[Wilt Chamberlain] There's just no way the average guy
could envision what it's like being a seven-footer.
When that seven-footer is also black, rich,
famous, and dominates his sport
as no other man in history has dominated any sport,
well, you can see how difficult it is
for people to relate to me.
I am judged on what people have said,
not what I actually have done.
My guess is you have certain preconceptions about me.
My guess is, too, that you're wrong.
But when we get to the end of the story
where they say, can this poor monster from Philadelphia
really find happiness,
you'll know just how it feels to be alive.
How it feels to be seven feet and 1/16th inches tall
with no place to hide.
He's the greatest athlete that ever played.
Shot block by Antetokounmpo!
What a block from Giannis.
Giannis is incredible what he can do,
but you're not Wilt Chamberlain.
Wilt Chamberlain has a bunch of records
that will never be touched.
Kobe Bryant with 81,
second only to Wilt Chamberlain.
He did score 100 points in a basketball game.
100 points.
Wilt against Michael, my prime and his prime.
How much money would you be willing to bet?
He's been polarizing for over half a century now.
There's two numbers in basketball.
There's Wilt getting 100,
and Russell getting 11 championships.
They were marketed as Russell being the good guy
and Wilt being the villain.
In his mind, there's constantly a dialogue
with the external world about who he is.
Wilt was demanding to be a part of ownership.
It was revolutionary.
We're out here to make money.
The first player empowerment
all the way back then in the sixties.
Wilt, what about the young people in the Black community?
A Black celebrity who transcended the sport.
It's his claim that he slept with more than 20,000 women.
20,000 women?
Wilt did always like to put up numbers.
[laughs]
Today, the NBA is a global product.
Today, a Black basketball player
can create billion-dollar empires,
is able to be the kind of celebrity
that can influence styles,
and that playbook originally started with Wilt Chamberlain,
the original gangster of fashion.
Wilt was a Renaissance man.
[Wilt] This couldn't have happened
to a fella like myself
anywhere else but in America.
He was the most important player of all time.
Wilt Chamberlain invented the world-famous, photogenic,
Black millionaire, seven-foot tall basketball player.
He created a job that did not exist before.
Shaq's just applying for that job.
He was the first rock and roll superstar in basketball.
Without Wilt, wouldn't be any Kevin Garnetts.
Wouldn't be any Kobe Bryants.
LeBron James, Michael Jordans,
wouldn't be none of us.
Wilt Chamberlain was an absolute motherfucker.
I think he is one of the most misunderstood people
that I've ever seen.
[cheering]
Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain, the seven-foot giant
of the University of Kansas Jayhawks,
is one reason why the Jayhawks
are picked as the team to beat.
The 1957 national championship game
is the biggest game ever at the time.
This is Wilt's first time on the big stage.
He's playing an undefeated team in North Carolina,
but Kansas, his team,
is actually favored because he's out there.
North Carolina coach Frank McGuire
tried to get into Wilt's head
by starting the game by having Tommy Kearns,
who was 5-11, jump tip-off against him.
Wilt has his hands on his hips, looking down at me,
But there's no question it was a psychological thing,
and that created the whole atmosphere.
North Carolina came out
with multiple players swarming around Wilt.
The strategy was fairly basic: five against one.
[Announcer] Goes to Kindred on the left.
Down the line to Elstun for the shot.
It's no good. Young has the rebound.
And so they're conceding outside shots for Wilt's teammates.
[Announcer] Out to Parker to the right of the circle.
He fires the shot, missed it.
Quite frankly, if they started hitting a couple of those,
we would have had to have changed our tactics.
[Announcer] Rosemond gets it to Cunningham.
Below the circle. He shoots it.
And then on the other side of the court,
North Carolina's starting five,
are all capable of making outside jumpers.
[Announcer] Cunningham over near the right sideline to Kearns.
He fakes, tries a push shot from outside and hits.
We shot extremely well.
We got off to a quick lead on them.
[Announcer] Takes the shot from outside.
It is no good.
Chamberlain gets the rebound, shoot and misses.
But Wilt starts to score.
[Announcer] In to Chamberlain in the lane.
He shoots and makes it.
24-19.
And then Kansas came back.
[Announcer] Some help for Chamberlain.
Chamberlain shoots and hits.
Out it comes to Kearns near the center circle.
Kearns faking with it.
[Kearns] I remember just dribbling around
because we just wanted to keep the ball away from Wilt.
Dick Harp, who was the coach at Kansas,
should have been a lot more aggressive with us defensively.
I think strategically a mistake was made.
[Announcer] Brennan puts it up and hits it.
It's a hook and he hits it.
Amazing, amazing game.
Eight seconds, seven, six, five, four.
Driving in, it's Kearns. He shoots.
It's knocked down by Chamberlain.
That's it. A double overtime.
I knew it was going in,
and then out of nowhere, this guy comes
and knocks it into the third row of the balcony.
So the game goes in to not two overtimes,
but triple overtime.
[Announcer] North Carolina brings it in.
Nine seconds left.
Driving in is Joe Quigg.
And we have a foul, I believe, on King.
It's on King with six seconds left.
Shot is up. It's good.
It's tied up 53-53.
Here comes another.
It's up. It's good.
54-53, North Carolina leading.
Quigg made two foul shots.
Kansas called a timeout.
[Announcer] In to Loneski.
It's tipped by Kearns.
The ballgame is over. The Tar Heels win.
They are champions!
It was not a great pass into Wilt.
Wilt didn't have a chance at getting it.
The game was over.
This game was the toughest loss of Wilt's career.
Wilt shot 46% for the game,
and Wilt had 23 of 53 points that Kansas scored,
and his teammates shot 26%.
We were really, ultimately no match for him,
and nobody was.
So were we lucky? Yes.
We were blessed for one game, and I'll take it.
[Wilt] I've always been more bitter about that loss
than almost any other single game in my whole career.
I guess it's because that's the game
that started the whole "Wilt's a loser" thing.
Like Goliath, I was a guy who should never lose.
No one roots for Goliath,
and no one tells the truth about him, either.
I like to win.
After all, I wanted to be the best at what I was doing
long before I even knew what a basketball was.
My mother and father had 11 children.
The first two died with pneumonia
before we were born.
We're all 15 months apart, all nine of us.
My brother Wilt, he would be 86 in August.
His birthday's in August.
My father and mother both did not finish school.
Everybody was poor.
As far as we were concerned,
we were in better condition than most of my relatives
because we owned a house with a garage.
Not that we ever had a car.
His father was William.
His mother was Olivia Chamberlain.
His father was a janitor at Curtis Publishing.
Wilt's mother was a homemaker
for predominantly Jewish-American families.
My mom was a very tall, stunning-looking woman.
My dad was a short guy.
My mother was my height. I'm 5-9.
Wilt, right away we knew that he was gonna be tall.
Even at five years old,
he looked like he was 12 years old.
My father was born in Virginia,
my mother was born in North Carolina,
and my father was born on a farm.
My father did not like the South at all
and refused to go back there after he got married,
and so he sent my brothers back there
to do the farm work every summer.
Which was fine with Wilt,
because he absolutely loved animals.
And when he come back from Virginia,
he'd be another two inches or so taller.
One summer he came home.
At that time we were in elementary school,
and my mother, she almost fainted.
She could not believe he had grown so tall so fast.
Like 6-5.
Wilt stuttered as a child.
Some of the teachers or administrators
thought that Wilt was slow because of the stutter.
They asked him questions in class,
and because he did have a speech impediment,
he didn't want to respond
and that the kids would laugh at him.
And they put him in a class for slow learners.
That OB class was really something.
It really affected him emotionally a lot.
He kept saying that he wasn't learning anything.
He began to lose his regular personality,
and he really got upset and started stuttering worse.
He came home really sad.
He got very sick and had to stay in the bed
for I think almost a month.
My older sister said, mom, he doesn't belong OB.
He's way too intelligent to be in this class.
She went to the school, both her and my mother,
and they fought.
We're all outspoken, all of us.
We would not let people take advantage of us.
And they had to put him in my class.
It makes me sad
that he lived through that as a fourth grader
when we are most vulnerable.
People would imagine the abuse for being so tall.
I don't know how tall you were in sixth grade?
-Absolutely. In fact-- -How bad was it?
It was really very, very bad.
It was actually embarrassing.
It was quite traumatic.
A lot of people looked at a guy like Wilt Chamberlain
as though he was some kind of freak,
almost like he has a disability.
When Wilt was born, there was no NBA,
and by the time there was an NBA,
it wasn't necessarily accessible to Black people.
Nobody goes, "Oh, you're so tall.
"That's going to lead you to fame, fortune,
and everything that goes with it."
Nobody says that.
Because, honestly, people hadn't seen it.
I grew up in a Christian home.
My mother often would pray
that God would let her live long enough
to see my brother would be able to take care of himself.
As she said, God will provide.
He and I both just loved to run.
He would take my hand every day
and try to get me to be the fastest girl running
so he could be the fastest boy.
He was chosen to anchor his elementary school team
that ran in the Penn Relays,
one of the most prestigious track events in the country.
He said it was a wonderful feeling.
The applause from the crowd made him tingle all over,
and it was a moment that he never forgot.
In the summer, Wilt used to sleep on the garage at night.
He was fascinated by the stars.
Wilt was a very unusual human being.
Given the gifts that God gave him,
and given the way that he overcame
the path that he was put on as a child,
he completely obliterated that.
He started playing basketball.
That was probably one of the best time of our lives.
I would be at every game.
Well, I've been coaching him for two years now,
and I marvel at just watching him play.
Everybody was aware
that someone special was in West Philadelphia
at Overbrook High School.
There was one game when he scored 90 points.
His team won the championship
both in his junior year and senior year.
Wilt Chamberlain was a phenomenon.
There had never been a high school athlete
who had got the attention that Wilt Chamberlain did.
I used to get upset, quite upset.
All these White men would come in, these reporters,
and were sitting around the table and all that,
and I wasn't used to that,
and I didn't want them to invade our privacy.
And then they start calling him Wilt the Stilt,
which he did not like at all.
He preferred The Dipper:
the great constellation in the sky,
the starry night.
To get under the door, he had to dip his head.
He kept hitting that arch and getting knocked on his head.
So we got in the habit of calling him Dip
because we had to keep telling him dip.
And then we start calling him Dippy.
Him being as tall as he was, that was the hardest part.
Trying to get him with some clothes and some shoes.
When we got in high school,
they made his clothes for him.
I don't remember him having a girlfriend
until he got maybe into college.
He wasn't a lover boy in those days.
We were all dancers in our house.
We loved to dance, but Dip didn't do it.
He just didn't dance with the girls.
This is Al Packman, a high school classmate.
"In Wilt's sophomore year, his coach, Sam Cozen,
"said to me, do you know any girl
"who can dance with this guy?
"So I went to this girl, she said she would,
"and then Coach Cozen said to me,
you stand at the girls' gym while they're in there dancing."
"And if anyone hears music
"and wants to know what is going on,
"just tell them to move on.
And that helped Wilt with his coordination."
He didn't go to his prom.
He didn't go to the things that we all went to.
I guess he didn't ask nobody
or they didn't want to go with him.
I don't know what it was, but he didn't go.
It's hard to be the Black guy who everybody's looking at
for whatever reason,
because it doesn't make you feel more safe in the world.
We might have been juniors in high school,
and as we were walking,
there was a number of people stopping, gawking.
By golly, look how tall he is.
Wilt trying to hide.
But when you grow to be seven-feet-one,
you can't hide.
[Wilt] One of the things that always bothered me
was people always wondered, well, where do you sleep?
How big is the bed that you sleep in?
An old lady once asked me how tall I was,
and I said 6-11.
I was in high school at the time,
And she said I just lied to her.
She couldn't believe: "You gotta be nine feet tall."
People had never seen a seven-foot kid.
On top of that he's fast as shit.
He's blocking all the shots.
So, yeah, you're supposed to be stared at.
You're supposed to be looked at
like you're something different,
because you are.
[Announcer] Your sports commentator
drove up to New York's Catskill Mountains
to look in on tall timber,
basketball timber in the person of Wilton Chamberlain.
Kutsher's Country Club is a resort in the Catskills.
The Borscht Belt was the compilation of hotels.
It was like the Jewish Alps.
Kutsher's brought in players from college and the pros
to work by day, usually as waiters.
Wilt was still in high school, which was unusual.
He was a bellhop.
Can you imagine Wilt Chamberlain
taking your bags to your room?
At night they would entertain by playing basketball games.
You saw a 16-year-old outplay 20-year-olds,
against college All Americans and kicking their butts.
Remember the name Wilt Chamberlain.
It'll probably make big sports copy
for years to come.
I think all of those things kind of helped him
to get even more confidence.
He stopped stuttering.
Became powerful.
All of these letters here in front of us,
where do they come from?
Well, from various colleges all over the nation.
Some from the Midwest, West,
even some from out East here, even some from the South.
-Some from the South, too. -Yes, some from the South.
And this is in a period of segregation.
[Announcer] Arkansas National Guardsmen,
under orders of Governor Faubus,
preventing nine Negro youngsters
from attending the Central High School in Little Rock.
[Reporter] The demonstrations
that came to be called the sit-in movement,
exploded across the South.
And for the first time,
the community was confronted with Negroes
in places where they had never been.
When Wilt decided to go to Kansas,
he was in a segregated community.
We got to Kansas City.
We stopped at a place and went in to eat,
and the proprietor came to the table,
and he knew who I was.
And he said it was nice to have me here,
but he would be more than happy
to serve me in the kitchen.
Perhaps more than any athlete,
he understood how to use his power,
how to leverage what he had
to make sure that the institutions,
the universities didn't exploit his labor,
at least not without a fight.
One of his proudest achievements
was desegregating Lawrence, Kansas,
where the University of Kansas is.
[Wilt] It took me about a week to realize
the whole area around Lawrence
was infested with segregation.
I called on a few of the alums who had recruited me.
I told them that in no uncertain terms
what they could do with Kansas
if things didn't get straightened out in a hurry.
A couple of them told me, look, sit down in those restaurants
and don't leave until they serve you.
That is exactly what I did.
I went into every damn place within 40 miles of Lawrence.
I singlehandedly integrated that whole area.
Suddenly, restaurants, lunch counters
would allow the celebrity Wilt Chamberlain
and his teammates in.
But think about where we are as a nation
in terms of race relations at that time.
But after Wilt left, no, it wasn't lasting.
He began to understand that he was blessed.
My mother used to say, you know,
you didn't think you were, but you are.
After four years of waiting,
Eddie Gottlieb, the owner of the Philadelphia Warriors
of the National Basketball Association,
has finally signed Wilt Chamberlain.
We were coming out of the era of George Miken,
a very different kind of player.
George Miken was at his time
the greatest big man to--
Man, Wilt destroyed that.
Do you feel that you are ready for this?
I actually do.
I think there will be a period of orientation
for me to cross like there is for every newcomer in the NBA.
But I think in the long run,
I'll be able to handle myself man to man
with almost anyone in the league.
He was an exceptional athlete
who just happened to be seven feet,
as he would say, and 1/16th of an inch tall.
He would funnel the ball in the basket.
This was before the phrase finger roll.
Wilt was an amazing leaper.
Philadelphia trainer Al Domenico
saw Wilt put a quarter on the top of a backboard.
Basketball may not have even have been his best sport.
It might have been track and field.
He was able to win back to back to back
Big Eight track championships.
He ran 100 yard dash
in a little less than 11 seconds
for a seven footer.
He was the fastest player in basketball.
When he was in a running mode, it was scary.
Like, please don't hit me in the head with this ball.
They always said he was by far
the strongest person who's ever played in the NBA.
Absolutely. I remember that he came to the gym
and he would do a tricep extension
that like the big guys, the strongest guys
would do let's say 120 pounds.
He would come and he would do 170 pounds.
That's how strong he was.
When he first started out,
you saw this really skinny guy, but...
He got to be a very powerful man.
Picked up by Bill Russell now.
Knocked out of bounds.
He was the first player I can remember
ever lifting weights.
We used to work out once in a while
at this place called the Philadelphia Athletic Club.
And it was 180 pounds.
Why do I remember that? I have no idea.
My left hand is up here and my right hand is down here.
All of a sudden, Wilt comes walking over
and he said, you mean you can't pick this up,
180 pounds with one hand? [laughs]
I used to enjoy using my power
to amaze other people and get reactions.
Haskell Cohen,
the publicity director for the NBA,
has a flat tire.
Wilt comes over and lifts the back of the car up
so Haskell Cohen can change the tire.
The frame of reference is Shaquille O'Neal.
[Announcer] Up off the rim. Oh!
what a dunk by O'Neal. Shaquille O'Neal.
Shaq. Face up. Shoot.
They were two of the strongest players
that ever played the game period.
And there was nothing you could do
one on one with them.
Yeah, I think Wilt was stronger than Shaq.
I think he had a more powerful upper body.
I played against Shaq
and I firsthand know what that power is like.
And I'm, like, damn.
Wilt was stronger than Shaq?
He was afraid sometimes guys trying to block his dunks,
he'd break somebody's wrist up on the top of the rim.
Size, speed,
strength, and agility.
Young Wilt Chamberlain might have been
the greatest pure athlete of the 20th century.
I believe Wilt had three distinct phases of his career.
This is the first stage of Wilt's career.
It was the "I'm going to lead the league in scoring
and maybe set a record" phase.
Wilt comes in, averages about 38 points per game.
That is the all time single season scoring record.
He not only wins Rookie of the Year in 1960,
he's voted the most valuable player.
The year before,
they played at about a 35-win pace.
Not a playoff team.
They have one of the worst offenses in the league.
They jump up to a 50-win pace,
and they now have an average offense
behind this mega scoring presence in the paint.
And then the defense, he inhaled defensive rebounds,
a tremendous defensive presence and shot blocker.
Ooh!
The universal language, you know what I'm saying?
And they make the playoffs.
My father, Paul Arizin,
played with Wilt for three years.
If the Warriors won,
my father would let me in the locker room.
And Wilt sat in front of his locker,
and he would eat two full-size hoagies or subs.
We call them hoagies in Philadelphia.
And then after that, he would top it off with a pie.
And you add to that
this infectious from-the-soul laugh.
I was just in awe of this almost god.
He was just that much better
than the rest of the league at that time.
But Wilt had to get past the Celtics
and Bill Russell.
Bill Russell was nobody's favorite choice.
He didn't have a lot of scholarship offers.
He played in San Francisco.
He was a different kind of player.
He didn't have the stature that Wilt Chamberlain had.
Bill Russell was 6-10 maybe.
We know famously that Red Auerbach
was trying to rig the system
so that Wilt Chamberlain went to school at Harvard
so he could be his territorial pick
with the Boston Celtics.
In the early fifties,
Kutsher's hired Red Auerbach
as their summer basketball coach.
Pretty good hire, if you think about it.
And Red would teach Wilt something,
say, try to do this, try to do,
and Wilt would say, Dipper got it, Red.
Red didn't like that. [laughs]
But Red loved Wilt.
Red Auerbach wanted Wilt Chamberlain
over Bill Russell.
Red saw what he would become,
and that's when I think he got the idea
that he needed a top-flight center to compete.
[Announcer] It's a 5-5 game.
West again blocked by Russell.
There was Russell blocking the shot by West.
Bill was an elite defender,
disrupting teams with his defensive play.
Great rebounder.
He just had a great nose for rebounding the ball.
He could have played successfully
in this league today. Very.
I used to break it down, like,
make sure that they only get one shot
and no offensive rebounds.
But Bill Russell was not a great offensive force.
In fact, his teammate, Satch Sanders,
famously said once,
if he's 12 feet from the basket
when he turns around and sees it,
he looks at it like it's a snake.
Russell maintained that he could have scored more points,
but they might have lost
because he had disrupted the balance of the team.
See, I can't be a star that always has to have the ball.
I have to be a star
in a way that my teammates can do what they do.
If I'm getting the rebound and outlet pass,
we'd have this fast break going.
In five seconds we got a basket.
I'm out of the picture.
Russell's measurement was the success of the team.
How well do you set picks?
How well do you pass the ball
that makes it an easy shot?
I tried to put them in a place
where they could do their best.
[Wilt] On the basketball court, Russell is my sworn enemy,
which is the way it ought to be.
But in private life, he is the greatest
and one of my closest friends.
Wilt and Russ were close.
In those days, the NBA was really an extended family.
I mean, he'd come past my house on Thanksgiving,
eat the food, sleep in my bed,
and go out there and whip my butt, you understand?
And my mother would say, now, Wilt,
we shouldn't feed Bill so well next time.
[both laugh]
[Wilt] The White media was always building up Blacks
to go against each other,
sort of, okay, niggas, let's see who can fight.
Blacks constantly have to demonstrate
superiority against each other.
That left only one Black superstar
to challenge the White superstars.
The league they entered into,
Russell was one of the very few Black players
at all in the NBA in 1956,
and one of the reasons that he was available to the Celtics
as the third pick in the draft is that the St. Louis Hawks
were not going to have a Black player period.
The NBA started in 1947.
It was a segregated league.
1950, they bring in three guys:
the great Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper,
and Sweetwater Clifton.
These three guys in this eight team league
of about 80, 85, 90 guys.
You can't take Wilt out of his era.
Wilt's not just a basketball player
in the way we might think of LeBron James or Kevin Durant.
He is trying to navigate
an actively hostile structure and system.
100% they changed the rules in college and the pros
to target and limit Wilt Chamberlain.
At that time, the lane area was six feet,
and they adjusted it to 12 feet
to at least get him a little further away from the basket.
Back then, the rule was
you just had to start from behind the free throw line.
So Wilt would take a running start
and slam dunk his free throws.
Well, the NCAA changed that rule.
Said you have to release the ball
behind the free throw line.
I saw the rule change as, okay, you're at this level.
In order for everybody else to catch up,
we need to slow something down.
So that the game can be more fun
for these short White guys.
Also more fun for the White guys in the audience to watch.
In 1958, a former colleague of mine,
Shirley Povich, wrote for Sports Illustrated,
"The game lost this particular patron years back
"when it went vertical
"and put the accent on carnival freaks
"who achieved upper space by growing into it.
"Who can applaud Wilt the Stilt or his ilk
"when they outflank the basket from above
"and pelt it like an open city?
"These fellows are biological accidents
"who ought to be more usefully employed,
"like hiring out as rainmakers
and going to sow a few clouds."
It was a vastly different world.
When Wilt came into the NBA in 1959,
NBA owners felt
that if there were too many Black players on the roster,
White fans would not come to the game.
For years, the attendance was so poor.
But when Bill and Wilt started playing each other,
those were the games that would sell out.
The league didn't matter until Wilt came along.
It's Wilt that put the fannies in the seats.
People were mesmerized by him.
Wilt was this genius of marketing...for Wilt.
That was always there.
In the field of professional basketball,
one man is virtually the unanimous choice.
Here he is, the star of the Philadelphia Warriors,
Wilt Chamberlain right here.
[applause]
[audience laughs]
He was the first rock and roll superstar in basketball.
What one thing would you say
has helped you to reach the heights?
My appetite.
[audience laughs]
Wilt Chamberlain was living in New York City
and would commute to play in Philadelphia.
He's the one that showed up half an hour before the game,
ate three hot dogs and went out and scored 70 points.
He was a fast driver to put it real nice.
Lived in New York because he liked the buzz.
He was this larger than life personality
who was walking into clubs with two women on his arm.
He played the ponies
and purchased a pony, Spooky Cadet.
He cut a record.
By the river
'Neath the shady trees
Just my baby
That was one of the funnier parts.
A lot of my family were singers.
Wilt was not. Of course, he thought he was.
He was okay in the church choir
because you know how they take anybody
in the church choir almost.
But he just felt like he could do anything.
He liked people.
He liked meeting people, talking to people.
But there was a flip side to it,
because it was unrelenting.
Fans would often come up to Wilt
and say, how's the weather up there?
Wilt's response was usually I got a phone in my ass.
Why don't you call and find out?
So there was all these different kinds of people that he was.
On one hand, Wilt wanted to be like everybody else.
On the other hand, I think he liked the idea
that he was a bon vivant.
I think he liked the idea
that he was an owner of a very important nightclub.
Smalls Paradise was considered a big thing in New York.
Smalls was a great place for dancing, dinner, jazz,
and some of the hottest foxes in Harlem.
He liked to dress cool.
He had a rap,
and you could tell when he got excited
because he'd stutter every once in a while.
And then one of the things
that he'd say when he leaves you,
he said, I'll dig you later.
[laughs]
And Wilt would have in this club a young Cassius Clay,
Muhammad Ali.
He'd have Langston Hughes, the poet.
He'd have Willie Mays, Sammy Davis, Jr.,
and they'd party till 6:00 in the morning.
Everything about Wilt was excessive.
His personality, the way he played the game,
the statistics he put up,
the amount of women
that he may or may not have bedded.
Wilt embraced this bachelor's philosophy.
I mean, that's Hugh Hefner, that's Jim Brown.
A lot of well-known men during that period of time
were doing their version of the same thing,
and a lot of men are looking at that,
wishing that they could do the same thing.
He was a womanizer.
The more money you have, the more women you have,
especially when you're looking at a high-priced athlete.
It comes with the territory.
Women would walk up and they'd look down,
they'd look up, and they'd have that smile on their face.
[laughs]
That's how life went with Wilt.
There were women who kind of threw themselves at him.
I chose Wilt.
I chose him, and I went to go be with him.
I grew up in San Jose.
I was at San Jose State,
and I heard a rumbling on the beach one day
that Wilt Chamberlain was there,
so I went down.
Totally not connected to him.
Had never met him before.
Saw where he was sitting. I looked around,
I looked for an approach angle
so I could go up and meet him.
I was figuring out what I was going to say to him,
and before I could do that, he read my T-shirt.
It said "San Jose" on it.
He said, "Hey, San Jose, come here, sit down."
[laughs]
And we talked, and already we were bantering and bickering.
Track and field was a connection
because he loved track and field,
and I didn't know that.
I ran the 100 yards
and 220 yards at San Jose State,
and he said, you want to run with me?
You want to see the prettiest runner?
[laughs]
Of course, I wanted to be able to say, yeah.
I was with Wilt.
Not only did we have great sex,
but we slept really well together.
And that to me was an indicator
that that might be fun to keep doing.
I knew he was a player.
It's the sex in the sports world game.
I had the sense the more of his teammates I talked to
that Wilt absolutely loved basketball,
he loved his women, and he loved himself.
He was gonna do what he wanted to do.
Wilt could be difficult to coach certainly.
There's a moment early in his career
when Wilt is coached for the Warriors
by Neil Johnston.
And at halftime, Johnston says, "Wilt,
there's a guy out in the corner making all these shots."
And Wilt said, "Well, I'm not gonna be covering him.
You know, I'm going to be the guy in the middle."
And it was Wilt saying, "You're the coach, but I'm the man."
[Wilt] I know basketball, too.
If a coach told me to do something I knew was stupid,
I wasn't gonna do it.
Quite frankly, while you have to be honest with your superstar,
you can't be over-judgmental.
You just can't.
And you as a coach
have to find your way around that.
In 1961-62,
Eddie Gottlieb hires a new coach.
His name is Frank McGuire.
Frank McGuire coached against Wilt
in the famous triple overtime game.
Who knew that Frank McGuire and Wilt would rendezvous
in a much more interesting capacity in Philadelphia?
And McGuire told his players,
we're going to get the ball into Wilt two thirds of the time.
[Wilt] He actually put me in a position
to have maybe the greatest single season
that I think a basketball player
could possibly ever have.
We had no one that could bother him. No one.
In 1961, Wilt averaged 50 points a game.
And these are double and triple teams.
That's video game shit, man.
There's always the statements that are made
in terms of, well, Wilt never played against anybody.
They were all six-foot-five White boys that couldn't jump.
That's what they say, and that's not true.
Can you imagine if he could shoot foul shots
what he would have averaged?
They would hard foul him because he couldn't make a free throw.
That's the only weakness that Wilt had.
He tried to do the Rick Barry way,
you know, underhanded.
But he still was better
than he was shooting it the other way.
[Wilt] I'm a psychic.
I'm a head case when it comes to the foul line.
It was a sad sight.
So if you have a weakness in your game,
you got to be smart and play around it.
Wilt came up with this unstoppable fallaway jump shot.
The man worked on his game.
There is nobody better in the league
with that fade away jumper than Dirk Nowitzki.
Dip had that shot before Dirk Nowitzki.
Wilt said that he never wanted to come out of a game,
so McGuire played him every minute of every game.
The fun trivia is that he averaged
more than 48 minutes a game thanks to overtimes.
It's astounding that Wilt could, in the same body,
have inexhaustible stamina.
Never fouled out of a game.
I mean, it was a remarkable accomplishment.
And we should give him credit for providing that value
throughout the whole game.
But pace is a huge deal
when we compare numbers across era.
And the short of it is they just took way more shots
than we would see today
because they weren't as careful about being efficient.
But when you account for pace, you actually start to see
that it's very close to the mega scoring seasons
of the 1980s, of the 1990s,
of the 2000s.
They're usually around 35 points every 75 possessions.
Wilt still looks like one of the greatest scorers ever.
He just doesn't look like
this complete video game outlier anymore.
You just don't show up and do that if you're not phenomenal.
Let's face it.
I don't care how many times they throw him the ball.
Wilt's signature night happens on March 2, 1962.
Game 75 out of 80 at the Hershey Arena
in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the famed chocolate town.
And they're playing the New York Knicks,
a last-place team.
They had teams play
some of their home games in nearby arenas
trying to grow new fans all across America.
There's no footage
because nobody deemed the game worthy enough to cover.
The rebound, Luckenbill.
Back to Ruklick, in the Chamberlain.
He got it! He got it!
He got it! The tip is good. He made it!
He scores the 100-point basket with 46 seconds left to play.
And all the kids of Hershey,
the sons and daughters of chocolate factory workers,
storm the court.
They say records are made to be broken.
There's not a chance in the world
that anybody will even come close to doing that.
He was Paul Bunyan from a basketball point of view.
But to Wilt, the 100-point game
symbolized that he was a gunner
and that he cared only about his own statistics.
In the '62 season, Wilt scored 4,000 points.
Nobody's done that since.
But he got crushed in the MVP by Bill Russell.
How do you explain this?
It's easy. The players voted for it back then.
The players voted for Russell,
and they knew that Wilt was chasing stats
and wasn't fun to play with.
All them would rather have played with Russell.
Tom Gola was the golden boy.
He'd been a star at La Salle in the NCAA tournament,
and he didn't like having Wilt on his team that much.
He told one player from another team,
he was just bouncing the ball against the wall.
Ball would ricochet back to him.
Somebody said, "What are you doing?"
He said, "I'm practicing our offense.
Pass the ball to Wilt and just stand there."
Was he selfish? I don't think he was selfish.
I think he had to shoot as much as he could
for his team to win.
The more we got him the ball, the more games we would win.
So we tried to get the ball to him as much as we could.
And if the team doesn't win, then he gets blamed for it.
But he was a team player.
I never felt like I was giving up my shots for Wilt.
The best basketball player on the team
should have the ball.
And I think a lot of players were jealous, frankly.
And I am reasonably sure
that some of the anger and the jealousy
that was directed at Wilt had to do with this,
you know, the fact that he dated White women.
Wilt and I were chatting up a couple of stewardesses,
and we were gonna double date two White women.
When we were getting off the plane,
some of the White guys on the team
were giving me a hard time for pimping for Wilt.
I was not a racist, but I wanted to fit in.
I wanted the guys to like me.
That's a very immigrant kind of mentality,
and I was an immigrant.
So I went against my better self.
I called Wilt,
and I said I was sick and I couldn't make it.
To make the story worse, of course,
I decided, that stewardess,
maybe I could talk her into going out with me anyway.
Well, I walked in the back door of the hotel,
and sure enough, as the gods of justice would have it,
Wilt Chamberlain was walking in the front door, and he saw me.
And I turned around.
I scurried like the rat I felt like out the back.
The next day at practice,
we're walking out of the locker room,
and Wilt pulls me back.
He took his finger and he said, I'm Black, you're White,
Tom, You got to make some decisions.
It was just simple kindness.
I'll never forget that.
Through Wilt's kindness,
I learned to be a better human being.
I mean, honestly, I think when you talk about the history
of Black athletes in the twentieth century,
we celebrate and we praise those individuals
who used their platform to advocate for social justice.
Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell.
Wilt Chamberlain comes from a very different tradition.
Jack Johnson, in the early part of the twentieth century,
would become the first Black heavyweight champion
and a threat to dominant White society.
Jack Johnson was about the individual.
I'm not trying to appeal to White people.
I'm not trying to appeal to Black people.
I'm my own man.
Down the line, you get Wilt Chamberlain,
who was basically about individuality,
which is eminently American.
And even though in today's society
that might sound selfish,
that was a radical position for a Black man to take.
Sure, he had an ego,
but so did Monet, so did Einstein.
We're talking about incredible talent.
I'll guarantee you some guys on a few teams
would have been very happy to be on Wilt's team.
We were always in the playoffs.
1962, the Warriors are competitive enough
to take on as an underdog
Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics
with the winner going to the NBA Finals.
It was his best supporting cast up to that time.
Paul Arizin was still viable. Gola.
Guy Rodgers, a terrific Hall of Fame-bound point guard.
Tom Meschery.
But it wasn't the equal of the Celtics.
This is a team that had won the world championship
in 1957, '59, '60, '61.
They had the best record in the league in 1962 by a mile.
This is a Celtic team that in those years
had upwards of eight Hall of Famers on the team.
You know, I've heard that argument before,
but it's more than that.
Bill Russell had a mental tenacity
that I'm going to argue Wilt Chamberlain did not.
I never tried to stop him from scoring.
That would be doomed to failure.
What I would do sometimes is push him
another two inches away from the basket.
That changes the angle to make him less efficient.
Basically, his strategy
was to try to make Wilt move laterally
more than he wanted to.
There was no doubt
that Russell had greater lateral mobility always.
In the series,
Wilt only averaged 37 points per game,
13 points below the regular season.
Wilt played for a coach that didn't utilize him
as effectively as he should have been utilized.
How do you say that?
Look at all the points and stuff he scored.
Well, yeah, but it wasn't good team basketball.
In the playoffs,
when one player is doing all the shooting
without passing and setting up your teammates,
defenses overload on Wilt.
It becomes less efficient to score.
Meanwhile, the other guys aren't going to be as effective
because you're not creating any shots for them.
But the fact is that they were in it because of Wilt.
This is the series
in which he had a 40-point, 30-rebound game.
That series was tremendous.
[Announcer] Bob Cousy and Sam Jones,
who's had a great series.
Back and forth.
[Announcer] This is Al Attles.
The Warriors take it to game seven.
[Announcer] A big play by Bill Russell.
Chamberlain gets the score.
Heinsohn.
He's gotta be 12 and a half, 13 feet off the ground
reaching for this ball.
It's called a goaltend
to put the Celtics up five in the final minutes.
It's controversial.
I think it's a goaltend.
They don't call them every time,
but at that point in the game
it could have gone either way.
Wilt makes two free throws the next time down the court
to cut it to three.
It's a turnover for the Celtics.
And then with only a few seconds left...
Just a ridiculous offensive rebound.
He scored five points in the final minute.
Russell isn't a scorer.
He's not gonna be taking the shot
down the stretch of a key game.
Russell can help the team by setting screens,
opening up pathways for his teammates to score.
[Announcer] Russell and Sam Jones.
[crowd cheers]
And Sam Jones hits a shot
to just knock off Philadelphia.
[Wilt] No one is as lonely as the loser.
It doesn't matter to me whether I score at all
as long as we win.
There's not anything that is beyond me
if I dedicate myself to it.
And I like a challenge.