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Personal life of Wilt Chamberlain

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The personal life of former NBA star Wilt Chamberlain has drawn scrutiny and interest, especially in light of Chamberlain's claim to have slept with over 20,000 women in his lifetime.

Star status

Chamberlain was the first big earner of professional basketball: his 1959 $30,000 rookie contract was $5,000 more than the previous best earner, Celtics star guard Bob Cousy.[1] He was basketball's first player to earn more than $100,000 a year, and earned an unprecedented $1.5 million during his Lakers years.[2] As a Philadelphia player, he could afford to rent a New York apartment and commute to Philadelphia.[3] In addition, he would often stay out late into the night and only wake up at noon,[4] a point that became notorious in the 1965–66 NBA season.

When he became a Laker, Chamberlain built a million-dollar mansion he called "Ursa Major" in Bel-Air. It had a 2,200-pound pivot as a front door and contained great displays of luxury. Robert Allen Cherry, journalist and author of the biography Wilt: Larger than Life, describes his house as a miniature Playboy Mansion, where he regularly held parties and lived out his later-notorious sex life. This was also helped by the fact that he was a near-insomniac who often simply skipped sleeping.[5] Chamberlain lived alone, relying on a great deal of automated gadgets, with two cats named Zip and Zap and several Great Dane dogs as company. In addition, Chamberlain drove a Ferrari, a Bentley, and engaged James Bond car designer Peter Bohanna to design the Chamberlain Searcher I, a $400,000 custom sports car.[6]

Friendships and rivalries

Although Cherry points out that Chamberlain was an egotist, he added that he had good relationships with many contemporaries and enjoyed a great deal of respect. He was especially lauded for his good rapport with his fans, often providing tickets and signing autographs. Dr. Jack Ramsay recalled that Chamberlain regularly took walks in downtown Philadelphia and acknowledged honking horns with the air of a man enjoying all the attention.[7] Jerry West called him a "complex... very nice person",[8] and NBA rival Jack McMahon even said: "The best thing that happened to the NBA is that God made Wilt a nice person... he could all have killed us with his left hand."[9] Celtics contemporary Bob Cousy even assumed that if Chamberlain had been less fixated on being popular, he would have been meaner and able to win more titles.[10]

During most of his NBA career, Chamberlain was good friends with Bill Russell. Chamberlain often invited Russell over to Thanksgiving, and at Russell's place, conversation mostly concerned Russell's electric trains.[11] But as the championship count became increasingly lopsided, the relationship got strained, and turned hostile after Russell accused Chamberlain of "copping out" in the notorious Game 7 of the 1969 NBA Finals.[11] The two men did not talk to each other for over 20 years, until Russell apologized privately, then publicly in a 1997 joint interview with Bob Costas: "There was a thing almost 30 years ago... I was wrong."[11] Still, Chamberlain maintained a level of bitterness, regretted that he should have been "more physical" with Russell in their games and privately continued accusing his rival for "intellectualizing" basketball in a negative way.[11]

More hostile was Chamberlain's relationship to fellow Lakers center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, ten years his junior. Although Abdul-Jabbar idolized him as a teenager and was once part of his inner circle,[12] the student/mentor bond deteriorated into intense mutual loathing, especially after Chamberlain retired. Chamberlain often criticized Abdul-Jabbar for a perceived lack of scoring, rebounding and defense, although Cherry points out that Abdul-Jabbar is virtually peerless regarding scoring, rebounding and call-ups to the NBA All-Defensive Teams.[13] In return, Abdul-Jabbar criticized him for being a Republican and supporting Richard Nixon (both seen by Jabbar as a betrayal of Black America) and living like a playboy.[13] When Jabbar broke Chamberlain's all-time scoring record in 1984, matters had improved, but after that, Chamberlain continued criticizing the new scoring champion. When Abdul-Jabbar published his autobiography in 1990, he retaliated by calling him "Wilt Chumberlame, a crybaby and a quitter", and the relationship remained strained until the end.[13]

Love life and “20,000 women” claim

Although shy and insecure as a teenager, adult Chamberlain became well-known for his womanizing. As his lawyer Seymour "Sy" Goldberg put it: "Some people collect stamps, Wilt collected women."[5] Swedish Olympic high jumper Annette Tånnander, who met him when he was 40 and she 19, remembers him as a bona fide pick-up artist who was extremely confident yet respectful: "I think Wilt hit on everything that moved...[but] he never was bad or rude."[5] Many of Chamberlain's personal friends and Orrie testified that he had an eleven inch penis that sometimes fell out of the leg of his shorts during games, once had 23 women in 10 days, had no problems organizing a threesome (or more), and particularly enjoyed a TV skit on the show In Living Color in which a mother and her daughter approach a Vietnam Wall-like list of women who slept with him, both of them pointing out that their names are on it, as well as a 1991 Saturday Night Live sketch where MC Hammer played Chamberlain in "Remembrances of Love", where Chamberlain spoofs a soap opera with romances with women that are usually over in five minutes.[5] However, Los Angeles Times columnist David Shaw claimed that during a dinner with Shaw and his wife, Chamberlain was “rude and sexist toward his own date, as he usually was,” adding that at one point Chamberlain left the table to get the phone number of an attractive woman at a nearby table.[14]

In 1991, Chamberlain wrote his second autobiography, A View from Above. There, the lifelong bachelor claimed he had sex with 20,000 women. For this to be true, he would have had to have had sex with 1.37 women per day from the age of 15 up until the year of the autobiography's publishing, a rate of over nine women a week. (One wag asked if that number was “regular season only, or does that include the playoffs?”) He quickly became a target for jokes and jibes, and fellow African-American tennis superstar Arthur Ashe was highly critical, blasting Chamberlain for embarrassing black men and fueling prejudices about their sexual behavior. Chamberlain defended himself: "I was just doing what was natural—chasing good-looking ladies, whoever they were and wherever they were available" and pointed out he never started a relationship with a married woman.[15] In a 1999 interview shortly before his death, Chamberlain regretted not having explained the sexual climate at the time of his escapades, and warned other men who admired him for it, closing with the words: “With all of you men out there who think that having a thousand different ladies is pretty cool, I have learned in my life I’ve found out that having one woman a thousand different times is much more satisfying.”[16] Chamberlain also acknowledged he never came close to marrying, and had no intention of raising any children.[6]

Cherry believes that Chamberlain's extreme sex drive was fueled by the female rejection he had experienced as a teenager, causing him to over-compensate.[5] Although his life was highly promiscuous, his lifelong friend and on-and-off girlfriend, Lynda Huey, eleven years his junior, said: "He had an inability of combining friendship and sexuality."[17] Shaw added: "Wilt never liked to admit a weakness ... [but] you cannot be married and be Superman ... you cannot appear invulnerable to your mate."[18]

Death

Chamberlain had a history of heart trouble. In 1992, he was hospitalized for three days following an irregular heartbeat, and in 1999, his condition deteriorated rapidly. During this time, he lost 50 pounds[19]. After undergoing dental surgery in the week before his death, he was in great pain and seemed unable to recover from the stress. On October 12, 1999, Chamberlain died in Bel-Air, California.[20] He was cremated[21]. His agent Sy Goldberg stated Chamberlain died of congestive heart failure, and for about a month, doctors had been draining his legs of fluid that had accumulated because of the heart problem. He was survived by sisters Barbara Lewis, Margaret Lane, Selina Gross and Yvonne Chamberlain, and brothers Wilbert and Oliver Chamberlain.[20]

NBA players and officials mourned the loss of a player they universally remembered as a symbol of the sport. His lifelong on-court rival and personal friend Bill Russell stated "the fierceness of our competition bonded us together for eternity", and Celtics coach Red Auerbach praised Chamberlain as vital for the success of the entire NBA. Ex-Lakers team mate Jerry West remembered him as an utterly dominant, yet friendly and humorous player, and fellow Hall-of-Famers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Johnny Kerr, Phil Jackson and Wes Unseld called Chamberlain one of the greatest players in the history of the sport.[22] Four days after Chamberlain's death, on October 16, 1999,[23] a strong earthquake shook Southern California, causing people to joke that The Big Dipper, as he was called, must have arrived at The Biggest Dipper.

References

  1. ^ Cherry, 89.
  2. ^ Cherry, 207.
  3. ^ espn.com (2007-02-10). "Wilt was Philadelphia's greatest athlete". Retrieved 2008-01-26.
  4. ^ Lawrence, Mitch (2007-02-10). "Chamberlain's feats the stuff of legend". Retrieved 2008-01-27.
  5. ^ a b c d e Cherry, 343–356.
  6. ^ a b Deford, Frank (2007-02-10). "Just doing fine, my man". Retrieved 2008-01-26.
  7. ^ Wilt's spirit was larger than life
  8. ^ Cherry, vii-viii.
  9. ^ Cherry, 85.
  10. ^ Cherry, 362.
  11. ^ a b c d Cherry, 360–361.
  12. ^ Cherry, 130–131.
  13. ^ a b c Cherry, 245.
  14. ^ Shaw, David (October 13, 1999). "A Gracious Man, but Driven to Win". The Los Angeles Times.
  15. ^ espn.com (2007-02-10). "Sexual claim transformed perception of Wilt". Retrieved 2008-01-26.
  16. ^ espn.com (2007-02-10). "Wilt spoke of regrets, women and Meadowlark". Retrieved 2008-01-27.
  17. ^ Cherry, 319.
  18. ^ Cherry, 340–342.
  19. ^ Mirkin, Gabe. "STD's, Cardiomyopathy and Wilt Chamberlain". Retrieved 2009-03-02.
  20. ^ a b espn.com (2007-02-10). "Chamberlain towered over NBA". Retrieved 2008-01-26.
  21. ^ http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6886
  22. ^ espn.com (2007-02-10). "Reaction to a basketball legend's death". Retrieved 2008-01-26.
  23. ^ pasadena.wr.usgs.gov (2000-08-28). "USGS Pasadena Earthquake Information". Retrieved 2008-01-29.
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