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

by John Taylor

  The ongoing dispute, and the way it was played out in the papers, distressed the other Lakers. Jerry West felt that Chamberlain, by publicly blaming his coach for the loss to Boston, was only going to inflame matters, making it probably impossible for both men to remain on the same team come the following season. West wished Chamberlain had kept quiet until he gained a little perspective on the season, but that was not Chamberlain’s way. The big guy was always going to sound off. A few days after the seventh game, West flew into New York to receive the Dodge Charger that Sport magazine was giving him for having been named Most Valuable Player. During the lunch at Leone’s Restaurant, someone asked West if he saw a solution to the feud between Chamberlain and van Breda Kolff. “Yeah,” West said, “one of those old-time duels.”

  AFTER THE SEASON ENDED, Bill Russell set out on the college lecture circuit. During his talks, he spoke with little preparation, taking questions and candidly giving his opinions on whatever topic came up. Students asked him for his views on the Black Panthers, the military-industrial complex, and women’s liberation. In late May, his tour brought him to the University of Wisconsin, and in the midst of political questions, one student stood up and asked why Russell was always compared favorably to Wilt Chamberlain when, as Russell himself well knew, Chamberlain was by far the superior player. The only reason the Celtics usually beat Chamberlain’s teams, the student continued, was that he always had such weak teammates. The Celtics were just lucky, the student added, and would have lost the 1969 championship if Chamberlain hadn’t been injured in the final minutes. “Why don’t people see that?” the student asked.

  Russell had faced tougher interrogators before, but he was nonetheless a little startled by the question. He pointed out that in Wilt’s first year he had played with Paul Arizin and Tom Gola and Guy Rogers. “That’s not bad,” he said. On the 76ers, he continued, Wilt’s teammates included Luke Jackson, Chet Walker, Billy Cunningham, Hal Greer, and Wally Jones. “That doesn’t seem bad company,” he said. On the Lakers, he went on, Wilt started with Elgin Baylor, Keith Erickson, and Jerry West. “That’s not bad either,” Russell told the student. “I don’t see how anybody can say he never played with anybody good. Now, you say he got hurt . . .”

  As Russell began talking about Chamberlain’s injury in the last minutes of the seventh game, he started to feel more and more exasperated. As he’d listed Chamberlain’s genuinely talented teammates over the years, it had reminded him of Chamberlain’s tendency to blame everyone but himself for his defeats. And now, when he got onto the subject of Chamberlain’s supposed injury, all of the rage Russell had felt at Chamberlain for ruining what was Russell’s final game came flooding back. Throughout his career, Russell had made it a practice never to publicly criticize another player, on his team or any other, but now he let loose.

  “I want to tell you something,” Russell said to the student. In the final game of the championship series, he went on, Wilt had hurt his leg when the Lakers were trying to catch the Celtics and asked to be taken out. But the Lakers kept the rally alive, and they fought back to within two points of the Celtics. “So Wilt made a miraculous recovery and wanted to come back into the game,” Russell said. “Now, in my opinion, if he’s hurt so bad that he can’t play in the seventh game, he should go straight to the hospital. But if he’s hurt and then five minutes later recovers, there’s something wrong with that injury. You can’t quit like that and win championships.”

  Russell told the student he sided with van Breda Kolff for keeping Chamberlain on the bench for the final minutes. “Wilt copped out in the last game,” Russell said. “Any injury short of a broken leg or a broken back isn’t good enough. When he took himself out of that game, when he hurt his knee, well, I wouldn’t have put him back in the game either.” Russell told the student that he himself had never said Chamberlain had no talent. “But basketball is a team game,” he went on. “I go by the number of championships. I play to bring out the best in my teammates. Are you going to say he brought out the best in Elgin and Jerry?” Russell then said he thought criticism of Chamberlain as a loser was both justified and unjustified. By calling him a loser, people acted as if he should have been a winner. But that assumed he was greater than he actually was. On the other hand, Chamberlain invited the criticism because he was the one who made the loudest claims about his greatness. “He asks for it,” Russell said. “He talks a lot about what he’s going to do. What it’s all about is winning and losing, and he’s done a lot of losing. He thinks he’s a genius. He isn’t.”

  Russell was unaware that a local reporter was sitting in the audience, taking it all down. The reporter wrote a story highlighting the remarks about Chamberlain, the newswires picked it up, and it appeared around the country. The story did not dwell on the fact that Russell thought he was speaking off the record to a group of college students, and Chamberlain, whose knee was still so sore from game seven that he’d canceled a tour with the Harlem Globetrotters in Europe, was enraged. “He’s been my house guest and he’s broken bread with me,” he told an acquaintance. “I’d like to jam a ball down his throat.”

  TWO DAYS after the Celtics had won the championship, George Sullivan, a reporter for the Herald-Traveler, dropped by Red Auerbach’s office in the Garden to discuss the season. Sullivan asked Auerbach if he was satisfied with the job Russell had done as coach. “What are you talking about?” Auerbach asked. “Two days ago we won the world championship.” Sullivan pointed out that with a different coach, the Celtics might have done much better during the regular season. Auerbach dismissed this reasoning, and when he called Russell to describe the conversation, Russell said, “Don’t worry, Red, it doesn’t make a difference, because I’ve made up my mind to leave.”

  Auerbach did not take Russell seriously. He thought that Russell just felt exhausted, and Auerbach was convinced he could get Russell to change his mind. Auerbach believed Russell had a good three years of top-caliber play left in him. Russell was aging, and his legs weren’t what they used to be, but Auerbach was certain that his intelligence and his years of experience would more than compensate for that. Also, Auerbach knew that Russell was aware that without him, the Celtics would simply collapse. So Auerbach kept talking to Russell, trying to bring him around, and Auerbach thought Russell was going to do it, because when he asked why Russell wanted to stop playing, the answers he got seemed vague and unsatisfying.

  “I don’t feel like it,” Russell said.

  “Where’s your logic?” Auerbach asked.

  “I don’t have any,” Russell said.

  Nonetheless, Russell’s mind was made up, and during the summer he wrote an article for Sports Illustrated describing his decision. It appeared on the newsstands in early August, and for just about everyone in Boston, it was the first they’d heard the news. Many of the city’s sportswriters, who had never liked Russell anyway, felt he had betrayed his team by hiding his decision to retire in return for a check from Sports Illustrated, reportedly in the amount of $10,000, for the exclusive story. Now, two months before the new season was to begin, the Celtics had neither a center nor a coach. And since Auerbach had gone into the college draft assuming that Russell would return, instead of drafting a center, he picked a guard named Jo Jo White.

  One day that summer Russell climbed into his Lamborghini and drove to California, leaving behind his wife, Rose—their marriage had gone stale a good ten years earlier—and his three children and his house on Haverhill Street in Reading. He wanted to put every aspect of his life in Boston in the past. He had once said he planned to retire to Liberia to run his rubber plantation, in which he had invested $250,000, but it had gone bankrupt. His restaurant, Slade’s, had gone bankrupt as well, and he defaulted on a $90,000 loan from the Small Business Administration he’d used to purchase it. He was in arrears on his taxes, too, and a few years later the IRS put a lien on the Reading house because he owed the federal government $34,430.

  Unable to persuade Russell to change h
is mind, Auerbach named Tommy Heinsohn as the next coach. But without Russell the team finished the season 34–48, failing to make the playoffs for the first time in twenty years, and attendance plummeted. At the end of the season, Heinsohn realized that the team would need to be completely rebuilt, and he released three of the remaining players from the dynasty years: Emmette Bryant, Bailey Howell, and Larry Siegfried. (Four years later, Heinsohn coached a new Celtics team featuring John Havlicek, Dave Cowens, Don Chaney, Jo Jo White, and Paul Silas to another championship.)

  In Los Angeles, Russell found an apartment near Hollywood, became a vegetarian, and took up serious golf. He tried to get into the film business, landing a few supporting-actor roles and appearing on some comedy-variety television shows, then he began working as the color analyst for ABC’s basketball broadcasts.

  Butch van Breda Kolff knew that after what had happened in game seven of the finals, he would be unable to coach Chamberlain any longer, and he quit his job and became coach of the Detroit Pistons. Jack Kent Cooke hired Joe Mullaney, who’d built Providence College into a national powerhouse, as his replacement. The following year, Chamberlain ruptured the patella tendon in his right knee during a game against Phoenix and was out for most of the season. He recovered by the playoffs, however, and the Lakers went all the way to the finals again, only to lose to the Knicks. The next year, Mullaney could get the Lakers only to the second round of the playoffs. So Cooke fired Mullaney and hired former Celtic Bill Sharman, and in 1972 the Lakers did finally win the championship, by beating the Knicks, though Elgin Baylor, his knees completely worn down, had retired early in the season and was not part of the team. In 1973, the Lakers again made it to the finals, to face the Knicks for the third time in four years.

  The Knicks were now at the peak of their early-seventies greatness, with Earl Monroe and Walt Frazier in the backcourt, Jerry Lucas and Willis Reed sharing center, and Bill Bradley and Dave DeBusschere at forward. They lost the first game but took the next three. Bill Russell was covering the series for ABC, and he was back in the Forum for the fifth game. It was close, but both Chamberlain and West were well past their primes by then. The Knicks won by nine and clinched the series. After the game, Russell, wearing his gold ABC blazer, walked down the corridor toward the Knicks dressing room to interview the new champions. As he reached the door, it opened and out stepped Chamberlain, who had just been inside congratulating the winners and was still drenched in sweat and wearing his Lakers warm-up jacket. Russell and Chamberlain saw each other at the same time, their eyes met for a brief, hard moment, and then they walked past each other without nodding or speaking. The sportswriter Merv Harris witnessed the encounter and thought, Cold, icy cold.

  By then Russell also had his own nighttime radio talk show, taking calls and conducting interviews. While most of his guests were athletes or sports figures, he never invited Chamberlain to appear, even though they were now living in the same city. A caller once asked him why. “It’s hard to interview someone,” he said with his trademark cackle, “when you’re not talking to him.”

  IN 1973, Russell became coach of the Seattle SuperSonics and revived his war with the Boston press corps by telling Seattle reporters in his first press conference there that living in Boston had been a traumatic experience and had left him with scars and bad memories. Boston was the most rigidly segregated city in the country, he declared, and its sportswriters were some of the most egregious racists, complaining constantly that the Celtics had too many black players. Larry Claflin, a columnist for the Boston Herald-American, responded by describing his support for and celebration of black athletes, and concluded by saying, “I am not a racist sports writer. I suspect Russell is the racist.”

  Throughout the seventies, Russell remained angry and unpredictable. In 1972, he refused to appear at a public ceremony in Boston Garden retiring his number even though he was at the arena to broadcast the game, and Auerbach had to have the banner raised with just a few of the old Celtics standing around, before any fans arrived. In 1975, he refused to show up for the ceremony inducting him into the Basketball Hall of Fame. In 1977, despite his declarations earlier in his career that he disliked white people, he married one. His second wife was Didi Anstett, a striking, dark-haired woman who had been Miss USA in 1968 and was fourteen years younger than he was.

  The marriage didn’t last, and neither did his job with the SuperSonics. He brought the team into the playoffs three times, but had difficulty imposing his will on the new generation of players preoccupied with their salaries and statuses and uninterested in Russell’s concept of team play. After four years, when the team fell apart and began losing at home as well as on the road, even the fans demanded Russell’s departure, and it became inevitable.

  Russell became a game analyst for CBS, but his commentaries were sometimes rambling and vague, and in 1983 the network replaced him with Tommy Heinsohn. His next job, as coach of the Sacramento Kings, lasted only eleven months. He was then made the team’s vice president of basketball operations, but was fired from that job as well after a year and a half. Afterward, Russell went into seclusion. He stopped reading newspapers and watching television news. Selling the house he’d bought on a golf course in Sacramento, he retreated to his home outside Seattle on Mercer Island, hidden on a hillside, with a view of Lake Washington, and lived as a recluse, reading and watching Jeopardy! and golf on television.

  THE NIGHT Chamberlain ran into Russell in the Forum he had played what turned out to be his final game in the NBA. He always liked statistics, and he had amassed plenty. He had played 1,045 regular-season games in fourteen years for a total of 47,859 minutes. He had scored 31,419 points and made 23,924 rebounds. He had played 160 playoff games for a total of 7,559 minutes, 3,607 points, and 3,913 rebounds. He had won seven divisional titles and two championships. The following year he became coach of the San Diego Conquistadors, a team in the still struggling American Basketball Association. Leonard Bloom, the owner of the Conquistadors, signed him for $1.92 million for three years, with the idea that he’d coach a year and then, when his playing contract with the Lakers expired, he’d play as well. But he missed practices and even games, and demoralized his players by criticizing them excessively. The team tied for last place and Chamberlain quit.

  Over the next few years, various NBA teams tried to lure him out of retirement. In 1976, William Wirtz, the owner of the Chicago Bulls, offered him a salary and a cut of all tickets sold above the current average if he would join the team. The Knicks and the New Jersey Nets also made offers. So did the Lakers’ new owner, Dr. Jerry Buss, who wanted Chamberlain to play backup center to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and 76ers owner Harold Katz, who launched a public campaign to try to lure him back to his hometown. Instead, Chamberlain coached a women’s volleyball team, appeared in commercials when a company such as Volkswagen wanted to make a point about size, and acted in Conan the Destroyer with Arnold Schwarzenegger. But he seemed bored, restless, and lonely. He spent days on end watching giant-screen television in his mansion in Los Angeles. He complained to friends such as Al Attles and Eddie Gottlieb that they never called him, but the fact was they did call. Chamberlain, however, was notoriously difficult to reach. “When and where and I’ll take it from there,” the message on his answering machine said, but he hardly ever returned phone calls or replied to letters. The mailbox at his home was at the foot of a long driveway, next to the trash cans. Once, when he was leaving in his car with his attorney Michael Richman, the son of his old friend Ike Richman, he stopped, opened his mailbox, and threw all his mail into the trash can.

  “What are you doing?” Richman asked.

  “Nothing in there,” Chamberlain replied.

  By the early nineties, more than two decades after the 1969 championship series, Chamberlain and Russell were still not speaking, and Russell’s criticism continued to gnaw at Chamberlain. “Bill Russell: Why do you find it so hard to apologize to me for that statement you made about me some twenty-odd years ago
, that you later admitted was made in error?” Chamberlain plaintively wrote in a 1992 memoir. “For those of you who don’t remember, after a championship series in which Bill’s Celtics beat my Lakers, I sat out much of the fourth quarter—I was taken out. Russell was asked, in a post-game interview, why I wasn’t put back in the game and, infuriated, he said, ‘I would never have left the game with anything less than a broken back.’ As if I wanted to sit down, as if I didn’t want to play! I was furious. Years later, Bill admitted—but not to me—that his comment was out of line. Someone asked him if he’d ever apologize to me and he said, ‘No, I can’t apologize. I’m not that kind of guy.’ ”

  Then, in 1993, almost a quarter of a century after their feud had started, Russell and Chamberlain were reunited. By then, a year after the Dream Team appeared in the Barcelona Olympics, the NBA had become a huge and fabulously lucrative sports business. Even weak franchises sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, and Michael Jordan was earning $30 million a year. Shaquille O’Neal, another one of the league’s new stars, was to appear in a new commercial for Reebok sneakers, but to make the point that he was the latest in the succession of great NBA centers, the producers asked Russell, Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Walton to appear with him. The commercial was shot in Los Angeles, and Chamberlain was accompanied to the set by his lawyer Sy Goldberg, who at five-seven felt among all these seven-footers as if he were walking through a redwood forest. Russell and Chamberlain did not go into the issue that had divided them and Russell certainly did not apologize to Chamberlain, but the two men found it was possible to stand together in the same room and shoot the breeze as if nothing had ever happened.

  Russell’s mixed success in later life was softening him. “I don’t care if I never go to Boston again,” he had told a reporter in 1975, but now the memorabilia promoter Joie Casey lured him back to the city by signing him to an exclusive autograph contract. Since Russell had refused most autograph requests through the decades, his signature was extremely rare. Casey figured it was one of the five most valuable in the world, up there with the autographs of Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, and the Queen of England. By the terms of the deal, Russell was paid a reported $250,000 to sign five thousand pieces of memorabilia—jerseys, basketballs, photographs, cards—over two years. Casey then actually set up a reunion between Russell and Chamberlain, arranging for them both to spend a January afternoon in 1995—the year the Boston Garden was finally torn down—signing autographs at Boston College High School.