BOISE, Idaho — This Day In Sports…November 7, 1959, 65 years ago today:
Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain play against each other for the first time as the Celtics beat the Philadelphia Warriors, 115-106, at Boston Garden. The numbers? Chamberlain had 30 points and 30 rebounds—Russell scored 22 points and pulled down 35 boards. It was the first of 143 times the legends would face off. Russell-Chamberlain is still the greatest individual rivalry in the history of pro basketball.
Russell and Chamberlain were the NBA’s first superstars. There’s no telling how popular they’d be today—and how much a ticket would cost to see them. Not to mention the salaries they would command in the modern era. The NBA was a distant third in popularity behind Major League Baseball and the NFL in the 1960s, and its games were rarely on TV.
Take 1963, for example. A feature by Jackie MacMullen in The Ringer reported that the average attendance at a Celtics game in was 7,455 fans—"unless Wilt was in town, and then the Garden would fill to its capacity of over 14,000 paying customers.” The same thing would happen in Philly. And, MacMullen added, “Russell was acutely aware of their rivalry and the jockeying for position and bragging rights. When Wilt negotiated a $100,000 contract—a lavish sum in 1965—Russell went to the Celtics, flashed his rings, and demanded $1 more.”
But MacMullen notes that Russell and Chamberlain had a close relationship during their playing days. “When the Celtics played the Philadelphia Warriors on Thanksgiving, Russell came into Philly the night before and stayed at Wilt’s house. He claims he did that six years in a row. ‘I mean, he’d come past my house on Thanksgiving, eat my food, sleep in my bed, and the next day whip my butt,’ Wilt told Bob Costas in 1997.”
At 7’1”, Chamberlain was three inches taller than Russell. Chamberlain led the NBA in scoring seven times and Russell zero. But Russell had a big edge in head-to-head competition, going 57-37 in regular season games and 29-20 in the playoffs. Most importantly, Russell won 11 NBA championship rings and Chamberlain only two. And neither of Wilt’s titles came against Russell’s Celtics.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
