It Was Free, but Not Easy

It may be the simplest thing in sports. Nobody has a hand in your face, is throwing something at or to you, is trying to knock you down or is tugging on your shorts. The playing floor is level, there’s no wind, the goal doesn’t move and there is nobody guarding it.

All you have to do, really, is stand there and throw a rather large ball 15 feet through a rather larger hole. There is no complicated technique: Breathe, bend your knees, aim and shoot.

Even if you can’t hit the hole clean, there’s a board behind the goal to help you, with a well-defined aiming area.

It’s basketball’s free throw, of course.

Compared to hitting a pitched baseball, it’s a snap. Compared to throwing a football to a guy running away from you while other guys are running after you, it’s a breeze. Compared to sinking a long putt on an undulating green slicked with dew, it’s an absolute cinch.

Kids can make free throws. Dads can make free throws. Heck, some grandmas can make free throws. Everybody can make free throws.

OK, so Shaquille O’Neal can’t make free throws.

Neither could the Big Dipper. Wilt Chamberlain really couldn’t make free throws. He could make hook shots and jump shots, finger rolls and layups. He could rebound and pass and even dribble, if he had to. But he couldn’t make free throws.

He tried. Lord knows, he tried.

He tried shooting them underhanded, grannies, as the kids used to call them. He tried standing off to one side on the free-throw line. He tried standing off to the other side. He tried shooting them from the top of the free-throw circle, and he tried shooting them as jump shots. He tried them with a high arc. He tried line-driving them. In the end, it didn’t matter what he tried. Wilt couldn’t make free throws.

Nine times in his 14-season NBA career, he led the league in free throws shot. In only one of those seasons did he also lead in free throws made. And that season, 1961-62 with the Philadelphia Warriors, he shot 61.3%, the best of his career. High school kids who shoot 61% from the line ride the bench, when they aren’t running laps.

Wilt’s worst season was ‘67-68, back in Philadelphia but this time with the 76ers. He shot 932 free throws and made 354 of them, 38%--38%. Altogether, he made 6,057 out of 11,862, 51.1%. That was for regular-season play. In the playoffs, he was worse--757 for 1,627 and 46.5%.

How could one of the greatest scorers of all time not make free throws?

Chamberlain blamed an injury.

“Believe it or not, in high school, I was an 80% shooter from the foul line,” he said in his book, “A View From Above.”

” . . . My freshman year at Kansas, I hurt my knee. When I shot free throws, I used to have this deep, deep knee bend. But after the knee injury, I had to change my style of shooting.

“When I started to miss from the line--using this new style--I changed to a third style.

“The more I kept missing, the more I kept messing around with different methods and techniques. People started giving me advice. I started listening--to anybody and everybody. But the whole thing was a psychological hang-up.

” . . . I knew I had been good--but now I knew I was awful. Once your brain is giving you that message, forget it.”

Still, Chamberlain did have his moments at the line. On March 2, 1962, for instance, the night he scored 100 points against the Knicks at Hershey, Pa., he went to the line 32 times--and made 28 free throws.