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

Author:Taylor, John [Taylor, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

THE WARRIORS had started the season unevenly, but they improved as the months passed, taking second place in the Western Division in January and first place in February. Alex Hannum had retooled the team, drilled it incessantly, pushed and pushed. He called his style of basketball “muscle and hustle.” The Warriors were not a fast club, the fast break was not a part of their repertoire. They jogged down the court. Chamberlain moved into the low post to the left of the basket, took the pass from Guy Rogers, then paused, raising the ball above his head with one upstretched hand. When he judged the moment right, he drove forward for the dunk or, if the opponents fell back to cover him and freed up one of the other Warriors, he passed to the open man. His scoring average fell by almost 20 percent, but his teammates more than made up for it. With the team in first place, he stopped sulking, and the atmosphere in the dressing room improved remarkably. Hannum even had Chamberlain coach one game when he was ejected after disputing a call, and the Warriors won, surprising Chamberlain by their willingness to accept his authority. “I told them what I thought would work,” Chamberlain said afterward, “and I got their cooperation.”

With the team such an apparent success, Guy Rogers and Al Attles began to urge Chamberlain to acknowledge to all his teammates that Alex Hannum had been right in their dispute and that he, Wilt Chamberlain, had been wrong. Admitting he’d been mistaken was something Chamberlain was almost constitutionally incapable of doing. But Rogers and Attles persisted, and finally, in mid-March, during halftime of a game with Philadelphia that if the Warriors won would give them the Western Division title, Chamberlain made his concession speech in the dressing room.

“I want to tell you that I made a mistake, a bad one,” he began. He said he had not at first appreciated the fact that Alex Hannum knew how to win games in the NBA. But Hannum did know, and winning was what the Warriors had been doing, particularly toward the end of the season, when they had not just won but won emphatically, decisively, when they had crushed their opponents, taking the Pistons by fourteen, the Lakers by sixteen, the Bullets by twenty-three. Chamberlain ended by saying that Hannum was the best coach he’d ever seen and he was willing to do whatever Hannum asked of him. His teammates applauded, and then they went out and beat the 76ers, locking up a division title for the first time in Chamberlain’s career.

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