Hoop Magazine: May 1999
Looking back on his life as men 62 years of age sometimes do, Wilt Chamberlain offered a summary of a professional life that began as a phenomenon and grew to proportions that are nothing short of mythical. The description was simple, but as accurate as could be in a seven-word sentence.
"My life has been full of hype," Wilt said.
It is impossible, however, to hype something as blissfully complex, as endlessly provocative, as undeniably rich as the basketball career and life and times of Wilton Norman Chamberlain. His actual, honest-to-goodness experiences dwell outside the commonplace, and extend far beyond the reach of the most outrageous hyperbole. His Herculean accomplishments on the court are so staggering that they seem almost fictitious, but they are too real, numerous and documented to be permitted entrance into the catalog of myth.
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There is also the off-the-court Wilt, the unpredictable one who not only created much of his own hype, but also believed it. Would he don boxing gloves and fight Muhammad Ali? Maybe, Wilt said. And he could beat the champ. Would Wilt return to his track and field roots and high jump, shot put and run with world class athletes? Could have, but basketball comes first. Would he play on the Olympic volleyball team? Could. Know anyone better? Would he go into politics? Would he make an NBA comeback at age 45? How about at age 55? What about 65?
Wilt attended the induction ceremonies at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in October. As usual, he was mobbed by fans anywhere from six to 86 years of age. Who else could generate that idolization at age 62? Muhammad Ali will. Michael Jordan will. If alive, Babe Ruth and perhaps Jackie Robinson and Joe DiMaggio. But as someone once said, when you're talking about that class, it doesn't take long to call roll.
"The longer it goes, the more flattering it gets," Chamberlain said of the fanfare that accompanies his every move when he's anywhere but in his quiet neighborhood in Bel Air, California, where there is a millionaire at every stoplight, a movie star at every table in local restaurants. "I think in most cases, it shows a great deal of respect. I really deem it an honor. In this new age of entertainment and basketball, things have grown so vastly. To think that a whole generation ago and more, I played. So to have people remember you and want to get a chance to know you a little more, I feel very proud of that."
One look at Wilt tells you that he is still not adhering to the same biological rules as the rest of us. He looks as fit, muscular and vibrant as anybody past 40 years old should be allowed to look. He's actually trimmed a few pounds from his playing weight of his late career, and is back to about 275 pounds spread over a 7-1 and 1/16 inch frame. Listen to him speak in his basso profundo for a few minutes, and you get the sense of a relentlessly active mind, one that is still searching, seeking, wondering, learning. Occupying Wilt's wake, one understands that the term 'commanding presence' might have been invented for Charlemagne, but today belongs to Chamberlain.
Since his retirement from the NBA (yes, it's really been 26 years), Wilt has written four books: Wilt; A View From Above; Chamberlain House: The Possible Dream, and the recently published Who's Running the Asylum: The Insane World of Sports Today. They range from recollections of his playing career to his opinions on sports, politics and social issues of the day.
But Wilt has not confined his efforts to the literary world. He's made a fortune in the restaurant business. He's dined with presidents, kings and Hollywood's beautiful people. He's designed homes, owned racehorses and played professional volleyball. Today, Wilt lives in a mansion he helped an architect design in Bel Air, and spends a lot of time in Vancouver and Florida, where he tends to business interests.
"I'm busier now than I was 30 years ago," Wilt said. "I own a few businesses. I develop land in countries all over the world. I play the stock market. I sponsor youth track and volleyball teams. So I've got a full schedule."
With the help of the late Philadelphia attorney Ike Richman, Wilt invested his money wisely early in his basketball career and is financially comfortable. He shares the wealth, but in distinct non-Wilt style. He would rather people not know about the large amounts of time and money he gives to charities, and, unless asked about a specific charity, he won't address it. In publishing circles, it is known that portions of the proceeds from the sale of Wilt's books are earmarked for Operation Smile, which provides heath care to indigent children.
He'll never mention it, but Wilt's friends will tell you he has been known to personally squeeze every dime he can for a public appearance, then turn around and donate the entire fee to charity. He sponsors the Wilt Chamberlain Rising Star Shootout Tournament in Florida, where 16 of the state's top high school teams compete and showcase their skills.
"People don't understand what a kind-hearted, good guy Wilt was and is," said Marty Blake, the former general manager of the St. Louis Hawks who is the NBA's Director of Scouting and who has known Wilt for 40 years. "When there were 10 of us waiting for our rooms in the lobby of the hotel in Cincinnati before an All-Star Game, Wilt ordered food for everybody, paid the bill and left a big tip. And let me tell you, nobody was making big money in those days, even Wilt. He once got up and made a 5 a.m. flight from Jacksonville, Florida to Atlanta just to speak at a breakfast because I asked him to help us promote a game there. I don't know how many players would do that today, but that's the kind of guy Wilt is."
Today, Chamberlain is often characterized as a man whose ego is as big as his contribution to basketball history. While a few minutes spent in Wilt's presence will reinforce assertions that he: 1) lacks false humility; 2) detests pretense, and 3) remains an opinionated, plain-speaking man, it is obvious that most of the accomplishments Wilt talks about are things he, and only he, has ever been able to do. His achievements are legendary and border on the mythical. Why not look back on them with pride?
It may have taken a few years, but Wilt seems to have gotten over the fact that while he singularly dominated the game like no NBA player ever has or is likely to, his career coincided with the greatest dynasty in league history, that of the Boston Celtics. He is quick to mention that outside of his 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers team, which he considers to be the greatest single-season team in NBA history, the teams he played for never had the depth of talented players the Celtics assembled around Bill Russell. But as an advocate of the team concept, Wilt gives Russell and the Celtics their due.
"It's fashionable to say that Wilt had great God-given gifts, and while that's true, it's often overlooked how hard he worked to develop into the overwhelming force that he ultimately became."
"People say, 'Gee, Wilt, if you played for the Boston Celtics, they never would have lost a game,'" Chamberlain said. "I disagree with that. I brought certain things to the game of basketball, and maybe I would not have fit in as well as Bill Russell did with the Boston Celtics. He had a role to play, and the rest of the players played their roles perfectly. Perhaps if I had scored the way I did, I may have taken away from Tommy Heinsohn or taken away from Bill Sharman, taking away things that they brought to the floor. You have to remember you are talking about a team."
Many basketball fans today assume that since Wilt was the single greatest offensive force in basketball history, he celebrated individual self-aggrandizement above team play. But there are voices who dispute that, and paint a much different picture, including Alex Hannum, who coached two different NBA teams to championships and later won an ABA title for good measure.
"Wilt Chamberlain is one of the most misunderstood athletes in the history of sports," said Hannum. "He is one of the most gentle, kind, sincere people, yet he has often been made to be the bad guy. People had always asked him to score a lot, and so he scored a lot. When you have a dominant scorer, you go to him. But when he got back to Philadelphia [being traded to the 76ers by the San Francisco Warriors in the middle of the 1964-65 season], we had talent throughout the team."
Chamberlain's scoring average dropped from 33.5 points in 1965-66 to 24.1 in 1966-67 as Hannum coached a balanced unit of Chamberlain, Chet Walker, Luke Jackson, Hal Greer, Larry Costello, Billy Cunningham and Wali Jones. The team finished with a 68-13 record, then the best in NBA history, and playoff victories over Cincinnati, Boston and San Francisco on the way to the NBA title. Hannum claimed he never explicitly asked Chamberlain to shoot less.
"He understood, he was a very cooperative guy," Hannum said. "Wilt realized that with talent like that, you have to spread the wealth around."
But that is not to say that Hannum did not, at times, attempt to goad Chamberlain into delivering points when Hannum thought the team needed them.
"Alex went to the press one time and told them to write that I couldn't score anymore," Wilt said. "We had a couple of guys hurt, and he wanted me to score more points, but I was happy being in the mode of scoring 20 or 22 points, and passing the ball. So there was this one crazy writer who came out with a big headline: Wilt Can't Score Anymore. So I went out the next three games and averaged about 56 points. After I got those points, I went back to the writer and said, 'You wanted me to score some more? What's happening?' But Alex had done just what he wanted to do, being very cagey. But I didn't know about it. I was getting really, really P.O'd at the writer for putting me down, but it was all a setup. So they got me."
In recent years, Wilt has attended events where his No. 13 has been retired by the Philadelphia 76ers and the University of Kansas, and his No. 5 honored by Overbrook High School in Philadelphia. When he returned to Kansas in January 1998 for the ceremony, Wilt swept away 40 years of disappointment that had lingered after a triple-overtime loss to North Carolina in the 1957 NCAA Championship Game. Instead of returning to Kansas for his senior year, Wilt played with the Harlem Globetrotters for one season before entering the NBA.
"A little over 40 years ago, I lost the toughest battle in sports in losing to the North Carolina Tar Heels by one point in triple overtime," said an obviously emotional Chamberlain. "It was a devastating thing to me, because I thought I let the University of Kansas down and my teammates down. But to be here today ... I'm humbled and deeply honored. I've learned over the years that you've got to take the bitter with the sweet, and how sweet this is, right here!"
It's fashionable to say that Wilt had great God-given gifts, and while that's true, it's often overlooked how hard he worked to develop into the overwhelming force that he ultimately became. Chamberlain's first love was track and field, and he trained hard to compete in the shot put, high jump and varied distance races. He was not always the sculpted colossus he would become, at one time checking in at 6-11 and 202 pounds.
"I had this thing about going out and becoming strong because I was always a skinny, skinny kid," Chamberlain said. "I could jump to the moon, I could run as fast as the wind, but I had this thing about wanting to be strong."
By the time he arrived at Kansas, Chamberlain was already stronger than most NBA players. Maurice King, a teammate of Wilt's at Kansas, and a retired executive of Hallmark Cards, called Wilt "absolutely the strongest man I ever met, and that was when he was just a kid of 18 or 19. Wilt was already doing conditioning things when he came to Kansas that we had not been allowed to do, things that are now routine training, like lifting weights. You heard people talk about how skinny Wilt was. I learned very quickly that power doesn't necessarily come with bulk. What an incredibly powerful man!"
Wilt continued to participate in track and field at Kansas, even clearing 6-6 and 3/4 in the high jump to tie for first in the 1958 Big Eight Conference Track and Field Championships.
"Maybe if I'd been from California, I'd have been a decathlete," Wilt said. "If I'd been from Oklahoma, I'd have been a football player. But fortunately, I lived in Philadelphia, and it was a basketball city."
By the time he got to the NBA, Wilt was sculpted and scary. Everyone knew not to mess with Dipper, as in The Big Dipper.
"One time, when I was with Boston and he was with the Lakers, Happy Hairston and I were about to get in a scrape," said Charlotte Hornets coach Paul Silas, who was a rugged, no-nonsense enforcer. "All of a sudden, I felt an enormous vise around me. I was 6-7, 235, and Wilt had picked me up and turned me around. He said, 'We're not going to have that stuff.' I said, 'Yes sir.'"
And former Celtics guard K.C. Jones remembered his casual run-in with Wilt.
"He stopped me dead in my tracks with his arm, hugged me and lifted me off the floor with my feet dangling," Jones said. "It scared the hell out of me. When I went to the free-throw line, my legs were still shaking. Wilt was the strongest guy and best athlete ever to play the game."
While Chamberlain contends his most impressive record is leading the NBA in assists for a full season -- "I am the only non-guard to win the assist title, and boy, am I proud of that," he said -- the number that will follow him always is 100, as in the number of points he scored against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pa., on March 2, 1962. While critics point to this unfathomable achievement as yet another example of Wilt's selfishness, Wilt's teammates say nothing could be further from the truth.
"His teammates are the reason Wilt scored 100 points, and we did it for two reasons," said Al Attles, a hard-nosed guard for those Philadelphia Warriors who later coached the Golden State Warriors to the NBA Championship in 1975. "One was our style of play, designed by Coach [Frank] McGuire, was to get the ball as close to the basket as possible for a shot, and that meant getting it to Wilt in the low post. The other was we wanted Wilt to break the record. We all liked Wilt a lot."
"What I remember about that game," said Wilt, "was that when I had gotten to about 80 points, the fans began to holler for me to get 100. And I thought, 'Damn, aren't they satisfied with this? I'm getting tired!'"
When the NBA celebrated its 50th anniversary two years ago, a check of the first half-century revealed that Chamberlain held 56 NBA records. At the time, Michael Jordan -- for all his greatness -- held four. And no one -- no one -- had an impact on the rules the way Wilt did. Consider:
" When Wilt was at Kansas, an NCAA rule was implemented to prevent him from jumping from the foul line and dunking the ball. " The NBA's offensive goaltending rules were changed so that Wilt could not catch his teammates shots above the rim and put them in. " The three-second lane was widened in 1964 to keep Wilt from posting up so close to the basket that he could simply catch the ball, turn around and dunk it. " On inbounds plays, players were prevented from lobbing the ball over the backboard so that Wilt could catch and dunk it.
Over the years, there have been many testimonials about Wilt's legendary career, enough so that if they were stacked one on top of the other, they would reach a height above even the stratosphere where his massive hands would deliver a signature Dipper Dunk. But perhaps it is fitting to allow the man himself, who has never been shy about sharing his opinions, to deliver the ultimate analysis.
"I say that Wilt Chamberlain was the Goliath of his time," said Wilt some years back. "He was too big for the game of his time. He had too many tools, too much arrogance. That would be what I would think of Wilt Chamberlain."
Chris Ekstrand is a staff writer for Hoop. He treasurers his own memories of watching Wilt in the early 1970s.
This article first appeared in the May 1999 issue of Hoop.
