[Announcer] Sitting majestically on one of the highest hills
in the sumptuous Bel Air section of Los Angeles
it's a domicile as dazzling as Disneyland
and even larger than its owner, who is a giant of a man.
Wilt agreed to give us his own description
of this marvelous pad on a hilltop.
Here he is big as life.
Well, like most people,
I always dreamed of owning a home.
Wilt built his own house.
From the outside,
the house looked like Darth Vader's helmet.
There were triangles everywhere.
As first I thought is he doing this right?
But then it ended up being a fabulous, fabulous house.
[Wilt Chamberlain] As you look around the house,
it really represents me,
and it's just really too complex
to just sum it up in a sentence.
It really is a lot of different things,
as I think I'm probably a lot of different things.
He had wolf fur on the floor and over on the couch.
I'm, like, wow, this really is wolf.
I mean, it has whiskers and everything.
There were doors that were nine feet tall
so he wouldn't have to duck.
Then he had water all through his house.
There was a hole.
We could literally jump in from the living room,
and then we would just swim under the house
to take us around the pool.
I loved the round waterbed.
We called that the triple X room.
We would go in there and play in there
and jump in there.
As I became an adult,
I wondered to myself, okay,
when was he doing in that room? [laughs]
That was a special room.
I am a bachelor,
so I tried to create a type of house
that would give me the mood
that a bachelor would normally like to have.
If I'm not mistaken,
before Hugh Hefner purchased his mansion,
he used to borrow Wilt Chamberlain's home
for his parties.
Was I thinking in my teens,
you don't wanna get a job, you wanna invent a job.
Wilt Chamberlain invented the world famous,
photogenic, millionaire,
seven-foot-tall basketball player.
He created a job that did not exist before.
Hello,MTV Cribviewers.
It is I, Shaquille O'Neal.
This is my house.
By the time you get to Shaq,
Shaq's just applying for that job.
When he built his house,
Wilt called it Ursa Major,
the Big Dipper.
Right next to the bed, there was a button.
Press that button, the ceiling went back
and there was the sky.
[Gary Pomerantz] And at night,
he would look up at a starry night.
[Robert Cherry] And he liked to gaze at something
even bigger than himself.
So we're gonna call this the Saboteur Hall of Fame.
Wilt Chamberlain, he's really kind of the poster boy
for the Saboteur Hall of Fame.
In 1965, Frank Deford wrote aSports Illustratedarticle
about how Wilt
had just forced his way out of San Francisco.
He tried to leave Kansas twice.
He tried to leave Philly after his rookie year.
And meanwhile they have no idea
he's gonna do it again in 1968
when he forces them to trade him to the Lakers.
[Wilt] All satisfying stories have a bad guy,
a villain to make the good guy look even better.
During my playing days, I was a classic bad guy.
Controversy followed me wherever I went.
Many times, though, the bad guy becomes the good guy
as the plot unfolds.
If Ike Richman was still alive, during that period of time,
I think Wilt would have stayed in Philadelphia
the rest of his career.
[Announcer]On the right, president Irv Kosloff,
sole owner after the death of Ike Richman.
Back in '68, we had a situation
where Wilt and Irv Kosloff had a disagreement.
Ike Richman had promised Wilt a piece of the 76ers.
That he would have a share of the team,
and my dad acknowledged that that may be true.
But there never was anything in writing,
so was Wilt gonna buy it?
Was it going to be in lieu of salary?
I think it's highly unlikely
that we were just gonna give him a share of the team,
because he had no basis for it
other than a verbal promise that Ike Richman told him.
The 76ers wouldn't be worth anything
if not for Wilt Chamberlain.
He knew what he was worth.
He was way before his time
to be able to perceive why can't I own a team?
But my dad felt one owner making decisions
was the best way to do things.
And Wilt said, look,
if you're not gonna treat me right, I'm out.
There was no free agency back in those days.
That didn't come till later.
So the players really didn't have much say
in what they did.
But Wilt was, like, if I don't like it here,
I'm gonna figure out a way
that you're gonna not want me here anymore
so I can get over there.
Wilt did a lot of complaining to the press.
We're out here to make money.
We're playing something that we love to do,
but the primary interest for you is how much you can make.
On July 9, 1968,
Wilt's traded to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Sometimes I sit back
and I just wonder the impact that had
on the whole franchise.
Maybe it could have been resolved
if he had part of the team.
That might have been the answer.
It would have changed the course of history, too, by the way.
If that team could have stayed together
and could have stayed healthy,
no one would have beaten them for a few years.
They had it all.
The thing that Wilt Chamberlain often gets criticized for
is the thing that players do now all the time,
which is moving around a lot.
Player empowerment has always been
a scary dynamic in professional sports.
Let me be very specific.
Black player empowerment
has been a scary dynamic for professional sports.
The people who did it earliest
often are the ones that are most villainized,
and in Wilt Chamberlain's case,
it's astounding that during that time
where speaking up for yourself as a Black person
could cost you your life,
that he was willing to say
this is what I demand.
Wilt understood people are treating me like a commodity,
so why don't I act like one?
And you know what? I wanna go to L.A.
Very happy to announce
that Wilt Chamberlain has signed
a five year contract
with the Los Angeles Lakers.
You would have thought the Lakers
had won the lottery, right?
Because you get Wilt Chamberlain.
You've got Jerry West, one of the great players of all time,
Elgin Baylor, one of the greatest players of all time,
This Lakers team in 1969 is so fun
because they were the first super team ever.
I feel very, very happy that I've been traded to a team
that I believe may stand a chance to be--
go down in the records
as one of the best teams in basketball ever.
Everyone thought the Lakers
were going to walk over the league,
and that's not quite what happened.
Butch Van Breda Kolff, the coach,
got off on the wrong foot with Wilt
and never got on the right foot.
There was a total personality clash,
and he was asking things of me to do
that I didn't feel altogether that they were right.
The success of great teams
comes from trying to get more than the sum of your parts.
There's only one ball,
and you need to learn to share that ball
in a way that makes you more efficient.
Wilt loved to set up on the left block,
but Butch Van Breda Kolff
was focusing on spacing,
setting screens,
similar to Bill Russell in the high post,
creating driving lanes for West and Baylor.
But Wilt doesn't want to move up to the high post.
Part of it is probably selfishly motivated
in the sense that he doesn't want to play away from the ball.
Well, if you're Wilt Chamberlain,
you're like, really?
I'm the greatest talent you've ever coached.
I can score at will,
and you're gonna have me set screens?
I can understand Wilt chafing at that, to be honest.
With Van Breda Kolff's style of play,
you're empowering Wilt's teammates.
When you play the way they were in Philadelphia,
you're running more through Wilt,
and he has the ball.
He's making more decisions.
Wilt wasn't used to sharing the ball,
and it didn't work.
It didn't work too well.
Those guys had trouble meshing
on the floor and off the floor.
I probably wasn't affected as much as Elgin,
because he didn't have enough room
to do the things he normally did.
It was a chore to try to find a way
that they could both be successful at the same time.
It was an awkward period for me
because I was so close to Elgin.
And then Wilt, I didn't even know him, okay?
And because he was sort of aloof.
He would tell some outlandish stories
that, oh, my gosh, I didn't...
He told me he drove from New York City to San Francisco
in 24 hours.
Elgin and I would kind of look at each other and...
I don't think that's true. [laughs]
[Wilt] I love to drive.
I've gone across country 20 times, always alone.
[Reporter] What do you think about when you're driving?
[Wilt] Who I am. What I'd like to be.
Going fast. Flirting a little bit with, um...
not with death, but, you know,
just those things that seem to be what we like to do
but are a little bit afraid of.
He wasn't afraid to say things.
If something's bothering him, he didn't give a damn who it was.
He'd say it.
[Wilt] I'm a loud extrovert
who's not afraid to say something good about myself
or something bad about someone else
when the occasion warrants it.
The two of them were like banty roosters
going at each other.
There was no respect there.
When you don't have respect, that's what you're gonna have.
Despite having this clash,
at the end of the year,
the Lakers are still competitive.
They're still a very good team.
With all that great talent, they start playing better.
And they reach the NBA finals.
And guess who was waiting for them
in the finals of the NBA?
Number six and friends.
If we tried to write the novel,
it might be dismissed as, oh, don't give me that.
You're not gonna have them play the Celtics again, right?
Yes, we are.
And the Lakers are favored.
Everyone's always been talking about
how the Celtics have all the talent.
Well, now you finally do.
This was as valuable an NBA finals
as there had been to that point.
The series has these back and forth zigzags.
I don't think it was widely known
that that was Russ's last game,
but certainly those guys knew on the team.
One of the things I said before the last game
was that we were gonna beat the Lakers.
The teams I played on could play any style.
And the way we were gonna beat 'em is we were gonna run.
[Announcer]Wilt Chamberlain driving on Russell.
18 points for Wilt.
Even though Wilt played well...
[Announcer]Chamberlain with the rebound.
He has over 20 rebounds.
The Celtics take a huge lead
going into the fourth quarter.
[Announcer]Fourth period.
But this time, he has Jerry West.
Jerry West, this incredible player
who couldn't call himself champion.
He was the noble loser in those days, you know, to the Celtics.
He lost to them six times in the finals.
Like with Wilt Chamberlain,
it was his misfortune to play at the same time
that Bill Russell and Sam Jones
and all the Celtics did.
[Announcer]They have to make up 17 points
and they've gotta get that ball down quickly.
They're looking for Jerry West.
Howell switches off on West.
And Jerry West starts this incredible comeback,
draining jumper after jumper.
Jerry West...another one!
And the Celtics sense trouble.
With five minutes left in the fourth quarter...
Here's Havlicek.
Rebound coming off and Chamberlain gets it.
Chamberlain hurt his leg.
Chamberlain can't move, Chris.
He's down there holding that knee.
[PA Announcer]20 second official's timeout.
He comes out.
And the lead gets down to seven.
And then to five, and then to three.
[Announcer]The Lakers within one point of the lead.
Wilt is on the bench,
so now you're thinking, is he coming back in?
We could use him now with the way the tide has turned.
He goes to his coach, says I'm ready to go back in,
and the coach says, we don't need you.
[Bob Ryan] It's a one point game.
The Celtics have the ball.
[Announcer]Havlicek.
Erickson.
Knocked away, but Nelson gets it.
He goes and tips the ball.
It goes right to Don Nelson,
and Don Nelson nails a lucky jump shot.
The Celtics win their 11th championship.
That ball must have gone in the air 15 feet.
I could not believe it.
The disappointment, bitter disappointment.
That was probably my lowest ebb
in my life as a professional athlete.
That one game.
And the coach left after that.
Three weeks after the game,
Russell was speaking at the University of Wisconsin,
and he started to criticize Wilt.
[Jackie MacMullan] He really called Wilt out
and said, you know, short of a broken back,
you should have been out there.
He felt it took away from his final game,
from his legacy.
I have to be honest.
I thought Bill was out of line.
Of all people,
there's no one else on the earth
that would have mattered more
to have his respect than Russell.
The inference that somehow he quit
and that Russell was indignant over it,
it bothered Wilt so much,
they didn't speak for decades.
Wilt loved Los Angeles from a lifestyle perspective.
Well, he's the highest paid player in all of sports.
But he wasn't just getting his money
and just, you know, hanging out.
He was investing.
Wilt was the first professional basketball player
that when they retired,
he didn't have to work another day in his life.
As bad as it was,
we thought, when he was coming up,
God turned it all around.
My mother was worried about him,
and he was able to take care of her.
[Wilt] Of course, it didn't take me long to realize
that it's not the amount of money you have.
It's what you do with it that brings contentment.
My parents and several of my aunts and uncles and cousins
actually lived in an apartment building
that my uncles owns.
We called it Chamberlain Villa.
28 apartments.
There was a swimming pool
so mom can have a swimming pool.
My dad was loving sitting on the patio
watching my mother jump in the pool
like a crazy lady.
But then my mother was a lot like Dip.
She was a natural.
The adults hung out.
It was really like a little community,
a really close little community.
And then we'd be in the back yard shooting shots.
Kids would lose their mind
if they was around the neighborhood and see his car.
A Ferrari or a Maserati
or a Rolls-Royce.
He bought that Chamberlain Villa for my father basically.
Because my father was getting older,
and we didn't trust his health.
My dad died, you know, when we were still in California.
My mother didn't do well after my father passed,
and she came to the East coast,
but she didn't want to live with none of us.
She wanted to live by herself.
I was at home in my house in Santa Monica
when he called me from Philadelphia.
His mother was dying.
[monitor beeps]
[Wilt] I lost both my mother and father
to the disease of cancer,
the most extraneous, indescribable.
Wilt came home.
That was a good thing.
All the other kids had been around,
and then he said, when I got there,
the others left and it was just me.
There was the incredibly moving thing I read
about the end of her life,
where he got into bed with her
to nurse her till the end.
[monitor beeps]
[monitor flatlines]
And she died in his arms.
When I think about my Uncle Dippy,
I think about just how warm he was.
He was a hands-on uncle,
almost like a father figure.
Do you have any children?
I'm a single man.
I'm not sure. If I have some children--
Yeah, but wouldn't you like to be a father?
[ding dong]
Hey-hey.
How you doing, cuz?
Good to see you, man. Good to see you.
Looking good, looking good.
Welcome back, welcome back.
My full name is Aaron Levi,
and Wilt Chamberlain was my biological father.
You know, being in his family, I hate to say it.
We got a lot of stuff
where, like, oh, I think I could be...
And it's just, like, no, no, no.
Come on, man, you're not.
Aaron brought more than a story.
He brought documentation.
It's called a non-identifying letter,
and the description of the biological father
was he's a professional basketball player,
six-foot-ten, and that he had a connection to Kansas.
I was born in San Jose, California.
January 27, 1965.
I knew I was adopted.
I knew our adoptive parents were Jewish.
I knew I was half Black, half white.
All my brothers and sisters were adopted.
I'm a little bit over 6-5.
I definitely felt looked at as a kid
because I'm tall and Black.
I can only guess how it would have been
for someone who looked like Wilt.
It wasn't till I got a little older
that I started thinking more about, well,
you know, where are my parents
and why did they, you know, let me go?
And it was a long journey
to find my birth mother.
She did confirm immediately
that Wilt was my father.
She met him in a jazz club in San Francisco.
He was playing for the Warriors.
It was the sixties.
The truth is it was a one night stand,
and it was very clear to me
that this was a big secret for her,
and that maybe only one or two people
even now know that she had a child.
It's kind of funny. I see some of the resemblance, though.
-Yeah. -You know what I mean?
The first thing I noticed about me and Wilt
is the eyebrows.
What my mother told me
was that she did reach out to Wilt
and said that, you know, she was pregnant,
but that she was going to put me up for adoption.
And according to her, he said, okay.
Yeah, this is when--because he's coming out of high school then.
And then there I am right here.
I like your hair.
Finally do our own little thing, right?
Yeah, it's...
My Aunt Barbara told me
that he would have been very surprised
that I existed,
because he thought that my birth mother
was considering abortion.
But he would have been happy.
-How's Peggy doing? -She's doing well.
But because there's different versions of the story,
I sometimes still think about, you know,
what did he actually know?
Once I confirmed when I did a DNA test
that Wilt was my father,
it was this very strange moment
because I knew his name probably at three or four years old.
You know, you could not not see him on TV.
Reaching high
All along the borderline
I'm Wilt Chamberlain.
His life was epic in so many ways.
He's in a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Aah!
I'm more intimidating in my BVDs.
He's stuffed inside a Volkswagen bug in an ad.
He's on TV all the time.
Hey, it's nice to see you guys again.
Oh, it's great to be here, Wilt.
He is spectacular.
It doesn't mean he's a perfect person.
I suppose if you're a spectacle all your life
that it would make sense
that you are also spectacular.
Building his own race car was amazing.
He was gambling.
We were playing them in this exhibition,
and he said, I gotta be at a party, you know,
for, you know, the changing of the showgirls
over at the Stardust.
So he said, go cash these in.
$20,000.
I went and cashed it in.
I was making 15,000 for the season,
and I gave him $20,000 that I cashed in for him,
and he said, hey, come with me to the party.
The first time I ever met him in person,
come out of a restaurant in Santa Monica, California,
and there in a white Rolls-Royce
with two dogs the size of small horses,
a beautiful blonde woman, is Wilt Chamberlain.
And he's got the wrap around tangerine sunglasses.
He's got an African walking stick.
He's got a beret.
His feet are propped up against the steering wheel.
No shoes.
I said, Wilt Chamberlain, I'd love to have you on the show.
He goes, Roy Firestone, I'd love to do the show,
but you have to understand, I'm trying to keep a low profile.
He was a peacock.
Man, he looked good. He had that big medallion on.
And when he wore those suede velvet shirts he had,
then he was really cool.
Long fringe leather jacket and pants.
Of course, they had to be custom made
because who makes clothes for a seven-footer?
Wilt Chamberlain was the original gangster of fashion
for NBA players.
[laughs] Well, he thinks he dresses hard,
but my mother was person that liked us to look nice,
so we all dressed well.
So because we dressed well,
he thinks he's in fashion, too, but he's not.
Keeping him in his place. [chuckles]
Nine games into the 1970 season,
Wilt Chamberlain takes a pass,
starts to dribble towards the basket
and collapses.
It was the first time
that I saw a distressed look on his face.
I got the news that he was gonna miss a long time.
His patellar tendon in his right knee was ruptured.
It was the same knee
that he wrenched in the '69 finals.
The orthopedic surgeons thought
that he may never play basketball again.
[Wilt] My body was the one thing
I'd always been able to count on.
Now my body had failed me.
Wilt rehabbed his knee
on the beaches at Santa Monica.
He went and ran on the sand.
Gene Selznick, the king of the beach,
taught him the game of volleyball for rehab,
because running around in the sand,
you get to really work your legs.
He remembered me from when he was on the Globetrotters.
I got into volleyball before basketball.
So I started playing a lot with Wilt.
And we hung out and we played cards together.
And they're all cheating.
Wilt cheated at backgammon, he cheated at cards.
Let's face it. Wilt did not like to lose at anything.
And then talk about yelling and screaming.
We were the loudest on the beach.
Everybody's going, what's going on over there?
But he had fun.
I think Wilt just loved it.
You go to the beach and everyone's in a bathing suit,
so you don't know if they're rich or they're poor.
And everyone opened their arms to Wilt.
They loved him.
[Wilt] I was forced to do
some serious thinking about myself
and to take stock of Wilt Chamberlain the man.
He had a whole new subculture of friends
that he really did things with
and liked him not just because
he was the best basketball player for the Lakers,
but for who he was.
I mean, I think those dudes down on the beach
knew Wilt better than any of us as teammates.
People left him alone out there when he was doing--
and maybe that's where he felt...
he felt, um...more normal.
[Wilt] I found out
I really didn't need being the center of attention
to be happy.
And that led to him loving outdoor and indoor volleyball,
and that's another phase of Wilt's life.
Years later, he didn't go straight to retirement.
He went straight into volleyball.
People would flock to all these volleyball matches
that he would be part of.
Wilt put volley ball on the map.
You know, you would think he would have been spoiled
in this or that, but he wasn't.
He had good values about hard work.
And way back in the seventies,
when he was coming back from his knee injury,
I'm convinced that the reason
that he came back so much quicker
was because he was running in that soft sand every day.
He put in 10 hours of rehab almost every day.
Now, even with modern surgery,
it's a good year
to where you could come back and play.
Well, he came back after four and a half months.
Well, we're hoping it's strong enough.
You know, it really feels different, I must say.
The only way we can really test it
is to try it, you know.
It's unfortunate that it can only be proven
by an error, which would be a very costly error.
This is the guy that quit and didn't wanna play
and came back four and a half months
after fricking surgery for the playoffs.
And they make it all the way to the NBA finals.
[Announcer]NBA basketball
is being brought to you by Salem filter cigarettes,
with the taste that's springtime soft,
menthol fresh.
The 1970 finals
were the Lakers against the New York Knicks,
led by Willis Reed.
And there are very clear clips in the 1970 finals
where Wilt looks much stiffer.
Just getting up and down the court,
where you can see him laboring.
In the middle of a tough series...
Willis Reed injures his hip.
I was there in game five when Willis went down,
and now the Knicks played the entire second half
with nobody over 6-6 of consequence,
and Wilt did nothing in the second half.
And they lost the game and Wilt got criticized
that he didn't have that killer instinct.
You know what happened in game six though, by the way.
After all the ballyhoo, Wilt went for 45 and 27
and they won the game.
So here it is. It's game seven.
We have theater. Theater counts.
[Announcer]Tonight its a one game showdown.
New York hoping that Willis Reed will play.
I think we see Willis coming out.
There he comes right now.
Willis Reed literally limps onto the floor.
This is certainly amazing.
You never heard anything like that in your life.
[Announcer]Frazier then slows it down,
is picked up by Jerry West.
Top of the post, Reed, good!
Makes the first two jumpers.
That was the only two baskets he made all game.
The momentum shifts, and you can't stop it.
[Announcer]Frazier.
And then it was the Clyde Frazier game.
36 points, 19 assists.
We have a new NBA champion!
But the story needs to be--
Congratulations.
You offered I think the best
that the human spirit can offer.
Willis Reed's almost put on the sporting Mount Rushmore
for his effort.
It was like a big miracle.
You know what a miracle is?
A miracle is getting on that freaking court
four months after patellar tendon surgery,
competing for the NBA title.
That's a freaking miracle.
Winning changes things.
The theater could have been Wilt Chamberlain,
after rehabbing from a knee injury
and winning the game for the Lakers.
Because he didn't win the championship that year,
no one remembers.
You know, you're talking about
Wilt's surgically repaired knee.
I forgot completely about it.
Because at the end of the game,
there goes Goliath again.
I don't think it's fair to him at all.
That was one of the most remarkable recoveries
from an injury ever in the history of the game.
Ever.
At least here in Los Angeles,
and the fans gave him a big ovation.
[Wilt] It's almost as if my injury
freed me of that Superman image.
No one ever roots for Goliath,
but in today's world...
[Announcer]At center, from the Milwaukee Bucks,
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The fans are not always sure who Goliath is.
[Announcer] Jabbar and Chamberlain.
I was never used to seeing anyone taller than Wilt
until I saw Kareem.
Wilt said, Sonny, this is the first time
that I've ever looked around and said maybe I need some help.
1971, young Kareem is coming off an MVP season,
and then Milwaukee, they won the championship.
People probably never would have guessed
that Kareem met Wilt when he was a teenager
at Rucker Park.
You know the expression
"he'd give you the shirt off his back?"
Well, he literally did.
Wilt would give him his clothes.
He wasn't old enough to get into the clubs.
Wilt got him in.
There was a mentorship relationship that was there.
[Wilt] When he got to UCLA and then turned pro
and got so heavily into the Black pride/Black power thing,
he started to snub me.
He seems to think because I haven't changed my name
and still have a lot of white friends
I've abandoned the Black man.
Kareem did not respect the fact
that Wilt was a Nixon Republican.
Kareem grew up in a more progressive era.
You know, they had a rivalry.
[Announcer] Right hand 12-footer good!
The new king of scoring.
has ascended his throne.
[Wilt] I could have put the scoring record
so far out of reach,
Kareem would have had to play 30 years to break the record.
I've found big men are much more sensitive
than we realize.
And I saw it in my interviews.
And this is the open letter to Wilt.
Which I've never read, by the way.
So you're gonna read me something I've never read.
You, Wilt Chamberlain, complain about the officiating,
your teammates, and other things,
and then you quit, leaving college early
to tour with the Globetrotters and make your fortune.
That seemed to set a pattern for you.
After any tough test in which you didn't do well,
you blamed those around you and quit.
Playing 15 years of professional basketball,
14 years in the NBA is quitting?
Their competitive rivalry continued for years,
but during the 1971/72 season,
Wilt faced a crossroads
that we've seen a lot of athletes face,
which is the physical gifts that you once had
are not as dominant as they used to be.
I just couldn't play this guy all by myself.
The hardest thing for a superstar to do
is to not be a superstar anymore
and to take your game down a notch
for the better of the team.
Wilt Chamberlain has to decide
whether or not he is able
to become more of a role player,
as opposed to being the centerpiece
to ironically play more like Bill Russell.
The differences with Russell,
he was never the guy scoring the winning baskets
and getting all the points.
His ego was already in check in some regards
because of the way he played the game.
There's things that Bill Russell does
that are incredible, but he's not a great scorer.
So there are literally players on the team
who'd be, like, he needs them.
I need you because I cannot score the way you can.
Built trust amongst his teammates.
That seemed to be something that Wilt maybe struggled with.
Bill Russell, there was no such struggle.
When I played for the Boston Celtics as a rookie
with Bill Russell, the trust was there
because that team stayed together
for all those years.
They won championships together.
But Wilt, who was so dominant as an individual,
and with all the different coaches,
moving and getting traded,
it took him a long time to learn that.
He came to a place in his life
where if this is what it's gonna take to win,
I'm gonna do it.
[Announcer] Screen by Washington.
Shoots a 17-footer. No good. Tipped by Wilt to himself.
Tight rope act. Throws the ball to McMillian.
Great play by the big man.
McMillian, bounce to Jerry,
down the middle, around Maravich, up and in!
They say that Wilt Chamberlain
is now playing sort of Bill Russell style basketball.
What does this mean? How does he--
Well, first you have to say as well as he can.
One of the reasons they call it a Russell impression
is because Bill Sharman, former teammate of Bill Russell,
comes in and coaches the Lakers
On defense, Wilt's protecting the paint,
blocking shots.
He would go out to the perimeter if he needed to.
He decided to play defense the way he could,
and of course he became a great defender.
He is grabbing the rebound and starting the fast break
and getting Jerry West,
getting Gail Goodrich out and going.
On offense, now Wilt is playing up top
off of the ball.
He's setting screens,
creating space for his teammates.
He was an exceptional passer.
And if we needed a big bucket,
I mean, Wilt was the Big Dipper.
He was only taking, you know, nine shots a game then.
He'd do that in a minute and a half in 1962.
That year we won 33 games in a row.
It was like magic.
To this day, it is the record
among all professional sporting teams
in North America.
They had Jim McMillian, Happy Hairston,
Gail Goodrich, and Jerry West.
They just played together like a symphony.
[Announcer]Wilt playing another tremendous game.
Wrap around bounce pass--
And now here's the final
and third stage of Wilt's career.
They were all scoring points, and he's okay with that.
He actually felt, I think, a lot more happy
to play that kind of game.
I think he's one of the most misunderstood people
that I've ever seen.
I spent a lot of time with Wilt personally,
particularly our last two years in the league.
He was a good guy, okay? A good guy.
I remember a time in San Francisco.
Wilt, Happy Hairston, and myself
pile into a cab.
On the radio, all of a sudden The Temptations come on.
And I looked back at both of them,
and I said, hey, have you heard The Temps new one?
You know, Just my imagination
Running away
And they picked up in the back seat.
All the way to the arena,
we're singing Just My Imagination.
And I became one of his favorite dinner partners.
He took Chris and I to dinner.
He brings out this great bottle of wine.
So he told me all about the wine,
the grapes and where it came from.
Wilt knew everything and all things about anything,
and whether he was accurate or not
didn't make any difference to him.
If I had the savoir faire...
There you go.
What happens to the team,
they win 69 games that year,
and that was the record for wins at the time,
producing the most efficient offense
in NBA history.
Everything clicked.
They defeat Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
and the Milwaukee Bucks for the Western Division title.
They cap the season with a dominant NBA championship.
[Announcer] The Los Angeles Lakers
have won their first NBA title.
Of course, I climbed all over his back
as he drug me and everybody else there.
Jerry West finally got a championship.
That was a great team.
A team.
Widely considered one of the great teams of all time.
And Wilt wins the MVP of the finals.
When Wilt retired,
he owned over 100 records in the record book.
No athlete in team sport
has been able to accomplish that.
I'm a big fan of the lists.
Like, who are the top? Who are the number one?
If you had to start a team, who would you pick?
Because in a life where you can't figure out
why is my dog sick?
Why is my wife mad at me?
Why are the kids upset?
It's one of the reasons people love sports
is because we keep score.
Wilt is often not in anyone's top five.
Bill Russell won 11 championships
in 13 seasons,
and many of those were at the expense of Wilt Chamberlain.
He had one to do and one job only.
I had several that I had to do.
I had to score at times and rebound and play defense.
I don't think as far as individual talent goes
that Russell even comes close.
A sad thing about Wilt's legacy
is that he gets defined by Russell,
but not vice versa.
Because he didn't win enough.
Fuck winning.
No one's out here.
We gotta put three, four people out here
to be able to match up with this.
Like, just think about that.
You had to start saying, hey, well, you can't win.
You had to. You had to go to that.
History's written by the winners,
and then it becomes about we wanna tell the story
of why this person deserved to win.
Why he was guaranteed to win.
Especially if we like that person.
You don't win repeatedly by mistake.
You just don't.
There's something about you
that makes that possible.
The legacy of a great player,
they make their own luck.
[Gary Pomerantz] Russell won the four game sevens
in the playoffs between them
by a total of nine points.
That's very close if you think about it.
Sam Jones making an off balance shot
doesn't change how Wilt Chamberlain played.
Don Nelson hits the crazy bounce off the back of the backboard
and up and in,
What if that shot misses?
If the ball bounces a few different ways,
Russell could easily have seven or eight championships
and Chamberlain could have four or five,
and Wilt's legacy would be completely changed.
But does that make sense?
And the need for these simplified narratives
reflect something in us
even maybe more so than the athlete themselves.
Wilt lives at the soul of the game today.
Don't the younger generations know
about the mighty Dipper?
The way he saved the NBA when it needed saving?
The way that he symbolically blew apart the quota
that limited opportunities for Black players?
The one thing that Wilt wasn't prepared for
is all this thing that is very common now:
legacy talk.
How can you write a book
and not say all the things that make you what you are
to what actually helped you construct your views?
He couldn't just allow his legend to rest.
He was always stoking the embers.
Wilt called me one day and said, I have a book deal.
This editor wants me to say that I, like,
that I slept with 20,000 women.
I said, what, are you crazy?
I thought it was a joke at first.
And I said, don't do it.
You don't need to prove that women like you.
20,000 liaisons with women.
Wilt did always like to put up numbers. [laughs]
That averages out to 1.2 women per day
from the age of 15.
20,000? Come on, man.
But I know about 30 in Rome.
[laughs]
I said, come on. You know it isn't 20,000.
He just winked at me.
He goes, what's a zero between friends?
It has been treated more as a punchline, a joke.
These 20,000 names
are the women who slept with Wilt Chamberlain.
[audience laughs]
When the reviews came out,
everything was all about the 20,000.
I said you got six sisters.
You cannot be talking that dumb talk.
He was devastated.
Why anyway?
He said I don't know why I did it.
In a way in his mind, there's constantly a dialogue
with the external world
about who he is.
I mean, everything he writes in his book
is in response to a real or imagined critique
or pressure or view of him.
When you're always in response,
there's certain things that you don't know how to evaluate.
If you can't evaluate by how do I feel about things,
what do I really want,
then you go to numbers,
and you say, okay, if it's higher than this, it's good.
[Wilt] I used the 20,000 as a figure of speech.
I called my relationships "encounters"
because that's what they were,
not conquests the way some people say.
I'm sorry if I did an injustice to my women friends.
Coming up, our program with Wilt Chamberlain.
We taped this show literally days
before the story about Magic Johnson
contracting the HIV virus broke.
The tone of it would have been different
had we known about Magic's tragic story.
And Wilt's on a book tour at the time in 1991
that Magic Johnson announces he's HIV positive.
So suddenly Wilt is seen as this symbol
of the over-sexed athlete.
Do you think that now
people are seizing on the tone of the book,
women's group especially, to single you out
as an example of everything wrong
with the way men treat and feel about women?
Well, I think that because of the times
and because of AIDS being so prevalent,
they just think that maybe I had the wrong attitude.
I'm not proud of what my life was all about then,
but it was my life and it was of mutual consent.
With AIDs being as bad as it is,
have you been tested for AIDS?
Yeah, I have,
not that I think it's anyone's business.
I think it's hilarious that you won't announce
whether or not you've had AIDS testing.
You all say in your book that you've had 20,000 women.
You have to say whether or not--
It is people's business.
Children look up to you.
It did haunt him.
He remained upset about that.
It just put this overwhelming shadow
on what was a tremendous basketball legacy.
It's one of the first things that comes up
when people talk about him.
People that don't even follow basketball.
It's too bad.
There's more to him than that.
Wilt, people would be almost shocked to learn
that it's been about 20 years
since you've seen Bill Russell, right?
Yeah.
It wasn't beneficial to either one of them
to have all this animosity between the two of them.
And then Shaq tells me
it was his idea to have this commercial
about his entrance into the Big Man's Club.
[knock knock knock] Password.
Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.
I.D.
It's a great commercial because it has Shaq,
Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Walton, Bill Russell.
-That's not enough. -And Kareem.
And from what I understand,
it was Wilt Chamberlain that was the big enough man
to extend his hand to everyone,
including Bill Russell,
and break the ice.
Wilt and I could talk,
and neither one was asking the other for anything
except friendship.
And friendship that is not this way or this way.
It's this way.
If you keep examining all the narratives about Wilt
and discarding these and discarding those
and finally getting to that core of Wilt,
you're gonna discover kindness
and sensitivity.
Wilt's teammate in his first three seasons
was Paul Arizin.
Even though they had very different lifestyles,
Wilt really admired my father.
Now you advance decades later,
and Paul Arizin's granddaughter Stephanie
has an inoperable brain tumor.
The doctor says your daughter has 12 to 18 months to live,
and there's nothing we can do.
Maybe it was the next day,
Stephanie said I just got off the phone
from a half hour conversation with Wilt Chamberlain.
Did grandfather call him and tell him?
I said, I don't know.
I didn't do anything.
I wouldn't know how to get in touch with Wilt.
And I get a phone call at my house.
[deep voice] Hello, Mike?
This is the Dipper. Remember me?
He said, do you mind if I call her
on a regular basis?
We had such a lovely conversation.
[exhales]
From that point onward,
she always had reserved 6:00 to 7:00 on Fridays
her and Wilt were gonna talk,
and he would call her.
She called him Wilty,
making her smile,
and we were not sure
if we would ever see her smile ever again.
After each call, he would call me
just to see how am I doing.
There was nothing in it for him.
Paul Arizin and Wilt are both named
to the NBA's All Time Top 50 Players list,
and they go to the All Star Game for a ceremony.
As we rolled up to the door to get in,
out comes Wilt.
I got her. She's with me.
The popular fad among my daughter and her girlfriends
was collecting autographs.
She wanted to collect the autographs
of all the players.
Wilt asked if he could lead her player to player.
He took her up to every player.
He was with her every second.
And Stephanie says, who's that guy?
And I said, that's Bill Russell.
Can we get his autograph?
And I said, he's kind of famous
for not signing autographs for anybody.
Wilt says, hold on.
Russ, this is Stephanie. Sign her book.
Happy to. Bill Russell.
Stephanie Arizin died months later.
Wilt sent a massive floral arrangement.
There was a telegram
that accompanied the flower arrangement.
"To the Arizin family,
I am here for you."
[clears throat]
"I am here for you, all of you.
"I lost a friend today
"who was full of strength and loved life passionately.
"From Stephanie, I realized
"you're never too old to learn
"and never too young to teach.
Love and peace, Dippy."
That's how I choose to remember Wilt Chamberlain.
He made such an effort.
I had a relationship, and a lot of it was by phone,
for almost 20 years.
Friend after friend told me
about Wilt's one hour and two hour long conversations.
It was 213-something.
I have it written down in my book.
I haven't scratched it out.
He'd call late at 11:00.
We'd talk like an hour just about everything.
Sometimes I was doing something else.
I'd just hold the phone out here, let him talk.
If I could go back,
I wish I'd spent more time with him.
I think that Wilt
was just about always lonely.
I wish I had done the search earlier
and at least been able to meet him.
I really did wait too long.
What scares you?
Probably not old age,
but not being able to do things
that I now am capable of doing.
I remember him saying one time,
you know, us big dogs don't last too long.
He told me I'm gonna stop by
when I come from the doctor's.
I had a purple lavender tree with these lavender things,
and he would always pull one off.
And he didn't do it. He hurried up and sat down.
I said to him, you want me to stay?
Because he wasn't feeling good.
No, I'm okay. I'm fine.
He didn't share a lot of stuff
that he thought might upset us.
He wouldn't want us to be burdened down with him.
[Reporter] Police and paramedics
rushed to the Bel Air home of Wilt Chamberlain this afternoon,
responding to reports of a cardiac arrest.
The 63 year old basketball great's attorney
was the first to release news
that Chamberlain had died.
It was the gardener who found his body.
He called out to Wilt and he went upstairs
and saw Wilt motionless in bed.
[Cherry] The roof was open.
Wilt Chamberlain's last moments on earth
were looking at the stars.
As he did when he was 10 or 11 years old
in Philadelphia.
[Wilt] People always have tried
to make me feel like a freak,
but I'm just a person.
I lived with that loser label
stuck on me like some big ugly scar.
People, just people
are the only ones that hurt you.
Wilt, from the standpoint of the world,
was one of the toughest people on the planet.
But the reality is he was like a little sweet man
inside of this giant body.
Things happened to him
that he could never rid himself of these things.
And everybody's got something,
and his is such a big life
that he just had the biggest version of it.
[Announcer] At halftime out at Allen Fieldhouse,
Kansas State trailing Kansas 32-31.
And Wilt Chamberlain is having his jersey retired
in a ceremony just getting underway.
Let's go out to Tim Ryan.
Thank you, Michelle.
It's been 23 years since Wilt Chamberlain
has been here in Lawrence.
A lot of people have wondered why he hasn't been back.
I think it was because Wilt felt
that he'd let down the entire state.
Not the school, the entire state of Kansas
when they lost that painful triple overtime.
Not until the year before his death
did Wilt agree to attend
to retire his number.
And he spoke to a journalist,
and said that I'm afraid that they'll boo me.
One of the true legends in the history of the game,
welcome back Wilt Chamberlain.
[cheering]
[Firestone] He walks out on that court and received the love
and he's overcome with emotion.
It meant the world to Wilt,
because deep down I think
the one thing that eluded this guy
was love.
Wilt was always admired and held in awe,
but not loved.
But what he should have taken to his grave
is the knowledge that people thought he was a damn good guy.
A little over 40 years ago,
I lost what I thought was the toughest battle in sports
in losing to the North Carolina Tar Heels
by one point in a triple overtime.
It was a devastating thing for me
because I felt as though I let the University of Kansas down
and my teammates down.
But when I come back here today
and realize how many people
have shown me so much appreciation
and love and warmth
from the University of Kansas...
[cheers and applause]
All right, all right.
I've learned over the years
that you must learn to take the bitter with the sweet,
and how sweet this is right here.
[cheers and applause]