Far from Chamberlain making him irrelevant, Russell thought, his opponent had instead forced him, or inspired him, to play better basketball than he’d ever played before. He had a feeling that this could get interesting.

 

Red Auerbach, the Celtics coach, was sitting on the bench, and as the game drew to a close, he pulled out a cigar. Auerbach had first seen Chamberlain play back in 1953, when Wilt was still in high school, and Auerbach had become convinced even then that Wilt was going to be one of the best basketball players the game had ever seen, possibly the very best. But even before Wilt’s rookie season began, the sportswriters had been acting as if it was a foregone conclusion that he and the Warriors would overrun every other team in the league. Auerbach had disagreed. His strategy going into the game that night had been to let Chamberlain get his thirty or forty points but to make sure that the Celtics smothered the rest of the Warriors, and it had worked. None of Chamberlain’s teammates had ever really gotten into the game.

Auerbach removed the cigar’s cellophane wrapping, pulled out his lighter, and fired it up. He puffed, smoke drifting upward, and then exhaled with an air of self-satisfaction. Auerbach smoked eight to ten cigars a day, but this one was always different, for this was the notorious Victory Cigar, the one he ceremonially lit once his team had put the game away, the one that drove opposing coaches mad with distraction, the one that seemed the ultimate embodiment of what they regarded as the man’s unbearable arrogance. Auerbach was a stout, balding man with dark rings around his eyes and a cauliflower nose. He had a family, but his wife and two daughters lived in suburban Washington, D.C., while during the basketball season he stayed at the Hotel Lenox, in Boston’s Back Bay. He rationalized this arrangement by saying that he traveled so much and worked such long hours during the season that he would have seen little of his family if they had moved to Boston. He always added that one of his daughters had asthma that would have made it difficult for her to live in Boston. But Boston’s brisk sea air was much better for asthma than Washington’s humid, pollen-thick climate, and some of the people who’d had exposure to Auerbach’s frequently crude, obstreperous, primitive, intimidating personality believed it was a toss-up as to whether he couldn’t stand to have his family around during the season or whether his family couldn’t stand to be around him.

During games, Auerbach wore a dark suit or loud plaid sport coat and carried a rolled-up program in his left hand. His right hand was usually cupped around his wide-open mouth as he shouted in disgusted disbelief at the benighted officials. When a call particularly outraged him, he rose from the bench and raced along the sidelines shouting or ran onto the court and up to the offending official, thrust his face forward until they were standing nose to nose, arguing so heatedly it was almost impossible for the official to get a word in. He was, referees and rival coaches agreed, obnoxiousness personified. “He incites a murderous rage when he takes his place on the bench,” one sportswriter declared. “When I first met Auerbach, I disliked him,” an unnamed coach once told a reporter for the Boston Record. “But gradually it grew to hate.”

One reason other coaches hated Auerbach was that he was becoming so successful. In the fall of 1959 he had won two NBA championships in the past three years. By the time he retired, in 1966, he had won seven more, a record unmatched by any professional team coach in any sport. 1* But Auerbach also had the improbable distinction of being one of professional basketball’s most significant social pioneers. That first game between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain was played just weeks before the dawn of what John Kennedy, in the upcoming presidential campaign, would call “the challenging, revolutionary sixties.” At the time, the greatest turbulence in the country centered around race relations. Black migration out of the rural South had continued strong since the end of World War II, and the 1960 census found that in Washington, D.C., blacks for the first time had become a majority in a large American city. But segregation remained the rule throughout the Deep South, and in April 1959, seven months before the game, the most notorious lynching since the murder of Emmett Till took place when a group of hooded men kidnapped Mack Parker, the black suspect in the rape of a white woman, from a jail in Mississippi and left his mutilated body in the Pearl River.

As the civil rights movement gathered momentum in the early and mid-sixties, basketball, more than any other major sport, would find itself caught up in the issue of race. Its integration was more sudden and complete than in football or baseball. Within a few short years after Chamberlain’s arrival, four of the top five players in the league—Chamberlain, Russell, Elgin Baylor, and Oscar Robertson—were black. They became wealthy celebrities and, whether they liked it or not, role models. While the NBA in general integrated more quickly than any other team sport in the country, the Celtics set the pace within the league. They were the first team to field a majority of black players, the first to field an all-black team, and the first team in any major-league sport to hire a black coach.