CHAPTER NINE
The Triple-Double
1961–1963
IN 1961, THE NATIONAL Basketball Association expanded, adding the Chicago Packers to its ranks. Soon to change its name to the Zephyrs, Chicago had the worst record in basketball. Only their center Walt Bellamy provided a bright spot, averaging 31.6 points and nineteen rebounds, while also leading the league in field-goal percentage. The 1961–1962 season was also notable for the Boston Celtics, whose sixty regular-season victories marked a first in league history. And then you had Wilt: the phenomenon of all phenomena. In his third season in the league, Wilt, age twenty-four, averaged more than fifty points and twenty-nine rebounds a game for the Philadelphia Warriors, records which stand to this day. (In his wonderfully named autobiography, Wilt: Just Like Any Other Seven-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door, he revealed that even those numbers were misleading: “Late in the season, I realized I was creating a monster. I was averaging almost fifty-five points a game then, and I realized if I did it for one season, everyone would expect me to do it every season. I started passing off more, and let my average drop to just above fifty.”) That season, Wilt played in all but eight minutes of eighty games. Because of overtimes, he actually averaged 48.5 minutes a game—more than were possible during a regulation contest. And, of course, on March 2,1962, he did something that will never be matched. Perhaps you’ve seen the picture: a sheepish Wilt Chamberlain looking at the camera, holding up a piece of paper with the number one hundred scrawled across it. That night, as the Philadelphia Warriors defeated the New York Knicks, 169–147, Wilt Chamberlain became the first and only person in the history of professional basketball to hit the century mark in a single game.
Numbers start to give you some idea of how dominating Wilt Chamberlain was, but they really don’t do the man justice. It’s impossible to overstate his dominance—he led the league in scoring his first seven seasons. The NBA literally changed the rules to try to stop him. They expanded the lane, even instituted a no-dunking rule for a while. In 1968, Wilt got bored with scoring and told his teammates and the press he was going to lead the league in assists. Then he went out and did. And what makes the whole thing truly amazing is that nobody could say it was an aberration—it was the third time he’d finished in the top five in assists.
Today, it’s hard to imagine just how low basketball was on the sports totem pole. The NBA was a second-rate league. In 1962, even the best teams were drawing small crowds. Most teams played a third of their home games away from their actual cities, in small regional venues—Wilt’s hundred-point night, for example, was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in front of a paltry 4,124 people—and the Warriors led the league in attendance that season. But news of his hundred points spread and added to the legend of Wilt Chamberlain—for years afterwards people came up and told Wilt that they were at Madison Square Garden the night he hit his hundred. Almost by himself, he made the league a curiosity, made it interesting. People heard about Wilt scoring a hundred, averaging fifty a night, and they wanted to see the guy do it. Without him, the NBA might have lost the small television contract, which it so badly needed back then. I believe Wilt Chamberlain single-handedly saved the league.
The Boston Celtics were a great team, however, and great teams will beat a great player every time. The rivalry is remembered as Wilt versus Bill Russell. In truth it was Wilt against the Celtics. Over the years, Wilt’s teams played against Boston in forty-nine regular-season games, met routinely in the Eastern Conference playoffs, and met twice in the NBA finals. It’s probably the biggest rivalry in pro basketball history. Usually, Wilt outscored and outrebounded Bill, but the Celtics came away with the title. It happened in the 1962 playoffs, with the Celtics putting an end to Wilt’s fifty-point, twenty-rebound season, one of the greatest of all time.
Of course, the 1962 season was a pretty big one for me too.
When announcers mention my name nowadays, usually they do so in conjunction with the term triple-double, a shorthanded phrase for one of basketball’s seminal accomplishments. The year was 1962. I was all of twenty-three. Over the course of the season—my second in the NBA—I averaged double figures in three areas: points, rebounds, and assists (hence the term triple-double). No player in basketball history had ever done this. No one has done it since. Some people look at it as one of the holy grails of sports, an accomplishment on par with Ted Williams’s 400 batting average.
The truth is, I didn’t realize what I had achieved; I never looked at stat sheets. Actually, it took almost twenty years for anyone to figure out what I’d done.
Statistics were tracked, obviously. But basketball didn’t occupy the place it now does in the national consciousness. And no one was looking at individual season averages in points, rebounds, and assists, to see if all three were double digits. But when a young buck named Earvin “Magic” Johnson brought Show Time to the Los Angeles Lakers during the early 1980s, newspaper reporters met with the team’s stat crew and started to talk about how, every now and then, Earvin hit double figures in scoring, rebounding, and assists. Soon, an enterprising researcher was combing the NBA’s archives, searching to find out how many people had achieved triple-doubles. He kept digging and finally discovered, quietly, amid reams of statistics and a bunch of numbers that nobody had bothered to crunch . . .
Oscar Robertson
Season 61–62
Team Cincinnati
MIN 79 3503
FGM 866
FGA 1810
PCT .478
FTM 700
FTA 872
PCT .803
REB 985
AST 899
PF 258
DQ 1
PTS 2432
RPG 12.5
APG 11.4
PPG 30.8
There’s a story attributed to baseball legend Willie Mays. When Jose Canseco was honored in the 1980s for being the first man to hit forty home runs and steal forty bases in one season, Mays said, “If I’d have known that would be such a big deal, I would have done it a few times myself.” That comes close to expressing the bemusement I feel about all the attention on my triple-double season. According to the NBA statisticians, I lead in triple-doubles, with 181, far outpacing Magic Johnson (138), Wilt Chamberlain (78), and Larry Bird (59). I can’t say that if I’d have known the importance of the accomplishment, I might have had more, because I played hard every night I took the floor. And anyway, an assist is much easier to get today than it was in 1962.
Jason Kidd is by far the best point guard in today’s game. He’s also something of a triple-double fan. Indeed, when he entered the league with the Dallas Mavericks, Jason chose number thirty-two in honor of the triple-double, saying it reminded him of what he wanted to achieve every night he took to the floor. After a few seasons, Jason was traded to the Phoenix Suns, where he was also thirty-two. When he joined the New Jersey Nets, thirty-two was taken. Jason settled for five, the sum total of three plus two.
Jason has told interviewers that if there was one question he could ask me, it would be how I managed to sustain those averages over a whole season. I think, in actuality, he’s referring more to an idea than an average. I also think that when an announcer brings up my name and the phrase triple-double, he’s talking about the same concept: the idea of the complete player. The idea of excellence in all phases of the game.
And a triple-double season really translates into the idea of sustained excellence.
So Jason’s question might be: How were you able to sustain that level of excellence over the course of an entire season?
I had certain natural gifts. I was six feet five. I was athletic. I was fast and strong. I was skilled. My success in the backcourt advanced the natural evolution of the game and helped popularize the strategy of having large, athletic guards bring the ball up court and run the offense. In addition to my size and my skills, I understood the game, both at the individual and the team levels. This is an important distinction. Basketball is
a contest of individual skills, improvisations, and challenges. It is graceful and poetic and brutal, often all at once. At the core is an individual game and a simple idea: Isolate your man, beat him, score; don’t let him do the same to you. At the same time, the individual exists within a team structure—one that has its own demands, challenges, and improvisational moments. In a team game, if you isolate your man, beat him, and drive to the basket, another defender will come to help. Every individual action brings a team response.
I’ve always thought you play the game of basketball against yourself as much as against any opponent. Every situation on the court has its own natural logic, a feel and rhythm. At the highest level of the game, you are playing your best and are up against opponents who are every bit as good as you, opponents who can do many of the things that you can do, and some things you can’t. That game is mental as much as physical. Your thoughts are embodied in your instinctive physical reactions. I used to finger basketballs for hours at a time; I couldn’t explain why, exactly. Rolling a ball just gave me a feeling that I could handle it—the feel for the ball came through my fingertips, and I knew that I could do anything with it. To truly comprehend the game, you must achieve that sense of control with a basketball, but you must also master the game itself. When you do, you know there’s no challenge you don’t have the skills to answer, nothing they can throw at you that you don’t instinctively know how to counter.
This involves skills: being able to dribble left when the opening is there, making the open shot when it’s time to do so. But even those things are predicated on the idea that playing the game correctly is more important than your own personal desires. The teams I was on put the ball in my hands. Roughly seventy to eighty percent of the time that we were on offense, I had the ball. Not so that I could shoot it every time or dribble between my legs and draw attention to myself—things I could have done if I really wanted to. Rather, coaches gave me the ball to orchestrate the game. I understood the game and could shoulder the responsibility for getting our offense going, getting guys the ball at the right time, and making the right choices and decisions.
Here’s an example. Say I have the ball at the top of the key and am dribbling, keeping my defender at bay with my body as I read the court. Down on the right baseline, Jack Twyman is running toward a pick, set on the low block by Wayne Embry. Maybe Jack’s defender is trailing him, which means, I hope, Jack will run past the pick, curl tightly around it, and pop out in front with his hands ready, so I can hit him with a pass in rhythm. I’m watching for this, but I’m also watching to see if the defender is going to aggressively overplay, or pop over Wayne’s pick, and try to deny that very pass. If he does try to play aggressively, I’m trusting Jack to gauge this and react, perhaps fading to the corner for an uncontested jump shot, or perhaps he will slip backdoor and be available for slick a bounce pass and a layup. Maybe Wayne, after setting the pick, is going to be able to pop out for an open shot. Or maybe he will roll to the basket. All this is playing out in one, maybe two, seconds. Meanwhile, I’ve still got my own defender in front of me, looking for the first chance to reach in, ruin all our plans, and head the other way with the ball.
If I know the offense, if I understand where the guys on my team prefer to get the ball, as well as how the defenders like to play, then I’m going to be able to read all this, judge what’s going on and make the right pass. Or maybe I’ll decide that none of these options are worth a damn. Maybe I’m going to pass the ball around the perimeter. Maybe I need to drive and create some momentum. So you see, when I was running the show out there, I had larger responsibilities than my own statistics. If I played the game correctly, that naturally took care of itself.
More important than scoring, especially at the start of a game, was getting guys involved, giving everybody a feel and a taste, and seeing who was hot. Bill Russell said I was like a quarterback and a coach on the floor. I can’t just dribble down the court and jack up a shot. If I do that, Jack Twyman starts to wonder just why he’s running himself ragged, fighting through picks down on the baseline. Wayne Embry might shake his head—he’s down in the trenches pushing and shoving for position, and here this fool comes down and fires it up first thing? It starts a chain reaction. Jack would have been willing to run the play patiently all the way through to its logical conclusion—maybe this might mean shooting off a pick; maybe it would have meant getting the pass, concluding he wasn’t open, passing the ball, and then cutting and running through more picks. Instead, he’s seen that I’m selfish. That gives him license to shoot as soon as he touches the ball too.
Meanwhile, at the first time-out, Wayne Embry comes back to the huddle and starts complaining. Here he is down in the post, banging and swinging and getting the hell beat out of him. Why doesn’t he ever get to see the ball?
Do you think either one of these guys is going to bust his ass to get back on defense when I miss and the rebound comes off and the Celtics are running a fast break in the other direction? Hell, no, they won’t.
If you understand the game, you’re aware of all this. You’ve got it under control. The guys you see. The defender running up behind you, who you can’t see, but somehow sense. You understand who likes the ball in what spot, and make sure you get the ball to them from where they can score. You know which players need to get some touches early in the game, otherwise they might sulk and be useless to you for the next three quarters; which guys can’t dribble on the perimeter, and make sure they never have the ball in a position where they have to. If you are only dribbling for your own benefit, you are selfish.
I used to start games out by sizing up a defense, testing it, getting a feel for its cracks and openings, what the guys playing against me wanted me to do, how I could do the opposite. Red Auerbach used to say that Bill Russell never knew when to double-team me or when to back off. I was adept enough with the ball to keep Russell guessing. And if I could do it to the greatest defensive center who ever lived, I could do it to anyone.
Once I realized what a team was trying to make me do, I’d exploit that. We might have had ten, even twenty, plays in our offense, but once I saw who was hot, what was working for us, I mined that vein until it went dry. To me that was the essence of pro basketball: Run a play until the other team proves it can stop it, and milk a hot player until his run is over. Jack Twyman was a deadly spot-up shooter. Part of the reason he busted his butt to get to his sweet spots was because he knew I’d find him. Wayne Embry’s offense originally relied on short, rolling hook shots. But when I joined the Royals, Wayne saw how well I could drive and pass. He realized that one result of my penetration into the lane was going to be defenders collapsing on me. Which meant he’d be open for a lot of ten-foot jumpers. Wayne didn’t have a smooth midrange jump shot, but he spent hours alone after practice working on it. “We always busted our tails to get open because we knew he’d get the ball to us,” Wayne told reporters. “How he saw us sometimes, I’ll never know.” While he played with me, Wayne had the best scoring averages of his career.
He wasn’t the only one. This is from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s autobiography, Giant Steps:
There is an exact moment when a center, working hard in the pivot for a glimmer of an advantage, has the position he needs for the score. You’ve run the length of the court, established your ground, defended it against the hands, forearms, elbows, trunks, and knees of another two-hundred-and-fifty-pound zealot who is slapping and bumping and shoving to move you off your high ground. You need the ball right then. It’s like a moon shot: Fire too soon and you miss the orbit; fire too late and you’re out of range, but let fly when all signals are Go, and you should hit it right on. Oscar had the knack of getting me the ball at the right place and time. Not too high, didn’t want to go up in the air and lose the ground you’ve fought for. Not too low, didn’t want to bend for the ball and create a scramble down there. Never wanted to put the ball on the floor where some little guy could steal in and slap it away. Oscar knew all of
this, and his genius was, whether two men were in his face trying to prevent him from making the pass or in mine trying to prevent me from receiving it, in getting me the ball chest-high so I could turn and hook in one unbroken motion.
A friend once told me a story about the great jazz bass player Charles Mingus. Mingus was known, among other things, for his improvisational skills and loosely structured bands. During the 1960s, he somehow got mixed up with the psychotropic guru Tim Leary. Leary was making a movie in Woodstock, New York, and Mingus agreed to act in it and score it. The first day of the shoot, they’re standing around with their scripts. Leary says, “To hell with the scripts. Let’s improv the whole thing.” Mingus shook his head. “Look, man,” he said, “The key to improv is having something concrete to go away from, and something to come back to.” I bring this up because basketball is not only about set plays. Part of the beauty is the improvisational moments, the brilliance that can explode from out of ashes and chaos.
The fact is, you do need one-on-one skills; you do need to be able to isolate your man and break him down. You need to be able to create enough space for yourself to take a tough jump shot, to hit shots with a high degree of difficulty, to drive and dish to the open man. Whatever I was called upon for, I did. When you watch Kobe Bryant play basketball, you see a great offensive player. But you also get the sense that he grew up and learned to play as if there was a television camera on him at all times. His style is something of an extension of Michael Jordan’s game, and Michael’s game not only had flair, it was the embodiment of flair. Both play a spectacular, highlight-oriented game, cherished by the cereal-box crowd and the marketing executives of corporate America. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The Big O Page 18