Ruklick had his small part in basketball history
Milestone comes on assist to Wilt
On a historic night in Hershey, Pa., Joe Ruklick understood he had one job: Get the ball to Wilt.
Ruklick, an All-America center at Northwestern in 1959, is a footnote to one of the most momentous plays in sports. On March 2, 1962, he passed the basketball to Philadelphia Warriors teammate Wilt Chamberlain, who recorded his 99th and 100th points of the night — a single-game NBA record that might never be broken.
“I was wide open,” Ruklick, 78, recalled recently in an interview with the Tribune. “I’m looking at the New York players who will not yield. I don’t know what I thought, but I knew I had to get the ball to Wilt. There were 46 seconds to go, and there’s a guy hanging on his left hip.
“He went, ‘Woo!’ and that meant he was open briefly. There were his hands, and I got the ball to him. And he scored.”
Ruklick knew it was a special moment as he hit Chamberlain with the pass under the basket and Chamberlain spun for a Big Dipper dunk to send the crowd of about 4,000 into a frenzy. Ruklick said he waited patiently at the scorer’s table to ensure he was credited with the assist. History was made, and he now refers to himself as a “walking footnote.”
For a broad-shouldered, 6-foot-10 former NBA center, Ruklick is a largely inconspicuous part of basketball lore. He lives in Evanston, Ill., near Welsh-Ryan Arena and attends Northwestern games as a reporter for the Aurora Voice.
At a recent game, ushers were delighted to learn his background, chat with him and ask if he ever faced some of the most famous athletes to play the sport. Ruklick had a story about almost all of them.
But after he retreated from the conversation, he conceded it’s a complex dynamic to have an identity that is often boiled down to one play 54 years ago. He went on to an investment banking career, became the father of three, received a graduate degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism at 50 and worked at newspapers such as the Chicago Defender.
Ruklick enjoys discussing the friendship he forged with Chamberlain through three NBA seasons together, lasting until Chamberlain’s death in 1999 at 63. He still receives annual Christmas cards from Chamberlain’s sister and cherishes photographs of himself with Chamberlain — including one from 1967 with Chamberlain holding Ruklick’s infant son as the 7-1 Chamberlain’s head almost touched the basement ceiling.
“Wilt always said, ‘Whenever you brag, be sure you say you should have gotten two assists,’” Ruklick recalled with a laugh.
Chamberlain averaged a record 50.4 points and 48.5 minutes during that 196162 season. He played all but eight minutes during the season.
In the 100-point game, Ruklick played only eight minutes. His only significant statistic was that one assist. He didn’t expect to enter so late in the game, but he said Chamberlain told coach Frank McGuire to put in Ruklick to help get him the ball.
“We just wanted to sit and watch what Wilt was doing,” Ruklick joked. “We see our coach (waving us over). ‘What the hell is he doing that for?’ He said, ‘Get your ass in there.’ ”
Only the score appeared on the scoreboard, no player point tallies. So the small but exuberant crowd relied on the announcer’s colorful play-by-play.
After the game, however, Ruklick described the smelly hockey locker room the team used as “quiet.”
“I don’t think anybody congratulated Wilt but a few guys,” he said.
Even some of Chamberlain’s teammates, Ruklick said, were resentful of a black player reaching such dominance and stardom. Ruklick had become a keen observer of the sometimes unspoken — and sometimes loud — racism in that era of the NBA.
“Many of them didn’t think there would be more than a handful of black players every year,” he said. “They thought: ‘Chamberlain is a freak. We’ll never see another Bill Russell.’ That’s how dumb we were back then. People were ugly sometimes. But it was as common as the morning sunshine.”
After three seasons, Ruklick said he left the NBA under moral objections. The fact he was playing little and making only $8,000 a year, he said, didn’t help either.
Ruklick said Warriors owner Eddie Gottlieb called him into his office at the end of the 1962 season to tell him he wanted to keep him on the team, which was moving to San Francisco. Ruklick, a first-round draft pick in 1959, averaged only 3.5 points and eight minutes in his three seasons.
“I was 23 years old and having fun, but sitting the bench wasn’t fun,” he said. “He said, ‘We need you next year. Fans won’t buy tickets if you have too many Negroes.’ I went and told my wife. She said, ‘You mean you’re on this team because you’re white?’ ‘Well, yeah.’ So I went to New York to look for a job (outside of basketball).”
Ruklick has been working on a book about basketball’s history of racism, called “Too Many Negroes.”
He and Chamberlain remained friends. They had been linked since Ruklick, from Princeton, Ill., was chosen for a high school all-star game in 1955 while Chamberlain was left out because black players weren’t permitted to compete with white players in the South.
They met on another historic night when Chamberlain played his first college game for Kansas. Ruklick joked that he “held” Chamberlain to 52 points.
“I think he had an honest respect,” Ruklick said, “for someone who played him clean.”