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

by John Taylor

  It was then that the Lakers finally found their rhythm. West’s injured leg made each step painful, and he wasn’t as quick on defense. But with only one man guarding him, he now made up for it on offense, shooting from the outside and scoring more points than anyone else on his team. The Lakers steadily moved closer to the Celtics, basket by basket, and with each point West became more intense. He was in the zone, practically every shot dropping in, and it seemed to Baylor that West was now playing as if his hamstring were perfectly fine. But suddenly, just as West looked as if he was taking over the game, he twisted his injured left leg and began hobbling again. Not long after that, Baylor sprained a muscle in his right leg, and that slowed him. Even so, the Celtics were slowing as well, as their age got the better of them, and the Lakers continued to narrow their lead.

  Chamberlain was concentrating on defense, still jostling angrily with Russell in the pivot. With five minutes left on the clock, and the lead cut to nine points, he went up for a rebound, his twenty-seventh of the game. He grabbed the ball but fell off balance when he dropped back, stumbling to the floor and striking his knee so hard against the floorboards that he felt the jangling sting throughout his body. The officials called for a standard twenty-second injury time-out. Trainer Frank O’Neill sprayed Chamberlain’s knee with a numbing anesthetic. Chamberlain returned to the court, but his knee hurt so badly that he could only limp with a grimace, and when the clock was stopped after West was fouled, Chamberlain asked van Breda Kolff to take him out.

  The request infuriated van Breda Kolff. All professional athletes were expected to play with pain from time to time, it was the price of glory, especially in the finals. West was limping up and down the court, but he hadn’t asked to be taken out. Baylor was favoring a leg, and he hadn’t asked to be taken out. Chamberlain, however, was insisting that he couldn’t play, so van Breda Kolff took him out and replaced him with Mel Counts.

  On the court, Bill Russell was astonished that Chamberlain had taken himself out of the game. Chamberlain had only banged his shin, it seemed to Russell, hardly a serious injury, and in any event, with the championship at stake, you played, injured or not. There are no such things as injuries, Auerbach had said at the outset of the playoffs. If a player can walk, he can play. At least that was the Celtics philosophy. Back in the final game of the 1965 championship series, Russell had insisted on playing with a hemorrhaging eyeball after Jerry West had jammed a finger in it. That was the way it was supposed to come down in the pros—a player refusing to take himself out of the game even when the coach wanted him out. After all, most of the players on both teams were nursing some sort of injury. The Celtics’ Larry Siegfried had played throughout the series with a pulled hamstring, bruised knees, bruised hip, left-elbow contusion, and charley horse—though, as one sportswriter noted, he was wrapped tighter than Ramses II.

  Not only was Russell surprised to see Chamberlain go out, he wanted him in the game, despite the fact that his own job became a lot easier with Wilt on the bench. The reason was that, though he had yet to announce it, this was Russell’s last game. Halfway through the season, around the time he hurt his knee so badly that he had to be carried off the court on a stretcher, Russell had decided to make this season his last. His level of play was deteriorating, his moments of inspired basketball were fewer and fewer. One reason the Celtics had barely made it into the playoffs was that he had so rarely been able to ignite the team. His coaching responsibilities made it almost impossible for him to throw himself completely into a game, but he was also losing his passion for basketball. He had not lost it entirely, and he was determined that he would not allow that to happen, that he would not keep playing when his passion was gone and he was suiting up just for the money.

  Russell had always remembered Bob Cousy’s final season, with endless maudlin tributes in every city in the league, as if Cousy had died and all these crowds of people were mourning him. Russell had decided he did not want to go out that way, on a tide of raw emotion, so he had mentioned his decision to no one else except Oscar Robertson, after the playoff series with the Royals. But he did want to go out with one last championship victory, and he wanted Chamberlain in the game. To win his final game with Chamberlain sitting on the bench—instead of in the game, forcing Russell to earn it—would cast a cloud over the victory. Chamberlain, by asking to be taken out, was ruining Russell’s final game, Russell felt, and like van Breda Kolff, he was infuriated.

  Chamberlain was sitting on the bench, a towel around his shoulders, and after a minute his knee felt better and he signaled to van Breda Kolff. “I’m ready to go back in,” he called.

  But with Mel Counts playing center, the Lakers had narrowed the Celtics’ lead to just three points, and van Breda Kolff decided to keep Counts in the game. “Wait,” van Breda Kolff said. “Wait.”

  Chamberlain grabbed another towel and stalked to the far end of the bench. Most of the Lakers, he felt, had been playing miserably throughout the game. Baylor was eight for twenty-two, and Counts, despite the team’s little surge when he took Chamberlain’s place, was four for thirteen. Jerry West and Wilt himself were the only two players making more than a third of their shots. Chamberlain felt it was necessary for him to return to the game. He signaled to van Breda Kolff again and again, and when the coach did nothing, he approached him. “Put me back in,” he said.

  Van Breda Kolff now had a decision to make. Did he put his star center, a man considered by many to be the best basketball player in history, back in for these crucial final minutes? Or did he stay with Counts? Counts had a hot hand. He had just hit a jump shot from the foul line to bring the Lakers within a point. It was the closest they’d been in the entire fourth quarter. As had happened from time to time throughout the season, with Chamberlain on the bench the Lakers were playing better than they had at any other point in the game. Chamberlain had pulled down twenty-seven rebounds, but van Breda Kolff felt that all too often on defense, instead of moving around and blocking out, Chamberlain simply stood under the basket waiting for the ball to be shot so he could pick up the rebound. And since the Celtics were shooting so well, all too often there was no ball to rebound. Counts, on the other hand, was moving off Russell when Russell set picks and switching over to cover the unguarded Celtic with the ball. That had cut into Boston’s scoring. And back in the first game of the Western Division championship against the Hawks, Counts had made a game-winning three-point play in the final seconds. Counts had proven that he could come in at the end and provide the jolt that put the team over the top. So van Breda Kolff made his decision. “I’m not putting you back in,” he told Chamberlain. “We’re playing better without you.”

  Chamberlain, enraged and humiliated, returned to the end of the bench and sat back down.

  With less than two minutes to play, and the game very much in the balance, the tension on the court became almost unbearable. The noise from the crowd made it almost impossible for the players to hear one another, and both teams turned sloppy. West, his backcourt partner Keith Erickson, and Celtic Don Nelson all committed turnovers. Counts scored again to put the Lakers up by one—the first time the entire game they had been in the lead—but an official called him for traveling, and the basket was erased. Now there was little more than a minute left to play. Erickson blocked a shot, and the loose ball was recovered by Nelson, a former Laker, who made a wild, awkward shot from the top of the key. The ball struck the front rim and bounced a good three feet up into the air, and then, just as had happened with Sam Jones’s lucky shot at the end of the fourth game, it fell into the basket.

  The Celtics now had a three-point lead, but with forty-five seconds left, the Lakers felt they were still in the game. They recovered the ball after an offensive foul by Larry Siegfried. Counts tried to drive to the basket, but Russell blocked the shot. It had been a rough game, with both teams fouling each other heavily, and now Siegfried—the best free-throw shooter in the league—drew a foul. It was the ultimate pressure moment, but
Siegfried, wrapped in bandages, stepped to the foul line and lofted in both shots. Then Havlicek was fouled and put the Celtics up by six with a free throw. Frustrated, desperate, having clawed their way back only to slip in the face of this final Celtics surge, the Lakers sank two free throws and made a final basket, but then they ran out of time, and, with Chamberlain watching angrily from the bench, they lost the game, the series, and the championship by two points.

  As the fans filed out, ABC sportscaster Jack Twyman was interviewing Havlicek on the sidelines when Red Auerbach, cigar in hand, materialized beside him. Auerbach pointed at the ceiling. “What are they going to do with those goddamned balloons up there?” he asked. “They’ll eat them!” he shouted and burst into giddy laughter.

  In the Lakers dressing room, Chamberlain was angrier than he’d ever been in his life. He felt certain that van Breda Kolff had benched him as payback for all their quarrels. Motivated by spite, the coach had thrown away the game and the championship title, and publicly humiliated Chamberlain himself, in order to settle a score. Van Breda Kolff was just as angry. No true athlete, he believed, asked to be taken out of a championship game in a crucial moment—with the outcome in the balance and his teammates and fans depending on him—just because he got a little banged up. It was unprofessional, the equivalent of leaving the field of battle after a minor flesh wound. An argument broke out. Van Breda Kolff called Wilt a quitter and Chamberlain called him a liar, and the two men had to be physically restrained from attacking each other.

  West sat on a bench in his sweat-soaked jersey, his injured leg propped up on a chair. He had given the game everything he had. In fact, he had played so hard—earning a triple-double, with forty-two points, thirteen rebounds, and twelve assists—that Sport magazine was to name him the Most Valuable Player of the series. But still his team had lost. They should have won, but they didn’t. It seemed to Bill Libby, one of the sportswriters, that West was like a figure in a Greek tragedy, someone the fates had conspired to deprive of the one thing he truly wanted. The visitors’ dressing room was next door, and as West sat resting his knee on the bench, the sounds of the Celtics’ celebration could be heard through the wall. “I can’t stand to listen to that,” he said.

  The Celtics, who had felt the heat of West’s determination through all seven games, were aware how much he had wanted to win. They all admired him for his talent and for his character, and after a while Russell and Havlicek came into the Lakers dressing room to pay him tribute. Russell, who was overcome with emotion and unable to speak, clasped West’s hand for a long moment in silence and then turned away. Havlicek said, “I love you.”

  Russell and Havlicek returned to the visitors’ dressing room. As the celebrations died down, the Celtics showered and changed and gradually made their way out to the street. Russell, one of the last to remain, finished putting on his lavender shirt and tan suit. Someone had left a single bottle of champagne next to his locker. Russell rarely drank, but he figured it would be nice to have a bottle of the champagne used to celebrate his final victory. He picked up the bottle with one hand and his battered suitcase with the other, and walked out the door. In the hallway, a young female usher stepped in front of him and held out a pen and paper.

  “You’ve refused all these years,” she said. “How about signing this now, just this once?”

  Russell ignored her and continued down the hall.

  IN RACIALLY TROUBLED BOSTON, the Celtics’ unexpected victory touched off a frenzied celebration unmatched by any of their previous championships. Only seventy-five people had shown up the previous year to welcome the team back after winning the finals, but now a crowd of 2,000, including Governor Francis Sargent, was waiting when the Celtics arrived at Logan Airport, and they broke into cheers as the players appeared through the gate. The city’s newspapers welcomed them just as enthusiastically. Under the headline “The Conquering Celtics,” the Herald’s editorialist wrote, “Each game of the grueling playoffs seems to have its own hero, but the secret of the Celtics is that, unlike Los Angeles, they do not rely on super stars to save their games. The Celtics play and win as a team—a team that keeps Boston the home of champions and proud of them.” The Boston Globe declared, “Some day in the far-off future, there’ll be other great teams, no doubt. But they’ll have no stature in Boston, where people will sneer: ‘Aw, you shoulda seen the Celtics.’ ”

  Two days later, on a cool and drizzling Thursday morning, 30,000 people gathered four and five deep along a parade route that ran from the Commons down Tremont Street and then up Washington Street and ended at City Hall, where Mayor Kevin White waited to hand out silver trays and Boston rockers to the members of the team. A flatbed truck, its sides lined with red, white, and blue bunting, pulled the Celtics slowly through the cheering, waving crowds. Auerbach wore a khaki raincoat and jovially scattered cigar ashes on his players. They were all there, the heroes of the series: Havlicek the team captain, Sam Jones the savior of game five with his off-balance final-seconds shot, Little Em Bryant, Satch Sanders, Bailey Howell . . . all of them that is except Bill Russell. It was the first time in their eleven championships that the city had honored them with a parade, but Russell—the man who played for the Celtics not for Boston, who said he owed the public nothing, who never heard the boos because he never listened to the cheers—declined to attend. Although no one knew it at the time, he was gone.

  25

  THE FINAL GAME of the 1969 championship series was the culmination of an epic ten-year rivalry between two of the greatest athletes of mid-century America. But it was more than that, too; it was the last battle in what had been an ongoing contest over how best to compete, a contest that had revealed to fans and to the players themselves the essence of athletic greatness in a team sport. And in the end it had turned on a single moment and a single choice—Chamberlain’s request to be taken out—that seemed to reveal the issue at the very core of the rivalry: could determination trump talent? Milton Gross had watched the game closely. Both Russell and Chamberlain, he thought, were extremely complex individuals, but in the end what differentiated them on the court was that Russell was always able to make his players an extension of himself, while Chamberlain, for all his personal dominance, never truly became a part of a team. And in the end, that was the difference between winning and losing.

  In the days after the game, the debate continued over van Breda Kolff’s decision to keep Chamberlain on the bench for the final minutes. Some, like Milton Gross, blamed van Breda Kolff. His decision was tantamount to suicide, they said, and the upshot was that the Lakers had not been beaten by the Celtics but by their own coach. Many people, however, blamed Chamberlain for asking to be taken out of a championship game when he had teammates who were injured and still playing. It was, according to this line of thinking, the ultimate indication of Chamberlain’s selfishness as a player, his refusal to sacrifice himself for the sake of his team, and if nothing else it proved that he was overvalued and overpaid. After all, back in 1966, with Darrall Imhoff at center, the Lakers had also lost the seventh game of the finals by two points, and that had been at Boston Garden, without the home-court advantage.

  Chamberlain, who followed the coverage, continued to brood over the final game. He decided van Breda Kolff was the worst coach he’d ever played under, a rotten coach, utterly hopeless, a man ignorant of human nature. By keeping him out of the game, van Breda Kolff had humiliated him on national television and prevented the Lakers from winning the championship. It was true that Mel Counts had had a hot hand in those final minutes, Chamberlain reasoned, but van Breda Kolff could have sent Wilt back onto the floor and also kept Counts in, by moving him to forward. Russell had been playing with five fouls at that point, which restricted his aggressiveness on defense, and Chamberlain was sure he would have been able to score against him. Chamberlain talked to Milton Gross by telephone from his home in Los Angeles, just before visiting the doctor to treat his twisted knee. “The thing that kills me,” he said, �
��is that we had the chance to win and he wouldn’t put me back in. I don’t see how he could have left me on the bench. I asked about ten times.” The Lakers, he went on to say, were the better team and should have won the game but had been undermined from within, by their coach. “They didn’t beat us,” he said. “We beat ourselves. You don’t mind too much being beaten by a really superior team, but to go out and beat yourself, it’s a shame.”

  Van Breda Kolff, while not complaining as publicly as Chamberlain, took the position that if he had made any mistake, it was not in keeping Chamberlain out but in leaving him in as long as he had. The team that had finished the game, with Counts at center, had been in the midst of rallying from a deficit created by the team playing with Chamberlain. “If I had had fifteen minutes’ practice with the team that finished the game,” he told an acquaintance, “and if I had played them the whole game, I would have won the title.”