Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Then Ryman, enjoying his moment, said, “Wilt scored one hundred points with that ball, and I scored a couple hundred thousand with that ball.” If Ryman loved his own line, Brokaw didn’t seem to like it much. He said, “You think that’s going to add to the value, Kerry, the fact that you scored a couple hundred thousand points?”

  Ryman: “Probably not.”

  Ryman returned to the waiting room after the interview. He had another scheduled at CNN. Blouch was thinking about the appearance of the ball. “Can we borrow that?” he said, pointing to the room heater. A woman there said no. Blouch offered her $500 for the heater. “Can’t,” she said. “Union property.”

  En route to CNN, Blouch and Ryman stopped at a drug store and purchased a hair dryer. As a makeup artist worked on Ryman, Blouch plugged in the blow dryer and heated the ball. He turned the dryer to high. Slowly, the ball began to rise … until a fuse blew and the CNN rooms lost all power. Two technicians appeared, one shouting, “WHO DID THAT?” Blouch raised a brow.

  The controversy erupted later that afternoon. As Ryman and Blouch decompressed over a few beers in the hotel bar, they heard that people in Philadelphia said their basketball wasn’t the hundred-point basketball. Harvey Pollack, the old Warriors publicist who still worked as a statistician for the 76ers, contended that after the Dipper had scored the hundredth point, referee Willie Smith took the historic ball out of play and gave it to the Warriors for posterity. The Warriors ball boy at the time, Jeff Millman, now the 76ers equipment manager, confirmed the sequence. Millman said he took that hundred-point ball to the locker room when the game stopped with forty-six seconds to play, placed it in the Dipper’s bag, and covered it with towels. Further, Millman recalled returning to the court, the crowd still congratulating the Dipper, whereupon he noticed a giddy Guy Rodgers joyfully heaving basketballs into the air. He said Wilt asked him in the locker room after the game to have Warriors players and team officials sign the hundred-point ball, and he did.

  Pollack said Ryman must’ve grabbed a replacement ball and run off with it. Millman remembered that when the Warriors left the Hershey Sports Arena on the team bus, he had only six of the twelve balls—a costly loss that must have enraged the Mogul.

  Now Harvey Pollack appeared on national television saying Ryman’s basketball was a hoax, a fraud. The real hundred-point ball, Pollack said, was brought to the team offices. On the morning after the game in Hershey, Pollack said, the Zink had used liquid white-out to paint a single panel of the signed ball—apparently there were no signatures on that panel. The Zink then wrote over the white-out the basic game information, namely that Wilt Chamberlain had used this ball to score one hundred points against the Knicks in Hershey. Gotty then placed this signed ball in a window for passersby to see in the few months before the team was sold. Pollack wasn’t certain what became of that ball, though he assumed it had gone with Wilt Chamberlain to San Francisco. Some suggested that, given Gotty’s promoter’s instincts, he might have put any signed ball in the window for a little extra publicity, authentic or not. The Dipper himself said years later that he had given his hundred-point game ball to Al Attles; that was what he told Ruklick, who asked Attles about it when the Ryman controversy broke out. Ruklick remembered Attles saying, “Don’t tell that I’ve got it. I don’t want people climbing into my bedroom.” Publicly, Attles steadfastly maintained the Dipper gave him a different ball.

  Kerry Ryman was incredulous, angry, hurt, and confused. Stealing that basketball, silly as it was, had been a life-defining moment for the smalltown crane operator. He wasn’t proud of what he’d done, but nearly everyone in Hershey knew that he had done it. He had not taken the ball for its memorabilia value: There was virtually no such thing as sports memorabilia then. To Ryman, this wasn’t about money; it was about a different currency—telling the truth. How could Harvey Pollack, or anyone else, doubt him thirty-seven years later?

  Even more stunning was the news that came the next morning. Back home from New York, wishing he’d never allowed Mike Blouch to convince him to sell that ball, Ryman received a phone call from his barber, asking if he’d seen the morning paper. He hadn’t. “You’re on the front page. That ball of yours sold for $551,000!” Kerry Ryman felt light-headed. Was he ecstatic or sick? He was both. Only two sports memorabilia items had ever sold for more at auction: McGwire’s seventieth home run ball in 1998 for $3 million and a rare 1910 Honus Wagner tobacco card for more than $640,000. The personal mathematics overwhelmed Ryman: his five-eighths share of $551,000 computed to more than $340,000—the equivalent of roughly eleven years’ salary for him. Ryman left work early and went home. He took a call from ESPN Radio. He told the same story he’d been telling for nearly four decades: I shook Wilt’s hand. The referee threw him the ball. Wilt bounced it once. I grabbed it…

  An irate caller phoned from Chicago. “This guy is building a hot dog stand on Wilt’s grave!” It was Joe Ruklick, from the newsroom of The Chicago Defender. Ruklick told his own story, how the Dipper had asked him at the free-throw line near game’s end to get the ball for him, and how he’d picked up the ball and put it in the Dipper’s gear bag. Ruklick didn’t even know that Kerry Ryman was on the line. Once he realized it, he called Ryman a liar. Ryman told his version again—or tried to. “Well, I’ll bet my house against yours,” Ruklick said testily. He demanded that Ryman take a lie detector test. Kerry Ryman couldn’t stand it anymore. He hung up.

  Facing a high-profile controversy over authenticity, Leland’s suspended the sale, pending further study. In the months that followed, Blouch went to work, gathering signed affidavits from locals who saw Ryman take the ball that night, the Sandman and Spammer among them. Around Hershey, there came whispered criticism of Kerry Ryman. Some suggested the sale of the ball proved only that crime paid.

  Six months later, Leland’s auctioned the ball a second time. The new Leland’s catalog laid out the controversy and concluded: “If anything, the conflicting tales create even more lore behind the ball. Leland’s feels that Ryman’s story holds greater credibility, particularly with no counter version ball having been produced. Still, bidders can make up their own minds having been presented with all known facts. And, in the end, the ball remains the only ball from the historic game known to exist.”

  This time, the basketball sold for $67,791. Crestfallen, Mike Blouch did the math: almost $484,000 less than last time. Leland’s announced that the bidder who won the ball in the first auction hadn’t bid this time. Ryman was glad it was over. His share, minus taxes and small expenses, was about $25,000. With that money, he bought his daughter a used Dodge Arrow to replace her 1987 Ford Tempo (which he took for himself, even though its heater didn’t work). Ryman also paid a few bills for his daughter. At a friend’s urging, he invested the remaining $10,000 in video company stock, $4 a share. That stock rose to $16 a share and then, like his hundred-point game ball, collapsed. The stock was worth pennies. Ryman did not fret. He figured that money didn’t belong to him, anyway, same as the hundred-point ball. His father was right: He should’ve put that thing in the burn barrel.

  What mattered was the memory of the Dipper’s extraordinary moment. Chamberlain had created a storm and then stood in the middle of it. Kerry Ryman only did what any right-thinking boy would have done. He ran out to meet the great man, same as the French had done once in a field when the Spirit of St. Louis dropped from the sky and out stepped Lindbergh. A unique moment in sports history—instantly identifiable—Ryman and the other Hershey kids wanted to share in it. Rising to the level of the great man’s thigh, Ryman had looked up at Chamberlain. The Dipper was sweating, weary, famous, miraculous. Camera flashbulbs went off. A cresting wave of young fans about to crash down upon them, Kerry Ryman reached out his hand. Wilt Chamberlain accepted it. It was like a gift from a god.

  EPILOGUE

  THE DAY AFTER CHAMBERLAIN’S DEATH, obituaries in newspapers across the nation made it clear that two numbers—100 and 20,000—would be the shorthand su
mmary of his life. He had created the numbers, and if one could be verified and the other couldn’t, they both were real in that they fit a unique man’s idea of who he needed to be. If he was seven-foot-one and one-sixteenth, he could not hide it, so through such outsized numbers he made himself bigger, a lifelong pattern that fused reality and myth. “Yes, that’s correct, twenty thousand different ladies,” Chamberlain wrote in A View from Above, a memoir published by Villard in 1991, eight years before his death. “At my age, that equals out to having sex with 1.2 women a day, every day since I was fifteen years old.” His literary agent had asked, “Are you sure you want to do this? That’s all that people will talk about.” But Chamberlain replied, “Any publicity is good publicity.”

  His editor at Villard, Peter Gethers, had sought a frank, intelligent book about a star athlete’s life and times. In early conversations, Chamberlain had told Gethers about his many women. “You have to understand what it was like in those days. That’s what an athlete did,” Chamberlain said. To help flesh out a narrative, Gethers created a list of one hundred questions for the Dipper, starting with his childhood, and including this one: “Wilt, you’ve talked about this a lot—how many women do you think you’ve had sex with?” Chamberlain patiently answered each question in writing, including the one about his sexual encounters. From Gethers’s question, the figure of 20,000 emerged.

  “How can you possibly do that?” Gethers asked.

  Chamberlain responded by telling stories: Once he was invited by a woman to another woman’s birthday party only to discover that he was the birthday present. There were nine women at the party, and he told Gethers, he had sex with each of them. “That’s nine in one night,” Chamberlain said. Gethers would note that in all of the Dipper’s stories there was no boasting, that he was “weirdly matter-of-fact. He definitely took glee in it. He obviously was a little pathological about pursuing women.” Gethers added, “When he was obsessed with something, he went all out, as he did as an athlete. You can’t separate that sexual voraciousness … with the fact he was capable of scoring one hundred points in a game.”

  The Dipper’s book earned strong early sales, but while he was on an author tour, Magic Johnson disclosed he was HIV-positive. “Wilt became the poster boy for everything wrong with athletes,” Gethers said, and the book sales died. The boast of 20,000 also cost Chamberlain commercial endorsements. The head of an advertising agency said as much to the attorney, Sy Goldberg. The problem, he said, was women. “The idea [of using Chamberlain in an advertisement] goes up to a certain level until it hits a female executive somewhere up the line—and then it’s killed. As soon as a female has a kibosh position,” the advertising man said, “it’s dead.”

  Maybe the number 20,000 mattered in real estate, as well. Wilt’s famous house in Bel Air remained on the market for more than two years, vacant, unloved, asking price plummeting, and occasionally featured on TV shows about odd or extreme places. In life, the house personified the Dipper, his genius and his excesses, his vision and self-absorption, his manliness. In death, the house became the anti-Dipper, the hundred-point scorer transformed to what he had never been in life, an underdog. Small wonder, then, that when Ursa Major finally sold, it was to a Hollywood couple, George Meyer and Maria Semple, comedy writers in their forties, self-described environmentalists, social contrarians, and devotees of underdogs.

  Meyer served as co-executive producer and lead writer for The Simpsons. He once was described by The New Yorker as “the funniest man behind the funniest show on TV.” He wore a beard and wire-rim glasses, drove a beat-up Honda Civic without air conditioning, and collected memorabilia from the Soviet space program in part because it, like the Dipper’s home, seemed an undervalued underdog. Semple, the daughter of a screenwriter, counted among her writing credits Mad About You, Beverly Hills, 90210, and Ellen. Smart, edgy, quick-witted, Semple saw the Dipper’s house first and told Meyer that she loved it. “If you’re woman enough to live in Wilt Chamberlain’s house,” Meyer told her, “I’ll buy it for you.” Their purchase of the Chamberlain house lit up conversation in the room where writers for The Simpsons gathered. “Any guy who seems to be beating the system, like Hugh Hefner or Robert Evans or Wilt,” Meyer would say, “obviously is a kind of patron saint of male comedy writers.”

  Meyer and Semple quickly developed an appreciation and respect for the Dipper. A year after living in his home, they still called it “Wilt’s house.” As in, “What do you want to do for dinner, honey? Should we just go back to Wilt’s house?”

  At a local restaurant, Semple saw a friend, comedian Mike Myers, and told him about buying the Dipper’s house, which she described to him as a “very James Bond-villain house” and “this big Seventies sex palace.” In the restaurant Myers broke into his Austin Powers act. Semple thought, He’s doing Austin Powers for me. God, I know you’re famous, but … Not until she was driving home did she realize, Oh, yeah, that’s what Austin Powers was all about. James Bond, hedonism, sex.

  Semple: “A lot of people, because we are comedy writers, will say, ‘Oh, you guys get the house. You are perfect for the house because you are so ironic.’ That is so not what this is about…. I’m not into the Seventies. I’m not going to live in a pet rock just for joke appeal. I mean, this is my home, and we are having children in this home. I think this is a beautiful house…. Since I’ve been here, I’ve learned to love Wilt so much. I feel so sad that he is dead. Sometimes I get so emotional and I say to George, ‘I would just trade this house in if he were still alive so I could talk to him and get to know him.’ It’s just how he went out on a limb with this house and how much he loved it. He obviously loved it so much.

  “I feel how misunderstood he is,” she said.

  Meyer: “We are always running into people who had some brush with him—obviously this is L.A.—but it’s amazing how they almost always break into a smile when they recall their encounter with him…. You respect Wilt’s individuality and his nerve. If he wanted a room in an odd shape, ‘Who is going to stop me? You?’”

  Semple: “You get into these weird corners in the house; instead of doing right angles so that you can live in an inhabitable space, he started making these parallelogram rooms with no windows, just these horrible little spaces…. It just got weird. Weird is the enemy of architecture. You want it to be cool. It has also been proven very difficult to kind of unweird the house because it’s not the kind of house where you go rip a wall out or gut this. It is what it is. At some point you cry, ‘Uncle!’ You are like, ‘You win, I give up. You get to stay the way you are. You are bigger than me.’”

  Throughout the house, Meyer and Semple made changes. They put glass over the ornate marble bathtub in the master bedroom, as if it were a museum piece, to be seen and not touched. They removed the purple shag carpeting, added airy light and bookshelves. “There was just one bookshelf in the house,” Semple said, “with crappy torn paperbacks…. For someone who was allegedly just constantly reading books, you would think he would have had more bookshelves.

  “I feel like we are living in Wilt’s arms,” Semple said, “like he is cradling us. I feel very honored.” Semple wondered, “Do you think Wilt was happy the last ten or twenty years of his life?” She added, “I hope he was.”

  About his boast of bedding 20,000 women, the Dipper told Lynda Huey, “What’s a zero between friends?” Huey would later say, “He just wanted to see if people would believe something ridiculous and they did.”

  “I believe the 2,000 number,” Huey said. “That makes sense.”

  The Dipper was, at the very least, complicated. Huey noticed how he could be garrulous and delightful while dazzling a dinner party with his witticisms and charm, but then, upon returning to Ursa Major, he would descend into silence and then meanness. “And that’s when I’d have to go,” Huey would say. Once, in 1977, Chamberlain had phoned her late at night, after they’d shared dinner, to say, “Don’t you ever just wish that you could go home with the same person
every night and just know that that person was going to be there?” Huey, only thirty and still caught up in the thrill of her independence, said, “Hell, no. I’m loving this.” She’d seen the Dipper once open his gold leather pouch and out tumbled phone numbers of women, penned on envelopes, scraps of newspaper, matchbooks, cocktail napkins. There were fifty or so such numbers, perhaps more. “Lorna?” the Dipper said, reading one. The name tested his memory. He asked himself, aloud, “Who is Lorna?” Huey saw him become jaded with women from “the sheer volume in number and repetition, the same-old, same-old, same-old thing…. He had sort of worn it all out and couldn’t choose anymore, nothing looked interesting to him anymore.” Huey would say, “Most normal people want a close, intimate relationship with someone, but neither of us did. I think that’s why we sort of ended up with each other at the end—by default.” The Dipper’s oversized bed seemed the center of his universe. Huey saw him happiest in quiet moments there, watching a movie on television or reading his travel magazines. As the Eighties neared an end, the Dipper had looked back at his own life of leisure during the decade and saw “far too much nothingness.” He vowed to be more productive, saying, “Why did I ever think that I could fool myself into believing that doing nothing could ever have any redeeming value? I lived this lie for a lot longer than I care to remember.”

  On the last Saturday night in Wilt Chamberlain’s life, Huey saw him leaning against his kitchen sink, pressing a hand to his ailing teeth, as if to release pressure, rocking back and forth, and groaning in pain. She’d phoned him earlier in the day, then reconsidered and hung up before he answered. The Dipper had caller identification, and a moment later, Huey’s phone rang, and she heard his typically gruff one-word greeting: “Yeaahh!” Their most intimate conversations always were on the telephone, where his physical presence couldn’t dominate. The Dipper told her his sister and her husband were coming by that night, and Huey agreed to join them.