Wilt Talks About a Comeback Again : He’s Still Fit and Feisty, but He’ll Be 50 Very, Very Soon

At an age when his old rivals and teammates are in the broadcast booth, on the sidelines coaching or sitting behind desks in offices, Wilt Chamberlain is talking about again playing the sport he revolutionized.

“There is no doubt in my mind I could play basketball again,” Chamberlain says. “If some of the players I’ve seen out there can still play, I know I could play in the NBA.”

Chamberlain, obviously, has not mellowed with age.

As he approaches his 50th birthday Aug. 21, little has changed about the 7-foot-2 giant from Philadelphia who once scored 100 points in a game and averaged 50.4 points for an entire season.

There is no hint of gray in Chamberlain’s hair or trademark goatee. The racehorse-thin legs that lifted him skyward for 23,924 rebounds are still shapely. The hands that helped score 31,419 points and can palm a bowling ball are still powerful. The icy glare that stared down NBA referees and opponents for 14 years is still menacing.

“Maybe the average person couldn’t come back and play at 50, but Wilt could come back and play,” Chamberlain says. “Where there’s a Wilt, there’s a way.”

As recently as four years ago the Philadelphia 76ers wanted Chamberlain to return to basketball. Chamberlain declined, but says if the right offer came along now, he would don his headband and sweatbands and take to the court.

“I stay in real good shape,” says Chamberlain, in New York recently for a youth sports clinic in conjunction with the Mobil Big Apple Games. “I think if I was a fat old 50 people wouldn’t be asking me to come back. You don’t ever hear them talking about asking back Bill Russell.”

It is important to Chamberlain that no one is asking Bill Russell to come back. It is Russell, not Chamberlain, who is revered as the sport’s biggest winner after taking the Boston Celtics to 11 league titles in 13 years. The label of loser that Chamberlain carries still rankles him.

“When I was playing, it was not me against Bill Russell, it was my team against the Boston Celtics,” Chamberlain says. “He had a great deal of help. No matter how great you are, it depends on your team. There were many times I outplayed Russell, but his teams won because his teams were better than mine.”

Who was the better player, Russell or Chamberlain? Like the Babe Ruth-Ty Cobb debate in baseball, there will never be a firm answer. There is, however, no doubt Chamberlain was the sport’s most influential player.

As a schoolboy star at Overbrook High School, Chamberlain was the most recruited basketball player of his era. When he finally selected the University of Kansas, authorities launched an investigation to determine if he was wooed by improper inducements. No wrongdoing was ever found.

Chamberlain so dominated the college game that officials changed the rules to keep up with him.

At Kansas, Chamberlain would position himself under the basket for an in-bounds pass thrown by a teammate standing directly behind the backboard. The ball would be lobbed to Chamberlain, who would outleap his opponents and dunk the ball. Rulesmakers made it illegal to throw the ball in-bounds from directly under the basket.

Also in college, Chamberlain would camp under his own basket and slap away shots like a hockey goalie protecting his net. Officials passed a rule making goaltending illegal.

In the pros, Chamberlain’s impact was as great. He was the sport’s highest-paid player before he ever played a game. His first year in the NBA, the league’s attendance jumped 27% from the previous year. He turned the sport into big business, taking it from neighborhood gyms to big-city arenas.

Chamberlain was basketball’s first powerful big man. He once scored 50 or more points in 45 straight games. He averaged as many as 27 rebounds in a season and had 55 in one game. In the 1966-67 season, Chamberlain averaged 24 points, 24 rebounds and 8 assists in leading the Sixers to an NBA title.

“These days every time a center comes out who can run and jump and shoot they say the game has reached a new level,” Chamberlain says. “There’s very little on the basketball court that hasn’t been done before. I used to dribble behind my back.”

These days Chamberlain stays in shape playing volleyball on the beach outside his homes in California and Hawaii. He has started a movie production company and is reviewing scripts for his first major project.

He plays basketball rarely but watches four or five games a day with his satellite dish during the season.

Chamberlain’s favorite modern player is Boston’s Kevin McHale.

“He does everything on the inside,” Chamberlain says. “Only someone like him can appreciate how hard it is to score inside.”