Prior to Russell joining the National Basketball Association, the game had consisted of little more than men running up and down the court making layups. But because Russell blocked layups so effectively, players had been forced to create a wider range of offensive plays, passing back and forth and setting screens until one of them could make a mid-range jump shot. The game immediately became more complex, varied, and challenging for the players and more involving and fun to watch for the spectators, and the late fifties became known as the Russell Era.

But now, with Chamberlain in the league, sportswriters were wondering if the Russell Era was coming to an end, if the defensive style of play Russell personified would yield to the singularly muscular offensive style of Wilt Chamberlain, whose fadeaway jump shot was almost impossible to defend against and who amazed fans by leaping up to the rim, taking a pass over the outstretched hands of the defending team, and then, still rising into his jump, actually shoving the ball down into the basket. It was a feat so startling, requiring such a rare combination of timing, grace, and strength, that it seemed to have more to do with acrobatics than with basketball. Until then, the sport had been thought of as a game played well below the net. Now it was becoming a game played in the air.

 

Russell, sitting in the Celtics locker room before the game, had read the articles musing about an end of an era—his era, even though he was only twenty-six—and he wondered if they were true. Russell had eaten a steak that afternoon and then played cards with his teammates Maurice King and K. C. Jones, who had also been his teammate on the University of San Francisco Dons when he led it to two NCAA championships. Russell always got nervous before a game, so nervous that he routinely threw up. Night after night, sixty or seventy times a season, he was in the head before the game tossing the remains of his lunch. In fact, he did it with such regularity that to his teammates it became a ritualistic sign of good luck. If Russell wasn’t in there puking, they got worried.

But on this night Russell was more nervous than usual, even after the obligatory trip to the head. Russell was tall, six-ten, but Chamberlain had three or four inches on him; Russell didn’t know exactly how many inches, because while Chamberlain was officially listed at seven feet one and one-sixteenth inches, he also claimed that no one had measured him since he was in high school. Also, Russell knew, Chamberlain was a good forty to fifty pounds heavier than he was. He could jump just as high and he was just as quick up and down the court.

And Chamberlain was smart. Russell considered himself one of the most serious students and analysts of basketball ever to play the game. While at San Francisco, he had thought so systematically about the game’s physics and geometry—the trajectories the ball drew between the horizontal plane of the court and the vertical planes of the backboards, the thrust of a 240-pound body hurtling at you at twenty miles an hour and the dynamics of deflecting that thrust—that he thought of himself as a scientist in sneakers. But Russell knew Chamberlain was just as smart as he was. The sportswriters were saying Chamberlain was even smarter. Russell wondered if tonight he was going to be outplayed and outthought by rookie Wilton Norman Chamberlain.

People had been feeding Russell information about Chamberlain for weeks: his moves and shots—particularly his fadeaway jumper—what worked against him, what didn’t, how close to guard him. Prepared as he was, Russell still felt unprepared because Chamberlain, from what so many people were saying, sounded simply unstoppable, a man who was going to get his thirty points regardless of what you did. Russell decided one thing: he would not look up at Chamberlain. Russell was used to being the tallest person in the room or on the court, and there was nothing that a tall person, accustomed to looking down at everyone, found more intimidating than to come face-to-face with someone who was even taller.

 

Chamberlain had spent the afternoon before the game sprawled diagonally across two beds he’d pushed together in the Hotel Lenox, trying to rest. Basketball fans had learned where he was staying, and a small crowd of them badgered him for autographs when he emerged from the hotel in the early evening. After obliging, he caught a taxi to Boston Garden. Now, sitting in the cramped and overheated visitors’ locker room with the rest of the Warriors, he was nervous as well. His transition into the pros had been more difficult than he’d thought it would be, given his commanding abilities and all the press he’d received. Pro ball was more violent than college ball, for one thing. He’d been elbowed in the mouth by Willie Naulls in a game against the Knicks.