Basketball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Paint

Wilt Versus Russell

WILT VERSUS RUSSELL David K. O’Connor IN THE 1960S, professional basketball posed a great philosophical puzzle . Who is the ideal basketball player, Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell? My friends and I got our first taste of philosophizing by defending our answers to this question. The competing ideals were sharply drawn. Supporters of Wilt pointed to his greater ability to dominate a game by himself, especially on offense . They also pointed out that he carried a heavier responsibility for his team’s success than Russell, since he was always the focus of the action . Russell had better teammates, who could contribute more on their own. Everyone recognized that Wilt was preternaturally strong and fast, especially for a man who stood just over seven feet tall. Wilt had more points and more rebounds, and in one year more assists, than anyone else. In his 142 matchups against Russell’s teams, Wilt outscored Russell 28.7 to 23.7 and out-rebounded him 28.7 to 14.5. Seven times Wilt scored 50 or more points against Russell, including a high of 62 on January 14, 1962. In that 1962 season, Wilt averaged over 50 points per game. Russell never scored 40 points in an NBA game. Less quantifiable but maybe more important, Wilt became a mythic hero in a way Russell never did. If basketball has a Babe Ruth, it is Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt famously scored 100 points one memorable night against the New York Knicks, in a game played in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The achievement is so mythic that most people, including hundreds who told Wilt they had seen the game in person, have transplanted the game in memory to a better place for myths, Madison Square Garden. It might as well have been Mount Olympus. Excellence on the Hardwood 117 Wilt versus Russell Partisans of Russell thought Wilt’s fans were silly to chatter on about how Chamberlain had less success than Russell just because Russell had better players around him. Surely it didn’t diminish Russell that he played on better teams than Wilt did, they would say, and in fact it’s part of what shows that he was a better player. Of the 142 matchups between Russell’s Boston Celtics and Wilt’s various teams, the Celtics won 85, as well as 7 of 8 playoff series. Russell’s Celtics won the NBA championship eleven times in Russell’s thirteen years. Wilt won one championship in those years, and one more after Russell retired.1 But most of Russell’s supporters would have rejected the notion that all they cared about was that Russell’s teams were more successful than Wilt’s. Russell, they wanted to claim, was also a better player, regardless of the records, because he was a better team player, especially on defense. They would compare Russell’s way of “making everyone around him a better player” with what they perceived as Wilt’s selfish play, hogging the ball and generally stealing the spotlight. It wasn’t only that Russell won more rings than Wilt, then. It’s that Russell embodied a different and higher ideal of basketball excellence, an ideal of teamwork rather than of one-on-one domination. Wiltonians, Russellites, and Aristotle These arguments weren’t merely theoretical squabbles. For us boys in the mid-1960s, the “Wilt versus Russell” question made a real difference in what standards we set for ourselves. If you were a “Wiltonian,” you tried to live up to different ideals than those of your friends who were “Russellites .” We had all the single-minded seriousness about sports typical of boys, so we focused on what the Wilt versus Russell question taught us about how to be athletes and teammates. That was the most serious part of our lives then. But the lessons about partnership and leadership weren’t limited to sports. As other aspects of life have become serious to me, I’ve come to appreciate how those early debates with my friends are still important , even if they’re being applied in the classroom, in marriage, or in the workplace rather than on the hardwood. Though we didn’t know it when we were debating the “Wilt or Russell ?” question, my friends and I were continuing a philosophical conversation over two thousand years old, started by one of the giants of ancient 118 David K. O’Connor Greek philosophy, Aristotle (384–322...