heaping accolades on his defensive accomplishments—was on offense. So often in a game, Russ managed to run up as many as twenty points, often sneaky, overlooked points made on offensive rebounds but points that nonetheless amounted to the margin of victory. If Chamberlain prevented Russell from making those offensive rebounds, Baylor told his teammates, that could decide the series. Chamberlain agreed, and he was convinced he could do it. After all, how often had Russell gotten into double digits against him? The fact of the matter was, when the Lakers were playing the Celtics, Chamberlain loved to see Russell with the ball.

  The day of the first game, the Los Angeles Times carried an article titled “It’s Time to Find Out If Wilt’s a Winner.” The article, by Mal Florence, who had covered the Lakers all season, referred to the “whispering campaign” that characterized Chamberlain as a perennial loser. These critics kept alluding to the fact that, playing on three different franchises in his ten-year career, Chamberlain had met Russell and the Celtics seven times in either the playoffs or the finals, and had won only once. Chamberlain was of course well aware of the whispering campaign and was acutely sensitive about the charge that he was a loser. What Chamberlain felt his critics overlooked was the fact that Boston did not sweep any of these contests. Many were decided in the final seconds of the seventh game and could have gone either way. Boston had won one of the final games by one point, two of them by two points, and another by four points. That represented a sum total of nine points—four baskets and a foul shot. Take away those nine points and the Celtics dynasty disappeared altogether, and instead you had Wilt Chamberlain with a handful of championship rings.

  THE DAY of the first game, Jerry West felt tired and listless from the moment he woke up. He snapped at his wife, Jane, who knew better than to reply, and while he attended the pregame practice, he hardly did any running. After the practice he bumped into Bill Russell, who was leading the Celtics to their practice session.

  “How you doing?” Russell asked.

  “I feel like I got nothing in me,” West said. “This season’s been two years long.”

  “It’ll be over soon enough,” Russell said.

  Once the game began, however, West shook off his nervous lethargy. He played for forty-six minutes without tiring—dribbling, running, spinning, taking his signature jump shot from beyond the perimeter—and scored a playoff record of fifty-three points. During a down moment in the third quarter, Russell came up beside him. “Empty, huh?” he said. “I’m getting so I just don’t believe you country boys anymore.”

  But both teams played almost flawless basketball, intense and error-free. Neither team was ever more than seven points ahead. They were tied fifteen times and swapped the lead twenty-one times. Boston led at the half and at the end of the third quarter, but the Lakers took the lead with seven minutes left to play when Keith Erickson scored on a loose ball, and they never surrendered it. Chamberlain made a critical basket with twenty-three seconds remaining, and at the buzzer the score stood at 120–118. The sportswriters in attendance considered it one of the best—and most rousing—games ever played in the NBA. “It was a game that should be preserved for the ages,” Mal Florence declared in the Los Angeles Times, “one that should be used in future textbooks as a classic example of the way pro basketball should be played.” Russell, who thought the Celtics had played superb basketball, was surprised that his team could score 118 points and still lose a game, but the key for the Lakers had been West. He had taken—and made—so many shots that toward the end of the game he started to find it embarrassing, and began passing off to Egan and Baylor. In the dressing room afterward, his arm was so sore that the Lakers trainer, Frank O’Neill, had to ice it down as if he were a baseball pitcher.

  Elgin Baylor knew that the Celtics’ goal was to split the opening pair of games in Los Angeles. If they could force Los Angeles to lose one game at home and then head back to Boston where, with the home-court advantage, they might win two, they would be up 3–1 and almost impregnable. The Lakers’ strategy represented the mirror-opposite of this approach. They hoped to win the first two in Los Angeles and split the second two Boston games to return home for game five with a 3–1 lead. And so, although it was early in the series, the second game appeared crucial to both teams.

  After the breathtaking first game, interest in the series grew even more intense. Tickets for game two quickly sold out, and Forum officials arranged for it to be shown on closed-circuit television in two theaters in down
town Los Angeles and in the International Ballroom at the Beverly Hills Hilton. It was another close, nerve-racking match, even more physical than the previous game. The Celtics’ Don Nelson hit his head on Chamberlain’s chin and had to have six stitches, while the Lakers’ Bill Hewitt, whose wife had given birth during game one, received a gash on his jaw that required five stitches.

  Throughout the game, Chamberlain and Russell effectively neutralized each other. Since Russell, on defense, had to remain under the backboard to counter Chamberlain, he could not come out and contest the ball the way he usually did, and this freed up the Lakers’ shooting stars. West rang up forty-one points and Baylor hit for thirty-two while Johnny Egan scored twenty-six. To Bill Russell’s surprise and irritation, Egan—the little guard—was making a crucial difference in the series. He had a graceless, desperate shot, but he moved quickly, and each point he scored seemed to represent to the fans the triumph of the underdog. Van Breda Kolff had made Egan a permanent starter only during the playoffs, and at first the Celtics had ignored him, focusing all of their energies on West instead, but between West and Egan the Lakers backcourt was producing fifty to sixty points.