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

by John Taylor

  Those were the sorts of stories making the headlines in 1958 when the Celtics flew into Charlotte, North Carolina, to play a neutral-court game. Despite the attention King had received, Southern cities remained rigidly segregated, and on the trip down, trainer Buddy LeRoux told Russell and Sam Jones that since the hotel where the rest of the Celtics were staying wouldn’t allow them as guests, they would have to stay at a Negro hotel. Russell’s fury at this was compounded by the deplorable state of the Negro hotel, but when he complained to Auerbach, the coach tried to minimize the matter. Russell stayed to play the game, but he also decided that from then on he would simply refuse to play in any city if he was forced to sleep in a segregated hotel or eat in a segregated restaurant. After the 1958 playoffs, a promoter scheduled an exhibition tour for the all-star teams. When the teams arrived in Dallas and Russell found out he could not stay at the same hotel as the white players, he spat on the promoter and immediately caught a plane home, forfeiting the exhibition money.

  It enraged Russell to think that he was living in a society that simultaneously celebrated his athletic accomplishments and considered him inferior because of race, to realize that not only did a large portion of the population hate him for his skin color but that this hatred inescapably seeped into his own view of himself. In his memoir, Go Up for Glory, composed in the free-floating Beat style of the early sixties, he wrote:

  It stood out, harsh and unyielding, a wall which understanding still cannot penetrate.

  You are a Negro. You are less.

  It covered every area. A living, smarting, hurting, smelling, greasy substance which covered you. A morass to fight from.

  And so Russell retreated into himself, refusing to rely on or even to respond to the applause of fans and the friendship of neighbors, considering it transient and insincere, aware that at any time it could be withdrawn and when it was it would probably reveal an undercurrent of racial bigotry that had been there all along. For motivation, for validation, he relied instead solely on his pride, his own sense of self-worth, which was based not on what anybody said about him or to him but on what he had accomplished, not on what he’d been given but on what he’d earned. Because he’d been given nothing.

  EDDIE GOTTLIEB’S attorney was a man named Ike Richman, and in the spring of 1959, when Chamberlain had returned from his European tour with the Globetrotters and was still negotiating with Gottlieb over terms for joining the Warriors, Gottlieb brought Richman into the negotiations. One night, Richman, who didn’t like to drive, came home and asked his son Michael, a high school senior, to drive him into town. After they parked on Broad Street, a white Cadillac Eldorado pulled up, with Wilt Chamberlain at the wheel. Richman told his son to wait, and got into the Cadillac. When he returned a half hour later, and climbed back into his car, he said, “Mike, I just worked as hard as I ever did in my life.”

  Richman, who would go on to become Chamberlain’s attorney and lifelong friend, had just persuaded him to sign with the Warriors instead of returning to the Globetrotters, who were offering more money than Gottlieb could hope to match. He had clinched the argument by appealing in part to Chamberlain’s vanity. The Trotters would always be regarded as entertainers, Richman said. Chamberlain would never be taken seriously as an athlete unless he played in the NBA. On May 30, 1959, Gottlieb and Chamberlain announced his signing at a press conference at the Sheraton Hotel in Philadelphia. Chamberlain looked stylish in a dark-blue suit and a straw boater. Gottlieb told the reporters that he was paying Chamberlain the highest salary ever paid to a player in the NBA. At first Gottlieb refused to discuss the figure, but finally he admitted that he was paying Wilt more than $30,000 and that with additional bonuses based on increased attendance the figure could rise even higher. In fact, he pointed out, he was paying more for Chamberlain’s services than he had paid to buy out the other investors and acquire the entire Warriors franchise—all the contracts with the players, the team’s NBA charter, and even an old equipment truck—just seven years earlier.

  One of the first things Chamberlain did after signing with the Warriors was buy his parents a nine-room house on Cobbs Creek Parkway, a quiet, well-kept neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia. With the money Chamberlain was now earning, his mother was able to stop working as a cleaning woman but his father kept his job as a handyman. Wilt, who continued to live at home, spent the summer in Philadelphia, lifting weights, running cross-country, and playing pickup basketball games on city playgrounds. In August, he drove up to Kutsher’s Country Club in the Catskills, where just a few years earlier he had worked as a bellhop, to play in a benefit game for the quadriplegic Maurice Stokes.

  In the mid-fifties, when Bill Russell was capturing national attention at San Francisco and Wilt Chamberlain was doing the same at Overbrook High, when Elgin Baylor was playing at Seattle University and Oscar Robertson was leading Crispus Attucks High in Indianapolis, a fifth outstanding black basketball player appeared on the scene. Maurice Stokes joined the Royals in 1955, a year before Bill Russell came to the NBA, and in doing so became basketball’s first black superstar. Stokes was six feet seven, which was little more than average height in the league at the time, but he weighed more than 250 pounds, with massive shoulders, and was also unusually graceful and quick for a man of his stature—so quick that he could rebound the ball and then, instead of passing out, take it down the court himself in a fast break. He became Rookie of the Year in 1956, and in his second season, the year Russell joined the Celtics, he was the league’s leading rebounder. Faster than anyone who was bigger than him and bigger than anyone who was faster, he was poised to become one of the greatest basketball players ever.

  Then, in a game against Minneapolis at the end of his third season, Stokes had his feet kicked out from under him, fell to the floor, and hit his head on the hardwood. It briefly knocked him out, but he regained consciousness within a minute and seemed none the worse for the fall. Three days later, however, in a playoff game in Detroit, he inexplicably felt so weak that he seemed ill, and he played badly. The year before, Lester Harrison had moved the Royals from Rochester to Cincinnati, and as soon as the plane took off on the flight home from Detroit, Stokes began sweating heavily and moaning incoherently, and then he passed out. The captain radioed ahead for an ambulance, which met the team at the Cincinnati airport.

  Apparently, the concussion three days earlier in the game against Minneapolis had caused Stokes’s head to swell, and then the changing air pressure in the cabin as the airplane took off stimulated an attack of encephalitis. Stokes was in a coma by the time the plane touched down. Early the following morning, surgeons operated on his brain but were unable to reverse the effects of the attack. Afterward, Stokes regained consciousness, but the stroke had seriously damaged his motor nerves, and for the rest of his life he would be virtually unable to move or talk.

  Stokes’s paralysis stunned the entire league. He was twenty-five at the time, he had been hurt on the last day of the regular season, and, like all players then, he had only a one-year contract, which meant that he was without any income. He also had no medical insurance, no disability insurance, and no pension, and he could not be moved back to his family in Pittsburgh. His medical bills were rapidly exhausting his savings. Stokes’s white teammate Jack Twyman came up with the idea of raising money for the injured player by holding a benefit game at Milt Kutsher’s Catskills resort, where Stokes, like Chamberlain, had worked as a bellhop. 8*

  Kutsher invited the league’s top players. He also invited Wilt Chamberlain, who drove up from Philadelphia in his Eldorado. Chamberlain had known and liked Stokes, but he wanted to play in the game for another reason as well. His NBA debut was a few short months away. He had played at the college level and on the Globetrotters, but he had never yet taken the court with a full contingent of hardened professional basketball players, and he wondered how he would measure up. All of the players who came up to Kutsher’s had of course heard about Chamberlain, and a number of them had seen h
im play. But while they all expected him to be good, they were surprised by just how good he was. To begin with, he was in better shape than most of them. And many of them were astonished by his moves. At one point he single-handedly broke up a three-man fast break by Bob Cousy, Frank Ramsey, and Guy Sparrow, blocking Ramsey’s shot when Cousy passed off to him, and then blocking Sparrow’s shot when he retrieved the ball. Cousy thought Chamberlain was better than his own teammate Bill Russell. And Chamberlain, when the game was over, felt pretty good about his performance as well. It was time, he decided, to take on the NBA.

  10

  IN THE FALL of 1959, when Red Auerbach was going into his tenth year as coach of the Boston Celtics, Vince Lombardi had just taken over as head coach of the Green Bay Packers. Auerbach and Lombardi would come to be regarded as the two best professional team coaches of mid-century America. Lombardi would become the more famous of the two, but in the end Auerbach’s record dwarfed Lombardi’s. Whereas Lombardi coached the Green Bay Packers for nine years and during that run produced five championships, Auerbach coached the Celtics for sixteen years and won nine championships, eight of them—from 1959 to 1966—consecutively. Both Lombardi and Auerbach were strong-willed, energetic, and determined. Lombardi, however, was obsessed with playbooks and diagrams. He micromanaged his players’ moves, calculating down to the inch the size of the crossover step a guard needed to take before cutting across the backfield to lead a sweep. Auerbach was not a clipboard coach. Complex patterns of x’s and o’s on the blackboard, flow charts, organization, index cards, briefing books—none of that was for him. And he was not the best technical coach; others were more articulate on the fine points of shooting and passing. But he had an instinctive understanding of the rhythms of the game, and this made him a master at the art of substitution. He could sense, even before the player himself knew it, when a man was beginning to fade, or when the other team had slowed a fraction and would be vulnerable to an injection of energy from the Celtics’ deep bench.

  In the dressing room, during the time-out huddle, on the practice floor, in training camp, he was an unparalleled motivator. He knew which players reacted to anger or threats, which were too sensitive or proud for criticism, and which were tough enough to endure a rebuke intended to send a message to the entire team. He inspired loyalty, trading only one player in the ten-year period after Russell joined the team, but he was also an unapologetic authoritarian who tolerated no challenge to his control of the team. He kept his distance from his players, who were never allowed to question his decisions. He had phrases he liked to use to cut off dissent: I’m not running a union here! or I hired you, and I can fire you! or I may not always be right, but I’m never wrong!

  Auerbach’s chief talent lay in his understanding of the nature of the game, of the simplicity that was the key to its beauty, and he recognized the need to avoid unnecessarily complicating it. He saw a basketball team as a machine or system that functioned by the harmonious interaction of its specific parts. Unlike many coaches, he was as a rule unimpressed by mere talent. He coldly but shrewdly evaluated players based on their ability to play a particular role needed by the team at a particular time. He had a gift for sensing potential in an underperforming player, one who would be susceptible to coaching, who showed determination, and who could be molded into the Celtics team. He had no time for troublemakers or gloryhounds—attitude was as important as talent—and when investigating a potential young player, he’d call the coaches, teachers, principals, even the ministers and police chiefs in the kid’s hometown, trying to find out less about his ability than about his character. The selection of the player, Auerbach felt, was more important than how he was handled once he arrived. Get the right guys in the beginning and you were all set.

  Auerbach served as his own scout, but his time was limited and he was helped by a network of former players and the coaches he knew, people such as Bill Reinhart, Bob Feerick, Freddy Scolari, and Horace “Bones” McKinney. In the previous two years he had added two more unheralded men who rounded out the legendary Celtics roster of the sixties, and it was Bones McKinney—one of Auerbach’s old players from the days of the Washington Capitols—who had alerted him to the first of them. Sam Jones was a student at all-black North Carolina Central when McKinney, then the chaplain at Wake Forest University, happened to see him play. Unlike most basketball players, who aim for the rim, Jones ricocheted his shots off the backboard, which gave him a greater variety of angles. Bank shots were as a rule more difficult to hit, but it was said of Jones that he worked the backboard the way a pool shark worked the cushions. McKinney was so impressed that he called Auerbach. “Red,” he said, “there’s a colored kid down here with the damnedest bank shot you ever saw.” Jones’s college had played against so few good teams that it was almost impossible for NBA coaches to assess his talent, and he had gone undrafted until Auerbach, picking last, selected him.

  The following year, Auerbach signed K. C. Jones, who had been Russell’s roommate at the University of San Francisco. The Celtics had drafted K.C. in 1956, the same year Russell and Heinsohn joined the team. But when K.C. graduated, he had gone into the military and did not join the team until 1958. Since K.C. was quiet and relatively small, many in the Boston press initially decided he’d been hired simply to provide a friend in town for his old college roommate Bill Russell, and they derided him as “Russell’s little buddy.” But Auerbach had recognized both his exceedingly quick hands and his defensive strengths, which he had acquired from San Francisco’s coach, Phil Woolpert. K.C. had been about to go to work for the post office when Woolpert had offered him a scholarship, and as the sportswriter C. Michael Curtis noted, “Had he attended a school where race-horse offense was the predominant pattern, it is fair to presume that Jones might have wound up back at that post office.”

  Though Auerbach had never met Joe McCarthy, the legendary manager of both the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, he had gotten to know Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto while in the navy during the war, and Rizzuto had told him how McCarthy ran his teams. As a coach Auerbach emulated McCarthy’s champion-molding principles. One of McCarthy’s rules was that champions should play the part of champions—“You’re a Yankee,” McCarthy would tell players. “Act like one”—and he required the Yankees to wear coats and ties when traveling. Auerbach, too, insisted that while traveling together as a team, his players wear jackets and ties and refrain from drinking liquor. Beer was acceptable, but he did not like to see his players sitting at bars with cocktail glasses in front of them. Anyone thus caught was fined. But at the same time, Auerbach was not a stickler for rules. While the Celtics had a curfew for road trips, he made it clear that he considered his players adults; he would not sneak around hotels checking up on them, and instead he made it a point to stay in his room.

  For all Vince Lombardi’s meticulous planning, his players liked to joke that once the game started he was the most useless person on the sidelines. Auerbach, by contrast, came to life most truly during games. He was such a forceful presence that it was as if he functioned as a member of the team, as responsible as any one of his defensive players for controlling the score. Auerbach believed that if he, together with the crowd, could make the officials hesitate on just a couple of crucial judgment calls against his team, he could create two to four points for the Celtics as surely as if he’d put the ball through the basket, and this could provide the winning margin in a close game. Auerbach also believed that the referees reflexively, even unconsciously, favored the weaker teams the Celtics played against, and he felt, or convinced himself, that he had to compensate for their inclination. At the same time, Auerbach used what he called “strategic” technical fouls and ejections, shrilly contesting calls to stir up the crowd in a lackluster game or having himself thrown out to inspire his team with his sacrifice. He once estimated that the Celtics won 80 to 90 percent of the games from which he was ejected.

  And so Auerbach perfected the art of courtside intimidati
on as no coach before or since has ever done. During the course of his career, he was fined more often than any other coach in the NBA. By the time of his retirement, the fines totaled more than $17,000. He was fined for calling referee Arnie Heft “stupid and incompetent.” He was fined for giving referee Richie Powers the choke sign. He was fined for calling referees Norm Drucker and Mendy Rudolph “a couple of chokers.” He was suspended for actually shoving referee Joe Gushue. In a game against the Lakers, referee Richie Powers became so upset with Auerbach that he threw his whistle at him and announced that he was quitting. “I won’t go for a league where they can vilify you like this,” he said.

  Auerbach’s attack on Kerner during the 1957 playoffs was not the only time he erupted in actual violence. He once punched Philadelphia Warriors coach Neil Johnston when Johnston interrupted an argument he was having with the timekeeper. During a game against the Royals, Auerbach attacked a Cincinnati fan, a gas-station attendant named Edward Finke, who in addition to showering him with abuse, spat on him and, according to one account, kicked him in the shins. Auerbach went into the stands after him, and a brawl ensued. After the game, Finke pressed charges, claiming Auerbach had broken his glasses and knocked out a couple of teeth. Auerbach was arrested at his hotel, but Finke later dropped the charges, and out of gratitude Auerbach subsequently left tickets at the box office for Finke when the Celtics were in Cincinnati.