Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  He reached for Bellamy’s hand at center court. “Hello, Walter,” the Dipper said. Then, he told the rookie, “You won’t get a shot off in the first half.”

  What followed was Goliath’s wrath. The first nine shots Walter Bellamy took from inside the free-throw line, Chamberlain blocked. Big Bells couldn’t score. He couldn’t breathe. Everywhere the rookie turned … Chamberlain. The Dipper didn’t often play defense so fervently. When he did, the results could be terrifying. One NBA assistant coach watched as Chamberlain sent shots flying back past Bellamy’s ear that night and said, “It was sad, man.” On offense, Chamberlain scored over Bellamy on an array of fall-away bank shots, put-backs, and dunks.

  When the two centers met for the second-half tip, Chamberlain looked at the shell-shocked rookie. “Okay, Walter,” Chamberlain said, as if to a child, “now you can play.”

  When it was done, he had outscored Bellamy fifty-one to fourteen. The Warriors had won going away. Sweetness and deference proved no better than elbows and scowls.

  Already in Hershey, the Dipper’s visage was sweat-soaked, like raindrops clinging to a pane of glass. Typically, he guzzled water during timeouts to keep hydrated, yet still lost about seven pounds per game. The Knicks heard Paul Arizin wheezing as he moved up and down the court, same as always, like an old man. Guy Rodgers, unwilling to shoot, kept sliding fancy passes to Chamberlain and Arizin. So rapid was the pace of this game, so meager the defense being played, by night’s end the teams would attempt a combined 233 shots, or nearly five shots per minute. At that rate, they could have used a twelve-second shot clock.

  Working his cigarette at the Hershey Sports Arena press table, Jack Kiser did not see anything out of the ordinary from Chamberlain during the second quarter—except his free throws. The Dipper kept making them. Kiser knew free-throw shooting was the weakest part of his game. He was the worst free-throw shooter on the team, among the worst in the league, making barely more than half during his three seasons. The Dipper wasn’t sure what the problem was. Maybe his hands were too big or he was just too tall or weightlifting had made him too strong or perhaps it was simply in his head. He’d practiced different methods of shooting free throws: one-handed, two-handed, from three feet behind the line, a jump shot, a fall-away, even blindfolded. Now the Dipper shot his free throws underhanded, same as Arizin and Rodgers and others in the league. He dipped down low, spreading his knees wide. “Anybody can make a free throw,” Jack Kiser barked at the Dipper, blowing like a windstorm into the Convention Hall locker room after a game, pen and notepad in hand. “I mean anybody.”

  With his southern accent that one sportswriter would term “cornpone, kind of like an addled Jerry Lee Lewis,” Kiser taunted anyone, even Chamberlain, though in truth he was the Dipper’s great defender in print. Loud and caustic, Kiser even wrote with a smirk. He didn’t think much of the Knicks. “You can find better benches in Central Park,” he wrote. About the Warriors’ recent loss to the Knicks, Kiser had written, “It was, honestly, the most pathetic offensive show put on by a Warrior team in years.” And then, upon further consideration, a paragraph later, “It was, honestly, the most pathetic defensive show put on by a Warrior team in years. New York should have been a pushover.” NBA referees knew Kiser as “Poison Pen.” Referee Earl Strom, smarting from Kiser’s criticism, once scuffled with him as they entered an arena. On another occasion, Kiser yelled at referee Norm Drucker from his courtside seat at Convention Hall, “You’re dumping, you’re shaving points, Norm!” Drucker attempted to throw him out of the game. “But you can’t throw me out,” Kiser said. “Why not?” Drucker asked. “Because,” Kiser answered, “I’m not in the game.” Gottlieb intervened. “What’s the matter?” he asked Drucker. “He said something that’s unbecoming of a newspaperman,” Drucker replied, adding, “Get him out or you’ll forfeit the game!” Gotty had nearly a full house, not the usual occurrence. To placate Drucker, he moved Kiser to another seat.

  Yet Chamberlain rather liked Jack Kiser, especially his directness, and played cards with him on airplanes, even if Kiser mocked him publicly for his poor free-throw shooting. The Dipper had an uneven relationship with the media; a few sportswriters in New York, such as Leonard Lewin and Leonard Koppett, liked the Dipper and wrote favorably of him. But, as Kiser would write, “too many writers around the league like Wilt personally about as much as they do a typographical error.” They thought him aloof. He thought they put words in his mouth. “Seeing as how this is a sportswriters’ dinner,” the Dipper had said, upon receiving his league MVP and Rookie of the Year honors in Philly in 1960, “I don’t want to be misquoted, so I’ll just say, ‘Thank you.’” Sitting in the audience, sportswriter Jack McKinney of The Philadelphia Daily News was moved to write, “Wasn’t that a lovely acceptance speech? … It was then that we of the press and radio realized how we have wronged the poor fellow. When Chamberlain played with the Globetrotters, the writers insisted on tipping off the public. Record-breaking crowds invaded his privacy and all Wilt got for the discomfort was $65,000.” McKinney termed it “the terrible price he must pay for being tall, talented, famous and rich.”

  But Kiser became the Boswell of the Dipper’s biggest season, smartalecky, all knowing, precisely what The Philadelphia Daily News wanted. When sports editor Larry Merchant, only twenty-six years old, arrived to The Daily News from New York in 1957, he all but planted sticks of dynamite into the staid and predictable nature of Philadelphia sports journalism practiced by the morning Inquirer and The Evening Bulletin. Merchant brought color, controversy, and Jack Kiser. The Daily News had nearly folded in 1956. Then Walter Annenberg, publisher of the rival Inquirer, bought the paper in 1957, killed its Sunday edition, and transformed it into an afternoon paper. The newsroom was set in a former warehouse without air conditioning on 22nd and Arch Streets. Through open windows trains blew soot that speckled copy paper. Columnist Sandy Grady, an elegant stylist widely respected in Philadelphia by athletes and journalists alike, quickly recognized that The Daily News managing editor J. Ray Hunt had two obsessions: Notre Dame football and women’s breasts. Grady heard Hunt roar to his front-page editors, “Bazooms! Give me more bazooms!” In the sports department, Merchant instructed his writers to get raucous and raise hell for The Daily News’s 285,000 readers. Dig into what happened on the field and then tell why it happened; bring the readers closer to the sports personalities. Merchant had been raised on The New York Post, a real sportswriter’s paper, and tried to emulate it in Philadelphia. Tummeling is what he called it—Yiddish for having a little fun. In the years that followed he built one of America’s finest sports sections.

  He originally hired Kiser to work the late-night desk, on the recommendation of Grady. Grady and Kiser had worked together at The Charlotte News. Grady knew that Kiser was a quick study, understood layout techniques, and was underpaid. In his green Volkswagen Beetle, Grady drove Kiser up to Philadelphia. For Kiser, this was a risky job move, Grady believed, “because Jack didn’t have standout writing talent, and The Daily News was an insecure paper.” Yet almost at once, Kiser fit right into The Daily News, a working man’s paper, popular in the river wards because of its edge.

  Certainly, once Kiser moved off the night desk and onto the Warriors beat, he showed his own edge. He wrote: “Eddie Gottlieb pays $1,000 [per game] to see Wilt Chamberlain score points. That makes Mister Gottlieb an extremely rare creature because there are millions of people in the immediate vicinity who won’t pay $1.25 to see the tall Warrior center score points.” In his three-dot sports columns, Kiser spread rumors, often trades he imagined. Editors at competing papers in town instructed their own writers to follow up on these rumors. They unnerved players and galled writers. His columns were prickly, sarcastic, fun.

  With Convention Hall attendance what it is of late, why doesn’t Gotty run the Warrior–Chicago game as a preliminary Saturday night and have the Eagles play the Colts in the feature?

  Wouldn’t it be fitting and proper for Red Auer
bach to give part of his salary to Bill Russell? With Big Bill out of the lineup, Auerbach is just a 1–5 coach. With him in action, Red is a 37–8 mastermind….

  Wasn’t the ignoring of Sam Jones in the all-star selection the biggest miscarriage of justice since they disqualified me out of a $745 daily double? …

  Thin, pale, and ingratiating, Kiser was formidable in his way. Merchant would say, “There was something very intense about him. There was a sense that maybe there was another side of Jack I didn’t know, some darker side, nothing I could ever put a finger on. That very same thing that made him a good reporter and brick thrower, like a lot of newspapermen, came from some background that was always looking to take on the establishment. There had to be a hard edge there.”

  At times, Kiser became a part of the Warriors season narrative. He had quickly befriended the Dipper, listening to his tales with admiration. Following a two-point loss to the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on November 14, a lackluster performance by Chamberlain, reporters crowded Frank McGuire outside the locker room. In his story, Kiser transcribed the exchange: Reporters: “Why didn’t you take Wilt out when he was going so bad?” McGuire: “Who do you mean? Wilt? Well, because we haven’t been taking him out, that’s why.” Reporters: “Does this mean you’ll never take him out?” McGuire: “I’m no fortune teller. I can’t answer that question.” Reporters: “If any other player wasn’t helping the team like that, would you have taken him out?” McGuire: “I don’t think that’s a fair question and I won’t answer it. I don’t know what you guys are trying to do, but if you’re trying to get me to put the rap on Wilt, then you’re wasting your time. I’ve never criticized a ballplayer—either one of mine or one on the other team—and I’m not going to start now.” Reporters: “Do you think Wilt was giving 100 percent?” McGuire: “Yes. Definitely.” Reporters: “Do you think it was his worst game?” McGuire: “You are the ones that must determine that, not me…. Everybody has a bad game once in awhile. DiMaggio struck out a few times and Mantle struck out a few times, didn’t they?”

  Kiser had his own explanation for this interrogation: competing reporters out for blood, not only Wilt’s but Jack Kiser’s. He wrote the next morning in The Daily News: “Why the intense attack? Maybe it was because they were so accustomed to New York losing that they could not believe the win had been earned by merit on the Knicks’ part. Maybe it was because Chamberlain is so great and it’s always a good story to expose some failing in greatness. But more likely it was because most of the reporters in the squad [outside the locker room] remembered a day over two years ago when the opposition paper beat them bad with a story on Chamberlain’s retirement (a short-lived one, it turned out). They didn’t think the manner in which the story was obtained was entirely kosher, and they’d been waiting for Wilt to make a misstep.”

  Indeed, nearly two years before, in February 1960, as Chamberlain’s rookie season had neared an end, Kiser broke the story that the Dipper was considering quitting the team to participate in a series of worldwide track and field exhibitions in an attempt to break the world decathlon record. This story, which had significant shock value, obviously had been in the works between Chamberlain and Kiser for some time; it was the first in a lengthy series that stretched across five days and thousands of words with articles about the Dipper’s boyhood and college years. Vintage tabloid stuff, it was filled with hyperbole and sensational headlines such as THE MAN WHO WAS NEVER A BOY AND FELLOW PLAYERS STUNNED BY WILT’S STATEMENT and WILT DENIES DENYING OUR STORY. The series drew attention to Chamberlain and Kiser, a winning proposition for both. (When the Dipper actually retired the following month, he claimed race as part of the reason, and he left for the Globetrotters not track and field; even so, Merchant, in a column, later crowed of Kiser’s scoop, “Even if Chamberlain was … bluffing for a raise, it was still a remarkable story.”) Of course, the lengthy series infuriated Gotty, who upon signing the Dipper to a three-year deal before his second season made certain to phone Jim Heffernan of The Evening Bulletin. Heffernan believed that Gotty handed him this this page one story “just to show Kiser that he didn’t know everything.”

  Not until December had the Warriors, and Chamberlain, found their own formidable stride. They won seven of eight games before Christmas, seven in a row in January, and then thirteen of nineteen in February. The team’s patterns and tendencies were clear: the Dipper took nearly forty shots per game, and Arizin, with his determined drives to the basket and accurate jumpers, took about twenty. The playmaker Rodgers suffered bouts of inconsistency with the worst shooting percentage of his career, missing nearly two of every three field goal attempts. The absence of the oft-injured forward Tom Gola exposed a weak bench. The Warriors struggled against the league’s top two teams, losing six consecutive games to Boston and winning only twice in eight games against Baylor’s Lakers. Chamberlain brutalized every team, averaging fifty-six points against St. Louis and forty-eight points per game against Syracuse, with the league’s other teams falling in between statistically, except Boston. In a dozen games against the Celtics in 1961–62, Chamberlain averaged forty-one points. Russell remained his most tenacious opponent.

  As the season progressed, criticism against the Dipper and his unprecedented scoring mounted. Syracuse coach Alex Hannum contended referees protected Chamberlain. “Nobody can breathe on him without getting a foul called,” Hannum said. Chicago Coach Jim Pollard said, “They’ve created a monster…. He’s nothing but a scoring machine. The idea of the game isn’t to score points. The idea is to win.” Syracuse veteran Dolph Schayes concurred: “How do you think the other [Warriors] players feel? They want to feel important, to feel needed. Some of them are treated like garbage. They’re pawns. Wilt doesn’t help them. Nobody can play full speed 48 minutes. What’s he trying to prove?”

  As the Warriors’ home attendance declined, Kiser defended Chamberlain: “Now that Wilt Chamberlain has gone cold at the gate, wouldn’t the Big Dipper have to perform as well as three $25,000 players to earn his big check? And isn’t he?” When others, like Schayes, criticized Chamberlain for shooting too often, Kiser countered, “A t last glance Wilt was hitting 49.3 percent of his shots, the rest of the team was hitting 40.2. Nuff said.” In mid-December, Kiser wondered about falling attendance in Philadelphia: “It could be that all of Chamberlain’s dunk shots look alike, all his jump shots look alike, and once you’ve seen one of them you’ve seen them all. The big guy could score a hundred in a game and few would be surprised, or willing to see him try for 101 the next time out. Didn’t he go into last night’s game with 300 points in a five-game period that has to go down in history as the hottest streak of all time?”

  Kiser’s devotion to Chamberlain was exceeded perhaps only by his devotion to controversy. When the Warriors arrived in Boston to play Detroit in the first game of a doubleheader on January 19, six weeks before Hershey, they were greeted by this headline in The Boston Traveler: STILT STUNTS NBA GROWTH. Sportswriter Hugh Wheelright’s story amounted to a blistering attack against Chamberlain for the way “he pads his bank account” as a scorer. Wheelright contended that Chamberlain’s seventy-three-point game against Chicago on January 13 “nauseated everyone who saw it” for his steadfast refusal to pass to his teammates who knew “they must pass to Chamberlain or sit on the bench.” Wheelright charged that Chamberlain had “cussed out little Al Attles for shooting a layup with no one within 40 feet of him. ‘You should have waited for me,’ was the expurgated version of Superman’s remarks,” Wheelwright wrote, before adding, “A Philly writer observed: ‘Wilt accomplished nothing but to drive away more fans. His and the Warriors’ behavior made a travesty of the game. It was a disgrace.’”

  What none of the Warriors could have known then was that the source of Wheelright’s material was … Jack Kiser. Wheelright and Kiser were friends who loved nothing more than to toss a Molotov cocktail onto their own sports pages. They swapped material often. Wheelright, a 1949 Harvard graduate with a degree in in
ternational law, was known to the Boston Celtics as something of a card shark. He counted Cousy and trainer Buddy LeRoux as gin rummy partners and Tom Heinsohn as his insurance man. Wheelright had verified Kiser’s material, as best he could, in conversation with an NBA referee and timed the release of his story for the Warriors’ arrival. Kiser could not use the material himself, he told Wheelright, for fear that it would alienate the players he covered.

  Reading Wheelright’s story, McGuire erupted. He read it aloud to his players in the locker room before the game and conducted his own question-and-answer session. McGuire asked, “Has anybody on this club been told to feed Wilt or else he would be on the bench?” Heads shook. “Al,” McGuire said to Attles, pointedly, “did Wilt curse you for not passing to him?” Attles shook his head. “Is anybody on this team unhappy?” McGuire asked. A chorus of emphatic No’s filled the room. “Well,” McGuire said, “it looks as if the whole world is against you. Now is the time to pull together, to play together. To show the people who don’t know the truth that this is a bunch of lies.” The Warriors went out and crushed Detroit in the opener, an aroused Chamberlain scoring fifty-three points and playing, Kiser wrote, “the kind of defense his worst critics insist he should play every second.” Kiser added, “The unintentional hero is Hugh Wheelright, a sports reporter for The Boston Traveler. And a half-glad, half-mad McGuire asserted later, ‘Mr. Wheelright deserves an assist on this one. He helped us to win the game.’”

  After the victory, McGuire called for Wheelright. Entering the Boston Garden locker room, Wheelright heard McGuire’s volcanic roar. “It was a malicious, vicious article, Hugh,” McGuire yelled. “Full of untruths, one based on fantasy rather than facts. It’s all lies!”