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

by John Taylor

  But Russell was still so thin that he lacked the strength to play the muscular offensive game defined by big centers such as George Mikan. Instead, Russell focused on the defensive strategy he had begun to develop on the all-stars tour with Brick Swegle. On defense, most centers simply guarded the other center, who usually stayed in the pivot at the top of the key. Russell did this, but he was also quick enough to drop back and cover the basket if one of the opposing forwards broke through. He trained himself to have what he thought of as “smart feet,” moving as lightly and as quickly as a guard.

  In the fall of 1953, when Russell joined the varsity, San Francisco played its first game of the season against the heavily favored University of California, the tenth-ranked team in the country, which had beaten San Francisco 64–33 in their last encounter. Russell was playing opposite California’s lauded all-American center, Bob McKeen. Minutes after the game began, Russell blocked McKeen’s first shot, smacking the ball into the third row of seats in the Berkeley Arena. “Now where in the world did he come from?” Pete Newell, the California coach, asked the player sitting next to him. The player had no answer, but from that moment on, the game was a rout, with Russell blocking thirteen shots and scoring twenty-three points while holding McKeen to fourteen.

  K. C. Jones had felt ill during the game, and the next night he collapsed with a ruptured appendix. That put him out for the season, and San Francisco’s opponents quickly learned to triple-team Russell, muffling the brilliant start. But then next season, with K. C. Jones back and Russell stronger and more experienced, the perennially neglected Dons won their first two games, lost their third to UCLA, and then did not lose another game for the next two years.

  What was so extraordinary about San Francisco was that the team seemed to come out of nowhere, from a school so small it was completely off the radar, with a fretful, anonymous, bespectacled coach and a roster of players no basketball powerhouse had even deigned to consider recruiting. Of the sixteen members of Woolpert’s team, twelve came from the San Francisco Bay Area, and only one was from out of state. None of them had achieved any true distinction in high school; had they done so they would not have gone to San Francisco. The coaches who ran the basketball programs at the powerhouse universities had the luxury of selecting from hundreds of hopeful players the chosen few whose skills matched exactly with the requirements of their specific systems. The San Francisco Dons that Bill Russell played with had been put together almost as haphazardly as a playground pickup team.

  They were also more integrated than other teams. Three of Woolpert’s starting players—K. C. Jones, Hal Perry, and Russell—were black, and so were three substitutes. In that day, many college coaches, even in California, would play only one black player at a time, and segregated Southern colleges never considered recruiting black players, regardless of talent. Once San Francisco became successful, Woolpert began receiving hate mail, fans in Southern arenas threw pennies at his players, and one USF alumnus told a reporter, “They are scarcely representative of the school. Perhaps a rule should be established that only three can be on the court at any one time.” When another alumnus suggested to Woolpert that he reduce the number of black starters, the coach reacted angrily. “Anyone,” he replied, “who claims there should be discrimination toward a Negro or a Protestant or a bricklayer’s son on an athletic team or in a classroom is not representative of this school either.”

  As San Francisco’s unbeaten record grew longer during the 1954–55 season, East Coast sportswriters considered it a statistical aberration that would be corrected once the team faced substantial, nationally ranked competition. When the Dons arrived in New York to play in the Holiday Festival at Madison Square Garden, it was expected that they would be trounced by Holy Cross, which had won the NIT championship the previous year with Tommy Heinsohn, who was to become Russell’s teammate on the Celtics, playing center. But Russell completely shut down Heinsohn, keeping him scoreless throughout the second half, blocking his signature hook shot, and scoring himself in a play, altogether legal at the time, that astonished Heinsohn. K. C. Jones backed into a corner as if to make a long set shot, but then he hurled the ball up over the backboard, while Russell leaped into the air, caught it, and stuffed it through the hoop. Heinsohn, who had never seen anything like it, was flabbergasted.

  By February 1955, when San Francisco’s record was 18–1, the Dons overtook Adolph Rupp’s legendary Kentucky to become the top-ranked team in the country in an Associated Press poll. The streak continued as the team sailed through the NCAA tournament. While the entire team was unexcelled in its balance of shooting, playmaking, coordination, and defense, it was Russell who received most of the attention. While watching one of Russell’s spurts of shot blocking, a radio announcer declared, “This is like a one-man volleyball game.”

  In the regional finals, San Francisco faced Oregon State, which had seven-three Swede Halbrook, the country’s tallest basketball player. Before the game, photographers had Halbrook and Russell pose together. Halbrook raised his right arm, a ball in his hand, as high as he could. Russell’s wingspan, which had never been measured, was said to exceed seven feet, and though he was six inches shorter than Halbrook, he now raised his arm up over the ball Halbrook was holding and wrapped his fingers around the top of it. Red Auerbach had a theory that the one true way to measure a basketball player’s height was not from the top of his head but from the top of his fully extended arms, and when Woolpert saw the way Russell’s reach exceeded Halbrook’s, he knew that his team could go all the way. In what was one of the greatest Cinderella stories in college sports, it did. Russell scored a record 118 points in the five NCAA games the team played. At one moment in the semifinals, in the game against Colorado, he had his back to the board but still managed to come down with the rebound. Then, his back still to the board, he jumped up above the defenders and, using both hands, swung the ball backward over his head and down into the hoop.

  “Did you ever see anything like that?” a San Francisco reporter asked Harry Hanin, a scout for the Globetrotters.

  “No,” Hanin said, “and I never saw anything like him, either.”

  After the Holiday Festival in Madison Square Garden, a writer for Sports Illustrated had declared, “If [Russell] ever learns to hit the basket, they’re going to have to rewrite the rules.” And indeed, once the season was over, NCAA officials decided to do just that. They widened the free-throw lane from six to twelve feet, to inhibit Russell’s ability to rebound on offense. “We weren’t planning to make any changes in the foul lane,” Doggie Julian, the Dartmouth (and former Celtics) coach told a reporter afterward. “But after some of the coaches saw Russell’s performance, they got scared and pushed through the twelve-foot lane.”

  When Russell started his senior year, in the fall of 1955, other coaches expected San Francisco to dominate the season once again. “The rest of us might just as well stay home and weed the garden,” one complained. Indeed, the Dons’ streak continued, and on January 28, 1956, when they beat UCLA and won their fortieth straight game, they set an NCAA record. But Pittsburgh State in Kansas had once won forty-seven consecutive games in the small-school circuit, and the Dons, still surprised by their own success, began to realize that they might surpass Pittsburgh State’s streak and make basketball history. Woolpert, by nature a nervous man, grew so anxious that he had trouble keeping down food and became unable to eat. Game by game, the string of victories grew longer, the magic number drew closer. And then on February 28, 1956, the Dons beat the College of the Pacific for its forty-eighth consecutive victory and a record in college basketball. By the end of the year, when the team beat Iowa for its second NCAA championship, it had a winning streak of fifty-five victories. After watching the final, Utah coach Jack Gardner said, “This is the greatest college basketball team ever assembled.”

  5

  BY THE SPRING of 1956, when Russell and the Dons had become the most talked-about basketball team in the country, Red Auerbach
was wrapping up his sixth year as coach of the Celtics. Attendance at Celtics games was now so dismal that when the 1955 playoffs were over, Walter Brown had been unable to pay the players their playoff bonuses. He had promised to make good on the debts, together with interest, at the start of the following season, and he was true to his word. But Auerbach felt uncertain enough about his future that he had begun supplementing his income by working as a sales representative for CelluCraft, a plastics company that manufactured flexible packaging like Jell-O bags and Kool Pop wrappers.

  By then Auerbach had become convinced that Bill Russell was the big man who would finally allow the Celtics to break out as a club and start drawing fans. The question for him in the spring of 1956 was how to bring the player and the club together. Auerbach had been aware of Russell since 1953, the same year he first saw Chamberlain at Kutsher’s Country Club. He had gone to see his old college coach Bill Reinhart. The George Washington basketball team had just returned from the All-American College Tournament in Oklahoma City, where it had been beaten by the University of San Francisco with Bill Russell playing center. It was the year K. C. Jones had burst his appendix, before the Dons began their record-breaking streak and when Russell was still an unknown. He had not scored many points in the game against George Washington, but he dominated under the basket, blocking shots and rebounding at will.

  Over lunch in the university’s Welling Hall, Reinhart told Auerbach he was convinced that Russell not only could play professional basketball but might well provide the crucial piece that was missing from the Boston Celtics. While Russell was still only a sophomore, Reinhart said, he was the fastest center in college, could outrebound taller players, and by thinking smarter was able to destroy the opposition’s game plan. “Try to get this guy,” Reinhart said, “no matter what you have to pay or who you have to trade.”

  It would be another year before Auerbach actually saw Russell play. In the mid-fifties, NBA teams did not have scouts who traveled the country evaluating potential talent. It was an era before videotape, and coaches such as Auerbach had to rely on the recommendations of people they knew and trusted. After talking to Reinhart, Auerbach periodically called Russell’s coach, Phil Woolpert, who assured him that his player had professional potential and could fit into Boston’s fast-break game. Auerbach also talked to Freddy Scolari, one of his own former players who was from the San Francisco area and had returned there.

  “Red, he can’t shoot to save his life, but he’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life on a basketball court,” Scolari told Auerbach.

  Auerbach asked Scolari if he was sure.

  “I told you,” Scolari said. “You want an affidavit?”

  A number of coaches and sportswriters believed Russell lacked pro potential. He had certain specific, if somewhat limited, skills, they believed, but he was too skinny and he was a poor shooter. He was certainly not the all-around phenomenon that Wilt Chamberlain, then still a high school student, was proving to be. But Auerbach’s inquiries left him with the impression that, however limited Russell might be in general, in the areas of his strengths he was overwhelming. Russell was not the answer to every coach’s prayers. But working with players whose skills complemented and extended his and whose talents covered for his weaknesses—players, that is, like the Celtics—he could be the linchpin of an indomitable team.

  DURING THE SUMMER of 1955, after the Dons’ first incredible season, Bill Russell had been invited to the White House for a meeting about physical fitness with President Dwight Eisenhower. Willie Mays, Gene Tunney, Hank Greenberg, Ford Frick, and Bob Cousy were all present. It was a remarkable honor for a mere college player to be included among professionals of such stature, and the president singled him out, reportedly asking him, as a favor to the country, not to turn pro until he’d played in the Olympics. With Russell were his father, his stepmother, and his fiancée, Rose Swisher, the niece of Earl Swisher, one of his teachers at McClymonds. They had all driven from California to the capital, and afterward, they decided to stop by Louisiana on their way home.

  This trip through the Jim Crow South, after having just been feted at the White House and called “Mr. Russell” by the president of the United States, made a lasting impression on Russell. The travelers endured the humiliation and indignity of being forced to use “colored” bathrooms, drink at “colored” water fountains, and enter rooms through “colored” doors, of being unable to find a restaurant that would serve them and having to buy crackers and bologna at a general store and sit eating on the roadside as whites drove by snickering. Once Russell arrived in Monroe, he had to step off the sidewalk if a white man walked by, had to sit in the back of the bus and in the balcony of the movie theater. The glory and honors, the attention and publicity, the cheering fans, the acknowledgment of the president himself—it was all reduced to nothing in the state of Louisiana. “I was just another black boy, just so much dirt, with no rights, no element of human courtesy or decency shown to me or mine,” he wrote in a 1966 memoir.

  It was one of the central experiences in Russell’s life, one that would stay with him forever. As an adolescent, Russell had been inordinately sensitive to the smallest slight, often imagining an insult when none was intended. He even thought that Phil Woolpert, who had fielded one of the most integrated teams in the NCAA, was racially insensitive, judging white players more leniently than black ones. Having achieved acclaim as a basketball star, he remained just as acutely, even morbidly, sensitive to slight, but now he was in a position to demand respect, and one of the first people to feel the sting of his icy disdain was Abe Saperstein.

  The owner of the Harlem Globetrotters was a tiny, fast-talking man, the son of a Polish immigrant tailor, who was born in London and then had moved to Chicago with his family when he was a child. Although he was an enthusiastic athlete, he turned to coaching after he reached a height of five feet three and stopped growing. In 1926, he had an all-black team, the Savoy Big Five, that was based in the Savoy Ballroom on Chicago’s South Side. When the ballroom’s owners dropped their basketball program in favor of roller-skating, Saperstein decided to take the Savoys on the road to play local teams in small Midwestern towns. He renamed them the Harlem Globetrotters, to establish in advance that the team was entirely black and to suggest an international track record that was totally nonexistent, and he created new gold-starred uniforms in his father’s tailor shop.

  In 1927, the team set out in a used Model T that Saperstein had bought from a funeral director. In their first game, in Hinckley, Illinois, they earned seventy-five dollars. It was just enough money to encourage them to continue. The Globetrotters struggled through the thirties, with Saperstein serving as manager, ball boy, driver, and even, from time to time, substitute player. The team began to attract a real following only once World War II came to an end. Since the two professional basketball leagues were all-white, the Globetrotters provided the sole outlet for black athletes who wanted to earn a living from their basketball talents, and by the late forties the team had perfected its game, which was part vaudeville show, part circus act, and part sport. The Trotters, also called the Globies, dribbled between their feet, rolled the ball the length of their arms, passed behind their backs, double-faked and triple-faked, and ran up into the stands. Goose Tatum was their team clown, Marques Haynes the dazzling dribbler with the fancy footwork. In 1952, on their twenty-fifth anniversary, Saperstein took the team on a world tour that had them playing before crowds in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

  In the spring of 1956, with San Francisco’s record streak continuing, Bill Russell preparing to graduate, and the NBA college draft approaching, Saperstein let it be known to sportswriters that he might be willing to pay as much as $50,000 for Russell’s services. Russell, who was nothing if not serious, was disinclined to play for a team of crowd-pleasing entertainers and clowns, but an offer of $50,000 was too rich to dismiss out of hand, so when USF was in Chicago playing at the DePaul Invitational, Russell,
together with Phil Woolpert and assistant coach Ross Guidice, accepted an invitation to meet Saperstein, who arrived at Russell’s hotel room with his assistant, Harry Hanna. Saperstein assumed he was negotiating with Woolpert, and, saying little to the prickly young man he wanted to sign, he talked to the coach about the benefits and rewards of playing for the Globetrotters while Hanna told jokes to Guidice and Russell. The slight enraged Russell, and as he listened to Saperstein make his case to Woolpert, he found himself thinking, You want to talk to Woolpert, you just get Woolpert to sign a contract with you.

  RUSSELL HAD NATURALLY LEARNED of the calls Red Auerbach had been making to Phil Woolpert, and he knew the Celtics were interested in him. His personal preference was to play with George Mikan and the Minneapolis Lakers. In 1949, when he was a junior in high school, Russell had once gone to see the Lakers in an exhibition game in Oakland. Afterward, he hung around outside the locker room to meet Mikan, who said, “How ya doin’, big fella?” and encouraged him to become a professional basketball player. But he was certain he would be drafted before the Lakers, the second-place team in the Western Division, got their pick, and he decided that if he ended up with the Celtics, he would play for them.

  Auerbach, for his part, knew he would be unable to draft Russell. Boston completed the regular season with the second-best record in the league and was drafting seventh. Russell, for all the discussion of his limitations, was one of the strongest college players to become eligible that year, and he would certainly be one of the early picks in the first round. If Auerbach was going to get him, he would have to trade for him.

  When the season came to an end, the Rochester Royals had the worst record in the league and were entitled to the first pick in the upcoming draft. Lester Harrison, who had owned the Royals since the time it was a franchise in the National Basketball League, was disinclined to draft Russell. Russell had committed to playing for the U.S. basketball team in the winter Olympics to be held that November in Melbourne, Australia, which meant he would not be able to join any professional team until December, well after the start of the season. Also, Harrison knew Abe Saperstein was itching to hire Russell, and while Russell had indicated his preference to play for the pros, it was expected that the NBA franchise that acquired him would at least have to approach the $50,000 Saperstein was reportedly offering. That would make Russell the highest-paid player in the NBA, and it represented a huge sum for the Royals, a money-losing franchise in a small city that, even with a big star, might not be able to draw enough fans to justify his salary.