Wheels Within Wheels

PRO BASKETBALL

For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name,

He writes--not that you won or lost --but how you played the Game.

--Grantland Rice

The sentiments, exactly, of the players in last week's National Basketball Association All-Star game. To begin with, there was never any question about who would win, because all the big stars--Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson--were on one side. The East had already won the game three years in a row, and had no trouble making it four straight, 137-94. But if the game itself was a bore, the game within the game was fascinating because, for the first time, N.B.A. officials had decided to give something of value to the night's most valuable player: a $5,000 Ford 7-Litre convertible.

Naturally, that put East Coach Red Auerbach in something of a bind. In real life, Red coaches the World Champion Boston Celtics--and three of his Celtics were playing for the East. Since the game was in Cincinnati, Auerbach bent over backwards to be fair, care fully parceled out equal court time to each of the East players. "There's only one ball, fellows," Red sighed unhappily. "You've got to remember the spot I'm in." Auerbach's Celtic star Bill Rus sell, who drives an $11,500 Mercedes-Benz, did his bit to help his coach by scoring exactly two points in 23 minutes.

The happy solution would obviously be for a Cincinnati player to win the car. Oscar Robertson, who already has both a 1965 Cadillac and a 1966 Olds Toronado, was the logical candidate, but he had an unaccountably bad night, scoring just 17 points--14 below his average. With Robertson's modest defection, there seemed to be no way to keep Philadelphia's Wilt Chamberlain from winning the Ford--although he needed it less than anybody else, since he owns a $24,000 Bentley--and can't get into a Volkswagen. At 7 ft. 2 in., Chamberlain was just too tall and talented to avoid scoring 21 points. Auerbach finally got lucky when, with the East leading 29-12, he sent in Cincinnati's Adrian Smith, the last player named to the ten-man East squad.

Smith responded by shooting every time he got his hands on the ball. "Say, Smitty," Chamberlain whispered to him jokingly, "you're making it awfully tough for me to win that award." Smith smiled and kept shooting. By game's end, he had scored 24 points, and everybody heaved a sigh of relief when N.B.A. President Walter Kennedy handed him the keys to the Ford. All Smith had at home was a 1965 Thunderbird.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.