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

by John Taylor

  At the end of Chamberlain’s freshman year, the university informed Phog Allen that it would not waive the mandatory retirement policy; he’d be required to leave. Chamberlain was surprised. He’d assumed Old Phog, as he called him, was canny enough to extract an extension from the school. The decision left Allen shocked and embittered. After all he had done for the school, it was, he thought, unforgivable, particularly because he knew that as soon as Chamberlain joined the varsity as a sophomore, Kansas would become the most avidly followed college basketball team in the country. And it was. In Chamberlain’s second year, on the day of Kansas’s first game, against Northwestern, the Lawrence Journal-World ran a front-page photo of Wilt dunking. Northwestern’s center, Joe Ruklick, who later became Chamberlain’s teammate on the Warriors, was convinced the photograph was staged; Wilt must have been standing on a ladder. But Kansas destroyed Northwestern 87–69, with Chamberlain scoring fifty-two points and pulling down thirty-one rebounds—setting new records for Kansas in both categories. “He scored at will,” Ruklick recalled, “but I wasn’t awed until after the game, when I saw the stat sheet.” As the season progressed, opposing teams assigned at least two men to guard Chamberlain, and at times three and even four. Kansas still won. Bill Strannigan, the coach of Iowa State University, felt he had to see Wilt play before his own team took on the Jayhawks, and he traveled to Lawrence to watch a game.

  “I’d enjoy the next few weeks a lot more if I hadn’t seen him,” he told a reporter afterward. “He’s the greatest player I’ve ever seen.”

  “What can be done about him?” the reporter asked.

  “Just be patient and he’ll graduate,” Strannigan said.

  Chamberlain was by then not just the most recognizable person on the Kansas campus, where he worked as a deejay on the college radio station, but also a national celebrity. He was profiled in Time and Newsweek. Fans wrote the university asking for signed photographs, and the university complied, mailing out copies of a publicity shot stamped with Wilt’s signature. When the team traveled, people now stared at Chamberlain not just because he was tall but because they recognized him. But he was not universally accepted, and when the Jayhawks went to Dallas to play in the NCAA regionals after winning the Big Seven championship, Chamberlain was subjected to a storm of racial abuse.

  To begin with, Dick Harp, who had replaced Allen as coach, had inherited Allen’s promise to Chamberlain that the team would stay together, and because Dallas’s hotels were segregated, he could find accommodations only in a motel in Grandview, twenty-six miles away. During the games, the greatest hostility came not from students but from older adults, who booed Chamberlain, screamed “Nigger!,” hurled seat cushions, pennies, and cups onto the court, and tore the Kansas banners. Players on the opposing teams also shoved and tripped Chamberlain, and muttered “Nigger” whenever he got close. The next day, the referee Al Lightner acknowledged the racial hostility of Kansas’s opponents who, he said, were deliberately roughing up Chamberlain and his teammate Maurice King. “The trouble seemed to be,” Lightner said, “that they were dark-skinned.” Chamberlain had not responded to the provocation, deciding that the most satisfying course of action would be simply to win, and indeed, Kansas easily took the Midwest regionals, beat San Francisco—which no longer had Russell or K. C. Jones—in the semifinals, and wound up facing off against undefeated North Carolina for the championship.

  FRANK MCGUIRE, North Carolina’s coach, was one of the many people who had predicted even before Chamberlain put on his varsity jersey that he was going to in some fashion ruin the college game. “I told Phog that he was trying to kill basketball by bringing that kid into school,” McGuire had told Jimmy Breslin at the beginning of the season. Going into the championship game, McGuire’s team was considered the underdog. The night before, in the semifinals, the Tar Heels had barely beaten Michigan State in triple overtime when Michigan’s Johnny Green choked on a pair of critical free throws. But there was also a mystique about the team. It was on a thirty-one-game winning streak, which extended back into the previous season, and the streak had created almost hysterical excitement on the university’s campus in Chapel Hill. Students were superstitiously growing beards and making sure that, every day, they took the same number of steps from class to class. One student had become convinced that if he moved his car from its parking spot, he would break the streak, and so he was letting it sit there, accumulating tickets.

  Although Chamberlain’s team was favored to win, McGuire had watched Kansas play during the NCAA tournament, and he did not consider it invulnerable. Chamberlain, he thought, was spectacular, but the rest of the team was unimpressive. McGuire, the thirteenth child of a New York City cop, was a credentialed member of that city’s Irish community, and a network of policemen, firefighters, and dockworkers who were on the streets in every neighborhood had helped him fill the roster at Chapel Hill with tough New York talent. He had strong, fast, experienced players—Tommy Kearns, Joe Quigg, Lennie Rosenbluth—and they were known for their poise, for making few mistakes and instead forcing their opponents to make them, and then for exploiting those mistakes.

  McGuire believed that if his team could control the pace of the game and contain Chamberlain, the rest of the Jayhawks would not be able to score as well as McGuire’s own men. Since Chamberlain was so difficult to stop once he got the ball, the only way to hold down his score was to reduce the number of shots he took, and so McGuire wanted his team to focus on preventing Wilt from getting the ball in the first place. In the locker room before the game, he told his players to take only shots they were confident of, shots where their teammates had boxed Chamberlain out, preventing him from getting the rebound. If they had to wait for the entire first half to take a shot, he added, that was fine with him. “We’re playing Wilt, not Kansas,” McGuire explained to his team. “Just stop him and don’t worry about those other guys.”

  Before the game, in the Kansas Municipal Auditorium, Tommy Kearns displayed North Carolina’s distinctive sangfroid when a reporter asked if the Tar Heels felt intimidated by Chamberlain. “We’re a chilly club,” Kearns said. “We play it chilly all the time. I mean, we just keep cool. Chamberlain is not going to give us the jitters.” McGuire decided to have Tommy Kearns, who at five feet nine was the smallest player on the team, face Wilt for the opening jump. McGuire figured Wilt would get the tap no matter what, so he thought he might as well use his tall players to go after the ball. And he knew Wilt would feel like a freak standing in the circle with someone who barely came up to his clavicle. If he could bewilder and embarrass Chamberlain, if he could get him thinking, Is this coach crazy?, he might be able to throw him off his game at the outset.

  Chamberlain, of course, outjumped Kearns at the tip-off, but just as McGuire hoped, the matchup perplexed him and he missed his first shot. McGuire had two of his biggest players, Joe Quigg and Lennie Rosenbluth, guarding Chamberlain so tightly that he found it hard just to move, and his teammates had trouble getting the ball to him. That left the other Jayhawks open, but they couldn’t make their shots, and North Carolina surged to a 19–7 lead. In the second half, however, the Jayhawks found their range and took the lead, lost it but then retook it, and with ten minutes to go were ahead 40–37. At that point, instead of pressing North Carolina, which was tired from its semifinal game the night before, Kansas slowed the pace. Dick Harp wanted the Jayhawks to control the ball, and the Kansas fans were cheering the tactic. But Frank McGuire was secretly elated as well, since by stalling, the Jayhawks were giving the Tar Heels time to rest for a final surge.

  With less than two minutes to play, Kansas was still ahead by three, and Chamberlain figured all he and his team had to do was let the clock run out. But by then North Carolina had caught its wind. To turn the ball over, the Tar Heels fouled Chamberlain’s teammate Gene Elstun. Elstun missed his free throw and North Carolina rebounded. Quigg quickly scored, and Kearns, who was fouled, made his free throw, tying the game at 46–46 and sending it in
to overtime. Once the extra period began, both teams, afraid of a turnover and wanting to stall until the final seconds, played so conservatively that each scored only one field goal in the next five minutes, sending the game into double overtime. As the clock started for the second extra period, the tension on the court seemed to immobilize the players. Both sides again stalled until a tussle for the ball between Chamberlain and North Carolina forward Paul Brenna emptied the two benches and sent players from both teams shoving and pushing onto the court. The second overtime ended with no score, and the game went into a third overtime. At that point, both teams broke out of their paralysis, and a flurry of points ensued that ended when, with six seconds left and Kansas ahead 53–52, North Carolina’s Joe Quigg was fouled.

  McGuire called a time-out. As North Carolina had extended its streak toward the final, fans had been coming up to the coach and giving him nutmegs and rabbits’ feet to carry in his pocket, begging him to wear the same sport coat to every game, anything to keep the streak alive, and now it had all come down to this: a pair of foul shots by Joe Quigg. McGuire told Quigg he had missed a one-point foul shot earlier in the game when the team was behind by a single point, and now he had a chance to make it up. Quigg was nervous. All he could think about was making those two shots, clinching the title, and going out undefeated. He was glad he had two shots. If he had only one shot, he thought, the pressure would have been even greater. When the time-out was over, Quigg stepped up to the foul line, and while he certainly felt nervous, he looked, as Tommy Kearns had put it, chilly. He dribbled, aimed, made his first and then his second shot, putting North Carolina ahead 54–53 and sending its delirious fans pouring out onto the court.

  Now it was Dick Harp’s turn to call a time-out. With six seconds on the clock, Kansas still had time to score. As the officials cleared fans off the court, Harp ordered Wilt to move in under the basket, in position for a high pass he could then dunk for the game-winning field goal. As play resumed, Chamberlain’s teammate Ron Loneski, standing out of bounds at the far end of the court, wound up to make the inbounds throw, but McGuire had shrewdly assigned the six-nine Quigg to guard him. Loneski heaved the ball. Quigg leaped, got a hand on it, and knocked it to Kearns, who hurled it high into the air as the buzzer sounded, giving the victory to North Carolina, and for the second time the screaming fans stormed onto the court.

  Chamberlain, who would go on to play more than one thousand professional and college basketball games in the next sixteen years, would always be haunted by this particular defeat. He’d been double- and triple-teamed throughout the game, and it had inhibited his play so much—he’d scored only six field goals and eleven foul shots for a total of twenty-three points, compared with his season average of thirty—that the frustration practically drove him wild. Also, North Carolina—overall a better team, an undefeated team—had won by only one lousy point. The game, as the sportswriters liked to say, could have gone either way. And it wasn’t his fault, he felt. He’d gotten into position under the basket to take the pass and was there waiting when that damned Loneski threw the ball right into Quigg’s hands.

  But that counted for nothing. In the end there were the champions and then there was everybody else. North Carolina had come into the game being told by Coach McGuire that they were not playing Kansas, they were playing Wilt. And that meant that they had beaten Wilt. Despite all the press coverage, despite the fact that he was voted the tournament’s Most Valuable Player, people would say in years to come—Chamberlain would hear it again and again, until it became a kind of nightmarish refrain—that the defeat by North Carolina was the first real sign that he was someone who was not able to deliver the title. That he choked in the clutch. That he was a loser.

  7

  BY MARCH, when the NCAA tournament was under way, the Celtics had established themselves in first place in the Eastern Division. Russell’s December arrival had initially thrown his teammates out of sync, since they had gone through training camp and the opening weeks of the season playing an entirely different type of game, but after a dozen matches with Russell starting, they had adjusted to his presence, and had begun winning regularly. Russell, who’d given up perimeter shooting and now confined himself for the most part to safe inside shots, was providing the Celtics with defense. The team’s offense, already strong, had been strengthened even further by the addition of its second rookie, Tommy Heinsohn. Heinsohn, sometimes known as Heinie, was a tough, handsome young guy with blue eyes and a military crew cut. Bob Cousy, who’d adopted Heinsohn as his wingman on the fast break, considered him an awesome natural athlete, a man with speed, power, and an incredible will to win. Heinsohn always played hard, but since he smoked, his wind was bad, and Auerbach typically sent him in for short spells and then rested him. “If you play for me, Tommy, go at top speed,” Auerbach had told him during training camp. “If you poop out in four, five, or six minutes, that’s all right.”

  Throughout the season, Heinsohn had done just that. He never paced himself, playing instead at a fever pitch until he was ready to collapse. He loved to shoot. He had a distinctive line-drive shot, the result of learning to play basketball as an eleven-year-old in a gym in Union City, New Jersey, that had an extremely low ceiling and an even lower pipe running across it. Players at the gym had to shoot either over the pipe or under it, and Heinsohn always shot under the pipe, his balls rifling toward the basket with scarcely any trajectory. After joining the NBA, he developed a reputation as such an eager shooter that he became known as Gunner and then as Ack-Ack, for machine gunner. His teammate Jim Loscutoff once kept count during a game, and found that, of the twenty-three times Heinsohn got the ball, he shot twenty-one times, lost the ball once, and passed off only once. Cousy liked to say that Heinsohn never shot unless he had the ball.

  As the regular season drew to an end, emotions on the Celtics were high. Auerbach and Walter Brown felt that the team could, for the first time, make it through the playoffs and go all the way to win the championship. But tensions were high, too. When the Celtics lost the last game of the season to the Nats, the team that had eliminated them in the three previous playoffs, Walter Brown rushed into the locker room enraged. “You bunch of chokers!” he shouted. “I’ll never come into this dressing room again.” But then a few days later, when the Celtics beat the Nats in the first game of the playoffs, Brown returned to the locker room. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just a fan, and I was so scared that we were going to lose everything again that I got frustrated. I didn’t mean it. I was upset. I apologize.”

  Tensions existed between players, too, particularly between the two rookies, Russell and Heinsohn. Heinsohn felt that Russell resented him. He thought the reason might date back to 1955 when Heinsohn, playing center for Holy Cross, had developed a reputation on the East Coast much like the one Russell was developing out west. But since the national press was based in the East, Holy Cross received more attention, and East Coast sportswriters had predicted that it would crush San Francisco in the 1955 Holiday Tournament. Instead, Holy Cross had taken a pounding, and Russell seemed to go out of his way to put Heinsohn in his place. It was something Russell still seemed to want to do. Shortly after Russell joined the team, Heinsohn brought a young cousin to Madison Square Garden, where the Celtics were playing in the second half of a doubleheader, and while the first game was under way, he asked Russell to sign an autograph for the kid. Russell refused. “Russ, this is my cousin,” Heinsohn said.

  “I’m not going to sign,” Russell said. “If I sign for him, I’ve got to sign for everybody, and I want to watch the game.”

  Despite that slight, Heinsohn had tried to be accommodating. At the beginning of the season it had been Heinsohn’s job, as the rookie, to carry the ball bag on trips. Once Russell joined the team in December, Heinsohn had tried to pass the assignment on to him, since Russell at that point was the team’s most junior player. But Russell made it clear he was not about to play Stepin Fetchit, carrying ball bags and running ou
t for sodas and sandwiches, as most rookies were required to do. Auerbach let the players sort out such matters themselves, and rather than make a fuss, Heinsohn had ended up carrying the balls for the entire season. But instead of showing any gratitude, or even thawing a little, Russell had remained cool and distant.

  Then, during the first round of the playoffs, the NBA announced that it was naming Heinsohn Rookie of the Year. Heinsohn had established himself as a terrific player, a defensive rebounder as well as a gunner, but even so, everyone in the league, including Heinsohn himself, knew that Russell, not Heinsohn, had been the key to the Celtics’ first-place finish in the regular season. Russell was not simply dominating all the other tall men in the league—Ed Macauley, Bob Pettit, Johnny “Red” Kerr, Ray Felix. He had in one season, or more like half a season, redefined the sport in a way that had earned him comparisons to Babe Ruth.

  The ostensible reason Russell did not receive the award was because he’d joined the team in mid-season and thus did not qualify. But this struck Russell as a flimsy rationale. Russell could not believe that the decision to deny him the award was not motivated by racism. The previous season, Maurice Stokes had become the first black player to be named Rookie of the Year, and it seemed clear to Russell that the owners wanted to assure fans that blacks were not taking over the NBA and so were offering up Tommy Heinsohn, not Bill Russell, as the new face of the league.