Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Looking for Chamberlain, Attles instead passed to Guy Rodgers. Rodgers’s jump shot missed. Chamberlain leaped for the rebound but misjudged its direction. The ball hit his wrist and went into the basket, the crowd erupting: seventy-three points. “Boy, what a tap he made that time!” Bill Campbell said. “He just tied the record, ladies and gentlemen, for a regulation game.”

  The Knicks countered quickly. The Warriors preferred it that way. They played defense like matadors, swooshing their capes and allowing the Knicks to pass. Cleveland Buckner, with that quirky over-the-head shooting style, hit yet another jump shot, 131–114.

  Looking for Chamberlain, Rodgers passed inside to Attles, a little man in the big man’s space. Attles’s shovel pass found Chamberlain underneath, too close to the basket for the Knicks to stop. The Dipper turned and there came a roar from the Hershey crowd. The Warriors reserves reacted, leaping from their chairs and cheering as if they hadn’t already seen the Dipper score 3,840 other points in the season, as if these seventy-five points were a newly minted first of their kind.

  Ten minutes to play: Meschery sensed a seismic shift in the Warriors offense. The whole team concept had broken down. The usual passing and cutting and moving without the ball stopped. Meschery felt himself slowing down, stopping, literally stopping, becoming almost a spectator—a spectator wearing white Philadelphia jersey No. 14 and standing twenty feet from the basket. He had never performed this way before. He would get the ball to the Dipper and then … watch.

  CHAPTER 14

  Guerin

  RICHIE GUERIN, SEMPER FIDELIS, always faithful. Here’s what he was thinking: This is a travesty! I cannot wait to get out of here! The madder he became, the better he played. It was one of Guerin’s more unusual traits. Pent up anger or frustration ruined many players, but not Guerin. With a little rage, the Leatherneck could go a long way. It made him stronger, meaner, better. When the NBA players of the early Fifties retired, their rugged sensibilities and habits from the war years did not fade quickly from the game. Richie Guerin yet embodied their spirit, chin up, elbows out. He played like the old Marine he was. Meschery would see him in a New York bar late one night in less than peak condition. They had a game at the Garden the next night. Meschery thought, Hell, Richie’s not going to be able to play tomorrow. But Guerin played and scored twenty-six points.

  Now, furious with what he saw as a travesty in Hershey, Guerin played in a semper fi frenzy. If they earn this the right way, more power to them. I could care less. But this is not right. This is outside the normal flow of the game. Now, Guerin sank a two-hand set shot, a shooting style that connected him to a nearly faded era. In the 1920s, Kansas’s Phog Allen, writing an article in The Athletic Journal entitled “Anatomy of Basketball,” had described the game’s three fundamental shots: the free throw, the two-hand push shot, and the one-hand English shot from the standing position, though the latter, he noted, was not often used. Of the two-hand shot later favored by Guerin, Allen wrote, “The flexing pronators are attached to the internal condyle of the humerus [and] the supinators and extensors are attached to the external condyle.” Now Guerin took a pass from Cleveland Buckner, drove to the tip of the circle, and fed Dave Budd nicely for an easy basket. Then he penetrated the lane, shoulder down, daring anyone—Attles? Meschery? The Dipper?—to stop his charge. He fooled them all. He pulled up and drained a jumper. It was as if Richie Guerin was making a statement: You can embarrass my team but you cannot embarrass me.

  If only Guerin could have closed his eyes and made this game go away. There wasn’t anything he could do about the Dipper—even rage wouldn’t allow him to stop a player nine inches taller. But of course, he tried, anyway. Budd stood in front of Chamberlain, Buckner behind, and Guerin sometimes crept in to add an angry obstacle. Other than this, all Richie Guerin could do was get in his teammates’ faces and scream at them and show them, yet one more time, how the game was played, alone, storming a hill into enemy gunfire, proving to the enemy and his shrinking comrades that he was fearless.

  Now, in the Hershey arena, Guerin heard the fresh-faced kids: “Give it to Wilt!” He saw the Warriors on the bench yukking it up when Chamberlain reached seventy-three points. Guerin’s red-faced rage grew. Then, driving hard to the Warriors basket, he hit another pull-up jumper, and Bill Campbell said, “And the shooting tonight is phenomenal!”

  In his first game in the NBA in 1959, against the Knicks at the Garden, Chamberlain scored forty-three points and pulled down twenty-eight rebounds. That night, Guerin and the Knicks noticed the way Chamberlain set up for his fall-away, getting the ball on the left side, down low, sticking his posterior into the defensive man to knock him off balance, and then turning, leaping, and firing. “There’s no way you can stop him from getting the ball. We tried to collapse around him, but it didn’t do any good,” Knicks Coach Fuzzy Levane said that night. “He might hit ninety points in some game sometime.” That night Carl Braun said the Dipper already was better than George Mikan ever was. Here’s what Richie Guerin said: “Wait until he learns his way around this league. Then watch out. Right now, he’s still feeling his way. Boy, what power!”

  Now, it was again Dave Budd’s turn to battle the Dipper. Budd outraced Chamberlain down the floor. He arrived first to Wilt’s intended destination, the left side, down low. Then again, it didn’t matter who got there first. The Dipper, so powerful, leaned into Budd and forced him to give ground. Budd knew, If Wilt wants to stand in my spot, he is going to stand in my spot. Budd would have moved to Plan B except there is no Plan B. Conlin passed the ball inside to Chamberlain. He shot and missed, though Conlin rebounded. He put the ball back in the Dipper’s hands: another miss. The Knicks took off on fast break, Willie Naulls to Al Butler, driving and then dishing to Guerin for a layup, 133–118. The Warriors mounted only a token defense.

  There’s a code of honor in sports, Guerin believed. You do not deliberately embarrass your opponent or set records outside the normal flow of the game. The Warriors were breaking a code. This was not earning it. Of course, Guerin knew what was required for a scorer to break records. On a night in December 1959 when he set a Knicks single-game mark by scoring fifty-seven points against Syracuse, Guerin had screamed at teammate Cal Ramsey, who would last just seven games with the team, for daring to shoot with two minutes left. Ramsey knew that Guerin wanted the ball but screamed back, “Hey, you’re trying to set a record. I’m just trying to get a job!”

  Now, Frank McGuire, leading by fifteen points with nine minutes, twenty-four seconds remaining, called a timeout. Campbell said, “History is being written here tonight in Hershey. The big man has broken the record and he is going for more!” Boy, what a travesty!

  What Guerin would not accept was a deeper truth: If this game was devolving now into a travesty, it was doing so under the massive force of the Dipper’s talent. It was Chamberlain’s talent that broke the dam, and the Knicks could not keep it from breaking. Guerin considered the game a farce as a way to protect his own dignity. It was as if the past was mad at the future because the future no longer involved him. Richie Guerin got madder and more aggressive as his rage infused his game, his own point total rising. What else could he do now but score?

  CHAPTER 15

  Attles

  DURING THE TIMEOUT, tugging on his cufflinks, Frank McGuire did not tell Rodgers and Attles, Conlin and Meschery, “Get the ball to Wilt.” Standing beside his coach, Attles was thinking, You don’t have to say it, Frank. It’s like the nose on my face: right there, obvious. I will get the ball to the Big Fella. We all will. Attles never worried about getting his name in the paper. He put the ball in the hottest hand, that’s the way he played the game, every game. He was a team guy, understated, without ego. In summer 1960, Attles had no expectations of ever playing in the NBA. In fact, he’d accepted a teaching job at a junior high school back home in Newark—he even took possession of the keys to his new classroom—when, in a series of personal twists, he found himself in the Warri
ors training camp in Hershey. Once he made the team, the Dipper looked after him. In a small town in Missouri once for an exhibition game that year, Attles saw his white teammates step off the bus and walk into a café. He followed until the Dipper and Andy Johnson shook their heads and told him, “We’re going to Dutch it.” The two old Globetrotters took Attles to a grocery store across the street for a loaf of bread, bologna, and cheese. Rather than risk the embarrassment of Jim Crow rejection, they ate their sandwiches on the bus.

  Now a rising fascination crept into Bill Campbell’s voice: “We’re just conjecturing here how many can he make. He’s got nine minutes and twenty-four seconds, and the guesses are running as high as one hundred.” Just saying it—one hundred—titillated Campbell. He added, “Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Conlin pulled up his dribble, momentarily stuck. Seeing Chamberlain surrounded by too many Knicks, Conlin took a long set shot that missed. Attles snuck through the lane and tipped it in, 135–118, his eighth basket in eight attempts.

  Back came Guerin, Attles’s man to cover. The Knicks had scored their last four times down the court, and Guerin had been in the middle of all four possessions. Together, Guerin and Attles made for a dynamic matchup: the Leatherneck and the Destroyer, players as different in style and persona as their hometowns, Gotham and Newark. Attles had first seen Guerin play years before on Channel 9 in Newark, which featured games of New York area colleges such as Guerin’s Iona. On the small screen, in black and white, Guerin had seemed formidable. In person, he was even more than that: all swagger. But Attles already was making his name as a ferocious defender by confounding the league’s best young guards, including Robertson and West.

  Guerin took the ball to the middle, Attles on his hip, and passed to Willie Naulls on the left side. Naulls drove the baseline and scored on a one-hander, 135–120. The Zink: “Naauuuuuullllssss.”

  The ball came to Meschery. He looked for Chamberlain. Suddenly … an opening! Not for the Dipper but for Meschery. He had a wide-open fifteen-foot jump shot, but the Mad Russian hesitated. He didn’t want to shoot. He looked for Chamberlain again. He still wasn’t in the clear so Meschery shot a jumper and made it, 137–120. These baskets are like sewers, Attles thought as he ran down the court. Nobody’s missing. The Warriors would score a record ninety points in the second half.

  There had been a play earlier on this night that fully captured the Dipper’s dominance and majesty. Attles saw it years later in freeze-frame: a photograph of the Dipper at the left baseline, swinging past the flat-footed Imhoff and rising, his head above the rim, for an easy finger-roll basket. Seeing Imhoff in that frozen image, Attles would feel nearly sympathetic for the young Knicks center: He’s got no chance. He knows it. We know it. They know it.

  Wilt Chamberlain could do that to almost anyone. Attles had seen it, over and over. That’s why when he heard Chamberlain complain about Red Auerbach repeatedly saying, “All Wilt can do is dunk,” Attles waved off the comment. He told the Dipper what the Dipper already knew: This was Red playing another head game, reverse psychology, Red encouraging you to keep shooting that fall-away to pull you further from the basket because Red does not want you to dunk. Attles told him, “Big Fella, just take it and turn in,” the same advice given to him by every coach he’d ever had, dating to Coach Cecil Mosenson at Overbrook High School. But Attles knew that you didn’t tell the Dipper what to do because the Dipper would only smile and brag about his fall-away jumper, saying, “It’s the best shot in basketball!” The Dipper knew no one could block it, unless some guard caught him from the blind side. Some teams screened him after he shot his fall-away, then sent their own center sprinting down the court. If Chamberlain followed time after time, he would fatigue; if he didn’t follow, the opposing center had an easy basket. As a rookie, Attles heard his roommate, Andy Johnson, tell the Dipper how to respond to criticism that he only scored points. Johnson put it succinctly. He looked the Dipper in the eye and said, “Big Fella, score every point you can get.”

  Naulls’s jumper missed, Chamberlain rebounded but dropped the ball. Attles dove for it—vintage Attles—and so did Cleveland Buckner. The referees called a jump ball.

  Buckner won the jump easily, as Bill Campbell rhapsodized: “Imagine a guy getting seventy-five points and you still have eight and a half minutes to play?” Again, Naulls drove the baseline and scored, 137–122.

  On any other night, it would be ludicrous to think an NBA player might score twenty-five points in these final eight minutes—a rate that would produce 150 points in a full game. Oddly, on this night, it seemed possible.

  Calling for the ball at the baseline, Chamberlain took a pass from Rodgers. He scored from close in and was fouled by Naulls. The Zink: “Dipper Dunk, Chaaaam-ber-lain! Goooooood!” He had seventy-seven points. Now, the Dipper positioned himself for his underhanded free throw, the shooting style that made him feel silly, like a sissy. His free throw missed, circling the rim and spinning out, the Hershey crowd, spinning with the ball: “Ohhhhhhhh.”

  Campbell marveled over the Dipper: “Tremendous performer. This guy is just a magnificent athlete. There’s no question about it. He’s quite a runner. He’s a good high jumper. He handles the weights. He takes excellent care of himself. And it pays off here.”

  The Knicks moved, fast forward, the other way. Butcher to Naulls to Guerin, who drove underneath. As Guerin shot, Attles fouled him.

  With Guerin at the free-throw line, Campbell filled the moment: “Jimmy Brown of the Cleveland Browns was telling me just yesterday that he is a great friend of Wilt’s and he was saying how Wilt really works at physical conditioning. He said, ‘It’s no surprise that he’s so great. He works so hard to attain it.’”

  Guerin made the first free throw, 139–123.

  Campbell: “Jimmy Brown says he has one distinction. He says he’s the only guy who has ever beaten Wilt Chamberlain at hand wrestling.”

  Guerin made the second free throw, 139–124.

  Campbell: “And Jimmy Brown says it took him twenty-three minutes to get his arm down….”

  CHAPTER 16

  Imhoff

  BACK INTO THE CRUCIBLE CAME DARRALL IMHOFF. He returned to face the Dipper with these thoughts: Stay with him. Pin him in. Body him. Keep him from turning in. Watch your fouls. Whatever it takes. The game was in its fortieth minute. Imhoff had watched twenty-six of those minutes from the New York bench, wearing his warm-up jacket against the arena’s chill. In time Imhoff would become known as the Axe because if he didn’t block your shot, he would chop you to pieces: You might get your two free throws against the Axe but not a three-point play. In this game, Imhoff had succeeded only in collecting fouls, four in fourteen minutes, a rate that would have fouled him out before halftime had Eddie Donovan not benched him. Chamberlain had overwhelmed Imhoff in the first quarter.

  Still learning the pro game, Imhoff was a quick study on how to defend the league’s centers. Each had his traits and tricks. Ray Felix and Swede Halbrook and Walter Dukes were no trouble; Imhoff believed he could handle them. Syracuse’s Johnny “Red” Kerr was more difficult, a finesse passer who once embarrassed Imhoff by passing a ball between his own legs and Imhoff’s. So Imhoff made a tactical shift when guarding him, always keeping one foot between Kerr’s legs. Kerr was sly, tricky. He slathered Firm Grip, a sticky solvent that helped him hold the basketball, on his sneakers and snuck in quick dips to cover his fingers until the NBA banned its use, threatening offenders with a $25 fine. So Kerr then hid the Firm Grip, in small globs, in new places around the court: at the scorer’s table, under the bench, behind the backboard. Against Bill Russell, Imhoff didn’t have to play tight defense. Russell would catch a pass and then step back so that Imhoff couldn’t feel where he was. Not to worry, Russell wasn’t a shooter (a left-handed hook was his best shot) though he was sneaky around the basket and had to be watched. Russell often scored by tipping in missed shots. Chicago rookie Walt Bellamy, heralding a new generation of quicker and
more athletic NBA centers, would lean and push. He was essentially a jump shooter though he also liked to drive. Bellamy played even bigger than six-foot-eleven and was difficult to defend. To Imhoff, Cincinnati’s Wayne Embry was like a tree, a very wide tree, and set the meanest picks in the league. You’ve got to pack a lunch to get around him, Imhoff thought. Though just six-foot-eight, Embry weighed two hundred fifty-five pounds, and as Oscar Robertson passed alongside his picks, Embry usually took out a couple of defenders, clearing a path for the Big O. St. Louis’s Clyde Lovellette was an especially scary prospect for opposing young centers, not only for his shooting skill but his deception. Imhoff knew, Lovellette will pat you on the ass and say, “Way to go,” and then smack you in the mouth with an elbow.

  Chamberlain was an altogether different proposition. The Dipper didn’t talk or deceive. He came right at you. You knew his shots—the finger-roll from the right side, the fall-away from the left side—and he knew that you knew them. He rarely deviated, figuring you couldn’t stop him anyway. Imhoff knew it was important to let Chamberlain feel his defensive presence, whatever it took, pinning him in place with his feet (much as he did with Kerr), putting a well-placed knee in the Dipper’s upper thigh or buttock or the point of his elbow into the rhomboids between his shoulder blades. Imhoff knew there were no defensive tricks or ploys that Chamberlain hadn’t already experienced.

  Now here came Chamberlain down the court with a surprise, a jumper from the circle. It shocked Imhoff, as it did Bill Campbell, who saw the ball cut through the nets and shouted, “Good!!” Imhoff was incredulous. Wilt taking a twenty-foot jumper? What’s that about? He hoped the Dipper would continue taking twenty-foot jumpers; that would be a gift, pennies from heaven. The record now was Wilt’s—that is, still Wilt’s, seventy-nine points. “He’s broke the all-time…” Campbell’s thoughts outraced his words. He amended “… all kinds of records now.” The Warriors led 141–124.