The Full Biography
Wilt Chamberlain. Center. The Philadelphia giant who scored 100 in a night, averaged 50 in a season, hated the nickname Stilt, and spent the years after the paint trying to be a man the box score could not hold.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a 7-foot-1 man in a Philadelphia jersey, hanging on a rim, or standing at the foul line in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on a night the scoreboard had to make room for three digits. The date is March 2, 1962. The opponent is the New York Knicks. What the still cannot show is Overbrook High, a Kansas final lost in triple overtime, a year with the Harlem Globetrotters, two NBA titles that arrived after the scoring records, and a man who would die at sixty-three in Bel-Air with a memoir’s worst sentence still following the 100.
He was born Wilton Norman Chamberlain on August 21, 1936, in Philadelphia, one of nine children of Olivia Ruth Johnson and William Chamberlain. His father was a welder and a janitor. His mother cleaned houses. The boy grew past the neighborhood the way a tree grows past a fence. At Overbrook High he was already a civic fact: scores in the 70s and 90s, a body the college scouts treated as a rare earth. He did not love the name Wilt the Stilt. He preferred the Big Dipper, because he dipped his head at doorways. The preference tells you how he wanted to be seen: not as a freak of altitude, as a man who had learned to live inside a frame the rooms had not been built for.
Kansas took him. Phog Allen was leaving; Dick Harp inherited the giant. Chamberlain had already been a track man as well as a basketball — a high jumper, a quarter-miler, a body that treated the field house as another gym. In 1957 the Jayhawks reached the NCAA title game and lost to North Carolina in triple overtime, 54–53. He was outstanding and, in the way of that night, not enough. Frank McGuire’s Tar Heels stalled and fouled and survived. The Jayhawks’ season the next year ended earlier. The NBA’s territorial rule and a waiting period kept him from the Warriors. He spent 1958–59 with the Harlem Globetrotters, a year of entertainment and travel that paid him like a star and taught him how to be looked at. Abe Saperstein’s troupe was a job, not a joke. In 1959 he joined the Philadelphia Warriors under coach Neil Johnston and then Frank McGuire, who had beaten him in that Kansas final and now handed him the ball. He was Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player in the same season. The league had not seen a first year like it. It still has not.
The 1961–62 season is the book that will not close. He averaged 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds. He scored 4,029 points, the only man to cross 4,000. He played 48.5 minutes a game, which is more than the length of a game, because overtime is a fact. On March 2, in Hershey, against the Knicks, he scored 100. The official scorer’s sheet exists. The photographs exist. A crowd of a few thousand in a minor-league hockey building saw a number that the league’s best nights have never approached. He took 32 free throws and made 28, a detail that annoys the people who remember him only as a misser of fouls. He never fouled out of an NBA game. That detail annoys the people who remember him only as a stat machine. Both details are the man.
The early charge against him was that the numbers did not become titles. Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics were the wall. Russell had teammates and a will that turned series. Chamberlain had nights that turned scoreboards. The argument followed him the way the nickname followed him. He was traded with the franchise to San Francisco, then sent back to Philadelphia in 1965 to a team that had become the 76ers. In 1966–67 the Sixers went 68–13 and won the title, breaking Boston’s hold. He averaged 24 points and 24 rebounds and, more to the point, passed. Alex Hannum coached a group that included Hal Greer, Chet Walker, Billy Cunningham, and a Dipper who had decided, for a season, that the beautiful thing was the extra pass. The argument quieted. It did not die.
Nobody roots for Goliath.Wilt Chamberlain
In 1968 he was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, to Jerry West and Elgin Baylor and, in time, a young Gail Goodrich. The 1968–69 Finals were lost to Russell’s last Celtics team; a knee in Game 7 became another exhibit in the old argument. The 1969–70 Finals were lost to Willis Reed’s Knicks, a series New York still treats as scripture. In 1971–72, under Bill Sharman, the Lakers won 33 in a row and then the title, over New York. He was thirty-five, a defensive presence and a rebounder, the scoring crown already in the case. He grabbed 18 rebounds in the close-out game and took the Finals MVP. He made the Finals again in 1973 and lost. He retired after that season with 31,419 points — then the career record — and 23,924 rebounds, a career rebounding mark that still stands. He led the league in scoring seven times, in rebounding eleven times, and, in 1967–68, in assists, a center’s joke that is also a fact. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would pass the points. The rebounds remain a mountain. So does the 50-point season. So does the 100.
He was not only a basketball. He volleyball-played at a serious amateur level, helped the sport’s American visibility, and treated the beach like a second court. He acted: Conan the Destroyer (1984) put him on screen as Bombaata, a bodyguard, a job the camera understood. He endorsed, invested, lived in a house in Bel-Air that the columns called a bachelor’s invention. He never married. In the 1991 memoir A View from Above he wrote a sexual boast — twenty thousand women — that ate a week of talk shows and still eats a paragraph whenever the 100 is mentioned. One sentence is enough. The boast is in the file. It is not the file.
He wrote other books, argued with Russell in public and embraced him in public, and remained, for a generation of big men, the measuring stick you did not want. He had been paid like a star when stars were still underpaid. He had crossed picket lines and taken positions that teammates did not love. He endorsed Richard Nixon, which did not endear him to every locker room. He was a Republican and a vegetarian, at different stretches, and a man who liked to explain himself at length. The explanations were not always wise. They were always his.
Everybody pulls for David, nobody roots for Goliath. It’s been that way since the beginning of time.Wilt Chamberlain
The Hall of Fame took him in 1978, the first year he was eligible. The NBA named him to its anniversary teams. Philadelphia and Los Angeles both keep him. Overbrook keeps him. Kansas keeps him. Hershey, which is a chocolate town, keeps a night the league cannot reprint. The turn is not the 100. The turn is 1967, and then 1972: the decision, after the scoring book was already rewritten, to become the player a title required. Goliath learned to pass. The people who only remember the 100 miss the part where Goliath won.
Six things most people never knew
- He wanted to be the Dipper, not the Stilt. Doorways taught the name he preferred. The papers taught the name he did not.
- Kansas lost the 1957 title in triple overtime, 54–53, to North Carolina. The giant was not yet a professional and already a national argument.
- The Globetrotters had him for a year before the Warriors could. 1958–59. Entertainment as a waiting room. Then Rookie of the Year and MVP together.
- The 100-point night was in Hershey, not in a cathedral. March 2, 1962. A few thousand people. 28 of 32 free throws. No one has come close.
- He never fouled out of an NBA game. The man who averaged 50 also stayed on the floor. The 1967 Sixers title is the extra pass, not the extra shot.
- The career rebounding record, 23,924, is still his. The points were passed. The 50.4 season was not. The 100 was not.
The later years
Retirement in 1973 did not send him back to a small life. It sent him into a Bel-Air house, a volleyball net, a Rolodex of appearances, and a long argument with his own legend. He tried coaching — the San Diego Conquistadors of the ABA in 1973–74, a brief, strange bench that did not become a second career and ended in a lawsuit about whether he had to show up. He played volleyball at a level that made the sport’s American people take him seriously; he helped a league and a beach culture that needed a famous tall man who was not slumming. He tried Hollywood beyond Conan the Destroyer. He tried to explain, in print and on television, that the scoring records had been a job and not a personality. The country preferred the personality. He obliged more than he should have and less than the tabloids wanted. He stayed big in the way some retired giants stay big: visible, quotable, slightly alone in rooms built for shorter men.
He remained in the Lakers’ orbit and in Philadelphia’s memory. He showed up when the league asked the past to stand at center court. He played in legends games until the legs said no. He kept himself in a kind of shape that made younger centers nervous at charity weekends. He wrote Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door in 1973, a title that is a joke and a thesis, and then the 1991 memoir that the thesis could not control. He debated Russell on stages. The two men, who had made each other’s March and April miserable, became, in age, a double act about the 1960s. Russell had the rings. Chamberlain had the night in Hershey and the season of 50. They both had the respect that does not fit on a graphic.
Friends describe a private man who could talk for three hours once the door was closed — about track, about volleyball, about the 1957 final, about why a certain coach had been wrong in 1968. He did not have a wife in the house. He had employees, guests, and a telephone. He kept cats. He kept a schedule that looked, from the outside, like leisure and was, from the inside, a tall man’s logistics: cars, doorways, a bed, a doctor who understood the frame. He had, in the last years, a heart that was no longer equal to that frame. He had been, even as a young player, a man who slept oddly and traveled hard. The body that had played 48.5 minutes a night was not designed for a gentle old age. He did not get one.
He died on October 12, 1999, at his home in Bel-Air. He was sixty-three. A spokesman said he had been failing for some days. The Los Angeles County coroner listed congestive heart failure. The obituaries led with 100 and with Russell and, too often, with the memoir’s boast. The better ones remembered Overbrook, Kansas, the Globetrotters, the 1967 Sixers, the 1972 Lakers, the rebounding mountain, and a man who had spent forty years being looked at and had never quite agreed with what people thought they were seeing. The funeral was not a small thing. The league stood up. Philadelphia stood up. The Dipper, not the Stilt, was the name the people who had loved him used.
Sixty-three is young for a monument and old for a heart that had carried that much height. He had already, by then, rewritten the book so thoroughly that every new center still walks into his shadow in the first week of a career. He knew that. He also knew that nobody roots for Goliath. He said it until it became a proverb. He lived it until it became a life.
After he was gone
The 100 remains a number other nights are measured against and never reach. The 50.4 remains a season that looks like a misprint. The rebounds remain his. Russell’s rings remain Russell’s. The two statues, in the mind, still share a court. Philadelphia schoolkids still hear Overbrook and look up. Hershey still tells the story to people who came for chocolate.
He came out of a nine-child house in Philadelphia, lost a college title in triple overtime, barnstormed with the Globetrotters, scored 100 in a hockey building, averaged 50, learned to pass long enough to win in 1967 and again in 1972, wrote a sentence he could not outlive, and died in Bel-Air with the heart finally done. If you only remember the 100, you have the still. If you remember the Dipper, the extra pass, the 33-win streak, and a proverb about Goliath, you have him.
Portrait: Unknown author · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons