His Feats Stood Above the Rest

He was arguably the dominant sports figure of his time, and Los Angeles can be grateful that some of that was spent here. If Wilton Norman Chamberlain had lived, he would have been 70 Monday.

To the sports public, he was Wilt the Stilt, or the Big Dipper. He hated both nicknames and wished, at least on the latter, that they’d call him Aurora Borealis, something a bit more sophisticated.

Whenever they pick any all-time basketball team, Wilt has to be on it. If he isn’t, the team is a fraud.

He died Oct. 12, 1999. In his playing days, he was listed at 7 feet 1 1/16 inches. He was probably closer to 7-4 and weighed between 270 and 320 most of his career. He never challenged the height listing, knowing that, in his case, bigger would not make things better.

“Nobody loves Goliath,” he used to say.

Mark Heisler, longtime NBA columnist for The Times, recalls the intimidation of just being around Chamberlain.

“I had long interviews with him twice, both at L.A. delis,” Heisler says, “and sitting in the booth with him made you feel like you were sitting in the lap of an octopus.”

At one time or another, in his 14 seasons for three teams in the NBA, Chamberlain led the league in scoring, rebounding, assists, and field-goal percentage, and was inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame in 1979. He won two titles, with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1967 and the Lakers in ‘72, and of his incredible statistical achievements, at least two, both when he was a young player with the Philadelphia Warriors, stand above the rest.

One is the 55-rebound game, Nov. 24, 1960, against the Boston Celtics.

George Kiseda, a retired Times staffer who worked as a sports reporter in Philadelphia during Wilt’s best days with the 76ers, calls that record “the one I consider the most unbreakable in sports. A lot of teams don’t get that many most nights.”

The other is his 100-point night against the New York Knicks, March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pa. He made 36 of 63 shots and 28 of 32 free throws, and, according to Rod Hundley, Wilt’s friend and longtime NBA broadcaster, stopped in a bar in Hershey afterward.

“A guy is sitting at the bar,” Hundley says. “He sees Wilt and asks him, ‘How many you get tonight?’ Wilt says, ‘Got 100.’

“The guy turns, looks at him, and says, ‘C’mon, don’t be such a jerk.’ ”

There is a third statistic that will forever spice the memory of Chamberlain, one he created himself when he said, in a book written about him, that he’d had sex with 20,000 women. Somebody quickly did the math and said, for that to be true, Wilt would have had to have started when he was 3.

In dozens of ways, Chamberlain was quirky.

He was known to eat fried chicken just before game time, and hot dogs at halftime. When he traveled, he wanted his seat on the plane to be front row, aisle seat, right side. He played 1,045 games without fouling out. His soft drink was 7-Up. Always 7-Up.

Kiseda cites Chamberlain’s incredible athleticism.

“I saw him palm a bowling ball,” he says. “I also saw him go up for a jump ball against K.C. Jones and tip it in. I saw him standing in a hospital gown, in a room with a high ceiling, and jump at least 42 inches straight up and palm the ceiling.”

Chamberlain was first to get a then-unheard-of contract worth $100,000. The next day, the Celtics announced that Bill Russell’s contract had been increased to $100,001.

The Chamberlain-Russell rivalry defined the sport in the 1960s, much as Magic-Bird did in the ‘80s. To commemorate Chamberlain’s 70th birthday, NBA.com did an interview with Russell, who sheds light on how they really felt about each other:

“We used to play a Thanksgiving night game in Philly,” Russell says. “That afternoon, Wilt would come and pick me up at the hotel, drive me to his house and we’d have Thanksgiving dinner together. Afterward, I’d go in and take a nap, in his bed. Then, I’d get up so he could drive us to the game. On the way out, his mother would take me aside and say, ‘Now, you be good to my boy tonight.’ ”

Chamberlain was stubborn, but not inflexible.

Elgin Baylor, now the Clippers’ general manager, was in the last of his 14 seasons with the Lakers in 1971-72. He tells the story of the arrival of Bill Sharman that season as coach.

“Sharman pioneered the idea of morning shoot-arounds,” Baylor recalls.

“One of our first games that season, we had a morning shoot-around scheduled. We are on the bus, and everybody is there but Wilt. Sharman sends an assistant into the hotel to call him. No answer. Sends him up to the room, where he knocks on the door. Wilt is told it is time for the shoot-around. Wilt asks what time the game is, and is told 7 o’clock. Wilt sends the assistant with a message for Sharman: ‘Tell him I’m only gonna go over there once, now or 7.’

“When Sharman heard that, he said, ‘OK, driver. Let’s go.’ ”

Sharman, a special assistant with the Lakers, acknowledges that morning shoot-arounds were not Wilt’s favorite thing.

“I went to talk to him about them,” he says. “I felt they were important to the team. I explained why I wanted to do it. He listened, then didn’t say a word. I started to sweat. Then he said he liked to sleep late. That’s kind of how we left it.”

Sharman says that, when that 1971-72 Laker team was 6-3, the jury was still out on Wilt and shoot-arounds. “Then, we won 33 in a row,” Sharman says, “and he seemed convinced.”

Bill Bertka, in his 25th consecutive year as a Lakers scout and assistant coach, says that Chamberlain’s image changed from somebody oft booed to somebody highly respected after he went down with a knee injury early in 1969.

“He wasn’t supposed to come back that year,” Bertka says, “But when he made it back for the playoffs, and people saw how hard he worked, the perception of the fans changed.

“Years later, he told me, when he was injured, he was, for the first time in his life, of no value to people. And yet, all that time, they sent him letters, encouraged him. He said for the first time, he felt appreciated.

“Later, when he won the title with the Lakers, he said it meant slightly more to him than the one he won in Philly because here, he had been respected as part of a team, not expected to be the team.”

Eventually, as he grew older, Chamberlain grew comfortable with his size and image. He learned that some people did love Goliath.

He sat one night, at the 2:30 a.m. Don Rickles show at the Sahara in Las Vegas, where Rickles was doing his normal routine of insulting everybody in the place. Chamberlain, all 7-4 of him, was front row, center. The audience waited. Rickles went his usual hour and a half and didn’t touch Chamberlain.

Then, as he ended, Rickles stopped, pointed at Chamberlain and yelled, “And you, you ought to be a ... high rise. Somebody ought to put a window in your ass.”

Howling the loudest was Chamberlain.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.