Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  At KU, Chamberlain briefly hosted his own radio show, “Flippin’ with the Dipper,” where he spun his favorite records, mostly jazz and the blues. (Years earlier, KU basketball star Clyde Lovellette had a show at the same radio station and played country music and was accompanied by Lester, his mythical hound dog.) King remembers that the Dipper’s arrival challenged segregated practices at the movie theater and lunch counters in Lawrence. Before, King and his Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity brothers had been forced to sit in a section of the theater reserved for blacks. But when the Dipper joined the fraternity, “Nobody ever asked us to leave or refused us service,” King would say. “They really wanted to cater to Wilt.” Once, as Chamberlain drove along the new turnpike en route to Kansas City, a police car’s flashing blue lights appeared behind his souped-up red and white Oldsmobile convertible. Sitting next to the Dipper, King tensed but only until the police officer, realizing it was Wilt Chamberlain’s car, turned off his lights and drove away. Chamberlain would say often over the ensuing years, “I single-handedly integrated Kansas,” and counted it among his proudest achievements. In truth, his was an integration of one. Because of his celebrity Chamberlain was granted honorary “white” status in Lawrence, but his actions did not diminish racial segregation there in any lasting way.

  Saperstein got his man in 1958. Kansas Coach Dick Harp was working in his yard when the Dipper drove up. Chamberlain’s car was already packed. He told Harp he had accepted an offer from Saperstein. He thanked Harp and left for Saperstein’s one-year contract that, with guarantees, would pay him $65,000; this at a time when the average NBA player’s salary was less than $10,000. With the Globetrotters, Chamberlain entered a world of slapstick entertainment, a basketball minstrel show. He made that choice for a simple reason—money. As racial strife in the South intensified, the Globetrotters performed yuk-it-up comedy that white crowds, particularly in the South, found comforting and unthreatening. With the Trotters, the Dipper joined teammates nicknamed Gipper and Ripper. He became a seven-foot-one guard and played so many games in his unwashed sweaty uniform that he wore Band-Aids over his nipples to keep the skin from rubbing raw. He reveled in the camaraderie with teammates. On bus trips, he was known to open two cans of salmon, two loaves of bread, and two cartons of milk and pass them around. He tried to blend in on the court with the more established Globetrotters stars but only until Saperstein showed up in the locker room at halftime to make a plea to his big-money gate attraction: “You gotta shoot more, Wilt. You gotta score.” He traveled to Milan and Moscow and Germany and Switzerland, drawing attention from foreigners who had never seen a man so tall and impressing them by lifting the backs of cars to announce his strength. He chased women of all different races and nations along the way. That’s what the Globetrotters did, Chamberlain quickly learned, first and foremost. The greatest girl hounds I’ve ever seen. The Globetrotters called their comedy acts “reams.” If a Globetrotter spotted a pretty woman in the crowd, he’d write his name, hotel, and room number on a slip of paper, hide it in his mouth or in his jockstrap, and connive a ream to approach the pretty woman whereupon he would secretly hand her the note—“dropping the bomb,” they called it. The Dipper began to see himself as an entertainer. Playing in Germany on a plywood floor laid atop a dusty soccer field, Chamberlain watched five-foot-seven Louis “Red” Klotz steal the ball from him and chortle, “You’re in my country now, Wilt.” But moments later Klotz fell to the floor, dust swirling all around him, and suddenly he felt a big shoe on his back. Klotz looked up and saw Wilt towering over him and saying, “Now you’re in my country, Red.”

  “I need you for a couple hours tonight,” Ike Richman told his son, in May 1959. Richman hated to drive, but his boy, Mike, still in high school, had obtained his driver’s license—a ready-made chauffeur. “Drive me to 4700 North Broad Street,” Richman said. As they pulled away from their home in the Melrose Park area of Philadelphia, Ike Richman said, cryptically, “When we get there make a U-turn and pull over.” His son didn’t ask any questions, not even, “Why, Dad?” Ike Richman was that kind of father, that kind of man. You didn’t ask him questions—you answered his. Richman was Eddie Gottlieb’s attorney and friend. He was smart, definitive, and combustible. His son drove him to 4700 North Broad Street in Philadelphia, a commercial district in transition. He made a U-turn and pulled over. They waited. Soon a white Cadillac convertible pulled up. Ike Richman got out of his car and told his son, “Wait here. I’ll be back.” The son couldn’t tell who was driving the Cadillac as his father opened the front door and got inside. The Cadillac drove off. In the darkness, the son waited for more than an hour. The Cadillac returned, Ike Richman got out and waved to the man inside as he drove off. He got back into his own car. “Let’s go home,” Ike Richman said. They drove home in silence until finally the father said, “Mike, I just worked as hard as I’ve ever worked in my life.” The son replied, “Yeah?” Ike Richman nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I just convinced Wilt Chamberlain to play for the Warriors.”

  A man of big appetites, the Dipper liked adding notches in his belt. That’s what all of those points were, and his women, too—notches—a way to define himself, a way to keep score of his manhood and put a sheen on his celebrity.

  Chamberlain had learned about the pursuit of women from the masters, the Globetrotters. When they weren’t trying to get laughs, the Globies were trying to get laid. Saperstein didn’t want his players to date white women, fearing white fans might resent it. (The Globies sometimes dated white women, anyway.) They had their own terminology: blacks were rocks, whites were you-alls, and ugly women were mullions. If spotted with a mullion by a teammate, a Globetrotter fled or simply claimed later, “That wasn’t me.” The Dipper fell in step with them, happily and devotedly. He learned their tricks, and now, liberated by fame and wealth, he took them a step further. He had become bigger than the Globetrotters. He could do this solo now. He didn’t need a team.

  The Dipper was young and frisky, full of life, and full of himself. It seemed that everything belonged to him, and he took it. Women were attracted to him. He was famous. He had the aphrodisiacs of money, size, mystery. As a New York City high school basketball star then known as Lew Alcindor, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was befriended by the Dipper. He became a regular at Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise and often visited his apartment near Central Park. There, he was awed by the Dipper’s collection of jazz records and his collection of beautiful women, one more lovely than the last: once, a blonde, blue-eyed Dane, the next time a beauty in a form-fitting Danskin “with thighs that made me want to cry on the spot.” Out on the town, the Dipper would place himself in a woman’s view, make eye contact from across the room, and hope she would come to him. Short of that, he would send a go-between, ofttimes using a go-fer hanging by his side (a role filled deftly at Smalls Paradise by Charlie Polk). The Dipper had his charm. Introduced to a woman whose affections he sought, he flirted and teased. He kept her on the edge of not knowing what to say by being slightly rude. Self-assured, and physically imposing, Chamberlain stood nearly two feet taller than many women. He’d try to convince a woman that sex was an experience not to be missed. Here was the Dipper’s theory: “If we lust in earnest for each other, that’s real and we should act on this, because how many real things are there in life?”

  His teammates rarely saw Chamberlain with women, not because he wasn’t with women, but because they rarely saw him at all. Gola had seen a young white woman waiting for Chamberlain after a few home games. Interracial dating in 1962 was widely considered social taboo—in sixteen states, mostly in the South, interracial marriage remained against the law—and his white teammates noticed that some of the Dipper’s dates were white. (In their telling of stories decades later, they considered this fact significant enough to point out.) The rookie Frank Radovich knew of Chamberlain’s womanizing and heard teammates wisecrack about his peccadilloes: “Guess we won’t see Wilt until game time tonight. Hope he can still walk …”

>   Once, Chamberlain’s pursuit of women created tension with a teammate. On a flight back from the Midwest, he and Tom Meschery hooked up with two white stewardesses. The women suggested a double date, the Dipper suggested Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise, and it was so arranged. They would meet at the stewardesses’ hotel. Though a rookie, Meschery, a.k.a. The Mad Russian, had a game, linguistic fluency, and a heritage that impressed nearly everyone. Meschery (pronounced Meh-shair-ree) was infused with the San Francisco spirit. He had a longshoreman’s swagger and rough-and-tumble attitude and an intellect to befit the bohemian café crowd. Born in Manchuria and descended from Czarist Russian nobility, Meschery counted on his family tree cousin Leo Tolstoy, who, it was said, had been kicked out of the house by Meschery’s grandmother because she thought him godless. Meschery spoke French and Russian fluently (prompting Tom Gola to say, “You don’t hear that from the guys on the streets of Philadelphia!”), and he liked to discuss literature and world politics. A few of Meschery’s white teammates heard about his planned double date with Chamberlain and teased him. They called him Wilt’s boy and Wilt’s pimp. Their teasing had a sharp metallic edge. There was a cutting message in it: You’ve overstepped yourself, rook. Meschery cared about perceptions within the team, particularly what the veterans thought. He felt mocked. He decided to back out of the double date; he gave Chamberlain a made-up excuse, and then the Dipper got a phone call from his date, canceling. Meschery showed up at the hotel at the appointed hour, anyway, because … well, there was still a stewardess waiting for him.

  What happened next stunned him. Greeting his date at the hotel, Meschery saw, looming on the far side of the lobby, Wilt Chamberlain. The Dipper silently watched his every move. Meschery froze, unsure of what to do, how to proceed. He felt himself shrinking from the Dipper’s glare. Suddenly, Chamberlain turned and walked out. The next day in the locker room, he confronted Meschery, not angrily or with shouted threats but with patience and forbearance. This was a side of the Dipper that Meschery had never seen. “Why did you do that last night?” Chamberlain asked. Meschery struggled to answer. Teammates, Meschery said, had pressured him and laughed at him. He didn’t want to cause problems or friction. The Dipper listened. He thought Meschery had backed out for racial reasons. Finally he spoke. “I want you to look at this skin”—he touched his own hand—“and then look at your hand. Now look at my hand. We’re exactly the same, just a different color.” The Dipper did not raise his voice, made no physical threat. That would have been much easier for Meschery. This was worse, an intellectual threat, an intellectual shout-down. Chamberlain was scolding him as if he were an unschooled child who needed to be chastised. He seemed nearly sympathetic, as if he felt sorry for Meschery. He said, “I’m not angry with you.” Sitting in the locker room, alone with the Dipper, Meschery was certain of only one thing—this was not one of his own finest moments. He interrogated himself: Was it that he was embarrassed to go to Harlem? Was it that he was unwilling to go out with a black man and a white woman? Or was it simply a rookie’s buckling to the peer pressure of his teammates’ whispered jeers, Wilt’s boy and Wilt’s pimp? Whatever it was, Meschery knew he had succumbed to it. The exchange brought him a deeper realization, an epiphany: His West Coast liberal façade was nothing more than that, a façade. Certain moments in life change you, Meschery decided, and cause you to grow up. This was one of them. He was indebted to Chamberlain for that. In a new way, Chamberlain had shown himself the bigger man. This experience “allowed us to be truthful with one another,” Meschery would say. “Wilt and I became more friendly, not less friendly.”

  The Dipper’s basketball exploits played against the backdrop of the larger drama of race in America. The Freedom Rides rolled across the South. The nation’s black leaders cheered President Kennedy for his civil rights promises but complained about his slowness to deliver on them. Jackie Robinson, in his ghostwritten editorial The Amsterdam News in Harlem, expressed his frustration: “We think that the President is a fine man, like we said. But Abraham Lincoln he ain’t.” In Philadelphia, 400 black ministers led their congregations in a Selective Patronage Program to boycott Tasty Baking Company pies and cakes and then Sunoco and Gulf gas until more African-Americans were hired to prestigious jobs. From Harlem, James Baldwin wrote, “For the Northerner … Negroes represent nothing to him personally, except, perhaps, the dangers of carnality. He never sees Negroes. Southerners see them all the time. Northerners never think about them whereas Southerners are never really thinking of anything else. Negroes are, therefore, ignored in the North and are under surveillance in the South, and suffer hideously in both places. Neither the Southerner nor the Northerner is able to look on the Negro as simply a man.”

  The race issue was aboil in America, and it pulsated, too, beneath the surface of professional sports. For black athletes, Jackie Robinson remained the standard-bearer. Robinson had persevered and come through the slurs and the rage, keeping his deportment, performing like an all-star. Robinson had, in his way, presaged King’s nonviolent movement, putting a face on the black struggle for assimilation in America. Even as a businessman now, as director of personnel for a chain of coffee shops called Chock Full o’Nuts, Robinson remained, in the deepest sense, a race man. He gave speeches and raised funds for the NAACP, led civil rights marches in Washington, traveled to racially tense spots in the South, addressed discrimination in public housing in Rhode Island, and hosted his own radio show in New York City. He had supported Republican Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign, rising up against bigoted southern Democrats, but also had lobbied in the 1960 Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin for the candidacy of Hubert Humphrey, playing both sides, as perhaps only Jackie Robinson could. A week before the hundred-point game in Hershey, Robinson appeared at an NAACP rally before 4,000 in Jackson, Mississippi, where his most fervent hope of enlisting other famous black athletes in the civil rights cause finally came to fruition, with the participation of boxer Archie Moore and the young baseball outfielder Curt Flood. (“Is there a medal anywhere which is worth a man’s dignity?” Robinson wrote.) Of course, Robinson had the protection of a supportive boss at Chock Full o’Nuts who effectively subsidized his civil rights work.

  In contrast to Robinson’s full engagement in the civil rights movement, the Dipper, like most young professional black athletes in 1962, was more a spectator of the movement than a participant. (Few white athletes at the time engaged in political or social issues, either.) In one instance when Chamberlain had become active, in spring 1960, he provided a caveat: Upon agreeing to serve as honorary chairman of the annual membership drive for the Philadelphia branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he made clear to local NAACP leaders that he was lending only his name, not his time. Attorney A. Leon Higginbotham, president of the NAACP branch in Philadelphia, thanked the Dipper for serving as “titular head of the drive intended to make democracy a reality throughout America and throughout our State,” and then reassured, “We hope to keep those contacts [with you] to a minimum.” In another instance, he contributed in a quieter way: While building his Villa Chamberlain apartment complex in Los Angeles, he privately insisted that only black contractors and subcontractors be hired. In all ways, the Dipper did what he wanted, and from afar others decided what his action, or inaction, meant.

  After his record-breaking rookie season, he had stunned the Warriors by announcing his retirement from the NBA, and he suggested race was partly to blame. Chamberlain insisted he had no problems with his teammates. But he said he was getting beaten up on the court by opposing players and that if he responded in kind and became embroiled in fistfights “it would reflect on me and then indirectly on my race.”

  This comment made Boston’s Bob Cousy blanch: “In my ten years in the NBA, I never saw any evidence of racial prejudice. There are over one hundred Negro players who have either tried out or made positions with clubs in the league and I have never heard such a similar complaint from t
hem. Chamberlain feels he’s being pushed around more than anyone in the league. The guy has only averaged thirty-six points per game, broken rebound records and had more foul shots than anyone else. How easy does he want it? … Wilt is the biggest complainer ever to hit the NBA. Standing six feet one inch, it is difficult for me to feel sorry for a man seven feet tall.” The Dipper’s reply: “Maybe if Bill Russell said it, I’d pay attention. But Cousy has never encountered the problems that we have.”

  The Dipper had announced his retirement while sitting in the locker room, only moments after the Warriors had been eliminated from the playoffs by Boston. He expressed interest in touring again with the Globetrotters. Only days before this startling retirement announcement, over lunch, Gotty had offered him a new three-year contract, telling the Dipper he had earned it with his performance as the NBA Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player and also for increasing attendance at Warriors games by twenty-three percent. The Dipper’s suggestion that he was retiring as a way to keep from discrediting his race was less than credible. Even Jackie Robinson, in a newspaper column, wrote, “If Wilt is worrying about the effect on anyone other than himself, I’d suggest that he forget about it. Great numbers of Negro athletes have had good years and bad years in their fields and the race has continued to progress. There have been fights before and there will be fights again.” Besides, Robinson wrote, “I look for him to change his mind … I have a hunch that Wilt is not only a great basketball player, but a fine businessman as well. He is certainly in a position to use his tremendous draw as a means to exact more favorable terms for next season from the Warriors.”