The NBA Finals have given us countless unforgettable moments, not the least of which came Thursday night when the Celtics put up a historically dominant fourth quarter to stun the Warriors. Giannis’s 50-point closeout. The chase-down block. Ray Allen from the corner. The flu game. Magic’s baby skyhook. Willis Reed on one leg. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find some tales that are equally remarkable but have been forgotten by time. Here are four of those story lines, beginning with, well, the beginning.
1947: The forgotten, tragic superstar
In the Warriors’ long line of gunners, no one—not Purvis Short, not Steph Curry, not even World B. Free—has been as unapologetic as Joe Fulks. Seventy-five years ago Fulks was the hero of the first NBA Finals, which the Philadelphia Warriors won in five games over the Chicago Stags. Actually the league was called the BAA at the time, and the games were most commonly referred to as the “world series” by the very few journalists who took note. The much bigger battle between Philly and Chicago in the spring of 1947 was who would get to host the following year’s Republican National Convention. Philadelphia won that battle on April 21. The Warriors closed out the Stags 4–1 the next night.
Fulks, who was the leading scorer in the series and had 34 in the clincher, was a man of few words. “I just like to shoot,” he explained. A few years later he elaborated: “I found out you got paid for scoring and to stay in the ballgame, not to play defense.” He was an early adopter of the jump shot, which sportswriters called a “corkscrew.” But he had an entire arsenal of moves—one-handed, two-handed, stationary, jumping. “To this day,” former Warriors coach and owner Eddie Gottlieb said in 1968, “I will still say that Joe Fulks had the greatest assortment of shots of any player.”
Gottlieb had to pay to get Fulks. He’d set a $50,000 limit on the payroll for his first BAA season, and Fulks, who had just come out of the Marines after a career at Murray State, wanted $8,000. “That damn hillbilly wouldn’t budge a nickel,” said Gottlieb, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972. “Joe talked about as much as this table. I’m saying 49 words out of 50, but he’s saying no. And I’ve never even seen the guy play!”
He’d prove to be worth the money. Earlier in the playoffs Fulks had broken the all-time record for points in a season, set three decades earlier in the old Central Pro League. Before tip-off Fulks was feted by the Philadelphia crowd and presented with the keys to a new car by the team. The man whose record he broke, Eddie Krummer, was on hand. Krummer was at the time working as a revenue agent—ironic given Fulks’s life story, one that would end three decades later with the Hall of Famer gunned down in a trailer park.
Fulks grew up in the heart of moonshine country, a town called Birmingham, Ky. It doesn’t exist any longer. When Fulks was a high schooler, the Tennessee Valley Authority dammed the Tennessee River, creating Lake Kentucky and leaving Birmingham under water. (The gym where Joe dazzled the locals was briefly visible in 1961, when the level of Lake Kentucky dropped enough that the roof of the building poked through the surface.) Fulks transferred, somewhat controversially, to Kuttawa High for his senior season before heading to Murray State. (Years later Kuttawa was buried by another dam project.)
Along the way, though, Fulks developed a drinking problem. He wasn’t accustomed to the big city life, and when he was in the small city, booze was literally a way of life. One teammate said that Gottlieb would check on Fulks before the game, so Joe would hide a case of beer in a closet and sneak a few before tip-off.
Fulks retired and moved back to Kentucky, eventually getting himself clean. But when the NBA announced its 10-man 25th-anniversary team in 1971, Fulks was on it. He went to San Diego for the ceremony and got to talking—and drinking—with his old friends.
Five years later he was working as athletic director at Kentucky State Prison in Eddyville. After a shift he went to visit a woman he had been casually seeing at Becketts Trailer Court. Her 22-year-old son, Greg Bannister, was there. He and Fulks had a bumpy relationship, and on the night of March 20 they tried to smooth it out with vodka. After hours of drinking they began arguing over a pistol. Bannister went to his car and came back with a shotgun. He’d later claim the shotgun went off accidentally; however it happened Fulks was dead on the floor. His former Kuttawa High teammate, Carrots McQuigg, was driving the ambulance that responded to the call.
Bannister, who had a blood-alcohol level of 0.20 when he was booked a few hours later, was found guilty of reckless homicide. Fulks, the hero of the first Finals, was laid to rest in an unassuming grave with no fanfare—two years before his posthumous induction into the Hall of Fame.
1950: The first buzzer beater
By 1950 the Lakers were regulars in the Finals. They had won the title in ’48 and ’49, but if there was one thing their championships lacked it was some good, old-fashioned buzzer-beating drama. They finally provided that in Game 1 of the 1950 Finals against the Syracuse Nationals.
As was often the case, center George Mikan was dominating. The 6'10" matchup nightmare had 37 of the Lakers’ 62 points with three minutes left in the opener, but the Nationals held a three-point lead.
Then a pair of Mikan’s sidekicks—a duo who to that point had combined to take one shot—stole the show. Rookie Bob “Tiger” Harrison came up with a steal and went coast-to-coast for a layup to cut the Nats’ lead to one. A Syracuse free throw made it 66–64 with just over a minute left when a crew-cut rookie Lakers guard sank a 20-footer to tie the score. It was his only shot of the game, and he’d be out of the league within two years—but that didn’t mean he’d leave the Twin Cities sports scene. His name was Bud Grant, and he’d go on to coach the Vikings to four Super Bowl appearances.
With the score tied, Syracuse held the ball for the last shot, but player-coach Al Cervi pulled the trigger too early. His attempt was blocked by Mikan, who got the ball to Harrison. Dribbling up the left side, he stopped just across half court and tossed up a one-handed push shot from 40 feet that passed through the net just after the final gun sounded.
Harrison almost didn’t make it to the court at the State Fair Coliseum in Syracuse. As he was dressing before the game, he couldn’t find his jersey. He was a rookie, and as such often found himself on the receiving end of practical jokes from his teammates. One of his teammates suggested that the hosts might have an extra jersey he could borrow, but Harrison shot that down: “I’m not playing in any Syracuse jersey,” he proclaimed. Convinced his shirt was gone, he started putting on his street clothes to go back to the hotel when Mikan told him to check his bag one more time. At the bottom, he found the jersey.
The Lakers won the series in six, with Mikan putting up 40 in the deciding game, an affair that featured 77 fouls—or one every 37 seconds. No one said the game was pretty back then.
Did the world champs go to Disney World? They did not. They immediately embarked on a barnstorming tour of the Dakotas.
1962: The dynasty that almost wasn’t?
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The Lakers and Celtics first met in the 1959 Finals, but their second meeting, three years later, gave birth to the sport’s most enduring rivalry. From 1962 to ’69, Los Angeles and Boston met six times in the Finals—and Boston won them all.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Celtics “had the Lakers’ number.” It’s entirely possible they were just the better team each year. But one can’t help but wonder how much the dynamics of the rivalry would have changed had the Lakers proven to the Celtics—and perhaps more important, to themselves—that they had it in them to win a series.
The biggest story of the first six games of the 1962 Finals was Elgin Baylor’s performance in Game 5. Facing his friend Bill Russell, Baylor put up 61 points. (He had 22 rebounds for good measure.) It’s a mark that still stands as the most points in a Finals game, though Baylor didn’t realize it at the time. As the Boston Garden crowd applauded at the final horn of the Lakers’ 126–121 victory, Baylor asked teammate Hot Rod Hundley why they were clapping when their team lost. “True dat, baby,” said Hundley. “You also scored 61 points.”
“I did?” replied Baylor.
The teams went back to L.A. with the Lakers holding a 3–2 lead, but the Celtics staved off elimination to send the series back to Boston. In the seventh game, the C’s led by four late when Frank Selvy got hot. The Lakers guard was one of the most explosive scorers the game had ever seen, especially when the spotlight was on him.
When Selvy was a senior in college at Furman, his coach proclaimed Feb. 13, 1954, “Frank Selvy Night.” Selvy’s parents and seven siblings made the six-hour trip from Corbin, Ky., to see him, and the game as the first sporting event broadcast live on TV in Greenville, S.C. Selvy responded by scoring 100 points (and jacking his average up to 41.3 points per game in the process). It was 29 more points than the previous Division I record, held by Temple’s Bill “The Owl Without a Vowel” Mlkvy. The opposing player who was charged with guarding him at the start of the game fouled out in three minutes.
As a pro, Selvy averaged 19.0 points per game as a rookie and was a dependable scorer later in his career with the Lakers. In Boston for Game 7, with L.A. down 100–96 with 30 seconds left, he scored two quick buckets to tie the game. After a Frank Ramsey miss, the Lakers had the ball out of bounds with five seconds left. Selvy inbounded to Hundley, who drove to the top of the lane and looked for Jerry West—but the logo was covered. “I had one thought in my mind when the ball came to me,” Hundley recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “‘Do I take the shot?’ I was wide open. I thought, ‘If I make it I’ll be mayor of L.A. But if I miss they’ll be riding me out of town on a rail.’ So I elected to pass it to Frank.”
Selvy was open in the corner, but his potential series winner hit the back iron. Russell got the rebound, and Boston won in overtime. After the game, Hundley walked over to an anguished Selvy and said, “Hey, baby, don’t worry about it. Get your head up. You only cost us $30,000.”
Showing he wasn’t above running a joke into the ground, Hundley would call Selvy for decades afterward. He’d simply say, “Nice shot,” and then hang up.
Would things have been different had L.A. gotten off on the right foot in its rivalry with Boston? Maybe. But it couldn’t have made things any worse. As Baylor wrote of the Celtics in his autobiography, Hang Time, years later, “I [felt] like their hopeless sparring partner. Or worse, their punching bag.”
1976: Praying at the altar of TV
Most fans are at least vaguely aware that the 1976 Finals, between the Celtics and Suns, featured one of the most remarkable games ever played. To fully digest everything that happened in Game 5, you really have to watch it, but in short: With the series tied 2–2, underdog Phoenix overcame a 42–20 deficit to force overtime. The game went into a second extra session, which seemingly ended with John Havlicek hitting a leaner to give Boston a 111–110 win at the buzzer. Only it wasn’t at the buzzer. There were two seconds left on the clock when the shot went through, a fact that weighed little on the collective conscience of the mob that stormed the Garden floor.
The officials called the Celtics back out of the locker room and put a second back on the clock. One referee was attacked by a fan. Another fan threw a courtside table in the air. The Suns looked ready to rumble, and it almost came to that. When order was sort of restored, and Phoenix was given the ball under its own basket, Suns guard Paul Westphal came up with a brilliant strategic ploy: He called a timeout his team didn’t have. Boston got a technical free throw out of it—Jo Jo White made it—but the upshot was that Phoenix could now advance the ball to half court. Gar Heard took the inbounds pass and drained a turnaround at the actual buzzer. Boston then won in triple OT, when guard Charlie Scott, who hadn’t scored a bucket all night, suddenly dropped in three. The C’s wrapped up the series in Game 6.
“It’s a fortunate thing that one of our players did not wind up with a broken leg or a broken arm,” Phoenix coach John MacLeod said after Game 5. Suns fans weren’t so lucky.
Back in Phoenix, a 32-year-old car salesman named Neil Schrock was standing in his living room when Heard made his shot. Schrock leaped into the air—and promptly shattered six of the 10 lights in his chandelier. “I thought the roof had fallen down,” he said. The broken glass tore up his leg, necessitating 25 stitches.
Schrock, whose wife applied a tourniquet to his leg, missed the third overtime on the ride to the ER, but at least he had company. His neighbor Bob Madrid rushed into Schrock’s house to help and promptly tripped on a pile of dirt and banged his arm on a concrete irrigation box. Madrid’s wife stayed with the kids, while Mrs. Schrock accompanied the men to the hospital.
The game was a magnificent advertisement for the NBA at a time when the league sorely needed it. Forty-six years later it’s hard to comprehend in how little esteem the Finals were held. Game 1 was held on Sunday, May 23. CBS, which was televising the series, didn’t want to broadcast a prime-time game during the sweeps period, which didn’t end until that Wednesday. So there was a four-day gap between the opening pair of games. And CBS then insisted that Game 3 in Phoenix not only be held on the following Sunday, but that it tip off early enough to be over in time for the network’s coverage of the Memorial golf tournament. That meant a local start time of 10:30 a.m. On a church day.
Suns GM Jerry Colangelo found himself in the awkward situation of having to apologize to local clergy. The Arizona Republic ran a half-page story on how churches were coping with the start time, with an illustration of a fan sitting in front of a TV, oblivious to the preacher behind him. The men of the cloth had varying takes on the game time, but the most level-headed—and appropriate, given the way the series would play out—was offered by the Rev. Alan Bond, of the Scottsdale Congregational United Church of Christ. “Remember,” the reverend said, “it’s not the score of the beginning of the game that counts but the score at the end of the game.”
