In spring 1962, professional sports in America, like the nation itself, stood at the river’s edge, the waters beginning to rise and churn. The Fifties had seen Connie Mack, the “Tall Tactician,” born during the Civil War, managing the Philadelphia A’s in the Shibe Park dugout for the last time wearing his three-piece suit, necktie, detachable collar, and derby or straw skimmer. The Fifties had seen the NBA in its bumbling adolescence, the stepchild of the college game, virtually unloved and unwatched, with crowds so small (the joke went) the public address announcers introduced the players and then the fans. In those early years, it was a rough game played by military veterans and other assorted rogues rebounding with their elbows out, so rough some NBA dressing rooms kept boxes in which players deposited their false teeth before they went out to play. Players smoked cigarettes (even at halftime) and washed their own uniforms in hotel room sinks (or sometimes didn’t). The game was that raw and run on a shoestring. One night, a young general manager, Marty Blake, lugged onto a train to Chicago two heavy boxes called “twenty-four-second clocks,” mechanical devices used to time the length of each possession in a game. Blake served as p.a. announcer and official scorer for an exhibition doubleheader that night between the Minneapolis Lakers and Philadelphia Warriors. When someone forgot to bring basketballs, Blake scrounged around and found two for pregame warm-ups, one for the Lakers, one for the Warriors. As the game neared conclusion, Blake received bad news: The Harlem Globetrotters’ plane could not land due to bad weather. This was a big problem. The Globetrotters were supposed to play the second game of the doubleheader. They were the main event. Blake called a timeout to stall. No use. He called a cab, two men grabbed the twenty-four-second clocks, and when the game ended, Blake stood by the arena’s side door and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, because of inclement weather, the Globetrotters’ plane can’t land. The second game has been cancelled.” Blake broke through the side door to leave before the riot.
Into this carnival that passed for professional basketball, into the NBA’s search for itself, strode Wilt Chamberlain. For the Warriors owner, a nickel-and-dime Barnum named Eddie Gottlieb, here, at last, was a must-see main act. In the old days in Philly, Gotty had scheduled and promoted any teams wearing spikes or sneakers—up to 500 semipro baseball games a week, the 2nd Ward Republican Club, the All-American Thespian League featuring baseball teams like the House of David and the Zulu Jungle Giants. It wasn’t just that Wilt Chamberlain was a scoring champion. Gotty had had plenty of those: Joe Fulks, Neil Johnston, and Paul Arizin had each twice led the league. More than scoring, the Dipper added aesthetic value with his athletic grace and beauty. He moved with a dancer’s elegance but at a higher plane. Gotty paid him $75,000 for this season, three times the amount he had paid for the entire franchise ten years earlier. He knew it would be a lovely relationship, an Old World Jew and a Philadelphia Negro, showmen both. The Dipper would score, stun, awe, win. People would talk. They’d pay to see him. They’d tell friends. Their friends would come, too. Gotty would win titles, help grow the young pro league. He would make a killing.
You had to stare at the Dipper, even if you were Red Auerbach. The Boston Celtics coach, a son of a Brooklyn dry cleaner, had seen Mikan and coached Russell, but even he, the great Auerbach, couldn’t help himself the first time he saw Chamberlain, then in high school. Auerbach just stood and watched the Dipper walk. Incredible, he thought.
And so with a minute twenty-five to play on a winter night in a nowhere town made famous not by basketball but by chocolate, there unfolded a spectacle, a mesmerizing show of power, cigarette smoke, and a little Borscht Belt kitsch—the p.a. announcer Dave Zinkoff handing out free salamis and cigars.
Here came the Philadelphia Warriors guard York Larese, son of an immigrant tinsmith from northern Italy, leading the fast break. Larese took the ball to the middle, a teammate angling on either side of him, three Warriors moving toward the New York Knickerbockers basket, perfectly choreographed.
But from behind, covering ninety-four feet in twelve strides, Chamberlain was coming, and Larese felt the force. The local kids had left their seats in the Hershey Sports Arena by now, and they pressed close to the court and shouted, “Give it to Wilt! Give it to Wilt!”
From the Warriors bench, Coach Frank McGuire, a dandy from the Irish side of Greenwich Village, called out those same words. The tinsmith’s son cradled the ball in his right hand and drove toward the basket, Knicks converging on him from all sides. At the last moment, Larese lifted the ball high—a lob pass to Chamberlain.
Larese’s momentum carried him beneath the basket and beyond the baseline and, as he drifted from the play, he looked back, and what he saw was unforgettable … beautiful and monstrous, exquisite and terrifying, a hugeness unlike anything he’d ever seen on a basketball court, rising up, up, up, Chamberlain, long and lean, leaping with both arms extended above his head, revealing the “PHILA 13” across his white jersey, catching the ball twelve-and-a-half or thirteen feet above the hardwood floor—two-and-a-half or three feet above the flimsy rim—and in one motion, slamming it through the basket with a ferocity that branded itself in Larese’s memory.
The ball bounced high off the floor, and the Zink called out on the public address system, “That’s nine-tee eigghhhttt!”
INTRODUCTION
WILT CHAMBERLAIN DIED ON A MOUNTAINTOP, alone, in bed, beneath a retractable ceiling that allowed him to see the stars.
The gardener found his body, which is how it often works in Hollywood. The Dipper lived alone, a life he chose. His gardener had arrived and called out to him but heard no response. He often did handyman work around the house and knew the house rarely was locked. He went inside and called out again; still no answer. Then he walked upstairs, into the master bedroom.
In a panic, the gardener’s first call went to Chamberlain’s attorney. Sy Goldberg had first met Chamberlain before that remarkable 1961–62 season. He’d set himself up in the San Fernando Valley in a Granada Hills storefront, orange groves all around, and hung out his shingle: SEYMOUR GOLDBERG, LAWYER. He accepted anything that walked through his door in those days: divorces, bankruptcies, wills, car accidents. It was a different era, a simpler time, hardly any money in it. Goldberg received a call seeking his counsel. Chamberlain, the young basketball star in Philadelphia, was building “Villa Chamberlain,” a forty-unit apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles, near the Sports Arena. He intended to move his parents there to manage the complex and to get them out of the Philadelphia cold. But the money budgeted for construction was fully spent, mechanics’ liens for unpaid bills had been filed, and workers were picketing. It made for bad press. Ike Richman, Chamberlain’s Philadelphia attorney and business manager, was looking for legal help in L.A. “Sure,” Goldberg said, “I handle everything.”
That’s how their friendship began. It deepened over the decades, with Goldberg serving as Chamberlain’s financial advisor, lawyer, and confidant. The Dipper had long surrounded himself with Jewish attorneys, accountants, and advisors. Goldberg believed this was due, in part, to the Dipper’s mother having worked years before as a domestic for Jewish families in Philadelphia with whom she shared warm relations. In 1958, Philadelphia Warriors owner Eddie Gottlieb and Harlem Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein competed for rights to sign Chamberlain, who later confessed, “It was the first time I’d ever gotten between two Jews.” Once Chamberlain showed up at Goldberg’s house for the Passover Seder. Everyone was dressed casually, except Wilt, who wore a fine suit and proudly placed a yarmulke on his head. He insisted they read every word of the Haggadah. He wanted to hear the account of the Israelites’ deliverance from slavery.
And this was how their friendship of nearly four decades ended: on October 12, 1999, Goldberg, ashen-faced, escorted into Chamberlain’s bedroom by the Los Angeles Police Department.
The Dipper looked peaceful in bed, his head on a pillow, not a sign of strain in his face.
Goldberg told the LAPD what he knew
. Wilt had not been feeling well. He’d had dental surgery recently, and it had caused him pain that he had described as his worst ever. He’d lost weight over the past few months, fifty pounds, maybe more. His hips caused him trouble, too. How old? Yes, he was sixty-three. Any issues with his heart? Well … over the years, yes.
Dazed, Goldberg heard an LAPD detective ask, “Can you tell if anything here is missing?”
He walked the detectives through the rooms. Chamberlain’s house was a Hollywood celebrity in its own right. It was a period piece locked in the early 1970s, purple shag carpeting everywhere, a house described by one architectural critic as “a curiosity with moments of genius,” an admiring critique that aptly summarized Wilt himself. Ursa Major, he called it, named for the constellation that included the Big Dipper. Built on a World War II Nike missile site, the house featured a series of interlocking equilateral triangles, an idea borrowed from Frank Lloyd Wright. Its five-story pitched roof resembled, from certain angles, Darth Vader’s helmet. Made from 200 tons of stone and enough redwoods to build seventeen traditional houses, surrounded by a moat, Ursa Major had been filled with eccentricities: a fifty-five-foot tall stone fireplace, an indoor pool, a triangular front door, a bedspread made from the stitched fur of 17,000 Arctic wolves’ noses, a circular dining room table accompanied by a symbolic thirteen chairs (he wore jersey No. 13), and, in the master bedroom, only a few feet from the eight-foot by nine-foot bed, a gold-laced marble tub Cleopatra might have admired. Downstairs contained another eccentricity, the “X-rated room,” with mirrors and pink/peach upholstered foam sectionals surrounding a circular waterbed. Triangles abounded: Even above the oversized master bed, the thirteen-foot mirrored retractable ceiling allowed a triangular view of the heavens. He lived among celebrities. Farrah Fawcett once was a neighbor. The comedian Albert Brooks was down the street. Ronald and Nancy Reagan lived in Bel Air. The panoramic view from behind Ursa Major was lovely: the Stone River reservoir, the buildings of Century City, Westwood’s Wilshire district, and beyond, the Pacific. On a clear day, which was not often, Chamberlain could see Catalina Island.
Sy Goldberg knew where Chamberlain hid his valuables. His diamond ring, his medallion. He found them in their usual places. This was clearly not a robbery. There was no sign of foul play.
He got word to Wilt’s sister, Barbara Lewis, who rushed to the house. Calls were coming. Jerry West asked, Is it true? Bill Russell reached Goldberg on a cell phone. Goldberg heard a catch in Russell’s voice when the Celtics legend said he’d heard that Wilt was dead and he needed to confirm it. Is it true? Russell sounded devastated.
Two dozen media members camped in Chamberlain’s driveway, waiting for a statement. Word was sent out to the patrolman working the front gate: Tell them to wait.
Lynda Huey stood at the front gate, too. For nearly thirty years, Huey had been in and out of the Dipper’s life, initially and for many years as a lover. She’d become like a nurse to him in more recent years, an aquatic therapist by profession helping him recover from elbow and hip surgeries. On Saturday night, three days before, Huey had spent a few hours with Chamberlain, his sister Barbara, and brother-in-law Elzie Lewis at Ursa Major, sharing chicken and dumplings and watching a movie on television. She saw the Dipper that night pause at the top of his stairway to catch his breath, but had no inkling the problem might be his heart. Stooped slightly, with a pained expression, he looked desperately uncomfortable, so different from their first meeting in 1971.
Huey had insinuated herself into his world then, a five-foot-three blonde, eleven years his junior, a track and field athlete in her own right who at San Jose State University during the Sixties had become captivated by black athletes and what she saw as the excitement and drama of their lives. From afar, she believed that she belonged in Wilt Chamberlain’s world. At a friend’s invitation, she caught a late-night plane from New York to L.A. to play in a beach volleyball tournament with him the next day. They played on the same team and lost horribly in the tournament but in between games flirted and challenged each other. Huey had a bravado of her own. “Hey, San Jose!” the Dipper called to her. She called him “old man.” He treated her poorly during the match.
Afterward, beach chair in hand, Huey had walked up Temescal Canyon Boulevard, still angry at how he’d blamed her for their defeat. Yet there was the Dipper, in his Bentley convertible, inching along beside her, and trying to sweet-talk her into his car: “Come on, baby! Come on, come on, come on!” Seeking to burn off her anger with a workout at a nearby high school track, Huey found him waiting, lying on the grass, near the football goalposts. “Want to see a pretty runner?” the Dipper said, grinning. His language, borrowed from Muhammad Ali, was narcissistic, immodest, and sexualized. Huey told him she’d already seen the Olympian Tommie Smith: “I’m going to be comparing you to the prettiest.” The Dipper ran down the field, and Huey saw it instantly: fluidity, grace, a gazellelike motion. Gorgeous. Suddenly she wasn’t angry with him anymore. He took her to Bel Air to see where his new home soon would rise. He was living in a trailer on the grounds. They slept together in his trailer that night, as both knew they would. Then Huey left town for a week, believing it the only way to keep the Dipper interested.
Their relationship never was conventional. It began as a conquest game played by sexual adventurers. The Dipper and Huey were of like mind, in the chase, collecting lovers. As a lover, the Dipper was “a lot of fun, just silly, playful and like a kid,” Huey would say, “just romping around all day.” But Huey learned the Dipper didn’t treat his lovers well. He could quickly turn cold and mean. “You almost had to drop out of being a sexual partner if you wanted to be his friend,” she would say. At times, Huey and Chamberlain wouldn’t talk for months, even years. But then they would come together again, in the last years as friends. He was alternately big-hearted, generous, defensive, smart, perceptive, analytical, gruff. She asked him once, “Don’t you think sometimes that since your image is so powerful in people’s minds you might fall victim to it and begin to live that image for them?” The Dipper admitted to the possibility. Lynda Huey came to believe that “Wilt chose being a legend rather than having a life.” Now, before Huey was admitted into the house, media members standing at the front gate recognized her as a long-term companion of Chamberlain’s and interviewed her about his remarkable life.
Suddenly, Goldberg heard a buzzing sound overhead—helicopters, which is also how it often works in Hollywood. The press shot aerial views of Ursa Major from high over Mulholland Drive. Word of Chamberlain’s death spread quickly. It was reported on CNN. News flashes broke across television screens in the Dipper’s native Philadelphia, where the mayor soon ordered all flags lowered to half-mast. That day at Big Nate’s Barbecue in San Francisco, Nate Thurmond stared at the poster on his restaurant’s wall that showed the NBA’s fifty greatest players of all time, named in 1996, Thurmond among them. A realization stung him. It was frightening to believe that the mighty Chamberlain had died, for if the Dipper had died it meant every NBA player of his generation was vulnerable. Theirs was the first generation of black superstars, the generation that had lifted the NBA from obscurity into a national phenomenon. The Dipper was at the center of that breakthrough, the ultimate individualist and the most skillful, compelling, and enigmatic character of all. “Almost by himself, he made the league a curiosity, made it interesting,” Oscar Robertson would say. Without the league’s defining black superstars of that generation, Robertson believes the league might have lost its small television contract, then withered and died. He pointed to the 1961–62 season. “People heard about Wilt scoring a hundred, averaging fifty a night, and they wanted to see the guy do it … I believe Wilt Chamberlain single-handedly saved the league.” Over the decades, the Dipper had taken such fine care of his body that he’d seemed, if anyone could be, immortal. Thurmond also realized that Chamberlain’s death was only the second among the fifty players on that poster: the first, dead of heart failure at forty while playing
a pickup game in 1988, was “Pistol” Pete Maravich.
The LAPD controlled the press conference that afternoon in the Dipper’s driveway outside the front gate. Two of Chamberlain’s brothers, Wilbert and Oliver, and his sister Barbara, stood beside Sy Goldberg, who fought tears. The LAPD said only that Chamberlain had been found in bed at 12:30 P.M. and was declared dead by paramedics at 12:41 P.M. No foul play was suspected. Sy Goldberg stared into the cameras and said, “We think it may have been a heart attack.”
The next morning obituary writers described the frame of the Dipper’s life but missed the engine that drove it: his nearly obsessive need to prove, in ways large and small, his own greatness.
The Washington Post termed him “a Herculean figure on the basketball court whose massive dimensions, intimidating personality and unprecedented point production helped him become a sports icon and cultural legend.” The New York Times said his “size, strength and intimidation made him probably the most dominant player in basketball history.” “If Wilt Chamberlain can die, anyone can,” The Philadelphia Inquirer editorialized. “He loved himself and the life he was living, and it was hard not to catch the gusto. In his undeniable excellence and egotism, Wilt Chamberlain was America itself, inspiring worship, ambivalence and downright awe.” These obituaries recounted his rise to prominence beginning at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia followed by his years at the University of Kansas and how he left behind a two-season 42–8 record, including a traumatic triple overtime defeat to the University of North Carolina in the 1957 NCAA title game, a defeat Chamberlain believed had been blamed on him. They recounted his tours with the Harlem Globetrotters, his seven NBA scoring titles, two league championships, and his battles (mostly lost) with Bill Russell’s Celtics. They recounted his dalliance with Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, his remarkable physical fitness regimen through middle age, his support for women’s athletics, his firmly held, if self-pitying, belief that “Nobody roots for Goliath,” his appearance in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Conan the Destroyer, his decades of playing volleyball on the beaches of Southern California, how he’d never married, how he’d once almost boxed Muhammad Ali, his incessant talk about making a comeback in the NBA at the age of forty or fifty, and his mythmaker’s claim to have made love to 20,000 women.
Wilt, 1962 Page 2
