by John Taylor
Baylor was determined to play professional basketball again, but there was so little progress with his knee during the summer that he began to realize that he might not have a future in the game. He started talking with his wife, Ruby, about the possibilities of life after the NBA, the different career paths that might be available to him. He kept saying just in case, and he kept up with Kerlan’s program of workouts and physical therapy, but he was having trouble sleeping, and it was clear to his wife how worried he had become.
When the Lakers training camp opened in September, Baylor still had not recovered. Nor was he ready to play when the season officially began. From time to time, coach Schaus injected him into scrimmages during practices, but only for brief intervals before taking him out. Baylor, Schaus thought, looked pathetic, so stiff-legged he was practically hobbling. Baylor was tight-lipped about his condition, and no one on the team knew what he was really going through, but Schaus was as close to him as anyone, and Schaus had a strong sense of how demoralized Baylor felt. Schaus himself had more or less given up hope. The situation seemed to him almost tragic. Baylor was desperate to play again, but he was also holding back, afraid that his body might not allow him to do the one thing he most wanted to do, afraid as well that if he pushed too hard, his knee might shatter into pieces, and he’d never even play golf again, much less basketball.
Finally, Baylor insisted Schaus play him in an actual game. Dr. Kerlan gave his approval, and before the game Baylor was given an extra dose of Novocain. His performance was dismal. He could still shoot, but he was erratic, and on defense he was tentative and slow, moving with that awkward hobble he’d developed. It was clear he had completely lost confidence in himself, and Schaus used him only sporadically. After games, the trainer wrapped his left knee in ice. Baylor had been favoring that knee, the bad knee, and that put an extra strain on his right knee. During a game in November, he made a sudden off-balance move and ended up straining the ligaments in it. Schaus put him on the injured-reserve list, and Dr. Kerlan now decided that his entire right leg should be encased in a hip-to-ankle cast, just as his left had been six months earlier.
Baylor was sidelined for a month. When he returned his self-confidence was, if anything, worse than before. Schaus, thinking a subpar Baylor was better than no Baylor, put him into a game against San Francisco, but then he regretted it. The Warriors’ new shooting star, Rick Barry, began dancing rings around the hobbling Baylor, scoring practically at will and rendering Baylor virtually useless on offense. Much as he knew it would hurt Baylor’s self-confidence, Schaus pulled him out of the game after only seven minutes.
At that point, Baylor realized he could either give up or simply develop some patience and wait for his knees to improve. After all, he told himself, he’d had only five months of rest and rehabilitation before going to training camp. Maybe he had come back too soon. Weeks passed. Baylor tested his knees every day without pushing them, but it was not until the middle of the season that they seemed like they might support him. He was still tentative on the court, however. Dr. Kerlan suspected that his problem might be psychological and urged him to go all out. And so in a game in January, Baylor truly pushed himself, running, even jumping, and when he found his knees supported him, he ran harder and jumped higher. The knees held up. He could play.
Baylor knew his body was never going to be what it had been six years earlier, that he no longer had the sheer physical ability of his younger, faster opponents such as Barry, but he had his years of experience. If he concentrated, undistracted now by worries about his knees, he could outthink his younger rivals, playing them tight, throwing them off-balance with unexpected moves, even going for rebounds. He began to readjust his game, and in February, he led the Lakers to a victory over Cincinnati, scoring twenty-nine points and pulling in twenty-one rebounds. It was a victory worthy of Baylor’s heyday, and he felt jubilant. “The old pro with the aching legs wound up the big man,” the Los Angeles Times declared the next day. One magazine headline celebrated “The Elgin Baylor Miracle.”
BEATING THE CELTICS in Boston Garden had been a pivotal moment for the 76ers. The Celtics, after that home-court defeat, lost their aura of invincibility, and began to seem more like just another basketball team, talented but aging, with most of their starting players now in their thirties, and undeniably vulnerable. Boston had ended the previous season twenty-two games ahead of Philadelphia, but now, as the 1965–66 season progressed, the two teams traded the lead. The Celtics enjoyed a slight advantage for most of the winter, then the 76ers won a pair of back-to-back encounters with the Celtics in early March and took a one-game lead. The Celtics wanted to win the regular season and rest for two weeks while the second- and third-place teams fought the opening round of the playoffs. They did the best they could, winning all six of their remaining regular-season games, but the 76ers won all of their remaining games as well, and ended the season with that same narrow one-game lead.
It was the first time in ten years that Boston had failed to finish the season in first place in the Eastern Division, and the Celtics’ Sam Jones thought Billy Cunningham, the 76ers rookie forward, was the reason. Cunningham had what was rare in a rookie: a complete game. He drove, passed, jumped, and rebounded, and when he didn’t have the ball, he moved instead of standing around like so many rookies did, waiting to be told what to do. Cunningham, who was the son of a New York City fireman and had been recruited by Frank McGuire to play for North Carolina, also had an appealing cockiness that had made him an immediate hit with the Philadelphia fans.
Boston beat Cincinnati in the qualifying round, and as the Celtics prepared to face the 76ers in the Eastern Division finals, Red Auerbach felt that the team’s biggest challenge was Cunningham. He had been punishing against Boston throughout the season, scoring but creating even more trouble by rebounding. Auerbach figured Cunningham’s one weakness was his lack of playoff experience. He’d never been there, and nothing prepared a rookie for it—the back-to-back games against the same team, the packed houses, the tension mounting with each successive match. Before the series started, Auerbach directed the Celtics to concentrate all the intensity of their defense on Cunningham, even if that meant neglecting the other 76ers. “Maybe if we press the kid and upset him,” Auerbach said, “Schayes will do us a favor and sit him down.”
In the first game, when Cunningham came in off the bench, the Celtics bore in on him, pressing, pressing. Cunningham became disconcerted, missed seven straight baskets, and heard a new and disturbing sound: the fans booing him. In the second game, the Celtics continued pressing him, and he made only one shot in nine attempts, a performance so dismal that Schayes benched him for the entire third game. Cunningham went from feeling confused to feeling dismayed to feeling mortified. It was the worst cold streak in his career. Even with the Celtics pressing him, he was getting open now and then and taking shots, but the ball simply would not go through the hoop, and he had no idea why. All he could do was keep plugging away at it, if he got a chance to play.
In Schayes’s mind, Cunningham was simply a rookie who had lost his game, a not uncommon experience in an untested young man in the pressure of the playoffs, and he didn’t count him out altogether. Philadelphia managed to take the third game, and in the fourth game, Schayes, ever hopeful, sent in Cunningham yet again. Pressed by Boston, he promptly missed five out of six baskets. Schayes took him out and Philadelphia lost. In the fifth game, with Boston up 3–1 and the series at stake, Schayes sent in Cunningham once more. But the Celtics, still following Auerbach’s instructions, again focused their defensive energy on him, and he made only one out of seven shots before Schayes ordered him back out.
With Cunningham sitting on the bench the model of dejection, shaking his head and looking at the floor, Boston won. If, as the sportswriters had been saying, it was Cunningham who had made the difference for the 76ers during the regular season, he had failed to make a difference in the playoffs, and he couldn’t help but feel that the team’
s loss was his responsibility. The series had been one long nightmare for Cunningham, it seemed to Joe McGinniss of the Philadelphia Bulletin, and now the nightmare was over.
AS THE REGULAR SEASON had ended and the playoffs had begun, Red Auerbach had kept talking to Bill Russell about the prospect of replacing him as coach of the Celtics. He stressed the fact that none of the men he’d talked to wanted the job, in part because the notion of coaching Russell himself was so daunting. The point was clear: if no one was willing to become Russell’s coach, Russell would need to become his own coach.
Russell still wouldn’t commit, so Auerbach asked him if he’d be willing to be coached by Alex Hannum, who’d just been fired as coach of the Warriors. Russell at first accepted the idea, then changed his mind, deciding he did not after all want an outsider coming in, and just as the final series with the Lakers was about to begin, he told Auerbach he’d take the job. He’d decided he could do it, and he liked the idea of proving to the world that he could, especially since that meant sticking it to all those fans—in Boston and elsewhere—who’d shouted racial slurs when he took the court.
Auerbach and Russell held a press conference announcing the decision the day after the first game with the Lakers. Reporters from Los Angeles and New York as well as Boston attended, and the lobby of the Hotel Lenox was strewn with the television equipment of fourteen different camera crews. Asked why he took the job, Russell said, “Being something of a nut, I thought it might be fun.” Auerbach explained that, although he himself was going to take the position of general manager and run the team’s front office, Russell would be making all the coaching decisions. “I’m not going to sit anywhere near him,” he said. “I’m not going to be near the bench in practice or at games.” But that was next year, he went on. The Celtics still had the finals in front of them and were looking forward to their next game against the Lakers. “We are leaving for L.A. on TWA at nine o’clock.”
“In the morning?” Russell asked.
“You ain’t coaching yet, baby,” Auerbach said.
When Auerbach was named coach sixteen years earlier, The Boston Globe had carried the story on the inside pages, surrounded by racing results and local high school sports scores. But the editors of The New York Times considered Russell’s hiring so momentous that they ran their article about it on the front page, next to stories on bombing strikes near Hanoi, proposed peace talks between the United States and Vietnam, and the Ford Motor Company’s recall of thirty thousand vehicles for safety defects. Milton Gross saw Russell’s appointment as a milestone, and in his laconic, hard-boiled prose he celebrated it as such. “Once he had contended in a national magazine article that the NBA had a quota system, unwritten, unspoken, but real,” he wrote in the Post. “Now here he is the first Negro to coach a big league team. He will not be the last.”
The next day, Russell took Gross in his white Mercedes convertible out to lunch at Slade’s, the restaurant Russell owned in the Roxbury section of Boston. When Gross asked Russell if he considered himself a racial pioneer in a league with Jackie Robinson, Russell resisted the social significance of his appointment. “I wasn’t offered the job because I am a Negro,” he said. “I was offered it because Red figured I could handle it.”
THE FINALS BETWEEN the Lakers and the Celtics was another tough, high-scoring series that went to the seventh game, which was played on April 28, 1966, and was Auerbach’s last game as coach of the Boston Celtics. He slept well the night before, but he woke up that morning thinking, This is the day. The Celtics had never lost a seventh game in any playoff series, but still Auerbach had to keep reminding himself that anything could happen in any given match. At one o’clock, he ate a corned-beef sandwich and drank a Coke, but ten minutes later he threw up. That did not particularly bother him. He wanted to be hungry going into the game, hungry and focused and on edge.
Before the game, the Celtics dressing room was particularly quiet. Auerbach felt that there was little to say. In any event, he’d been suffering from strep throat for days, and so, instead of opting for an inspirational speech, he discussed strategy. Lakers rookie Gail Goodrich was capable of dangerous bursts of scoring if guarded carelessly, he said, and he warned Sam Jones to play him close.
“You hear me good?” Auerbach asked.
“I hear,” Jones said.
“You stay in that kid’s jock.”
Auerbach then pointed out that so far the team had won $30,000 in playoff money and that if it won tonight it would take home another $28,000. That was a lot of money, Auerbach said, and it was worth pouring out their hearts and their guts for forty-eight minutes. Then, on a final note, he added that there was one more reason to win. If they did, they wouldn’t have to spend their summer explaining to everyone they met why they had lost.
Even though Elgin Baylor’s knees had healed, he was not the player he once was, and the Lakers had come to rely even more on Jerry West. But now, in the final game against Boston, West suddenly went cold, hitting only two out of nine shots in the first half. Baylor was even worse, going one for nine, and Gail Goodrich, with Sam Jones all over him, could not make up the difference. By the third quarter, Boston was up by nineteen points, and as the second half wound down Los Angeles was able to do little more than chip away at the lead. It was as if the Lakers by then had surrendered to the idea of the Celtics mystique, as if they actually believed it was impossible for them, or for any team, to beat the Celtics in the seventh game of a championship series.
With a minute left, Boston was ten points ahead. Massachusetts governor John Volpe, who was sitting courtside near Auerbach, assumed the game’s conclusion was foregone, and he leaned over and lit Auerbach’s cigar for him. The fans, similarly assuming the game was over, surged out of their seats and down onto the court, where a few of them started climbing the basket supports. The referees had to halt the game and clear the parquet, but instead of returning to their seats, the fans stood along the perimeter of the court, waiting to rush onto it.
When play resumed, one of the Celtics slipped on some orange soda a fan had spilled on the floor, the team’s defense was thrown off, and Jerry West immediately scored. Within seconds he stole the ball from Russell, scored again, and suddenly the Lakers were down by only six. Russell had expected them to surge at some point during the game, and now, with less than a minute to play, it was happening. Los Angeles got the ball again on an offensive foul and quickly scored a third time. Then Sam Jones, unnerved by the sudden Lakers surge, allowed a pass to slip through his hands and bounce out of bounds, giving control of the ball back to Los Angeles. Their center, Leroy Ellis, promptly scored on a jump shot, and with four seconds left, the Lakers trailed by only two.
Auerbach sat frozen on the bench. The cigar—the victory cigar—smoldered between his fingertips. People had often wondered if Auerbach wasn’t jinxing a game by lighting up prematurely, before it had actually ended. Auerbach always claimed that it had happened only once, in the early days, in a game against Providence; with ten seconds left and his team ahead by three, he had lit up, only to see a Providence player fouled while scoring and then make the foul shot to send the game into overtime. Now, with the Lakers down by two and four seconds left to play in the seventh game of a championship series, in what was his last game as coach of the greatest dynasty in sports history, Auerbach wondered if he had, once again, lit up prematurely. Would he go out looking like a goat?
Boston had the ball. With four seconds left, the Lakers would try to foul, hoping to send a Celtic to the line, where Los Angeles could rebound a missed point and take one final shot to try to tie the game. Russell passed in to K. C. Jones. The clock began. Before anyone could foul him, Jones passed to John Havlicek, who was standing downcourt with no Lakers nearby. Havlicek simply held on to the ball, and before any of the Lakers could get to him, time ran out, and the fans rushed onto the floor.
Milton Gross—whose motto was Run with the pack and you’ll read like the pack—was always searching for
that special angle that would distinguish his column from the straightforward game stories most of the sportswriters filed. In one of his most celebrated pieces, he had left the press box during the seventh game of the 1956 World Series, searched the locker room for Don Newcombe, the pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers who had folded under the pressure of the game, then accompanied him home and wrote a moving account of Newcombe’s emotional distress called “Long Ride Home.” Gross decided to reemploy this technique for Auerbach’s last game, and once it was over, he hooked up with the coach to accompany him home.
When Auerbach and Gross finally left the Garden, Auerbach found a parking ticket under his car’s windshield wiper. He’d had so much good luck, he told Gross, he figured he deserved a little bad luck every now and then. The two men went up to Auerbach’s suite at the Hotel Lenox, with its ninth-floor view of the Boston Public Library. Auerbach, who hadn’t eaten since he regurgitated that corned-beef sandwich at one o’clock, was ravenous. He called the Chinese restaurant from which he always ordered takeout and asked for wonton soup, egg rolls, chicken wings in oyster sauce, spare ribs, roast pork, and steak cubes. The person who had answered the phone at the restaurant asked who was calling. “Auerbach, who do you think?” he asked. “And hurry. I’m starving.”
The suite was cluttered with accumulated memorabilia, the mantelpiece lined with bottles of Chinese noodles, jars of nuts, and the countless letter openers Auerbach collected. He sat down in a chair and rubbed his face. He was still tense from the game, and he was still wearing the clothes that had gotten soaked when the Celtics threw him into the shower.