Larger Than Life

It surprised you.

Caught you off guard in the way that the news of a 63-year-old man dying of apparent cardiac arrest should not do.

The cold facts say this should not come as a complete shock. Sixty-three is not an exceptionally young age to pass away, especially for a man who had a recent history of heart problems.

Still, there was this sense of disbelief. That’s when it hit you.

What made this story different wasn’t the what, the why, the when or the how. It was the who.

Wilt Chamberlain. Dead. The two concepts do not go together.

“You just don’t think things like this are going to happen to people of his stature,” said Jerry West, another legendary player of Wilt’s era.

You hear quotes like that all the time, about many people and many situations. But have those words ever been used to describe the death of a man near retirement age?

If any person appeared to have the confidence, the willpower, the arrogance, the audacity to stare the Grim Reaper in the face and refuse to comply with him, it was Wilt Chamberlain.

He made a living out of doing the unprecedented and the unimaginable.

He scored 100 points in an NBA game. Impossible.

He averaged 50.4 points for a season. No way.

He averaged 22.9 rebounds for his career. Yeah, right.

He once averaged 48.5 minutes a game in a sport with a 48-minute regulation. Uh-huh.

He claimed to have slept with 20,000 women. Suuuure.

Everything he did or said he did was larger than life.

He loved telling stories, and some seemed so outrageous that “You’d say, ‘Wilt, come on now, there’s no way,’ ” West said.

But deep down inside there was a part of you that thought . . . it could have happened.

When the facts were just as astounding as the boasts, how do you separate the reality from the mythology?

When he was in his 40s and even in his 50s, there was the occasional rumbling that he would return to the NBA. Anyone else would have been summarily dismissed. With Chamberlain, you considered the possibility.

With Wilt, you had to consider every possibility. Except death. That one never crept into the imagination. He was too busy living his exceptional life as one of the true giants--physically and otherwise--to walk across the sports landscape.

He lived in an oversized house custom-built for his oversized dimensions. He was a Globetrotter (of the Harlem Globetrotters) and a well-traveled man.

And he commanded our attention because he never tried to fit in or apologize for his size. He played it up, let everyone know he was taller than us and therefore he felt he was better than us.

Many people despised him for that, for his refusal to conform and his candid statements on some unpopular viewpoints.

Yet no one ever ignored him.

Chamberlain did everything on his own terms. When an occasion called for everyone to wear a suit, Wilt was likely to show up in a tank top.

One walk across a stretch of sand summarized Wilt Chamberlain for me. It was a dozen years ago, at the volleyball nets next to the Santa Monica Pier, where Wilt liked to play his second-favorite sport with the locals.

Chamberlain got out of his car and started walking over. He was wearing black spandex tights. No shirt, no shoes, no socks.

“Hey Wilt,” his volleyball buddies called out.

He acknowledged them and kept walking--right through their courts, not caring one bit that they were in the middle of points, because he didn’t want to take the time and energy to go around. Wilt did what Wilt wanted, regardless of how anyone else felt about it.

Yet he almost couldn’t help but leave a lasting impact on the sport he played and the places he lived.

So great was Chamberlain’s reach that his death was not only national news but a major story in three disparate regions of the country: Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Kansas.

He was born and raised in Philadelphia and played half of his NBA career there. He spent the final five years of his career with the Lakers and lived here for the second half of his life.

Then there was that brief stop in Lawrence, Kan., where he attended the University of Kansas.

He maintained relationships with some of his Kansas teammates but never really kept any ties with the school for 40 years after leaving.

Then he returned when the school retired his jersey on Jan. 17, 1998, and learned that he was beloved in America’s heartland.

“I think the hero had returned,” said Doug Vance, the assistant athletic director of media relations at Kansas. “He was a giant of a man. His presence . . .

“Basketball is so important here. Basketball is like a religion. He’s certainly one of the icons of basketball at Kansas.”

It was late in the game, but it gave us a look at a Chamberlain we rarely saw, the “big pussycat” that West described Tuesday afternoon.

Wilt wiped away tears as he spoke to the fans at Allen Fieldhouse during ceremonies at halftime of a game against Kansas State. After the game he stayed and signed autographs for three hours.

“People didn’t know what to expect when he came back,” Vance said. “He couldn’t have been nicer.”

Perhaps that picture of Chamberlain goes against everything else you know about him. It still isn’t as jarring as the news Tuesday.

Perhaps his death is better than the other unimaginable alternative, watching him grow old and feeble. This way there won’t be any public images of a weakened Chamberlain, a shell of his former self.

You will remember him as a robust figure. You can’t picture him as anything else.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com.

MORE COVERAGE

Wilt Chamberlain dies of apparent heart attack at 63. A1

Bigger and better than the rest. David Shaw’s appreciation. A1

How Wilt ranked with Russell, Abdul-Jabbar and the other great centers of all time. page 6

His single-game scoring total of 100 resonates today. Page 6

Jerry West (above) remembers the linchpin of Laker teams, and the basketball world mourns Wilt’s passing. Page 7.