superunknown23
Superstar
Most players, even some of the biggest stars, quickly disappear from our journalistic purview once they're put out to pasture, but there was one exceptional athlete whose relationship with me changed considerably for the better. That was Wilt Chamberlain, a singular man of manifold contradictions who remains the most imposing physical specimen I ever encountered.
I'm sure Wilt's great size—or how everyone he met reacted to his great size: How's the weather up there, yuk, yuk, yuk—affected him from early on. He appeared to block out the sun, but it was not just that he was tall. Bill Russell told me he was convinced that Chamberlain was scared that he might accidentally hurt someone, so he always played a bit timidly.
Wilt's freakishness didn't make him withdrawn, however. In fact, unlike many other U.S. athletes, whose interest in geography is pretty much limited to the length of the Las Vegas strip, Wilt spent much of his free time abroad. Had he been self-conscious about his height, he never would have ventured so far afield. Indeed, even as a civilian, in middle age, Wilt dressed in a way that called attention to his body: tank tops, tight pants and (even on city sidewalks) bare feet.
But here was his professional bugaboo: expectations. He was so overwhelming, so good at almost everything he tried athletically, that he could never please people. I think this was at the heart of the unease he often exhibited. One night, late, he told me that he'd fallen in love only once in his life, and he never contemplated sharing his life for long with anyone. He probably feared that he would let his wife down, the way he had let down everyone else who expected too much of him.
I didn't like Wilt when I started covering him, though. One reason was that I liked Russell, and the basketball world then was divided into Russell People and Wilt People. Russell People said their man was bright and sensitive, a team player invested in winning, while Wilt was a dullard and a loser, interested only in his own point total. Wilt People retaliated that their man was misunderstood and lacked good teammates; he wasn't vain and selfish, only forced to do everything by himself. After all, one-on-one he was bigger and better than Russell.
A couple of years later I called up Wilt and went out to Los Angeles to do a long story celebrating the 50th birthday of a physical marvel. It struck me almost immediately how content he was. In his playing days he had often said that his happiest year had been the one before he joined the NBA, when he had traveled with the Globetrotters. Now he was even more at peace. In fact, I'm not sure there's ever been a star athlete other than Wilt who was so uncomfortable when playing and so much happier retired.
Anyway, in Los Angeles our rapprochement was complete. He even started calling me Frank, instead of my man, which was how he addressed most everyone. (Remember, everybody knew who Wilt the Stilt was, and he could hardly be expected to reciprocate by remembering the names of the whole human race.) We had a few laughs together. Nothing amused Wilt more than the glad-handing phonies who would corner him and tell him they had been in Madison Square Garden cheering him on the night he scored 100 points against the Knicks in 1962. Wilt would just nod and grin. That game, you see, had been played in Hershey, Pa.
We also could laugh at people such as flight attendants who always told tall people, "Watch your head," even though tall people naturally watch their heads. Wilt and I also talked about how smaller people are never embarrassed to ask tall people exactly how tall they are, even though no one would ever ask a short person how short he is or a fat person how much he weighs. Not only that, but when a tall person answers the question, he's not believed. Others always say, "You're taller than that." I'm 6'4". Of the thousands of times people have asked me how tall I am and I've told them, no one has ever said, "No, you're not that tall."
And more years passed.
Then Wilt made an ass of himself by writing a book claiming that he had slept with 20,000 women. Oh, my man, how could you? But Wilt had always been measured by numbers. Be the tallest. Score the most points. Grab the most rebounds. Hand off the most assists. Make the largest salary. And, yes, screw the most women. It quite surprised him that his sexual braggadocio put people off, even disgusted them...
So was SI writer Frank Deford, who cut his teeth on a - 04.23.12 - SI VaultIn 1999, as the century wound down, Bill Russell was himself coming out of the shadows. He'd spent much of the previous years, if not in seclusion, then certainly out of the spotlight. Friends began to point out to him that he was being forgotten. Never mind that he'd won 11 championships and become the first major league African-American coach; in a world where even black baseball players admitted that they didn't know who the hell Jackie Robinson was, Russell was being lost. So he agreed to something of a comeback coming-out party.
I happily did my part by writing a cover story for SI that proclaimed Russell the greatest team player of the century, and then an HBO special about him. Russell began to make appearances, even to sell his autograph, which he'd always resisted giving away (sometimes taking far more time to explain why he was opposed to the practice than it would've taken to scribble his name).
To culminate his reentry into celebrity, Russell returned to Boston that May to have his number 6 jersey officially retired to the heavens of Boston Garden. It was a huge affair, and Wilt graciously agreed to fly across the country to help honor his old rival—even though he knew he'd be the designated villain at the celebration.
Wilt showed up in the most dazzling, outlandish outfit I'd ever seen him wear, reminding me of one of those two-colored Popsicles. At a party after the ceremony he beckoned me over, and after greeting me nicely, he forced himself to confront me, stuttering a complaint: "My man, what's this I hear about you criticizing me for the way I played Willis Reed in that game?"
He was referring, of course, to the famous Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals, in which an injured Reed, shot up with God knows what, had limped out on the floor and immediately scored a basket against Wilt that lit up the Knicks and inspired them to victory. And yes, I had indeed mentioned that episode in the article I'd written about Russell, but I was not the one tendering the criticism. Rather, I was quoting Russell, who claimed that had he been Wilt in that situation, he wouldn't have backed off the wounded Reed but would've gone right at him, again and again. Oddly, it was a backhanded tribute to Wilt, pointing out again how reluctant he was to exert his great strength against a gallant foe.
So I replied rather testily, "Hey, Wilt, come on, read the damn article. I didn't say that. I was just quoting what your skinny friend over there told me." And I pointed at Russell, across the room, surrounded in glory, drinking in the accolades.
Wilt looked enviously at Russell. There he was, after all these years, the conquering hero once again. Wilt then turned back to me. "You think you could do me a favor?" he asked, almost sheepishly.
"Sure. What is it?"
"You think you can do one of those HBO things on me that you did on Bill?"
"Sure," I said. I was pretty certain HBO would be delighted.
"I could really use that," Wilt said—and maybe for the first time I realized how beaten down he had been, how much he'd been mocked for the 20,000-women claim. Neither of us knew, of course, that by October of that year, before the HBO special could be shot, Wilt would be dead at only 63.
