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Season of the 76ers: The Story of Wilt Chamberlain and the 1967 NBA Champion Philadelphia 76ers

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Overview

Destroying a dynasty.
That was the mission of Wilt Chamberlain and the1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers.

For eight straight years, the Boston Celtics had dominated the National Basketball Association. Each and every season during that stretch, a new NBA championship flag was hoisted to the top of the hallowed Boston Garden. No team had been able to stop them. Nobody thought any team could or would.

Season of the 76ers, The Story of Wilt Chamberlain and the 1967 NBA Champion Philadelphia 76ers, chronicles the unprecedented, record-setting championship journey of the team that finally stopped the Celtics and became the new kings of the NBA. It tells the story of the legendary Chamberlain's personal triumph over Boston and their leader, Bill Russell, arch rivals who had annually thwarted Chamberlain's championship dreams and had left him branded a loser.

Editorial Reviews

Lynch gives a near play-by-play account of the nail-biting season when the Sixers finally ended the Boston Celtics' eight-year winning streak in this sentimental but sometimes stirring hagiography of the team and their coach, Alex Hannum. The subtitle is apt, for Chamberlain dominates the book as he dominated the game; the rest of the story, though well-researched and competently told, seems a little thin in comparison. The most captivating sections are those that describe how the team was put together after this, the narrative blurs into a series of plays, games and scores that become numbing in spite of Lynch's clipped, dramatic prose and copious dialogue drawn from press accounts and interviews that he conducted over the last few years with team members and coaches. Lynch, vice-president of news and programming for NewsChannel 8 in Springfield, Va., is an adamant Sixers fan, a position that may alienate certain readers while endearing him to the other fans of the team who are likely to read this book. Enthusiasts of NBA history and Chamberlain should also find something here to hold their attention. 18 pages of photos not seen by PW. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Wayne Lynch

Wayne Lynch became a fan of the Philadelphia 76ers in the mid-1960s as a teenager growing up in Pittsburgh. He started a small scrapbook about the team back then, but it was not until more than three decades later that he decided to tell the full story of the 1967 championship team he loved so much. Lynch is a longtime television journalist who is now Vice President of News and Programming at Newschannel 8, the 24-hour cable news service for greater Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife, Karen, in northern Virginia. His son, Matthew, lives and works in Philadelphia.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Macmillan

Filesize

1.41 MB

Number of Pages

269

eBook ISBN

9781429977135

Excerpt from: Season of the 76ers by Wayne Lynch

I know exactly why and when I became a fanatic for the Philadelphia 76ers. It was an early spring night in 1965. I was just 15 at the time, gangly, nerdy, complete with the requisite black, horned-rim glasses, and very much into my own little world. I was into music and sports -- not playing, but listening.

I was hooked on clear-channel, 50,000-watt AM radio stations. The big rock 'n' roll music stations like WKYC in Cleveland, CKLW in Windsor, Ontario, and WLS in Chicago nightly lured me and countless other teenagers to sample the hot deejays and soak up the sounds of rock, roll, and soul.

But there were also the stations that carried sports. I would pump up the volume on the professional play-by-play of all the games I could find. That meant plenty of major league baseball and buckets full of basketball -- especially NBA basketball! It didn't matter if the words wafted from Don Criqui at WHN in New York, Vince Lloyd on WGN in Chicago, Ed Kennedy on WCKY in Cincinnati, Jerry Gross ("Grab a bottle of Busch, we're goin' into overtime!") on KMOX in St. Louis, or, as on this night, the gravel-throated Johnny Most on WHDH in Boston. Tapping into the games from these towns was like traveling there from our small wood-frame home on the North Side of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It was a ritual of sorts, because the signals of these stations, as strong as they were after dark, didn't always come through loud and clear. Maybe it was the atmospheric conditions. I had to work some magic to make those stubborn signals sing. I would lower my head, and nestle my right ear as close as I could to the white latticework that covered the speaker of the trusty Emerson kitchen radio.

I actually rested my head on the shiny red Formica countertop, and I placed my hands against the warm body of the box, fired by the glowing tubes inside the back panel. Sometimes it seemed that if I held it, cradled it, and caressed it in a certain way, moving my hands a little or a lot, the machine would respond by allowing me to hear every word, every thought, every name, every play, just a little bit better.