SEASON OF THE 76ERS

The Philadelphia 76ers’ one big year with Wilt Chamberlain at the helm, told with a fan's fervid passion by a Virginia-based TV journalist.

By the mid-1960s, the Boston Celtics were turning professional basketball into a one-note song. But every year, as Lynch remembers vividly from his youth, the Philadelphia 76ers, led by their enormously talented center Chamberlain, came close in the eastern championships. Lynch charges his story of the 1966–67 season with the spirit of a teenager watching in utter joy as his home team took down the giant. (He also has a tendency to write in a hasty, don't-look-back style, like a kid not wanting to recheck his test before handing it in.) Profiling the 76ers’ other players—Luke Jackson, Dave Gambee, Hal Greer, Billy Cunningham—he offers nuggets from their careers that never quite gel into portraits but serve well enough as quick sketches to fill the spaces around Chamberlain, who emerges as a literal and figurative giant. Lynch also provides good material on the evolution of the 76ers as a team and of basketball in general, complete with comparisons between the fame-and-money–driven game of today and the sport of yore, when a player might buy himself a car with his signing bonus but be told by the coach to make sure he drove the veterans to practice. The majority of these pages are given over to a near blow-by-blow recounting of the season, how Chamberlain had shifted his game from one-man juggernaut to team pivot, the showdown between two powerful teams and the two greatest big men (Chamberlain vs. Boston’s Bill Russell), and the taking down, if only for a season, of the Celtics' dynasty.

Not a Bulls threepeat, nor a Celtics nine-of-ten championship seasons, but Lynch makes it feel just as glorious and a piece of pure justice for Chamberlain. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)