Dipper's destiny to die alone

Wilt Chamberlain, who died at 63 on Tuesday, had been gone from the Kansas campus for nearly four years by the time I arrived in 1961, so we weren't exactly classmates. Still, his larger-than-life presence so pervaded life around the university that I felt as if I knew him long before I met him and, years later, covered the tail end of his NBA career.

A seven-foot, two-inch giant from Philadelphia's inner city cast adrift in a world of white, mid-western Lilliputians, he had never been what you'd call comfortable at the University of Kansas. On one occasion, when a fellow student jokingly asked "How's the weather up there?", Wilt bent over, eyed the fellow disdainfully, and spat on him.

"Raining," he said.

Although he retired from professional basketball a quarter-century ago, Wilt Chamberlain still holds career records in 17 of the NBA's official list of 26 offensive categories. He once scored 100 points in a single game, averaged over 50 for an entire season, and pulled down more rebounds (23,924) than any man who has played the game.

With time, Chamberlain's career has come to be shrouded in two enduring myths. One is that he was a pituitary freak whose accomplishments stemmed largely from his size alone. The other is that he was a selfish, me-oriented player who amassed individual records at the expense of team goals. Neither was really accurate.

Wilt may have been the most athletically-gifted big man I've ever known. Although he was the best high school basketball player in the country when he came out of Philadelphia's Overbrook High in the mid-1950s, he was also an accomplished performer on the school's cross-country team. At KU, then a national track powerhouse, he won the 1957 Big Seven high jump championship with a then-creditable 6 feet 5 inches, and could beat the team's best performers at 400 metres. He didn't win at his other event, the shot putt, but he did beat Bill Nieder, the 1960 Olympic gold medallist, in an arm-wrestling match in a Lawrence pub one night.

Later in life, apparently in earnest, he challenged Muhammad Ali to a winner-take-all boxing match. Fortunately for the reputations of both men, the backers of this sideshow fight failed to produce the stipulated guarantees and it never came off.

More empirical evidence underlies the second perception. Chamberlain's detractors point to the fact that, despite his collection of individual honours, seven straight scoring titles, and multiple MVP awards, his teams won only two championships over his 15-year NBA career. The critics cite Chamberlain's historic rivalry with Boston's Bill Russell, a smaller centre whose teams nonetheless dominated during the era.

Russell was a great player, but the Celtics were also a great team, and it wasn't as if he ate Chamberlain for lunch every time they met. Chamberlain's record 55 rebounds in a single game - a feat nearly as amazing as his 100-point game - came at the expense of Russell and his Celtics. And Wilt remains the only centre in NBA history to lead the league in assists over a season.

When "Wilt the Stilt" (his other sobriquet, "The Big Dipper", came later in life) emerged from Overbrook, over 200 colleges were in hot pursuit. He chose Kansas in part because it offered the best opportunity for a national championship.

Freshmen were in those days ineligible for varsity competition, but in his first appearance at KU's Allen Field House, Wilt scored 50 points in leading the freshman team over the regulars. A year later he scored 52 against North-western in his varsity debut.

The national championship narrowly eluded him. Chamberlain's Kansas team lost, in three overtimes, to North Carolina in the 1957 NCAA final. By then basketball had changed its rules in honour of Wilt the Stilt, widening the foul lanes and adopting the three-second rule in an effort to level the playing field. Beset by swarming zone-defences, he left school after three years.

NBA regulations of the day forbade teams to sign players with remaining collegiate eligibility, so Chamberlain signed with the Harlem Globetrotters when he left the university. It was rumoured, not entirely in jest, that he had taken a pay cut to do so.

Put it this way: at a time when NCAA regulations allowed scholarship players $15 a month in "laundry money", Wilt cruised the Lawrence campus in a flashy white convertible. He also held down a full-time job: he was reportedly paid $100 a month for being the custodian of the school's high jump pit. Fellows who were on the KU track team at the time told me that he performed this duty diligently: even in the dead of winter Wilt used to show up for work, pull the snow-covered tarpaulin off the pit, and give it a few brushes. After his playing days were over Chamberlain kept himself fit. He was an accomplished beach volleyball player in California, and just last year, at 62, competed in and finished the Honolulu Marathon. He also maintained his ties to the athletic world by sponsoring an track team known modestly as "Wilt's Wonder Women", a collection of world-class female athletes which was coached by Tracy Sundlun, now the director of San Diego's Rock & Roll Marathon.

Gossip had it that Wilt had an underlying motive in founding the Wonder Women: a fresh supply of female conquests for himself. Wilt was never one to dispel such rumours. To the contrary, in a 1991 autobiography he boasted that he had bedded some 20,000 women in his lifetime. Ironically, for all his other achievements, it is the 20,000-women statistic which may be his enduring legacy, but in a very real sense, Wilt Chamberlain may have been the loneliest man I've ever known.

Yes, Wilt could be aloof to the point of arrogance, but there are indications that he was doing his best to make peace with his past in the years preceding his death. I was with him and Russell at a sports memorabilia show a couple of years ago, and you'd have thought the two were fast friends.

Just last year he made his first visit to the KU campus in over 40 years. Not knowing what his reception might be, he wore his old varsity letter jacket into Allen Field House, and was moved to tears when the sell-out audience responded with a prolonged standing ovation. This past May he even showed up at Boston's FleetCenter to participate in a tribute honouring Russell, his most bitter professional rival, and was once again warmly received. But in the end Wilt Chamberlain died the way he had lived most of his life. Alone.