David and Goliath, this famous biblical story.
Goliath is the giant, you know.
David, you know,
slayed him with a stone.
I ain't been to church in a long time,
so my explanation might be a little off.
But it might be on point, I don't know.
But the point is,
the giant, who looks unbeatable,
but somehow David prevails, right?
When you think about Russell and Chamberlain,
Russell had a lot more help.
So you can be the baddest motherfucker in the world.
It's real hard for one to beat five.
So who's David and who's Goliath?
Billionaire mortgage lender Mat Ishbia
is planning to buy the Phoenix Suns.
The deal expected to be completed
in the near future, according to the report,
and could close at an NBA record $4 billion.
Back in 1951,
Eddie Gottlieb paid $25,000
for the Philadelphia Warriors.
At the end of the 1962 season,
he had a golden opportunity.
He sold the team for $850,000,
then the most ever paid for an NBA franchise.
[Wilt Chamberlain] Naturally, I was the key to the deal.
I was damn near the whole Philadelphia franchise.
I stood out literally and figuratively
in an era when sports were beginning to make
a tremendous impact in society.
For better or for worse,
I had a strong influence
on how things played out in the sports world.
The Warriors had a 3,000% increase in value
after Wilt Chamberlain played for them.
[Cherry] So at age 25,
Wilt Chamberlain found himself moving to San Francisco.
[Wilt] San Francisco is a sensational city,
a beautiful city, a different town.
Sophisticated people, lovely ladies,
a romantic town fit for romanticists,
the best in food and drink for a man of taste,
European charm and California tradition,
but no place for basketball.
We played our games in a place called the Cow Palace,
and that's just what it was.
The damn roof leaked so badly
that when it rained,
I'd get half a dozen drops of water in my eye
every time I looked up for the center jump.
They have a few changes with the team,
notably coach Frank McGuire and Tom Gola,
who was a great all-around player
staying behind basically on the East Coast.
And then Paul Arizin,
another Hall of Fame teammate of Wilt at the time
who had been around forever, he retired.
My father, he didn't really have much desire
to move to San Francisco.
The money wasn't compelling enough
for him to extend his career.
The fact is, these great athletes and players
weren't being paid enough money.
They all had to work in the offseason.
[Announcer] Chamberlain is the greatest scoring machine
the game has ever known.
Chamberlain still is scoring at these incredible rates,
but the Warriors really struggle.
The part where people start to care
is like, okay, so you do all those things,
but you're not winning.
Can you do those things and win?
They finished second to last place in the West,
and this is the first time
Wilt's team doesn't make the playoffs.
[Wilt] I never played before
for a team which lost more games than it won,
and it was the most miserable season of my career.
To have the expectation for yourself
of winning a championship,
those losses and those setbacks
probably felt that much more disappointing.
They probably hurt more.
Goliath is not supposed to lose.
[Announcer] Meet the most colorful comedy act
in present-day sport: the Harlem Globetrotters,
idolized by 20 million basketball fans in the USA.
Now matched against a team of white athletes,
they show England a trick or two.
The Globetrotters were an all-Black team
founded by a man named Abe Saperstein.
That summer, after the San Francisco Warriors
had a losing season,
Wilt chose to join the Globetrotters
in Western Europe and play with them.
You know, when you're a young Black kid
in America in the forties,
you loved Joe Louis
and the Harlem Globetrotters.
[Announcer] But for really tricky work,
just watch Haynes, the Harlem star,
going into a kind of Stanley Matthews act
that delights the crowd and drives the opposition daft.
I wanted to be Marques Haynes,
the greatest dribbler ever.
[Announcer] Yes, that Harlem rhythm
has certainly got something.
As people know,
back in 1958,
after his junior year at Kansas,
Wilt decided he had had his fill with college.
But he couldn't go to the NBA yet
because the rules at the time said
that you had to do four years of college.
This is like a decade before Spencer Haywood
helped get the rules changed,
and you could go straight into the league if you were ready.
So Wilt Chamberlain, in his senior year,
instead of letting the university
and the NCAA more broadly
exploit his talent and his services,
said, why would I stay in college
when I can play for the greatest basketball show on earth
at the time, the Harlem Globetrotters?
Probably the best time of my life?
The Harlem Globetrotters,
which I played for for about 17 years on and off.
A little known fact
was that he would go play for the Globetrotters
even after he played in the NBA.
Why did he do it?
He loved the experience.
[Announcer] Purists say they make a mockery of the game.
They clown, they juggle, they fool.
Number 50 is Goose Tatum,
the clown with the longest arms in the sport.
Wilt Chamberlain wanted to imitate Goose Tatum.
That means palming the ball,
fake passing, and laughing.
I first met Wilt in Italy
playing against him.
He'd be dribbling behind the back.
He had all the trick stuff, passing.
[Wilt] I was a young, naive, unsophisticated boy
during my year with the Globies,
but I fell in love with Europe,
and hardly a summer would pass after that
without my returning to Europe.
In time, I come to know the best restaurants
and the best hotels.
I learned my way around the cities
like Paris and Rome and Milan and Copenhagen.
[Announcer] Last year in Europe,
they played 73 games
in nine different countries, and lost only one.
The fans didn't want to see the Globetrotters lose,
so the script was
that the Globetrotters would win.
I think he realized that this is a good thing to do
to see the world and didn't have to win.
no pressure,
and naturally, everybody loved him.
I wouldn't be surprised
if Wilt just enjoyed it so much
because of people were always applauding him
for things that he was able to do,
you know, instead of the intensity
of trying to win a championship.
In 1964, Alex Hannum takes over
as Wilt's coach in San Francisco.
Yeah, Alex was a very interesting guy.
Tough-nosed guy, you know, military guy.
I can still hear him.
It's crazy that I even remember this.
Stand on the sidelines
and stick his chest out and going,
Hum-diddy-diddy. You got him. We need him.
How about a loaf of bread and a pound of meat
and all mustard you can eat?
And he'd come up with crazy things like that,
but that's the way he was.
[Wilt] I really wasn't all that excited
about playing for Alex at first.
When he coached at Syracuse,
he was always baiting me
and telling his players to push me around
and yelling about me to the referees.
He was my fourth coach in five years,
and sportswriters started blaming me
for the quick turnover.
That was preposterous, of course.
I think that his previous coaches,
to me, the idea was
that he would score as much as he possibly could.
My idea was to spread that wealth around a little bit.
He comes in and he says, Wilt,
I want you to pass a little bit more.
I want you to get the team more involved.
He was asking Wilt Chamberlain,
one of the greatest scorers ever,
to score a little less.
[Wilt] My last season in Philadelphia,
we won 80% of the games
in which I scored 50 or more points.
I'm not sure my shooting less will make us win more.
When I did not score as well as usual,
we did not win.
Coaching Wilt Chamberlain was certainly not easy.
It all comes down to how best to win a championship.
Alex stood up to him.
You know, Alex challenged him to a fight.
You can't help but respect the guy
who's willing to stand up to you
knowing full well that you could break him in half.
Alex Hannum was trying to impose his will on Wilt.
Hannum knew how far to push.
That was an essential element to coaching him successfully.
[Wilt] If a coach could show me the sense in something,
I was always willing to try something different.
Alex knew basketball, and he knew men.
If the man doesn't want me to shoot,
I won't shoot.
[Announcer] That's Rogers from Chamberlain.
Everything really starts to change.
Double-teaming Wilt
is actually opening up pathways for his teammates to score.
His assist numbers start to go up.
Playing with the Globetrotters, you know,
they're throwing it behind their head,
and I'm sure that helped his passing.
[Ryan] This is what I call the second stage of Wilt's career,
the well-balanced, middle of the road days
when he'd seen the virtue of passing.
[Announcer] A dunk by Nate Thurmond,
6-11 rookie for San Francisco.
That team also had a rookie join them named Nate Thurmond,
one of the great defensive players in league history.
[Wilt] I was still scoring a lot,
but Alex had us moving more and looking for the open man.
We were really playing good team ball.
[Taylor] This first year with Hannum,
they make it all the way to the NBA Finals.
[Announcer] On the rebound, Bill Russell scores,
[Taylor] Only to lose to the Celtics.
And yet they improved by a huge margin,
moving the needle in a way
that shifts the entire landscape of the league.
But Wilt has these health issues
in the offseason.
The San Francisco owner and their doctor
thought that Wilt had a heart condition.
Wilt's personal physician and friend of 40 years,
Dr. Stan Lorber,
he concluded that it was pancreatitis.
The indestructible man
missed a lot of games at the beginning of the season.
[Taylor] The team struggles immensely.
The team isn't happy because they're not winning
and they're paying Wilt a whole bunch of money,
so they decide they gotta trade the Big Dipper.
They decide, of all places,
to send Wilt Chamberlain back to Philadelphia,
now the Philadelphia 76ers,
a team that was formerly the Syracuse Nationals.
One reason why they were willing to trade Wilt
is they had Nate Thurmond,
a top 10 all-time center, in my opinion.
$150,000 and some players for Wilt Chamberlain.
The players really didn't matter.
It was the $150,000
that helped the Sixers to secure their star.
He wasn't thrilled about it.
[Wilt] It's a hurting thing to leave the city you love.
I guess it was the money.
I really don't know for sure,
but that must have been why they did it.
I'm sorry some hold me responsible for what happened,
well, as if I had anything to do about the move.
We understand the owners have to deal,
but it doesn't have to be this bush.
They could call the players in
and let them know what's cooking.
I don't mean ask the players' opinion,
but at least let them know.
Ike Richman along with Irv Kosloff
were the new owners of the Philadelphia 76ers.
Ike Richman was Wilt Chamberlain's attorney
and I think advisor
and probably partner in different business ventures.
And that's the reason
Wilt ended up coming back to Philadelphia.
Ike Richman was a wonderful, creative man.
Wilt's first game back as a 76er,
Ike arranges for 1,500 children to be in the stands
when they announce number 13, Wilt Chamberlain.
[Announcer] Welcome back Wilt Chamberlain!
[cheers and applause]
The kids go bananas.
Wilt is really moved by it and tears up
and says later that it was the most amazing thing
that ever happened to him in his sporting career.
I know they were very close.
I think Wilt fully trusted him.
And Wilt, you know, Wilt didn't trust everybody.
In fact, it'd be closer to say he didn't trust anybody.
Ike Richman and his family, in many ways,
were very similar to our family
and their relationship with Wilt.
One year he came up and my father yells out, Wilton!
And Wilt goes right back, Milton!
It was priceless.
Wilt absolutely loved my parents,
and they loved him as we did
over the next almost 50 years.
Wilt decided he wanted Jewish lawyers and Jewish attorneys.
He chose a man named Sy Goldberg,
Seymour Goldberg.
[Wilt] My attorney and my accountant
and my doctor
are all Jewish and all very dear friends.
I'd grown up in an ethnic neighborhood,
Black, Jewish, and Italian,
and I'd never really seen much discrimination as a kid.
The composition of the students at Overbrook
was African American, half Jewish American,
so we shared a sort of camaraderie or fellowship.
Zelda Spoelstra, she was in the NBA office.
She had worked for us when she was younger,
and she was very close to Wilt.
[Wilt] I pick my friends by their character,
not their color.
And I haven't found that any one race
has a monopoly on good or evil.
I want good friends, warm friends,
caring, loving, human friends,
and I don't think I have to apologize to anyone for that.
[Announcer] The Boston Celtics,
shooting for an unprecedented
seventh straight National Basketball Association title,
meet the Philadelphia 76ers
in the Eastern Division playoffs.
You can expect another classic rebounding duel
between Boston's ace Bill Russell
and Wilt Chamberlain of Philadelphia.
Chamberlain is intense in his desire to win.
The 76ers superstar
has yet to play on a championship team.
The Sixers look better with him,
and they get to the postseason.
They make a run through the playoffs.
Who's waiting for them but the Boston Celtics?
Wilt with the 76ers,
now we got a whole new cast of characters.
It's Chet Walker,
Lucious Jackson,
Hal Greer.
This is a damn good ball club,
but they are the clear underdogs still.
It was a tremendous series.
They take the Celtics seven games.
[Taylor] And in game seven...
The Celtics are up five in the final minute of the game,
so it seems like this one is all over.
[whistle blows]
But they call a foul.
Wilt makes two free throws to cut it to three.
And then on the next possession, with only a few seconds left...
The Sixers are able to get the ball back.
[Announcer] It goes into Chamberlain.
Chamberlain turns and stuffs the ball.
There are five seconds left.
Wilt dunks the ball to cut the lead to one.
The score was 110-109.
The baskets at the old Boston Garden
were uniquely attached.
There were what they called guide wires.
There were long cable cords tied up to the balcony.
Bill Russell takes the ball out of bounds and throws it in.
Russell's inbounds pass
hit the guide wire near the Celtic bench.
That's a violation.
The ball goes back to Philadelphia
with a chance to knock off the Celtics.
And there's timeout.
Classic Russell, he takes the blame.
Says, who's going to bail me out?
Setting up one of the most famous plays
in NBA history.
Play resumes, and Hal Greer is taking the ball out of bounds.
So the theory was throw it to Chet Walker.
If he misses, they have a very good chance
of an offensive rebound with Wilt crashing the boards.
[Announcer] Johnny?
[2nd Announcer] Greer's putting the ball into play.
He gets it out. Havlicek steals it!
Over to Sam Jones.
Havlicek stole the ball!
It's all over!
It's all over! It's all over!
[Wilt] Sure, we had to make the shot,
but there was no doubt in our minds
that it would go in.
We were meant to win this one.
I could feel it in my bones.
I can't describe how I feel,
all empty and sick to see it all end like this.
I'm beginning to think that I'm snake bit
losing out to Boston so many times.
As throughout his career, Wilt was blamed for the loss.
The narrative about this game,
I think this is a good example
of this idea called winning bias.
The field of study is cognitive science.
When a team wins, we start to look subconsciously
for all of the explanations for why the team won.
With Russell, you focus on the key block that he had
and the great rebound.
When a team loses, we do the same thing.
Let's go back over the course of the game
and say Wilt was at fault for the goaltender.
Wilt was at fault for missing his free throws.
It's based on this idea of heuristics.
A heuristic is a term for shortcut basically.
As humans, the way our mind works,
we can't sit around like some perfect supercomputer
and calculate all the options.
I'm gonna draw on some handful of past experiences
that help us tell a story that makes sense.
We're boiling down the complexity
into these bite-sized digestible pieces,
and it turns out that sometimes the stories that we tell
may not be that accurate.
So in this case, Havlicek steals the ball,
Russell gets off the hook.
You forget that Russell threw the ball
into the basket stanchion,
and instead Russell wins yet another game seven.
He wins another elimination game.
Now with Wilt, despite the fact
that at the end of this particular game,
he scored four points
just to put them in a position to win the game.
Even though that last play
had nothing to do with Wilt Chamberlain,
you're adding more to the fire
for that narrative that, you know,
he can't win the big one,
he can't win close games, he's a choker.
So this narrative emerges, right?
I guess the narrative was selfish, individual guy
versus ultimate team player.
The idea to have the giant to be beaten each time,
a lot of people loved that.
[Cherry] Wilt in his day was so domineering
and such a force in the game of basketball
that he was almost disliked in some respect.
He was always on trial.
I like to use the expression,
you know, no one loved Goliath.
People very easily were able to root against Wilt
because of the media.
That's where the Goliath came along.
Wilt was always Goliath, and Bill Russell was David.
Wilt was bigger and taller and stronger than everybody,
so why doesn't he just completely dominate
and win the championship every year?
Media people projected that out to the public.
One of the things about Bill Russell,
where he profited from Chamberlain's size,
is Bill Russell looked to be the underdog.
They were marketed, you know, and unfairly so,
as, you know, Russell being the good guy
and Wilt being the villain,
[Wilt] I feel like I've been chased my whole life.
I've been cast as the superstar you love to hate.
Bill Russell very famously didn't sign autographs.
He did not care if you liked him.
He didn't know you. You don't know him.
He did not care what you thought.
I think Wilt did care.
What they're doing is they're setting in motion
a certain way of thinking about basketball as a team game,
but featuring these prominent individuals leading their teams.
[Bill Russell] I was defense and he was offense,
And this was the greatest competitive thing,
I think, in the history of American sport.
They had two players that were a marketer's dream.
Little did anybody know then
that this would become the blueprint
that led the NBA to unprecedented success.
[Announcer] The NBA game of the week
brought to national television audiences.
Back in 1964,
the NBA signed a national television contract
with the ABC network.
The NBA was about to lose its television contract,
its small television contract.
Here came the Dipper.
[Announcer] Bill Russell
jumping against Wilt Chamberlain.
I must have heard it without exaggeration 50,000 times
that I used to watch you and Wilt on Sunday television,
and people make judgment
on which one they thought was the best.
I'm not sure that even someone like Michael Jordan
can be seen as historically important as Wilt Chamberlain,
because by the time Jordan came into the league,
the league was already on sound footing.
When Wilt came into the league, it wasn't.
So the league needed Wilt in a way that Wilt understood.
In 1965,
Wilt signs a contract with the 76ers for $100,000.
From the time I was, like, four years old,
I always thought there was a great need
to go out and work and to make money.
[Barbara Lewis] The milkman used to come
at 4:30 and 5:00 in the morning.
So Dip said, I'm gonna start going down
and working for the milkman.
And I said, how you gonna work for the milkman?
He said, watch me.
He would say, my mother told me
that I could help you deliver the milk,
which, of course, my mother did not tell him.
That was his way of making some change.
In the NBA,
where no player's making the money he was making.
Wilt Chamberlain was ahead of his time
not just athletically,
but also in terms of how he handled his business.
Even when he didn't have the option of free agency,
he could still take over the levers of power
with the threat of retirement.
I'll just go do the decathlon or I'll go play volleyball.
I'll join the Globetrotters again.
[Wilt] Money, I had it,
I demanded it, and I commanded it.
Yes, I was the father of the big dollar.
I had lawyers and accountants and business managers,
but I make my own deals
because I am the best businessman I know.
At one point, Wilt signed a series of one year deals
so that each season they would reassess his value
to make sure that he maximized his worth.
Breaking news.
LeBron James will not pick up the option
on the final year of his contract with the Cavaliers
and will become an unrestricted free agent.
What LeBron was doing with his one year deals
was showing everybody that you have the value and the leverage,
and Wilt was doing that 50 years earlier.
There's a way that Wilt Chamberlain
always gets seen as individualistic,
that he wasn't out there
advocating for all the players at the same time
the way an Oscar Robertson would
or the way a Bill Russell would,
and that's true to some extent.
Wilt was very much a solo artist.
But the impact of his efforts still benefited everybody.
As soon as Wilt Chamberlain got his $100,000 salary,
Bill Russell said to the Celtics,
y'all got to pay me more than that.
Wilt Chamberlain raised the salaries of all of us.
Wilt had such an impact
on the salary structure in the NBA,
we all were indebted to what he was able to do
when he negotiated for contracts.
But Wilt Chamberlain told his teammates and his friends,
don't believe for a minute that I'm getting paid 100,000.
I'm getting paid more.
They just don't want everyone to know it.
Bill Russell was the champion,
but Wilt Chamberlain was the draw.
He had that effect on people on and off the court.
[Wilt] I've always believed
that one should sow his wild oats
before settling down.
Apparently, by being a little larger than most,
I've got more oats to sow.
I believe in fidelity where marriage is concerned,
and my sexual appetite has not come close
to allowing me to think about settling down.
He did have a lot of girls.
They were models,
and a lot of them sent their pictures and stuff like that.
He comes into the locker room one day
and he said, I see this gorgeous girl
in this green Corvette.
She drives by me
and she waves at me like she knows me.
I got to get to meet this lady.
And I know exactly who it is,
but I don't want to say anything
because I don't want to get cut, you know.
So after the game, Wilt walks over to where we're standing,
and he, like, smiles at me like I'm doing him a good deed.
I found out who this person was,
and I'm gonna bring her to you, you know.
I said, Wilt, sorry,
but I want you to introduce you to my wife Chris.
And he, like, goes, oh, okay.
If that's the way it's gonna be, okay.
He was with a lot of women.
Just part of his life.
Fast forward 30 years...
It was still like that.
There's something compulsive
about so many sexual experiences.
It's about like a very powerful, immediate experience
that takes you into another realm,
some kind of altered state of mind.
And sex certainly does that, especially sex with new people.
[Wilt] I've always believed that lust
is a more natural part of us than love,
and that one can spend every waking moment
falling in and out of lust.
When he was on, when he was having a great time,
you were so blinded by the light.
He was just bigger than life.
He was something so amazing.
It was like you were watching a supernova
or something, you know?
And then when he would just slam the door shut,
it was like, oh, crash.
You would crash down.
You had to get used to it. It was like a drug.
You had to go off cold turkey.
He would just not call.
There was this quote that I read from him
that people don't understand
that it's so much easier
to sleep with a thousand different women
than to spend a thousand nights with one woman.
Because a thousand nights with one woman
would require a depth of familiarity, intimacy,
going deeper and deeper into getting to know each other,
enjoying that, knowing how to do that.
Which is why I think he had so many relationships
that could only develop this far.
A night, a few nights.
Great, with the great attitude, respect, pleasure, all of that.
But there's nowhere for it to go.
We had to stop being lovers
once we realized that we loved each other.
He couldn't have sex with somebody he loved.
They had to be just... sexual objects.
That's who he was.
People don't believe that I didn't sleep with him.
What other reason would there be
to have this relationship with Wilt Chamberlain?
He just touched me.
There was something about the fact
that he was so interested
in being my friend no matter what.
I'm a photographer.
I met Wilt on a photography assignment
in 1977 in Vienna, Austria.
I was working on a film called Holocaust.
I had been in the bar with some of the producers
and some of the actors,
and I hear a voice saying to me, you look like a little doll.
And I look up, and it's Wilt Chamberlain.
And I said, everyone looks like a little doll to you.
He came back to the table, and everybody was excited.
He was really very smart, and he amused everybody there.
Then I found him in front of my door one night,
and that's when he made a move.
And I said, you know, Wilt,
you just have to forget about that.
We can be friends.
He was really pushy, you know.
Wilt, you know, got what he wanted pretty much,
and I just yelled at him.
And everybody--in those days,
people, they thought it was funny.
It really wasn't fun--
But anyway but besides that, he shouldn't have done it.
Never did anything like that again ever.
So he decided that it was okay
to keep me as his friend because I told him the truth.
I think there was something about that, too.
I mean, I was a woman who was not--
I wasn't looking for anything from him.
That helped the friendship.
So he continued to call me.
You know, this was an extraordinary human being,
incredibly smart.
I found him very sweet.
He liked to tell me things,
talk to me, ask my opinion.
He knew I wasn't a bullshitter.
He could tell me anything, and I could tell him anything.
He was just a very complicated person.
When I met Wilt, he was in Vienna
because he was coaching a female volleyball team,
which I found really interesting.
He was familiar with all of these women athletes
way back in the seventies when no one even knew them,
and he was going to their games.
I met Wilt in 1974 through Lynda Huey.
That summer, they decided that Wilt
was going to sponsor our track club.
He definitely brought some attention
to women's track at that time.
You know, he created his own women's track team
just because he wanted to make sure
they had support financially, you know,
had, you know, structure and things like that.
He treated us like daughters.
He was very gentle and very soft spoken.
I mean, he had a deep voice, but he was very genuine.
His sister Barbara was a terrific athlete.
He was doing this in honor of her,
and we lucked out and got to be a part of that.
[Lewis] Dip and I, we both love to do track.
He would always try to make me
the fastest on the girls team
and just take my hand.
Of course, he's taking these giant steps
and just keep making me run around the track all the time.
[Wilt] My sister Barbara was a great athlete.
She was the fastest woman around school,
but there was no place for her to compete,
so she never developed like she could have.
That's why Wilt's Wonder Women was formed,
to give these women a chance.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee, back in the Olympics,
he sponsored her.
She explained to me that without Wilt
and the programs he had set up for women,
she never would have become the great star she was
in track and field.
[Wilt] I want to make it clear
that I appreciate women's unending campaign for respect.
I want to see women have a fair chance
to demonstrate their athletic talent
and to get the recognition they deserve.
Maybe I sound like a woman's libber.
In a way, I am.
Wilt supporting women's sports
doesn't mean that he still wasn't a womanizer.
Two things can be true.
That does not mean he was not a nice guy.
That does not mean he did not love his family.
And I think that's where it's hard to reconcile
who Wilt Chamberlain is for women.
It was December of '65.
It was a Friday night in Boston.
The game was on television,
and I remember hearing the score was actually 13-13,
and Wilt's number was number 13.
Ike Richman had a heart attack and died on the spot.
It was terrible.
He used to get very excited at the games.
I mean, he used to really get worked up.
He used to feud with the referees.
When you think about it, it's not surprising
that he had a heart attack at a game.
[Wilt] We won the game for Ike,
but Philadelphia was never the same for me again.
Few events in my life
have saddened me as much as his death.
Wilt called me a couple days later,
and he says, get dressed, you're coming with me.
I said, where am I going?
He says we're going to Ike's funeral.
And that was so sad.
Wilt was a very caring person,
and, you know, there was irony
because my dad and Ike Richman
had been able to get the players, you know,
with the ability to win the championship,
but Ike never saw it.
In 1965, I was drafted by Ike Richman
and the Philadelphia 76ers.
My first encounter with Wilt Chamberlain
was at training camp.
And I'm looking over the balcony,
looking out at the ocean,
and all of a sudden this purple Bentley pulls up,
and this man unwinds out of the car,
and I go, oh, my goodness.
To say it was intimidating is an understatement.
I knew Wilt had an apartment in New York,
and I eventually got the opportunity
to drive Wilt to New York
because I'm originally from Brooklyn.
And there I am in his purple Bentley
where I can't touch the pedals.
I have to move the seat up to touch.
This is the only car I've ever been in my entire life
where I couldn't touch.
I'm 6-7, and I could not touch the pedal.
I was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers
from the Baltimore Bullets.
I just made the NBA All Rookie team,
and Ike Richman traded for me.
I grew up right in the West Philadelphia area.
I was playing in the middle school league there.
So in our community,
you would have professional athletes coming to view you,
and Wilt came by and saw me play.
A lot of the older ball players mentored us.
You could go to his house.
At times, we would come and have lunch there.
His parents were welcoming. They were warm.
So it's very personal to me
about how Wilt has seen me as a little boy
and I'm getting ready to be a man to play with him.
He said, I expect a lot out of you.
We need you.
You could be the catalyst to make us reach another level,
Because now we have a team
where we have five defensive players.
1967, Philadelphia,
Alex Hannum is back for round two with Wilt.
My teammates were ecstatic
because they felt that respect factor
between Wilt and Hannum was very good.
Wilt did not live in Philadelphia.
When Alex came, there was no divas.
You will live in Philly.
And this time he kind of ups the ante again.
He says, Wilt, how about you score way less?
The global offense of the team overall will be better.
When he gets the ball,
he's dishing it off to teammates.
We would all be moving around the guy that has the ball.
Wilt finally got the pieces that fit in
that could eliminate him having to score that much.
And then when the defense
doesn't pay enough attention to him
and you play him in single coverage,
his scoring efficiency spikes,
optimizing the offense.
Wilt has reached a point in his life
where I don't have to go out there and score 40,
or are you going to go out there and score 30?
Well, in fact, he scored 24 points a game.
That was taking full advantage of what he had to offer
to a team playing that way.
There's no question.
[Taylor] And this amazing thing happens.
Philadelphia ends up producing
the most efficient offense in NBA history
up until that point.
They also win 68 games,
which is a record for victories,
and just 13 losses.
Wilt just wanted one thing, and that was to win.
Guess who's waiting for them again in the playoffs?
It's the Boston Celtics,
who are now on championship eight in a row
when they meet in 1967.
But this time, with this quality offense,
Philadelphia is just way too much,
and they basically overwhelm the Celtics.
The first team to really beat the Celtics
with Bill Russell on the court.
If you could see how he felt after we dethroned them.
Finally I'm a winner.
People had signs, Boston, you will die.
People were blowing cigar smoke in Red Auerbach's face.
Beating San Francisco
was nowhere near as difficult as beating Boston.
The Sixers played the San Francisco Warriors,
led by Rick Barry.
We just tried to play as good as we can,
play good team defense, and we gave them a heck of a battle.
So here we have the team Wilt left.
We acquitted ourselves pretty well,
but when Wilton was on a team
with some really great players, he won a championship.
They're mobbing Chamberlain.
Hello, is he ever happy.
Wilt has finally won the big one.
That one team that he played on
with Billy Cunningham,
that team would have beaten a number of the teams
that Bill Russell was on.
They were a great basketball team.
That was his crowning moment.
[Wilt] When I was a little boy,
I used to think of myself as climbing a high wall.
People were helping me up,
but a lot of others were holding me down.
Sometimes I'd wonder if you'd make it all the way.
In 1967, I guess I did.
We had the better team, so we won.
No, I am not surprised.
The better team always wins.
Gentlemen, would you join me here?
Wilt, let me have your right hand.
My right hand.
Your right hand. Let's hold it up to this camera.
Now your right hand.
Man, this don't mean nothing.
David slew Goliath.
Well, why'd you throw...
Wilt was approached by a group of businessmen
who wanted Wilt to fight a guy named Muhammad Ali.
Bill Russell and a few more players
are gonna be my sparring partners
to get ready.
[Wilt] Fighting Muhammad Ali
would combine the two kinds of challenges
I had always responded to doing,
something everyone said couldn't be done
and beating another man at his game.
When they announced that he was gonna fight Muhammad Ali,
and that was like,
first, I thought my father would never stop laughing,
and he was not the type that laughed a lot.
-Any predictions? -One prediction.
Timber!
[laughter]
He thought it was crazy to even think
about trying to fight Muhammad Ali
or any other fighter.
You're not a fighter.
That's nice. You'll get what you want.
And it was the fight that never came to be.
[Wilt] At the last minute, I decided not to do it.
I was like a groom who wasn't sure
the night before his wedding.
I would have had to give up basketball,
which I wasn't ready to do.
I've always been the kind of person
who needs specific, concrete goals and challenges.
What else was there to do?
So I decided I had to lead the league in NBA assists.
Wilt is passing even more,
and some people think maybe too much.
He leads the league in total assists that year.
This prompted some critics to say Wilt
just cared about stats and not the team.
In interviewing and talking with people of that era,
many of them felt
he was much too concerned with the statistics.
But imagine being talented enough,
deciding one year,
I think I'll lead the league in assists
and then going out and doing it.
Whether he was fixated
on leading the league in assists or not,
I don't know even how much that mattered,
because they still finished first in the league.
They still win 62 games.
He could have gone too far with the passing
and he could be the MVP of the league
as he was again for the third consecutive year
and put the team in a position to win a championship.
Both of those things can be true.
And once again, the Sixers
meet our old friend the Boston Celtics.
In '68, two things happened: I broke my wrist
against the Knickerbockers in the series before that.
But most importantly was before the game,
Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Good evening.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King,
39 years old and a Nobel Peace Prize winner
and the leader of the nonviolent civil rights movement
in the United States
was assassinated in Memphis tonight.
A sniper's bullet cut down Dr. King
as he stood on a hotel balcony in Memphis.
To say everyone was devastated was an understatement.
We were just walking around in a fog.
Russell knew Martin Luther King very well.
He had been there for the I Have A Dream speech.
So the two of them are with their respective teams,
and they really felt like, we shouldn't play.
It wouldn't be right to play.
So both teams separately voted not to play.
But then what happened was the Commissioner came in
and the mayors from both cities
contacted Wilt and Russ
because they represented their teams,
and said, listen, turn on your television set.
There's rioting across our country.
We really feel if you play this game,
you'd give all these people something else to think about
for this one evening.
And so both of them went back
and, you know, talked with their teams.
The league wanted us to play,
but I was very much against it.
We really relied on Russell and Chamberlain
to help make those decisions.
So both teams voted.
[MacMullan] Wilt still voted not to play,
but his team as a whole voted to play,
and he adhered to their wishes and so the game was played.
That's the only thing that I regret
is that I played.
From my personal standpoint, it's difficult
because I was just emotionally drained.
[Wilt] I knew Dr. King,
but not as well as I would have liked to know him.
I respected the man
and I believed in what he believed in.
I've been thinking about it
ever since I heard about what happened.
Numb like, you know?
[MacMullan] In an unprecedented move,
the NBA paused its season after that game
so Wilt and Russ
could walk to the Ebenezer Church in Atlanta
along with Martin Luther King's family.
Wilt and Russell were the first guys
that really had the juice
to be able to say to the people that ran this NBA,
hey, this is important to us.
We need to respect the legacy of Martin Luther King
by doing this.
That was really the first hint
of playoff empowerment
all the way back then in the sixties.
Play resumes and they were up three to one
against the Celtics in the series.
No team at that point had come back from three one,
but you don't have Billy Cunningham
for the entire series.
The Celtics come back, they force a 7th game.
The Celtics win the game.
The Philly team is lambasted for blowing it and losing.
Wilt got heavily criticized.
I fell into it,
and probably one of the biggest regrets in my career,
dumbest things I ever said in my life
is when I called him a loser one time in a book.
And that was not deserving.
It was the team that failed,
because this is a team game.
Nothing got attached to Greer.
Nothing got attached to Wali.
Nothing got attached to Chet.
It all got attached to Wilt.
Because in this game seven,
Wilt only ends up taking two shots in the fourth quarter.
[Wilt] After the game, not one writer came up to me
and said, how come the ball didn't come to you?
Not one.
But all of them did come and ask me
how come you didn't shoot more?
In this series, we don't have a lot of footage.
We don't know why Wilt only took two shots.
He could have been passing too much,
but maybe they're getting open shots.
Without knowing anything more,
maybe that story sticks with Wilt
because it had been in so many people's minds
for such a long time.
The whole thing fell apart.
Alex Hannum was gone from a potential dynasty
or at least something that would compete
nose to nose every year against the Celtics.
It just dissipated.
It was just like that.
[Wilt] But I had more important things that the 76ers
to think about that summer of 1968.
For the first time in my life, I got involved in politics,
real politics at the highest level.
Wilt, one thing that I've been concerned about
is what's happening
to the young people of this country generally.
You know, there's a lot of unrest
among young people, all people,
and particularly the young people in the Black community.
Give me an idea as to what they really want.
What is it that we can do to give them more hope?
Actually, I feel as though
that there are many young Negroes
that are in a position
to go into business for themselves,
and they're definitely qualified.
What they need is some help,
some loans that maybe will stimulate their interest.
If you go looking forward
after Martin Luther King's assassination,
all of a sudden it wasn't just Bill Russell
talking about the civil rights of Black Americans.
I think Wilt realized I have some power here.
I can make a difference. I can have a voice in this.
When you think about the Republican Party now
and you hear that Wilt Chamberlain
was a Republican,
that sounds different
than to have heard that during the 1960s.
For a long time, Black people who could vote
favored the Republican Party
because Abraham Lincoln, a Republican,
was credited with freeing the slaves.
The Democratic Party
was the Southern segregationist party.
Wilt was a worldly person
that would always gather people to talk about community.
It's not given enough credit to how he was an activist.
Wilt believed that if Black people
could get the right access to capital
and invest in our communities
and have government support for those investments,
that we could thrive.
One of the things that Richard Nixon was pushing
was Black capitalism.
[Nixon] Not only have you been very successful
in the field of sports,
but you also have been successful in a business career.
Now, do you think a lot of these young Negroes
are gonna be able to make it if they get this chance?
If given a chance, I think that they're ready
to go out there and start their own businesses, you know,
and be bosses in their own business, so to speak.
He would say, well, if you met Richard Nixon, you'd like him.
He's a good guy.
I said, I don't know about that.
Richard Nixon comes along
and engages in what he calls the Southern Strategy,
which is basically, we are going to go after
what had previously been white Southern Democrats
who support segregation.
We're going to recruit the racists.
[Wilt] Does that mean he exploited me? Sure.
Richard and Republicans exploited me to get Black votes,
and I exploited them to provide Black input.
Looking back on it, I suspect
I was also subconsciously influenced to back Richard
by several things he and I had in common.
Throughout his political career, he'd been called a loser,
the guy who could never win the big one.
Me, too.
When you lose, you're forced to confront yourself
as you really are
way down deep inside.
You gain insight and perspective on yourself.
That a guy who always wins
just never gets.