by John Taylor
Still, he was feeling relaxed and lucky. In the dressing room before the game, McGuire showed him a couple of New York newspapers predicting that the Knicks would outplay the Warriors. “Let’s run ’em tonight, Wilt,” McGuire said. In February, Chamberlain had cut a record album of rock and blues tunes called By the River. It was eminently forgettable, if not downright embarrassing, but Chamberlain had gotten a kick out of making it. Now, as the Warriors took the floor to warm up, Dave “the Zink” Zinkoff, the public address announcer for the Warriors who had come along to call the game, began playing it over the loudspeakers, and the music added to Chamberlain’s nonchalant, lighthearted mood.
Phil Jordon, the Knicks starting center, was ill with the flu. His backup was Darrall Imhoff, then in his second year. “You’re all I’ve got tonight,” Eddie Donovan, the Knicks’ coach, told Imhoff before the game. “Try not to foul out.” Chamberlain started scoring furiously at the very outset of the game, and Imhoff, unable to stop him from driving to the basket, resorted to fouling him, which sent Wilt to the free-throw line. Don’t let it bother you, Chamberlain usually told himself as he prepared to shoot his free throw, and then more often than not proceeded to choke. But on this night in Hershey, Pennsylvania, under absolutely no pressure in a sparsely attended game in which nothing was at stake, Chamberlain astonished himself by hitting his first nine foul shots in a row. If he kept it up, he thought, he might set some sort of foul-shooting record.
By the end of the first quarter, the Warriors were leading 42–26. Chamberlain had scored twenty-three of those points. As the second quarter got under way, Chamberlain continued to score, and Imhoff, unable to contain him, had no choice but to keep fouling him. It seemed to Imhoff that one reason Chamberlain was scoring so easily was that the hoops in the Hershey arena were as soft as garbage cans; a ball hitting them from any angle tended to drop in. Frustrated, Imhoff turned to Willie Smith, one of the officials, and asked, “Why don’t you just give him one hundred points and we’ll all go home?”
Imhoff soon had his fifth foul called and was replaced by Cleveland Buckner, who was thinner and shorter than Imhoff and had even less hope of containing Wilt. Chamberlain proceeded to rip off another eighteen points, bringing his total at the half to forty-one. In the locker room, the Warriors still thought of the game as nothing more than yet another of Wilt’s high-scoring nights. But in the third quarter, even with three Knicks collapsing back to guard him, he continued to dunk and to sink jumpers and one-handed set shots. By the end of the third quarter he had run up another twenty-eight points, and then, with ten minutes and ten seconds left to play in the game, he pulled down a rebound and shoved it through the basket, bringing his total to seventy-five. He had broken his own record for most points scored in a single game, and he still had the bulk of the fourth quarter to play.
At that point, everyone in the building sensed the possibility of something historic taking place. Since it was a neutral-court game, the crowd had no rooting interest in either team, but now many of the spectators left their seats and moved down to stand along the sidelines. Every time Chamberlain scored, cheering erupted, and if one of the other Warriors took a shot, the fans booed. Each time Philadelphia got the ball, they chanted, Give it to Wilt! Soon, Chamberlain abandoned his defensive role altogether to concentrate on scoring, and stayed down by the Knicks’ basket. As a result, the Knicks, though trailing the Warriors, were running up a score that in any other game would have been impressive. Cleveland Buckner, the backup to the backup center Imhoff, was on the way to scoring his all-time career high of thirty-three points.
Chamberlain’s friend and teammate Al Attles had hit his last eight straight field goals, but with five minutes to play, he sacrificed an easy shot to pass high to Chamberlain, who jammed through another dunk, bringing his score to eighty-nine. Knicks coach Eddie Donovan called a time-out. If Chamberlain did rack up a hundred points, the members of the losing team would forever be branded as goats—it was just the sort of nugget obituary writers loved—and Donovan was determined that he and his team were going to avoid that fate. “There’s no way that big S.O.B.’s going to get a hundred against us,” he said in the huddle. Donovan ordered the Knicks to slow the game and to start fouling the rest of the Warriors. He figured that by sending Wilt’s teammates to the line he could keep the ball out of Wilt’s hands and set up the Knicks for rebounds.
At first it looked like Donovan’s strategy might work. By fouling the other Warriors, the Knicks kept the ball away from Chamberlain for the next two minutes. Then McGuire called over three Philadelphia substitutes, York Larese, Ted Luckenbill, and Joe Ruklick, and told them to get in the game and retaliate by fouling the Knicks whenever New York got the ball. The final minutes of the game seemed strange to all the players. It was an ironic reversal of typical basketball strategy, thought Chamberlain’s teammate Paul Arizin. The losing team, instead of trying to speed up the game to increase scoring opportunities, was freezing the ball, and the winning team, instead of stalling to maintain its lead, was fouling in an effort to turn over the ball.
A number of the Knicks, such as Richie Guerin, had become angry about the way the Warriors were playing. The game back in November when Elgin Baylor had scored seventy-one points had been a real game, with the points scored during the normal flow of the action. This game, it seemed to Guerin, was not a real game. The Warriors had clearly decided that their goal was for Wilt to score one hundred points, and instead of playing a normal game, all they were doing was feeding him the ball. He was taking a shot, or more, on virtually every single possession, while the other Warriors hardly took any shots at all. Guerin became so disgusted with the spectacle that he wanted no part of it and intentionally fouled out.
To counter the Knicks’ foul strategy, the Warriors started inbounding the ball directly to Chamberlain, who was standing up near the basket in the forecourt. With two minutes left, Chamberlain got the ball and was promptly fouled. He made first one free throw. “Ninety!” Dave Zinkoff called out. And then another. “Ninety-one!” He was entitled to a penalty shot as well, and he made that, too. “Ninety-two!” He followed it, when the Warriors got the ball back, with a long jump shot. “Ninety-four!” And then another jumper. “Ninety-six!” With one minute and nineteen seconds left on the clock, Larese tossed a pass up toward the backboard and Chamberlain leaped up, caught it, and drove it through the net. “Ninety-eight!”
Chamberlain, wild now that the magic number was just one field goal away, stayed under the basket to harass the inbounds passer. “He’s going for one hundred, sit back and relax,” Zinkoff told the crowd. Chamberlain succeeded in actually stealing the inbounds pass and went up for a jump shot that missed. The Knicks got the rebound and, determined to keep the ball away from Chamberlain, brought it slowly down the court, but the shot clock forced them to shoot, and when they missed, the Warriors brought the ball back upcourt with less than a minute to play. Wilt shot, missed, rebounded, and missed again. Ted Luckenbill got the rebound and passed out to Joe Ruklick, who lofted a high pass over the heads of the Knicks toward the basket. Chamberlain once again leaped up, caught the pass, and, with forty-six seconds left, dropped the ball through the hoop. “One hundred!” Zinkoff screamed.
The fans surged onto the court, running toward Wilt, slapping at his hands, clapping him on the back, pulling his jersey. Forty-six seconds remained on the clock, but the officials at first were unable to clear the floor. There was too much pandemonium, and in any event, somewhere back in the third quarter the game had ceased to become a contest between two teams and had turned instead into a one-man carnival feat. Willie Smith, the official, gave the game ball to Harvey Pollack. “This ball is a relic,” Smith said. “Get it out of here.” Pollack gave it to Jeff Millman, the Warriors equipment manager, and he placed it in Wilt’s duffel bag in the dressing room. Pollack gave Smith a new ball. The officials cleared the floor. The Knicks had the ball, but Chamberlain, who wanted to keep his score at an even one hund
red, simply stood at mid-court, and New York scored twice before the game finally ended. 10*
Hysterical kids were climbing up Chamberlain’s legs, hanging from his arms and jersey. His teammates swarmed around him along with the fans, and even a few of the Knicks, reluctantly acknowledging the accomplishment, came over and shook his hand. The Warriors headed down to the locker room, which was no bigger than one you’d find in a high school, with a single long wooden bench for all the players. The Warriors passed around the game ball, everyone signing it except Harvey Pollack, who was busy phoning in the box scores to the Associated Press. 11* No photographers had been assigned to cover the game, but a sports editor, listening to it on the radio, had realized in the second half that it was significant enough to warrant a picture, and shortly before the end of the game, a photographer did appear. Pollack scribbled the figure 100 on a sheet of paper, Chamberlain held it up, and a photograph was taken.
But Chamberlain seemed strangely quiet. The fact of the matter was that he was embarrassed. He had been given the stat sheet, and it showed that, while he had scored one hundred points, he had taken sixty-three shots. That worked out to one every forty seconds. In the second half, it had been more like one every twenty seconds. He knew that any ball hog who took upwards of sixty shots in a school-yard pickup game would never be asked to play again.
“I never thought I’d take sixty shots in a game,” Chamberlain said to his teammate Al Attles.
“But you made thirty-six,” Attles said. “That’s better than fifty percent.”
“But Al,” Chamberlain went on, “sixty-three shots, Al?” He shook his head in disbelief.
It was an amazing accomplishment, one never again repeated in professional basketball. Chamberlain had run up thirty-one points in the final quarter alone. He’d made thirty-six field goals for a total of seventy-two points. What accounted for the difference in his overall score that evening was his free throws. If he’d hit his usual percentage of foul shots, he would have ended the game with a score in the mid-eighties. But, with nothing at stake in an unimportant game in a small-town arena, the pressure had been off and he was able to make twenty-eight of thirty-two free throws. Despite Chamberlain’s reputation as a terrible free-throw shooter, those twenty-eight points set an NBA record for the most made free throws in a single game—a record that remains unbroken.
13
GOING INTO the 1962 playoffs, Bill Russell felt wrung out. That season the Celtics had lost Gene Conley, their backup center, to the new Chicago franchise in an expansion draft, and Russell, without a substitute to spell him, had been playing far longer than he was accustomed to doing. But his team was even more dependent on him than ever. In January, he had twisted his ankle driving to the basket in a game against the Lakers, and the Celtics did not win again until he returned to the lineup after sitting out four games.
Despite Chamberlain’s stunning scoring average, Boston finished the regular season eleven games ahead of Philadelphia, and Russell was voted the Most Valuable Player. The award gave Russell some satisfaction because he felt that the only statistics of any significance at all were the numbers of wins and losses. Chamberlain had Russell beat in every category but one, victories, and that, Russell felt, was because for all of Chamberlain’s unsurpassed athletic talent, the man at heart did not understand how to play the game. Basketball was a team game, and every single person on the team—and most important the star of the team—had to recognize that. Every man, even a 30-percent shooter, had to feel respected and valued by his teammates, particularly by the star, had to feel that if he was in a position to take his best shot, his teammates were going to feed him the ball. If the star did not have the brains to look after his teammates, they were going to leave him in the lurch, and the only person Russell saw Chamberlain looking after was Chamberlain.
The Celtics rested while the Warriors dispatched the Nats in the first round of the playoffs, and when the teams faced each other for the Eastern Division finals, they seemed more evenly matched than in any year since Chamberlain had joined the league. Boston had won eight of the twelve games the two teams had played against each other during the regular season, but by the end of the season the Warriors had perfected McGuire’s system, and they took four of the last six games. Earlier in the season, Life magazine described the Russell-Chamberlain rivalry as “the fiercest private war in sports today.” Both men were now experienced professionals, but both were still at their physical peak, and both were accustomed to dominating the court when they played, except against each other. Typically, Chamberlain outscored and outrebounded Russell, but Russell held Chamberlain’s scoring well below his average. One reason for Russell’s success against Chamberlain was his uncanny ability to anticipate Chamberlain’s moves. “All season Russell has known just which way Wilt was going to turn,” Frank McGuire complained to an acquaintance as the playoffs began. But under McGuire’s direction, Chamberlain was now playing out of the pivot at the top of the key. As a result, reporters were writing about a “new” Wilt Chamberlain—“Warriors’ Wilt to Display New Style Against Celtics” was a headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer before the series began—and McGuire was hoping that, since Chamberlain had more options in the pivot, Russell might be forced to play him more conservatively, which in turn could free up Chamberlain to shoot.
Once the series began, Chamberlain was able to score more frequently. In fact, the Warriors’ five starters—Chamberlain, Paul Arizin, Guy Rogers, Tom Meschery, and Tom Gola, who was playing with a sprained back—outscored the Celtics’ five starters—Russell, Bob Cousy, Tom Heinsohn, Sam Jones, and Satch Sanders. But this advantage was offset by the fact that Boston’s top three relievers—Frank Ramsey, K. C. Jones, and Jim Loscutoff—outscored their Philadelphia counterparts—Al Attles, Ed Conlin, York Larese—by an even greater margin. The two teams split the first four games, and the inability of either of them to draw ahead frustrated both, leading to an increase of tension on the court that erupted in game five, in the Garden.
During the fourth quarter, in a sloppily played game with the Celtics enjoying a solid twenty-five-point lead, Chamberlain collided with Sam Jones, and after some angry words, Chamberlain took after him. Jones had no intention of tangling with a man Chamberlain’s size, so to protect himself he picked up a photographer’s stool from the baseline and threatened Chamberlain with it. As fans screamed and police ran onto the court, Carl Braun, a veteran formerly of the Knicks whom Auerbach had signed for one season, rushed in to help Jones. At that point, Chamberlain’s friend Guy Rogers stepped in and, thinking Braun was about to hit him, punched Braun in the mouth. Before Braun could retaliate—he later had to have two stitches—a Boston policeman grabbed his arms, and Braun wanted to say, What are you doing? You’re our cop, not theirs. Let go of me so I can get him.
Seeing Braun struck, his fellow Celtic Jim Loscutoff moved furiously toward Rogers, who, like Sam Jones, picked up a photographer’s stool to defend himself. At that point some two hundred fans, with piercing war cries, stormed onto the court to join the fight but were driven back by a phalanx of a dozen policemen led by Lieutenant Michael O’Malley of Station 1. “There would have been more,” Bud Collins wrote in the Herald, “if Jaguar Jim Loscutoff could have got at Rogers, if Bob Cousy had reached Ted Luckenbill, if Wilt Chamberlain and Sam Jones, the latter brandishing a stool, could have fulfilled their frowns and curses. However, pacifists on both teams, ushers and club officials strong-armed the would-be fighters and cooled them out.” As Frank Dolson noted in the Inquirer, “The brawl had its comic overtones.”
When the police finally restored order, Boston won the game. Back in Philadelphia, the Warriors took game six, and the series came down to a seventh and final game in the Garden. It was an exciting but emotionally draining game for the Boston fans as well as for all the players, because the Celtics, who were eleven-point favorites, repeatedly established substantial leads only to have the Warriors catch up and overtake them. In the second quarter
the two teams swapped the lead five times. In the fourth quarter the game was again tied, but then Frank Ramsey came off the bench for the Celtics and Boston built up a ten-point lead. The Warriors, however, whittled it down again. Russell, who had suffered from insomnia ever since the series began, was feeling exhausted but had done a spectacular job of containing Chamberlain for much of the night. In that final effort, however, Chamberlain scored seven of his twenty-two points. With a minute and a half remaining, Boston was ahead 107–102, but Chamberlain hit two foul shots and made a three-point play to tie the game with sixteen seconds left.
The Celtics worked the ball down the court. They had no game plan, no set play in mind; the idea was simply to look for the man with the good shot. K. C. Jones went up for an outside jumper, but at the last instant decided it was a mistake—pressure baskets were not his strong suit—and he twisted in the air and passed off to Sam Jones, standing fifteen feet from the basket. Sam Jones had now been with the Celtics for five years, but had become a starter only this season, when Bill Sharman retired. A quiet, self-effacing man who rarely smiled, Sam also never became rattled. Because he was bigger than most guards, he could often jump over his defender when taking an outside shot, and that, together with his nerveless manner, had turned him into the Celtics’ clutch shooter.