Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  “Is that so, Frank?” Wheelright replied. “What’s a lie?”

  “It’s all lies!” McGuire said.

  Wheelright did not back down. “Let’s start with one specific thing, Frank. Name one lie for me.”

  From across the room, Wheelright heard Attles shout, “It’s yellow journalism!” Wheelright puffed out his chest. “Well, that’s a word I never expected to hear in this dressing room—‘Yellow.’” (Wheelwright knew the Warriors had been called “yellow” for their inability to beat the Celtics.) McGuire grabbed Wheelright by the wrist and pulled him from the locker room, saying, “Come on, you’ll get killed in here.”

  Outside the locker room, sportswriters crowded McGuire as he berated Wheelright. “It’s not true! You weren’t even at that game, Hugh! How did you even get that stuff? Huh? Where did you get it, Hugh?” Wheelright felt himself in a corner now. He couldn’t, and wouldn’t, give up Kiser as his source. Before he could answer, though, Wheelright saw a head bobbing up and down in the crowd, behind McGuire, and heard a southern accent, filled with a mock anger, shouting, “Yeah! Where did you get that stuff, Hugh?” It was the conniving Jack Kiser. Wheelright stifled a laugh. The secret remained theirs to keep.

  Now, Kiser fingered a cigarette at the press table in Hershey, his face clouded by smoke. Guerin began to find his range in the second quarter, penetrating the middle, leading the Knicks back into the game. Philadelphia led at halftime 79–68, and though Chamberlain had scored forty-one points, it was his free-throw shooting that struck Kiser. The Dipper had made thirteen out of fourteen. Just like Kiser had said: Anybody can shoot free throws.

  Eddie Donovan had bigger worries. His Knicks were within eleven points, and a career night blossomed for Cleveland Buckner. But there was still the small matter of how to stop the Dipper.

  CHAPTER 6

  Gotty and the Zink

  GOTTY DROVE TO HERSHEY EARLIER that evening, which is to say he had Dave Zinkoff drive him there. They were quite a pair, two Jewish bachelors, together since the middle Thirties, a promoter and his sidekick getting by on instinct and shtick. Gotty, sixty-three years old, was known as the Mogul, a nickname he once defined: “A mogul is a top banana.” Zinkoff, fifty-one years old, was, like Gotty, born on the other side—Russia—but raised in west Philadelphia where his parents owned a deli. He had a difficult first interview with Gotty, then searching for a public address announcer. “Get over to that corner there—and shout!” Gotty instructed. Zinkoff did. Then Gotty said, “Now lower your voice,” and Zinkoff did that, too, his tone gravelly even as a young man. (At this point Zinkoff was thinking of Gotty, “He’s meshugs.”) But Gotty said, “Pretty good,” and hired him for $5 a game. Years later, Gotty hooked up Zinkoff with his friend Abe Saperstein, and he traveled the world with the Globetrotters as their p.a. announcer. Zinkoff liked to refer to himself in the third person, as in, “The Zink don’t drink.” For all but four years during World War II when the Zink served in Iceland, the two men seemed inseparable.

  They spoke their own language, Gotty and the Zink, much of it through nods and inference, though their conversation was mostly onesided. Gotty talked, the Zink listened. Of course, Gotty paid the Zink to listen, and to sell ads for Warriors programs, and to serve as his colorful game announcer, and to drive him in his big Cadillac, and to send out his trademark Christmas gift each year, one-pound Hershey chocolate bars.

  They liked to tell stories about themselves: The Zink once in the 1930s asked for a raise, contending that some fans came to games merely to hear him. Gotty said no to the raise, so the Zink quit. For three Saturdays, capacity crowds kept coming to games. Gotty waited, the Zink came back … then Gotty gave him a raise, from $5 a game to $7. Once, the Zink spoke about the Warriors at a local orphanage. He felt sorry for the orphans and invited thirty to a game as his guests. Gotty was furious. “Why the hell did you do that? What do you think we’re doing here? This is a business! How are we gonna make money if you invite everybody you meet to a ballgame? We’re professionals!” Red-faced, the Zink went home and wrote out a check for thirty tickets. He handed it to Gotty. “What the hell’s this?” the Mogul shouted. He tore up the check. “What are you, a wise guy?”

  The Zink seemed to know everyone in town—the politicians, newspapermen, cops—largely from his charity work. He often organized shows for veterans at service hospitals and brought along pretty young women from Police Athletic League shows and various organizations to greet the patients and to hand out gifts; “waitresses,” he called them. Surrounded by such women, the Zink would explain his enduring bachelorhood rhetorically, “Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?” Gotty never came close to marrying, either. “Now maybe the girl thought she came close,” Gotty once said. “I wouldn’t know about that.” From his courtside seat at Warriors games, the Zink didn’t always watch games closely. He was too busy talking to one of his waitresses; occasionally a Warriors official had to tell him which player had just scored. On the p.a., though, Zinkoff was an original with his flourishes and trills. When the former Warrior Jack George scored, the Zink had called out, “By George!” After a Tom Gola basket he called “Gola Goal!” and after a Chamberlain stuff, “Dipper Duuuuuuuunk! Chaaaam-ber-lain!” It was all part of the show.

  The show, of course, belonged to Gotty. The man who brought the Dipper into the NBA was a founding father of Philadelphia basketball, a practical, pear-shaped man in a gray suit, a watch fob dangling from his vest. Gotty used his vest and pants pockets like filing cabinets, cramming them full of notes and game tickets. The New York sportswriter Red Smith decided Gotty was “about the size and shape of a half-keg of beer.” To the rookie Tom Meschery, Gotty “looked like a bloodhound, a wonderful face with big John Huston jowls.” “What do you mean, what does a promoter do?” Gotty once responded to a writer. “He promotes! He gets the game up, he puts it together, he advertises it, he supervises it; he nurses it. He promotes!”

  As a boy, Gotty lived in an area of New York City that later became Spanish Harlem, and there his father, Morris, ran a candy store. When Morris Gottlieb died, Gotty was only nine, and his mother moved the family to south Philly. He later attended the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy and taught a few years at a junior high before moving into sports promotion and later coaching. He promoted entertainers, too; in 1937 he gave the comic Joey Bishop his first job, in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, $25 a week for the Bishop brothers trio. Joey Bishop thought Gotty meant $25 for each brother. The first week the Bishop brothers got $8 apiece. Joey Bishop complained. Gotty thought about it and replied: “I’ll tell you what. We’ll do your laundry, too.”

  The Mogul’s team now was his life and it was strictly a seat-of-the-pants operation. Gotty paid his bills immediately and preferably in cash since that saved him three percent. Arizin once saw Gotty chase after a boy who had picked up the basketball as a game ended at Convention Hall: As Gotty ran, jowls flapping, belly roiling, he looked like an egg rolling across a table. He ripped the ball from the kid’s hands. Over the years, Gotty had developed an uncanny ability to walk into an arena, gauge a crowd, and guess its size, invariably within a hundred of the correct number. He didn’t pay his players much, Chamberlain notwithstanding, but they liked and respected him anyway. His dour expression disguised an essential decency and sharp intellect; when he made friendly bets with them, the stakes always were the same—a prune Danish.

  He made up the NBA’s schedule of games each season on a yellow legal pad; to do it, he said, “takes a certain kind of mechanical brain.” In the old days, when he owned the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association team known as the SPHAs (pronounced Spahz), his players joked that Gotty paid them in the dark so that as he slapped the bills into their hands they couldn’t read the denominations. His SPHAs players all were Jewish—Joel “Shikey” Gotthofer, Inky Lautman, Moe Goldman, Cy Kaselman. The team’s players wore Hebrew letters across their chests—samekh, pe, he, aleph—and the Jewish star; Gotty had designed the uniforms h
imself. One of the original SPHAs, Hughie Black, would say, “Half [the fans] would come to see the Jews killed and the other half were Jews coming to see our boys win.”

  The SPHAs became champions of their home city, won two of three games in 1925–26 over the Original Celtics, barnstormed across the northeast, and played in the Eastern League and then the American League, winning many titles in the semiorganized professional ranks. On road trips to Trenton and Camden and Reading, Gotty drove his eight-seat Ford touring car, his seven players seated and the Zink (who handled SPHAs promotions) stretched out on the floor in between the seats. Not that the Zink minded; he was young and flexible then. The Zink slipped a lucky number into the SPHAs game programs, and the winner got a $20 suit from Sam Gerson’s store. Gotty staged many SPHAs games on a ballroom floor at the Broadwood Hotel, corner of Broad and Wood streets, the games usually followed by a dance. One of his SPHAs players, Gil Fitch, rushed into the locker room after games to change into a tuxedo and then led his band, accompanied by singer Kitty Kallen. SPHAs games became a social staple in Philadelphia’s Jewish community. “Many a fella met his wife there,” Gotty would say. “Many a fella met somebody else’s wife there, too.” The Zink put it like this: “Man, those were the days! Basketball and girls, what a combination! The Zink had a lot of good times then. That’s how the Broadwood got its name. Some broads wouldn’t and some broads would.”

  In his bow tie, Gotty had been a fiery coach, quick to chew out his players, both with the SPHAs and then, after the war, with the Warriors. That’s when arena owners in the big cities formed the Basketball Association of America, progenitor of the modern NBA. After one disappointing road loss late in the 1940s, his Warriors met the next morning at the airport where Gotty organized a team meeting—in the men’s room. His players formed a semicircle near the urinals. Shouting, Gotty asked each player, “And what’s your problem?” All heads bowed until a knock on the door. Gotty cracked open the door and peered out. “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?” he shouted. A man outside said he needed to use the bathroom. Gotty scared him off.

  Sitting in the back seat during the ride to Hershey was Jim Heffernan, beat writer for The Evening Bulletin, a solid, stable, and mainstream newspaper, which each day congratulated itself with the masthead motto, “In Philadelphia, Nearly Everybody Reads The Bulletin.” Heffernan loved to listen to Gotty and Zink. They were like Damon Runyon characters, he thought, colorful and quirky and, in Gotty’s case, cheap. Heffernan had driven to New York with Gotty and Zink several times before and finally realized that Gotty timed their departures so they would arrive at Madison Square Garden just after 6:00 P.M. when the parking meters expired. If they arrived before 6:00, Gotty instructed the Zink to drive around the parking lot until the meters went off. To the Mogul, time wasn’t money. Money was money.

  Listen, I’ve got news for you. That was how Gotty began many sentences, as in, Listen, I’ve got news for you: You don’t deserve a raise. You already make too much money. Early in the 1961–62 season, Gotty had startled Meschery and the other Warriors rookies by standing at the hotel check-out desk and informing each player how much he owed for telephone calls from their room: Usually it was twenty cents, sometimes a few nickels more. When St. Louis Hawks general manager Marty Blake phoned and asked to attend a Warriors playoff game against the Celtics at Convention Hall in March 1960, Gotty replied, “Marty, we’re sold out. Just bring your own chair.” And he meant it. So Blake followed instructions. He brought a folding chair on a train, carried it into Convention Hall, and set it beside the court; after the game, Blake carried his chair back home. Of course, Gotty himself always sat courtside to intimidate referees, who knew of his power in the league. Referees understood that with one phone call by the mighty Gotty their careers could be history.

  The Warriors and the Knicks came to Hershey—an hour’s drive north of where Pickett charged and Lee failed at Gettysburg—for a simple reason: Gotty put them there. It was Gotty, and Gotty alone, who drew up the NBA schedule; he knew when every train, plane, and bus departed from each NBA city. Gotty loved Hershey. His team had trained in Chocolate Town each autumn for years, and he had personal friendships there. But Gotty, ever the promoter, had more in mind than his relationships or his chocolate cravings. Potentially there was money to be made in Chocolate Town. Hershey had a big arena and plenty of basketball fans within driving distance, fans who typically might attend weekend games in the Eastern League, a vibrant independent association with fine talent, including dozens of black players unable to crack the NBA quota and others banned by the NBA for involvement with gamblers. The Eastern League featured teams across Pennsylvania, in Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, Sunbury, Hazleton, Williamsport, and Scranton. Further, the NBA was trying to expand its audience by luring new fans. During the 1961–62 season, the Boston Celtics played a few games in Providence, Rhode Island; the Cincinnati Royals in Dayton, Ohio; and the Syracuse Nationals in Rochester and Utica, New York. Out west, the Lakers played a game in Portland, another in Seattle. This was the Warriors’ third game of the season in Chocolate Town. They drew 4,800 fans the first time, 4,400 the second. The way Gotty had it figured, his Warriors were spreading their wings for the good of the league, and if nobody showed up at the game in Hershey, at least he could pick up a few extra crates of chocolate bars.

  Back in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color line, New York Knicks owner Ned Irish told the NBA’s Board of Governors that he wanted to sign the league’s first African-American player, the Globetrotters’ Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton. Gottlieb was nearly apoplectic. He didn’t have big money, but Gotty had big ideas and a promoter’s well-honed instincts. He had been a part of the game from its urban Jewish origins, first as a player and later as coach and now as franchise owner. For years Gotty also had promoted Negro League baseball teams such as the Homestead Grays and the Baltimore Elite Giants. He understood the way sports fans thought.

  Or thought he did.

  A business pragmatist, Gotty believed that white customers wouldn’t pay to see an NBA game if too many players were black. “Our players are going to be seventy-five percent black in five years,” Gotty said at the 1949 meeting, not as a prediction but a warning. “We’re not going to draw people to the game. You’re going to do a disservice to the game.” Further, Gotty said, to steal Sweetwater Clifton was to risk angering Abe Saperstein. His good friend Saperstein, he reminded the board, was a good friend to the NBA—and a gold mine. A Globetrotters appearance virtually guaranteed sellouts at NBA doubleheaders. So Gotty posed the question: If we steal Saperstein’s players, what happens if he stops bringing his Globetrotters to NBA arenas? Then what? It would cost the NBA its top drawing card. Without two guaranteed Globetrotters sellouts a year some NBA teams might not make it. This was the dark heart in Gotty’s fast-talking charm. He was out to turn a buck, and if necessary to do that, he would perpetuate segregation. Gotty had grown up scrambling and scuffling, and as owner of the Warriors he was still scrambling and scuffling. As he would explain years later, “This was my blood; this wasn’t a tax gimmick. If I lost $50,000, it was $50,000 that I lost.”

  Gotty was persuasive. The Board of Governors turned down Irish. Six months later, though, Irish came back. He said his Knicks needed a big man. He still wanted Sweetwater Clifton. Irish banged his fist on a table and presented his ultimatum, gently: If I don’t get Sweetwater Clifton, I don’t know if the Knicks can stay in this league. The NBA would have to choose its poison: lose Abe Saperstein or lose its franchise in New York. The vote passed, and Sweetwater Clifton went to the Knicks in 1950, breaking the NBA’s color barrier. As Carl Bennett, the Fort Wayne Pistons’ general manager, walked to the door after the Board of Governors meeting, an outvoted Gotty snarled at him, “You dumb S.O.B. You’ve just ruined our league.” Five NBA teams would sign black players before Gotty. Not until 1954 did Gotty sign his first, Jackie Moore of La Salle.

  A year later, in 1955, Gotty finagled league rul
es to his own advantage, using the integration of the NBA, which he had fought so passionately, to enrich himself. The NBA permitted its teams territorial picks; that is, in return for giving up a first-round selection, a team could select, without challenge, a college star who played in its immediate geographical area. Team owners hoped that drafting local college players would intensify loyalties with fans and help draw bigger crowds. So Gotty claimed Wilt Chamberlain as the Warriors’ territorial pick even though the Dipper was yet in Overbrook High School. NBA owners winced. These owners knew that territorial picks did not apply to high school players. But they respected Gotty, who was after all a good league man. Because they felt they owed Gotty for his fidelity to the league, they allowed him to bend the rule, stipulating only that Chamberlain couldn’t enter the NBA until his college class graduated, which meant the 1959–60 season. His power play a success, Gotty said he was willing to wait and somehow managed to keep a straight face as he said it.

  In the fall of 1959, the specter of the Dipper playing for his Warriors thrilled Gotty. “Wait until the people in Convention Hall see Wilt dunking that apple,” Gotty said. The crowds were large for Chamberlain at first; he was the talk of the league, as Gotty had predicted. But now, in his third season, attendance had fallen, especially at home, from an average of 7,000 fans per game to fewer than 5,000—this even as Chamberlain’s point production grew. With ratings and sponsor interest in decline, NBC considered not renewing the league’s television contract. Only 2,891 fans attended a Warriors home game against Syracuse in December, and Gotty confessed that even that number was padded since he’d counted the Syracuse University football team. “And they were here as guests,” he said. Even so, Gotty lashed out at critics. “Would we draw better without Wilt? Could the team win without Wilt? Is it riskier to play with him or without him? If the people don’t want to see him, then we’ve got to do something else, but I can’t think of any other city where the people wouldn’t pour out to see him.