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

by John Taylor

  In fact, during the second game, the two guards together scored sixty-seven, more than half the team’s total output, and the Lakers won 118–112. In the dressing room afterward, Chamberlain sat on a bench holding an ice bag against his jaw, which ached from the collision with Don Nelson. The score, he thought, was deceptive. The Celtics had played well, with the lead again changing hands constantly, until a late spurt led by Elgin Baylor, who scored the Lakers’ twelve final points, put the team ahead.

  Baylor, who felt that he had played better than in any other game in the playoffs, was more encouraged. Van Breda Kolff had rested him for a few minutes at the start of the fourth quarter, and that had enabled him to maintain an exceptionally fast pace when he went back in. Baylor thought that his final twelve-point rally, and his team’s two surges in the third quarter when the Celtics twice built up ten-point leads, were the turning points in the game. They showed that the Lakers now knew how to come back, regardless of the advantage the Celtics had established. In years gone by, Boston had more often than not been able to prevent such rallies because they surged and then, instead of slacking off, maintained a level of intensity that allowed them to trade baskets with their opponents. But now, when the Celtics turned it on, the Lakers could ratchet up their own intensity and overtake them again, and as a result Boston had lost two straight. Twice in previous playoff matchups, it was the Lakers who had lost two straight, and this had created a discouraging gloom, an ominous sense of foreboding that no one acknowledged but that would dog the team for the rest of the series, right up to the final bitter defeat. Baylor now wondered if, this time around, the Celtics were starting to feel similarly discouraged.

  Russell insisted that the series was far from over. Taking off his uniform in the dressing room afterward, he told reporters, “Yes, I will see you Thursday, for the fifth game.” But he knew as well as they did that in the thirteen years since he had joined the Celtics, the team had never trailed 0–2 in a playoff series. They’d been down 3–1 in 1968, but they had that first victory to cling to. Furthermore, no team in the history of the NBA had ever come back to win the championship after losing the first two games. The hole was just too deep.

  Some one hundred Lakers fans, including the actress Rhonda Fleming and her husband, producer Hall Bartlett, accompanied the team to Boston and watched from front-row seats just behind the Los Angeles bench, but they were drowned out by the packed stands of Celtics supporters noisily demanding victory. Responding to that energy, the Celtics blew out of the starting gate, running up an 11–2 lead while the suddenly perplexed Lakers went almost four minutes without scoring from the field. For the first time in the series, the Celtics double-teamed West—an omission in the first two games that had struck the Lakers as curious. Both West and Baylor lost their range, and the team fell seventeen points behind at halftime. It surged to a three-point lead in the third quarter, but that effort was so exhausting that West asked to be taken out, and the Lakers again fell behind, this time by fourteen points. West returned, but, unlike game one, this time he really did have no strength left. Johnny Egan tried to take his place as the primary outside shooter. He scored fourteen of the team’s sixteen points in one stretch, and the Lakers surged a second time. But the two rallies had drained them, and while they were able to narrow the final gap with Boston, they could not overtake the Celtics and lost by six points.

  Game four would be decisive, giving the Lakers an almost insurmountable 3–1 lead or tying the series at two apiece. A number of retired Celtics such as Tommy Heinsohn, Jim Loscutoff, and K. C. Jones showed up to sit with Auerbach behind the team’s bench. For the second time in a row, the Celtics blasted off at the opening, running up a quick ten points while the Lakers were unable to score until five minutes into the game. From then on out, both teams played badly, turning the ball over dozens of times, and enduring long scoreless stretches, but with seven seconds left, the Lakers had a one-point lead and felt the game was theirs.

  Then Joe Gushue, one of the officials, ruled that Baylor had stepped out-of-bounds retrieving a misfired pass from Chamberlain. Baylor was certain he had not in fact stepped out of bounds, but Gushue simply pointed at the line, saying nothing, and giving the ball to the Celtics. In the Boston huddle, Larry Siegfried suggested a play they called “Ohio,” a special triple-pick based on a play that Siegfried and John Havlicek had used when they were together at Ohio State. Before the playoffs, Russell had gone through the regular-season stats, and he realized the team had lost seventeen games by three points or less. The Celtics had not been closing the way they should. They needed a surprise last-second play, a buzzer-beater, but Russell let the players themselves come up with one, and so during a practice that Russell did not attend, Havlicek had introduced “Ohio” to his teammates, and they had it saved up for just such an occasion.

  But the play was complicated, and the team had never used it in a game before, and as they went into motion, Sam Jones, who had the ball, collided with his teammate Bailey Howell. Jones was knocked off balance, ruining the play, and as he slipped, he threw up a high shot from twenty-two feet out. Even before he released it he could tell that the ball was badly thrown, that it would fall short, and he felt certain it would miss. In the excitement of the moment he assumed that Russell was still in the game, and he tried to put some backspin on the ball, to make it pop up, so that if it did miss, Russell might tap it in.

  Russell, however, was not in the game. He had taken himself out and put in Don Nelson so the Celtics would have one more shooter in the crucial final moments. Standing on the sidelines Russell also thought Jones’s shot was going to miss. Damn, he said to himself.

  Jones, watching his shot loop toward the basket, thought it wasn’t even going to hit the front rim, but it did, then it bounced up because of the backspin, hit the back rim, and with one second left on the clock, it dropped in. Chamberlain, enraged at the idea of losing the game by one point on such a sloppy shot, jumped up and grabbed the ball with both hands as it fell from the net, but with one second left the Lakers could accomplish nothing and they knew it.

  We’re still magic, Auerbach had told Jack Kent Cooke earlier in the season, and so it would seem. That such a badly thrown ball—a brick, a clunker, a classic Hail Mary desperation bailout shot—would not only go in but would determine, by one point, the outcome of a critical game in a championship series, well, there was only one explanation for it, fans and sportswriters and the players themselves agreed, and that was Celtics luck. Whether you despised it or swore by it, everyone had to admit it existed. “I was very lucky,” Jones said after the game. “Somebody Up There likes him,” wrote Gerry Sullivan in the Herald. “Kiss the Blarney Stone,” proclaimed Mal Florence in the Los Angeles Times. “Drag out the four-leaf clovers.” Tom Heinsohn, for one, even subscribed to the not entirely facetious theory that Boston Garden had a resident leprechaun who favored the home team. “Didn’t you see that little gremlin sitting on the hoop when Sam shot?” he asked one of the sportswriters. “I thought for sure you’d see it.”

  The Lakers, angered by that loss and with the crowd behind them back in Los Angeles, played game five in a ferocious state of mind. They outran, outshot, and outscored the Celtics, who seemed hapless and uncertain. But the game was not without its costs for the Lakers. Boston’s Emmette Bryant, who was six-one and known as Little Em, stuck a finger in Chamberlain’s eye in the third quarter, and Wilt’s sight was blurry for the rest of the game. Then, with less than three minutes left to play, Bryant, who was also known as the Pest, stripped the ball from Jerry West, and despite the fact that the Lakers had a solid lead, West lunged for the ball and felt a stab of pain in his left thigh.

  West hated to be called injury-prone, but he accepted the fact that he was. In his nine years in the NBA, he had broken his nose eight times and his hands twice. He had torn and pulled and bruised muscles, he had strained ligaments, and he had sprained ankles, wrists, and fingers. Most of the time these injuries, as well as va
rious illnesses, had not kept him from playing, but some of them had, and in those nine years in the league he had missed a total of 128 games—more than an entire season. In 1967–68 he had set his own record by sitting on the bench for thirty-one games. In the season just completed, he’d been prevented from playing for twenty-one games. By the time the playoffs began, he had felt fine, but then after game two his hand had swollen up when he hurt it in a fall.

  Now, with two and a half minutes left in the fifth game, West hobbled to the bench and sat down while Frank O’Neill, the trainer, examined him. West had pulled a hamstring. What particularly irked him was not just that he was hurt but that he been so foolish as to injure himself on such a meaningless play, diving recklessly after the ball even though the Lakers had a comfortable lead. Even without West, however, Los Angeles won easily. After the game, Robert Kerlan, the team physician, injected West’s leg with cortisone, but the doctor was unable to immediately determine the severity of the injury. He would have to wait until tomorrow, when the hamstring had tightened up, before evaluating it, and he was uncertain that West would be able to play in game six.

  Chamberlain, still unable to see clearly, was nursing his sore, swollen eye in the dressing room. Despite the thirteen-point victory, his mood was grim, and he brooded over the vagaries of chance. Luck once again appeared to be asserting itself as a factor in the finals. First there was Sam Jones’s very, very lucky shot in the last seconds of game four—a shot that by any measure simply did not deserve to go in. If the off-balance Jones had missed that shot, the Lakers would have won game four and with their victory tonight would have won the championship. Instead, there would be at least one more game, in Boston Garden, with West—the Lakers’ highest scorer, who’d run off twenty-eight points in the second half of the game they’d just won—injured and possibly unable to play. A reporter asked Chamberlain if the team would be able to maintain its momentum if West was benched because of his injury. “I don’t think so,” Chamberlain said.

  VINCENT CARTER, an associate of team physician Robert Kerlan, accompanied the Lakers to Boston for game six to treat Chamberlain and West. Chamberlain arrived wearing sunglasses to hide his swollen eye, his vision still blurry. West’s thigh bothered him, but he walked without a limp. By this time, going into the sixth game of the series, both teams felt battered and drained. On the Celtics, John Havlicek had a pulled groin muscle and a gash on the bridge of his nose, and he had been wearing a bandage over his left eye after the Lakers’ Keith Erickson stuck a thumb in it during game three. Larry Siegfried, the most grievously injured Celtic, had a pulled hamstring, a hip-joint injury, bruised knees, and a swollen left elbow. Even the uninjured players were exhausted. They were approaching their one hundredth game of the season, and their reserves were depleted. Because of the tension, many of them were unable to sleep. Havlicek felt his body weakening game by game.

  By the afternoon of game six, Chamberlain’s vision had cleared, but his eye was still sore and he had gone through practice wearing the sunglasses. West had kept his leg wrapped in hot packs during the day, and trainer Frank O’Neill set aside a heating pad on the bench for him to apply to his leg whenever he came out of the game. Just before it began, Dr. Carter gave West’s injured leg a shot of Novocain, and O’Neill bandaged it heavily. “If I had to take a saliva test now,” West joked, “I’d never get out of the starting gate.” Tom Hawkins had injured his ankle during practice, and so while Carter was at it he gave Hawkins a Novocain injection as well.

  Just as they had in the two earlier games in the Garden, the Celtics surged to an early lead and were up 55–39 at the half. West was not visibly limping, and in fact, as often happened, by the second half his hamstring had sufficiently loosened that he was able to pick up the pace, and he eventually scored a total of twenty-six points. Even so, van Breda Kolff could see that he was playing at only 75 percent of his capacity, and made him rest for ten minutes. Elgin Baylor, after playing so well earlier in the series, was once again off his game. But the largest disappointment, in van Breda Kolff’s view, was Chamberlain. A large part of what justified the big guy’s salary was the expectation that he would step up in crucial, high-pressure situations like this one—with the chance to finish the series at hand and the team’s leading scorer injured—and make a difference. Van Breda Kolff made sure the other Lakers got the ball in to Chamberlain, but he did nothing with it, taking only five shots and making only one of them.

  The Lakers had hoped to clinch the title this night and avoid a winner-take-all seventh game. But they could not make it happen. Instead, they played as if the outcome were a foregone conclusion, as if here in the Garden, this seedy, hot arena, with its musty, smoke-filled air, its beer-stained aisles and dangling white-and-green banners and overhanging balconies filled with rowdy fans, the Celtics could not lose, as if the series was destined to go to a climactic seventh game and there was no point in futilely expending energy in game six. Even when the Celtics lost their rhythm in the fourth quarter and missed twenty-one out of twenty-seven field goals during one stretch, the Lakers couldn’t capitalize, and they went down 99–90.

  Despite Chamberlain’s poor performance, he predicted in the dressing room after the game that the Lakers would win game seven. And when one of the reporters went into the Celtics dressing room and repeated what Chamberlain had said, Russell snapped. Tensions had been building between Russell and Chamberlain throughout the series. There had been a lot of jostling in the pivot, the two men pushing each other harder and harder, and at one point during game three they briefly came to blows after an entanglement over a rebound. It also irritated Russell that Chamberlain had been telling reporters that the Celtics’ run of championships was due to luck. The man, he thought, was a loser who had an excuse for everything. “Who cares what Wilt says?” Russell asked. “That’s all I’ve heard over and over again through the years—‘Wilt this and Wilt that.’ I don’t give a damn what Wilt has to say.”

  THE CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES was to end where it had begun, in the Forum. In previous finals, Boston had always won the seventh game, but it had always had the home-court advantage. Every single one of those seventh games had been played in the Garden. Now, for the first time, they’d be playing the concluding game on an opponent’s court. So far in the series, neither team had won a game away from home, and the Vegas oddsmakers rated the Lakers three-point favorites.

  When the Lakers returned to Los Angeles after game six, everyone in town seemed to be asking about Jerry West’s condition. Can Jerry go all-out in game seven? The team practiced the day before the game and West’s leg had improved, but he was still favoring it. He felt that whether the team won or lost was going to depend on whether his knee held up, and the day of the game he was so tense even the sound of his own children irritated him. But Baylor, Chamberlain, and the rest of the Lakers felt confident. They were on home turf, their Sunday workout had been loose, and they knew what they needed to do. This was their year.

  Jack Kent Cooke, in fact, was so confident of victory that he stocked iced champagne in the locker room, strung nets across the ceiling filled with thousands of balloons in neat cellophane packages, and had the University of Southern California’s marching band on standby, in the hallway outside the arena, to lead the victory celebration by playing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” He had even gone to the expense of printing up a program for the victory celebration. In the dressing room prior to the game’s start, van Breda Kolff told his team to anticipate the Celtics fast break and to run themselves, keeping the pace fast, keeping the game moving, but the Lakers knew that already, and as they walked up the corridor to the court, they felt that mentally and physically they were prepared.

  Just before the game started, Russell came upon a copy of the victory program Cooke had printed up, and he decided to do something he usually avoided as coach—resort to a motivational ploy. As exhausted as he was, he believed the Celtics could win that night only if they ran the entire game, and that r
equired starting and then playing at a level of intensity higher than whatever the Lakers could muster. It was simply a matter of determination. They’d have to will themselves up to the necessary level of intensity and then stay there, but it was only for one final game, and they were an experienced team and they knew they were capable of it. So Russell showed the Celtics the Lakers’ victory program, pointed out that Jack Kent Cooke had the audacity to tempt fate by presuming his team would win, and told them that the very existence of the program made it inevitable that they, the Celtics, would win, but only if they ran and ran and ran. Then they too filed out to the court.

  The deal Roone Arledge had struck five years earlier between ABC and the NBA had paid off beyond his expectations, and the network was planning to broadcast game seven nationally, in prime time. The stands were filled with men in jackets and ties—spectators not fans, as Alex Hannum had once derisively observed—but when Jerry West was introduced, they began clapping and cheering madly and then started standing up until just about all the people in the arena were on their feet, and the cheering continued for the frail, shy man from Kanawha County who refused to give up. West just stood there acknowledging it, but the truth was he hated that kind of thing and felt like hiding. All he wanted to do was play the game.

  The two teams took the floor, the Lakers in their gold uniforms with blue trim, the Celtics in green with white trim, all the Boston players still wearing the black sneakers that Red Auerbach had declared compulsory back in the fifties on the grounds that they didn’t show the dirt like white sneakers. Russell wanted the Celtics to get out ahead early, and they did, right out of the tip-off. With West injured, the Celtics stopped double-teaming him, and that undercut the effectiveness of Johnny Egan, the man left open when the Celtics sagged back on West. Sam Jones in particular was able to take advantage of West’s bad leg, cutting, feinting, dropping in jump shots. By the second quarter a pattern was established, with Boston building up leads of ten or twelve points and the Lakers fighting back to close the gap without ever moving out ahead. The first half ended with the Celtics up by three. The Lakers tied the game in the third quarter, but immediately went into a slump, missing fifteen shots in five minutes, and by the fourth quarter the Celtics had established a twenty-one-point lead.