The advance notice offered two versions of basketball’s future on the same floor. Wilt Chamberlain, already called the biggest attraction in the sport, would lead the San Francisco Warriors against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. Before that game, Lew Alcindor, the seven-foot schoolboy who might someday take Chamberlain’s place in the public imagination, would lead Power Memorial Academy against Archbishop Stepinac. The preliminary was scheduled for 6:45.1
It was January 1, 1965. Chamberlain was twenty-eight and in his sixth NBA season. Willis Reed, the Knicks’ rookie from Grambling, was twenty-two. Alcindor was seventeen. Their careers had not yet acquired the shape that later made the evening appear almost impossibly well cast. Chamberlain had already altered professional basketball. Reed had played barely two months of it. Alcindor still had a high-school schedule to finish.2
The three men did not play against one another that night. Alcindor’s opponents were teenagers from White Plains; Chamberlain and Reed met afterward in the professional game. Yet the arrangement placed three defining centers, representing three successive stages of basketball fame, inside the same building: the schoolboy everyone wanted, the superstar everyone watched, and the rookie New York had not yet learned to recognize.1
Stepinac’s players were already warming up when Power Memorial arrived at the Garden. Their coach, Nat Volpe, decided that his team had seen enough. He sent the players back to the dressing room rather than let them continue watching Alcindor. “I didn’t want them to see him before they had to,” Volpe later explained.2
There was a theatrical wisdom to the decision. Time listed Alcindor at 7 feet 1 and 235 pounds. He could palm the ball easily, score with either a conventional dunk or a reverse, shoot a hook, and move with the balance of a much smaller player. The magazine’s account made him sound less like an unfinished prospect than a problem for which schoolboy basketball had no reasonable answer.3
This was the oddity surrounding Alcindor before he had chosen a college. He was still subject to school bells, homework, and thirty-two-minute high-school games, but adults already discussed him in professional terms. College coaches competed for access. Reporters submitted questions through Donohue. His family kept its telephone number unlisted. The attention normally waiting at the end of development had arrived before Alcindor was allowed to complete it.3
Power Memorial won 69–44. Alcindor scored 37 points, and the victory was the school’s sixty-fourth in succession. About 7,000 spectators watched the preliminary, an extraordinary audience for a high-school game but an understandable one in the circumstances. The Knicks and Warriors were coming next, and the city was full of coaches, scouts, and other basketball people attending the holiday college tournament.4
The contemporary report admired Alcindor’s shooting touch, mobility, and footwork. It also recorded the difficulty of judging a seven-footer against boys so much shorter. That reservation already felt procedural. The meaningful debate was not whether Alcindor could play, but where he would play next. Dozens of colleges pursued him, while Power coach Jack Donohue restricted interviews and turned the decision into a guarded mystery.5
That ambiguity gave the preliminary its tension. Alcindor’s 37 points were both an answer and another invitation to speculate. He had dominated, as everyone expected, but he had done so against boys who could not reproduce the dimensions or strength of college and professional defenders. The Garden audience could see the ability plainly. What it could not see was the upper limit.5
Chamberlain watched from the seats. No one in the building was better equipped to understand the scene. At Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, he too had been the schoolboy attraction whose size made every opponent appear temporary. He had gone to Kansas, spent a season with the Harlem Globetrotters, and entered the NBA in 1959. By New Year’s Day 1965, he had led the league in scoring in each of his first five seasons. He had averaged 50.4 points in one of them and scored 100 in a single game. The league had already widened the lane and revised other rules in response to advantages associated with his size and athleticism.6
His numbers had changed the scale available to basketball writers. He had made once-astonishing totals recur often enough to alter expectations. Even on the night of the Alcindor preliminary, when Chamberlain would finish below his usual scoring level, the advance coverage used him as the unit of measurement. Alcindor was introduced not simply as a promising player but as the schoolboy who might one day displace Chamberlain as the game’s greatest attraction.6
Alcindor was therefore being measured against more than a professional player. Chamberlain represented what happened when the speculation ended and the giant reached the league. Every high-school performance by Alcindor invited the same question: was another such career approaching? Chamberlain’s presence turned the preliminary into something more than a recruiting spectacle. The standard was sitting in the building.
Then the schoolboys left the floor.
The professional game offered a different hierarchy. Chamberlain arrived as the established phenomenon. Nate Thurmond played beside him for San Francisco. Reed was a second-round draft choice on a Knicks team that had finished last in the Eastern Division the season before. New York’s most celebrated years were still ahead, and Reed had not yet become the captain identified with them.7
Reed’s value was already becoming apparent, although not in the overwhelming manner associated with the other two centers. He was undersized for the position and played with a left-handed jump shot that drew defenders away from the basket. He rebounded, defended larger men, set screens, and supplied force without requiring every possession to announce him. The style was less spectacular than Chamberlain’s and less unprecedented than Alcindor’s. It was also particularly useful to a team trying to reconstruct itself.7
The game remained close enough that one possession could decide it. Chamberlain scored 29 points, a below-average total by his standards, but his free throws damaged San Francisco. He missed seven of eight attempts. Reed did something rarer: he beat Chamberlain on the boards, 18–17.8
With 1:13 remaining, the Knicks needed a basket. Chamberlain and Thurmond occupied the area around the rim, nearly fourteen feet of centers positioned on either side of it. Reed found the opening between them. He slipped through and scored. New York held on, 101–100.9
Fourteen days later, San Francisco traded Chamberlain to the Philadelphia 76ers. The Warriors were 11–33 at the time, leading the league in neither attendance nor victories even though Chamberlain remained its leading scorer. The transaction returned him to his hometown and ended the particular arrangement the Garden had advertised: Chamberlain in a San Francisco uniform, Alcindor still in high school, and Reed at the beginning of his first Knicks season.10
The contrast was almost too orderly. During the preliminary, Alcindor had been impossible to miss. During the main event, Chamberlain remained the reason the game was promoted. Reed supplied the play that mattered most.
It is tempting to treat the night as a ceremonial handoff, but the evidence resists anything so simple. Chamberlain was not finished, Alcindor was not yet ready for the NBA, and Reed was not trying to become either of them. What the bill revealed was not one model of the center replacing another. It showed the position widening. Alcindor offered unprecedented reach joined to mobility. Chamberlain exerted enough force to rearrange defenses, record books, and league rules. Reed showed how a smaller center could affect a game through rebounding, shooting, timing, and the willingness to move into the narrow space left between larger men.
That made Reed’s basket more than an upset within the matchup. For most of the evening, attention had followed height and celebrity. The decisive possession rewarded recognition: seeing the opening before Chamberlain and Thurmond could close it, reaching the rim without trying to overpower either one, and finishing the play that a one-point game required.
The morning’s papers could therefore describe three distinct kinds of dominance. Alcindor had overwhelmed shorter schoolboys and extended a historic winning streak. Chamberlain, even on an inefficient night at the foul line, had scored 29 and drawn the structure of the evening around him. Reed had scored through two larger centers and preserved a one-point victory.
Nothing that followed was inevitable, but almost everything suggested by the evening eventually arrived. Reed completed the 1964–65 season averaging 19.5 points and 14.7 rebounds and became the first Knick to win the NBA Rookie of the Year award. He became a seven-time All-Star and the central figure on New York’s championship teams of 1970 and 1973. The Knicks retired his number 19, and his injured entrance before Game Seven of the 1970 Finals became the defining image of the franchise’s history.11
Alcindor chose UCLA. From 1967 through 1969, he led the Bruins to three consecutive NCAA championships and was named college player of the year three times. The Milwaukee Bucks selected him first in the 1969 NBA draft. After his rookie season he adopted the name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and by the end of a twenty-year professional career he had won six championships and six Most Valuable Player awards.12
Chamberlain’s career remained the statistical landmark against which other centers were measured. He retired with more than 30,000 points and 23,924 rebounds, along with two championships and four MVP awards. Alcindor eventually passed his career scoring total. Reed’s Knicks twice defeated Chamberlain’s Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals. The connections visible at the Garden that night would continue for years.13
But none of that history had been completed on January 1, 1965. Alcindor was still introduced as a schoolboy. Reed was still a rookie. Chamberlain was still the attraction they were approaching from opposite directions.
For one night, the future of the center position did not have to be imagined. It played the preliminary, watched from the seats, and slipped between two giants with 1:13 left.