Brave Words From A Hawk And A Warrior

In the beginning (of the present season) Jack Kent Cooke created the new super Lakers by paying something like three or four trillion dollars for Wilt Chamberlain, big super center. And Jack Kent Cooke said, "Let there be a new NBA basketball champion ensconced in my fabulous new Fabulous Forum." And after Jack Kent Cooke and the Los Angeles sportswriters had contemplated Chamberlain and his two teammates—Elgin Baylor, super forward, and Jerry West, super guard—they spoke more or less in unison. And they said, "There is none like them on all the earth, and how will they ever lose a game?"

And the rest of the NBA said, "We shall see what we shall see."

And the third week of the sixth month of the season arrived. And 11 of the other 13 teams in the NBA had beaten the Lakers at least once and some a great deal oftener than once. So that the Lakers, although they secured the Western Division title with a perfunctory lead over the runner-up Atlanta Hawks, were still a great distance away from a national championship.

For the guys who sit in basketball's drafty bleachers through the long winter months, it is a good thing indeed that the rest of the basketball players of the world were not paralyzed by fear at the thought of facing Chamberlain, Baylor and West. Next week the playoffs for the title finally begin, and a glorious three-way cat-and-dog fight between the Lakers, the Hawks and, yes, even the San Francisco Warriors is in prospect. At Vegas, Caliente and the Paris Bourse, the Lakers are not so much as even money to earn the dubious pleasure of losing to the Baltimore Bullets or the New York Knicks or somebody in the ultimate league playoffs ending sometime in May, June or July.

First consider those orphans of the storm, the Warriors, who have the first turn at assaulting the Lakers. By November, a month into the season, they were comatose, with a record of 7-8. In late December they were moribund (16-22). As the All-Star Game approached in mid-January, they were in fifth place and thinking not so much of the playoffs as whether the season would ever end. The news reports on the Warriors during that dismal spell read like something filed out of a field hospital near Danang. Looking back on it all, now that their luck has turned, the Warriors point to the nadir of their fortunes as that dreadful night of Dec. 6 in Seattle. They had exactly seven players fit for service, but league rules insist that a team must have eight men suited up to play or face a possible fine of anywhere from $25 to $1,000. So Jim King, the guard, who was home in bed with the Hong Kong flu, had to be wrapped like a mummy and flown north to sit on the bench, where he shivered and spectated for all but two minutes, when he had to go in and play.

The Warriors' casualty report is really better suited for a medical bulletin than a sports magazine. King, a tough, peppery little guard from Tulsa who, when healthy, last year led the league in scoring, had been counted on as one of the prime movers and shakers of the Warrior attack, but he has become a chronic invalid with an internal pelvic disorder that is inaccurately described as a pulled groin muscle. He missed the first 20 games and played only sporadically thereafter. Recently he has been in the hospital again for a checkup and is still doubtful for the playoffs.

Alvin Attles, who is even smaller and tougher than King, is the team's other offensive sparkplug as well as its assistant coach. He missed 15 of the early games with a pulled hamstring and 11 of the later ones with a shoulder separation. Two weeks ago in Boston he hurt his back and is now sitting restlessly on the bench mending slowly for the playoffs. Minus Attles and King, the Warriors are a little like John F. Kennedy Airport without a control tower.

Then there is Nate Thurmond, an All-Star for the last four years and one of only two or three men with the height and muscle to play belly to belly against Wilt Chamberlain under the basket. Big, genial Thurmond is the kind of rollicking bachelor who keeps a team loose on those awful road trips, but, even more important, you have to have him around to control the boards against people like Bill Russell, Willis Reed, Chamberlain and the other sequoias of basketball. Injury-prone for much of the last four years, Thurmond pulled a thigh muscle early in the season and was lost to the club for most of December.

On and on the woeful story goes with flu, wrenched knees, strained arches and bad backs, to the point where one figures the team doctor must be the richest fellow on the Warriors' roster. Not that it is over yet, but since the All-Star Game the Warriors have slowly been recovering into the kind of team that last week outshot, outdefended and out-rebounded the Lakers themselves for a smashing 97-85 victory in their final meeting of the season at the San Francisco Cow Palace.

When the Warriors are asked what happened to suddenly send them careering along in an opposite and considerably happier direction, they offer a lot of explanations. But one name keeps popping up in most of them—Jeff Mullins (see cover). Mullins is a most charmingly friendly Kentucky boy of not unusual dimensions for a basketball player at a mere 6'4" and 200 pounds. He has the kind of open, ingenuous manner about him that often makes older men say of his kind, "I'd like to have a son like that."