Giant of a Man Leaves Some Equally Big Impressions

DAVE ANDERSON, New York Times: The Good-Natured Goliath

If you were ever around Wilt Chamberlain up close you had to believe he might someday be the world’s oldest living person. Maybe nobody has ever been that big, that strong, and in that good shape. And for him to die suddenly at age 63, perhaps of a heart attack, well, you just never thought anybody or anything would dare attack him.

Nobody on the basketball court ever did.

He once said, “Nobody loves Goliath,” but he was a good-natured Goliath. In the 1970 NBA finals, he was falling back on defense when Knick guard Dick Barnett tripped. While keeping his eyes on the ball, the 7-foot-1-inch, 275-pound Laker center reached out with his right arm and, to prevent Barnett from falling, cradled him in midair as if he were a child.

Apparently thinking Wilt was holding him on purpose, Barnett pumped his legs and swung his arms in frustration. With his eyes still on the ball, Wilt gently restored Barnett to his feet.

As big and strong as Wilt was, if he had been mean and nasty, he would have been frightening, but he was never really belligerent. Brutal sometimes, if only by accident, but never belligerent.

ALAN GREENBERG, Hartford Courant: Gracious to the Very End

The last time I saw Wilt Chamberlain was at the Bill Russell Tribute in May at the FleetCenter. Ever the showman--Wilt played a year with the Harlem Globetrotters before joining the NBA--he was wearing a tiger-stripe vest with billowy black pants. He was limping badly from a chronic hip problem as he made his way through the audience toward the stage, and another whipping.

Gracious man that he was, Wilt had come, as Russell’s archrival, to honor the Celtics great. But mostly, he had left his Los Angeles home to come to Boston, site of many of his worst defeats, to be the butt of jokes. Master of ceremonies Bill Cosby’s clever jokes. Red Auerbach’s clumsy ones.

Ever the gracious guest, Wilt came and he smiled and he laughed and he took it all like the big man he was. Russell, surrounded by a Celtics supporting cast liberally sprinkled with Hall of Famers, won nearly all (11 in 13 years) the championships. Wilt, who won twice, with the 1966-67 76ers and the 1971-72 Lakers, mostly won the individual awards, and a reputation for selfishness. In the minds of the sporting press of 35 years ago, that made Wilt Chamberlain the world’s tallest loser. Nobody, the young Chamberlain acknowledged, roots for Goliath.

But the 7-foot-1, 275-pound Chamberlain was bigger than that mountain of criticism. He didn’t lash out with bitterness or crawl into an emotional shell, as some of today’s public figures who receive one-tenth the flak tend to do. If the best revenge is living well, Wilt certainly did.

TONY KORNHEISER, Washington Post: He Was of Mythic Proportion

Everything about Wilt Chamberlain was larger than life. Everything.

His size. His ability. His reputation.

And of course his failures.

That’s the way it is with Goliath. Everybody remembers David won.

Oh, there were great athletes before Wilt. Babe Ruth in baseball; Red Grange in football; Joe Louis in boxing. But there was never anybody as large as Wilt with the kind of power and grace Wilt had. Wilt was the first American athlete of literally mythic proportion. He was a superman.

In basketball, when they talked about big men, the discussion began and ended with George Mikan, who was 6 feet 10 and had a terrific hook shot. In the late 1940s and early ‘50s Mikan was the dominant player in basketball, averaging as many as 28 points and 14 rebounds a game. But the day 7-1 Wilt Chamberlain entered the NBA, Mikan’s name became a legacy of nostalgia.

Wilt was the most dominant individual player in basketball history. Don’t even mention Michael Jordan. Wilt Chamberlain was on another planet.

RICH HOFFMAN, Philadelphia Daily News: A Legendary Man of the People

Basketball is 94 feet long and 10 feet high. The dimensions of the game are fixed and unchanging, comfortable and understandable. They never meant anything to Wilt Chamberlain, though. Boundaries never did.

The game never defined him; he defined the game instead. Outsiders never seemed to understand him, but he understood more about them than they ever cared to acknowledge.

Truth was as he saw it. Consequences were, well, inconsequential. And labels? There were plenty of them, which was understandable enough for a man who looked down on the world from above seven feet, for a man who bragged of having been with 20,000 women. The adhesive on the backside of those labels always failed, though, and quickly. Nothing stuck to Wilt, nothing but greatness.

The geography of the world barely held him. The world of ideas always lured him. Deep down, though, we always knew that he was ours. He had houses in Bel-Air and Hawaii--he even lived in New York when he played for the Warriors in the ‘60s--but Philadelphia was still home. His basketball career took him to Kansas and San Francisco and Los Angeles, but he still came back to Philadelphia twice, back to play for two different franchises (the Warriors and the Sixers).

The ambitions that included everything from training horses to negotiating a boxing match against Muhammad Ali to proclaiming a desire to play Olympic volleyball when he was past the age of 50--they all stunned us as they amused us.

But he was ours--distance and desires and now, shockingly, death be damned. He was ours and he is ours. And as we mourn his sudden passing at the age of 63, the only comfort is that we can know with certainty that Wilt Chamberlain, the greatest basketball player ever, knew he was ours too.

TERRY PLUTO, Akron Beacon Journal: Short Talk Turns Extraordinary

It was in 1977, and I was a rookie sportswriter in Greensboro, N.C. He was coming to town with a touring professional volleyball team. I greeted him at the airport gate, where he immediately said he had no idea a reporter wanted to talk to him.

“And I don’t have time to do it,” he said.

I had the sinking feeling that my journalism career was about to go down the toilet, and I use that word for a specific reason.

One of my part-time jobs in college was as a janitor in an elementary school, where I learned how to clean a toilet without touching it with my hands. You used your foot to flip up the seat and a long brush to do the dirty work.

I thought of a lifetime of filthy floors and bathroom fixtures awaiting me if I didn’t at least come back with something from Wilt.

So I did what any young, cocky, American male would do in that spot--I begged, groveled and whined.

“Oh, please, Mr. Chamberlain . . . blah, blah, whimper.”

“All right, follow me,” he growled. “Just a few minutes.”

He led me out of the airport and climbed into the back of a limo. I followed in my car to a Holiday Inn.

“Come on up to my room,” he said. “You’ve got five minutes.”

The five minutes turned into two hours. It turned into stories about Bill Russell (“He secretly wanted to be Wilt Chamberlain.”) It turned into a discussion of what it was like to be a black man with strong opinions in America in the early 1960s. It turned into a day that I’ve never forgotten, and it told me so much about Chamberlain.

MITCH ALBOM, Detroit Free Press: Forget Jaded, It Was Wilt

I don’t stare. I haven’t in a long time.

When you work as a sportswriter, you get used to seeing famous, large, muscular human beings entering your field of view. Staring is the worst option. Nothing says “outsider” more than a gape.

Nonetheless, I stared when I met Wilt Chamberlain. Ogled him like a kid seeing his first Santa Claus. I knew better. Knew it was inappropriate. I still did it. He was that big. Bigger than the normal rules of behavior.

Which, of course, could serve as his epitaph, now that he is dead, apparently of heart failure, at age 63.

Bigger than the normal rules Wilt was, because the normal rules did not apply to a guy 7-feet-1 and 275 pounds, not in basketball--where he so dominated offensively that he once averaged 50 points a game for an entire season--and not in life, where his oversized socializing led to his now infamous claim of having slept with 20,000 women. “Don’t you believe in abstinence?” he was once asked.

“I believe in it,” said the lifelong bachelor, “but I don’t think I can sustain it.”

Big man, big appetites.

The occasion of my personal audience with the man they called the Big Dipper was a radio show I hosted in Detroit. Wilt agreed to fly in to be a guest. He entered the studio, ducking under the doorway, and as he sat down, he habitually slid the chair very far from the desktop, in order to accommodate the mileage of his legs.

His elbows were like anchors on the countertop, and his hands, as he pulled the microphone close, were large enough to cover a bowling ball. He seemed to me, at that moment, to be the biggest man in the universe.

JERRY GREEN, Detroit News: Right On About Early NBA

Back when Wilt Chamberlain dominated a sport as no other human ever had, he took his first flyer as an author. He delivered an as-told-to article for Sports Illustrated entitled “My Life in a Bush League.”

Being Wilt and 7 feet 1 high with overpowering strength, he did not mince words. The NBA was indeed a bush league. In those days, the 1960s, it resembled a floating crap game. It played games in such nonleague outposts as Hershey, Pa., and Toledo, Ohio.

And those towns, these 35 years later, still figure among my sporting favorite anecdotes, remembered now because the greatest athlete of the 20th century was not immortal, nor indestructible, after all.

There was a day long ago when Wilt came down the escalator of the Book Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit. He stepped onto Washington Avenue to search for the team bus. He was the top drawing card of the NBA, the one recognizable athlete of a struggling league. The Pistons, still new in Detroit, had arranged an exhibition game with Chamberlain and his Philadelphia Warriors--in Toledo.

“The team bus is right there,” a Pistons functionary told Chamberlain, pointing to a parked yellow vehicle.

Chamberlain, dubious, stepped on board, found a seat and folded his torso, his legs, his arms into the space.

Players from both teams hopped aboard the same bus. It chugged away for Toledo--a little yellow school bus, arranged for by the Pistons. Wilt Chamberlain, the foremost athlete in his profession, rode along, his 7-foot-1 body stuffed into a space usually occupied by some grade-school youngster.

Bush league, indeed.

RICK TELANDER, Chicago Sun-Times: Above and Beyond the Critics

The Big Dipper is gone.

One less constellation up there above the backboard.

All those stories you heard about Wilt Chamberlain’s strength--he dunked so hard, the rim cracked; he hoisted a guy into the air with one hand and held him there, by his shorts--meant nothing when it came to the fibrillations of an all-too-human heart.

Everything about Wilt the Stilt was so oversized--his athletic ability, his height, his statistics, his carnal appetites--that his sudden death at age 63 at home in Bel-Air seemed at first to be impossible.

What? That little muscle gave out? A man who scored 100 points in a game and, while in his 50s, was courted by former high school teammate and then-Philadelphia 76er owner Harold Katz to come back as a player, just couldn’t up and die like that.

But he did.

Giant Wilt Chamberlain is gone.

He was mortal after all.

And the criticism of him through the years for being somehow unworthy of deep respect because, you know, he wasn’t really human, now seems a little cheap, a whole lot nasty.