The GOAT.
Every sport has strong discussions about who is the Greatest Of All Time.
In hockey, you can make the argument that it’s Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe or Mario Lemieux.
In football is it Tom Brady, Peyton Manning or Jim Brown?
Soccer? Pele, Maradona or Messi?
Boxing? Ali, Louis, Robinson?
Baseball? Mays, Ruth, Aaron?
In basketball it’s simply Michael or LeBron. Right?
Wrong.
What about the man who had the rules changed because of him? The man who played all the time and once averaged 50 points a game and scored 100 points in a game.
That would be Wilton Norman Chamberlain.
“I never called him Wilt,” said Tom Hoover, former Knicks player and president of the National Retired Basketball Players Association and a long-time buddy of the Big Fella. “It was always Dip or Dippy.”
When Josh Hart was mesmerizing the Knick faithful because he played 48 minutes in multiple playoff games, that was very nice though Wilt took it to another dimension.
Chamberlain averaged 48.5 minutes per game for the entire 1961-62 season.
How?
He played in every minute of every game, including overtimes, of the 80 games he played that season.
In fact, in his 14 years in the NBA, Wilt played in 80 or more games nine times, 79 twice and even in his last season in the league (1972-73), at age 36, he played in all 82 games. Not surprisingly, he played in all 82 games in the last three years of his career. He also pulled down 18.6 rebounds per contest in his final season and never fouled out of an NBA contest.
Now, how do you get today’s NBA players to commit to playing over 40 minutes per game, let alone 82 games, when load management seems to be the way to go?
Load management?
“Wilt would not be a part of that,” said Sonny Hill, another long-time friend and all-knowing savant concerning Philadelphia basketball. Their friendship started when they were both 12.
“He went to Overbrook High School, and I went to Northeast.”
They played against each other in high school and in the old Baptist Church League.
“And he never blocked my shot,” said Hill with a chuckle. “He always blocked my teammates shots, but I always knew where Wilt was.”
Both Hoover and Hill wanted everyone to know that Chamberlain was more than just a dominating basketball icon. He was much more than that.
“What I found over the years is that Wilt was a very intelligent, intellectual individual and took great pride in that,” said Hill. “Wilt was a learned man.”
Wilt was one of a kind on the hardwood and Hill won’t let you forget it.
“Who is the greatest athlete in the history of the NBA?” queried Hill, ready for his own response. “The answer to the question is Wilt. Not only could Wilt run like a demon, people don’t realize that Wilt was a world-class athlete. He was a tremendous track athlete and primarily because it gave him a chance to get away from being this tall guy.”
This tall guy who changed the game.
Centers are not as important as they once were in Wilt’s day, but he left an impression that will never fade away.
Shaquille O’Neal likes to brag that he’s the president of the Big Man Alliance of NBA Centers. Once you look at Wilt’s records, Shaq might be the second vice president after Wilt (president) and Bill Russell (first VP).
Not only is Wilt in both the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and the Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame, he had his No. 13 retired by the Harlem Globetrotters, the San Francisco (formerly Philadelphia) Warriors, the Philadelphia 76ers, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Kansas Jayhawks.
“The NBA Guide reads like Wilt’s personal diary,” Hall of Famer Billy Cunningham, a graduate of Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School, once quipped about his former teammate.
Wilt was a four-time MVP, 13-time NBA All Star, a seven-time scoring champ, 11-time rebounding champ, an assist leader and two-time NBA champion.
But wait, there’s more.
You can make the argument that Wilt was even more than that.
Remember, they changed the rules because of Wilt.
No jumping from the foul line to make a free throw. They widened the lane and added the three-second rule to stop Wilt from dominating in the paint, and no inbounding the ball over the back board (to Wilt).
“If the question is who is the greatest in terms of winning, it’s William Felton Russell,” declared Hill, of the Boston Celtics great center with 11 championships in 13 seasons. “If it’s winning, it’s William Russell. If it’s the greatest player, all you got to do is look at the history book one time.”
Time has let fans forget that Wilt was a supreme decathlon-like athlete. At the University of Kansas, Wilt ran the 100-yard dash (10.9), the 400, captured the high jump title in the Big Eight Conference track and field championships three times, and competed in the triple jump and shot put.
Lest we forget, he was a volleyball player in the International Volleyball Association, became league president and was inducted into the IVA Hall of Fame.
Because Wilt only won two NBA titles, while Russell captured 11, the mantra stuck with Wilt that he just couldn’t win the big one and that’s unfair.
“One of my greatest heroes just passed away … Willie Mays. He won one championship, but they don’t say that about Mays,” pointed out Hill. “Jim Brown won one championship. What do they say about Brown?”
“If Wilt wound up playing with Boston, they never would have lost a game,” said jazz saxophone great “Sweet” Lou Donaldson.
Russell was surrounded by nine Hall of Famers in his 13 seasons like Bob Cousy, Sam and KC Jones and John Havlicek, while Wilt had seven in 14 years like Hal Greer, Chet Walker, Paul Arizin and Jerry West.
Still, he was the anchor on two of the greatest NBA championship teams in the 1966-67 Sixers (68 wins) and the 1971-72 Lakers (69 wins) and don’t forget that Lakers team owns the still-standing record of winning 33-straight games.
After leaving the Lakers due to a contract disagreement, Wilt coached the San Diego Conquistadors of the ABA going 37-47 for the 1973-74 season.
Wilt was also an astute businessman when he became part owner of Smalls Paradise, a nightclub in Harlem, which he renamed Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise in 1961.
“Sammy Davis played downstairs one time,” said Hoover as Redd Foxx and Ray Charles played there among other entertainment greats like, “Gator Tail Jackson, Lonnie Youngblood, King Curtis. Lloyd Price was on the bandstand up front. Lionel Hampton and Jimmy Castor played there.”
Donaldson used to play at Connie’s Inn right across the street from Smalls.
“We heard [baseball manager] Leo Durocher was across the street in Smalls with his wife Laraine Day. Man, we ran to get their autographs,” said Donaldson, now retired to Florida.
Donaldson was front row to squashing rumors about a long-running feud between Wilt and Russell.
“Bill Russell would come into the club,” said Donaldson, now 97. “Everybody makes a big deal they didn’t like each other, but they got along well. I saw them talking all the time.”
“There was no feud,” Hoover said. “They ate at each other’s house.”
He would know because he ate there too.
Hoover found out Wilt died when he didn’t return his call and his sister Barbra told him he had passed.
“‘Your dime, Your time’ was on his voice recording,” said Hoover, pausing for a second before adding, “I miss him.”
Not for his prowess on the court, but for the laughs, the good times.
“Dip thought he could tell jokes, but he stuttered,” said Hoover. “When he got to the punch line, we would be laughing so hard, and he still couldn’t get the punchline out.”
Then there was the time Hoover and friends Carl Green and others were playing the card game Dirty Hearts.
“If you lost, you had to drink a gallon of water,” said Hoover, the chuckling starting already. “We all complied, but when Dip lost, it was time for us to go. ‘I … I … I … I’m expecting company. You gotta get out of here.’ We said, ‘No man, you gotta drink the water’ because nobody was coming.
“Then we would tackle him and force him to drink the water. That was the fun time.”
Hoover and Wilt also did road trips. When Wilt would visit New York and Hoover was attending Villanova, he would drive him back to campus.
Later, the road trip expanded.
“We used to meet at Smalls on Saturday. It was our routine,” said Hoover. “We’d get in his caddy and drive from New York to Atlantic City. It’s three hours and he did it in 90 minutes.
“I’d be asleep because I didn’t want to see. He drove very fast and if we got stopped, everybody knew who he was, so they let him go, right?”
There was always more to the larger-than-life Chamberlain and forget the impossible-to-believe stories about his conquest of over 20,000 women. There was so much more to the man who died at age 63 on Oct. 12, 1999, almost 25 years ago, from congestive heart failure.
Wilt would have been 88 on Aug. 21, same age as his longtime friend and confidant Sonny Hill.
“He never forgot growing up in Philadelphia, the old Baptist Church League or when he matriculated to Overbrook High School,” said Hill. “It was the way he was raised from his family and the way he was raised within that neighborhood, the community.”
The greats never stay forever.
This year alone, NBA Hall of Famers and Wilt’s teammates Jerry West and Chet Walker passed, but their accomplishments live on like the pages in a book.
Only in Chamberlain’s case, the book is in volumes that are still read, studied and appreciated even today.
The GOAT indeed.