My Northwestern teammates and I shuffled toward the University of Kansas’ student dining room, single-filing in for lunch. We were in Lawrence to play against this guy Wilt Chamberlain in his first college game, and out of nowhere he loomed in the double doorway, bobbing his head to the left so he could glide through safely on his way out.
He nodded down to me with half a smile. I was in my first year, too, and at 6 feet 9 inches I never looked up to other players. Here I was stunned when I realized his head and shoulders were nearly half a foot above mine.
He was wearing a sweater with a snowflake, reindeer and evergreen-tree pattern. I’d heard about his track exploits–his shot-putting and high jumping, his speed in the 440–and I thought, “God, he skis too.”
The next night I held him to 52 points.
At the center jump before we started the second half, the referee was tossing up the ball when Wilt said, “Hey, man, teach me that hook shot.” I started to think about explaining my favorite move, and next thing I knew I was chasing him down the floor. My guess is he was grinning like the Cheshire cat.
That 1956 intersection with The Big Dipper–don’t call him Wilt the Stilt–is one in a series that began following our senior year in high school. I came from tiny Princeton, Ill., and Wilt played in Philadelphia. The summer after graduation I was picked to play in the North-South High School Basketball Classic, as its promoters billed it, the main high school all-star exhibition in the country in those days.
I’d spent weeks practicing in the hope of getting into the game as his sub, but when I got to Murray, Ky., site of the game, we embarked on a week’s worth of working out and public pageantry with no Wilt Chamberlain around.
It turned out the game’s organizers hadn’t invited Wilt or any black guys to play in mid-South Murray, and after the game I stood in what would have been Wilt’s place. I won the prep All-American trophy as (theoretically) the nation’s top high school center. But everybody knew I was only the nation’s top white high school center.
Imagine. Race as the backdrop for every one of your achievements, an element that’s inextricable from your most celebrated personal victories and your every public accomplishment.
It has always been that way for Wilt, and it has been the denominator in nearly all my intersections with him over 40-plus years. In our second game against each other, in our junior year, we put a three-man zone on him that held him to 27 points, and we almost won. In a story about the game, a Tribune sportswriter made second reference to him as “the Philadelphia Negro,” a phrase that reflected a common news practice in those days.
I was Philadelphia’s No. 1 draft choice out of college because NBA rules had permitted the team to draft Wilt out of high school as a “territorial choice” four years earlier. My job for three seasons was to be his understudy as I filled the team quota of white guys. He was one of four black players each team was allotted through a gentlemen’s agreement among NBA owners in those innocent days.
I sat that bench for three years, hoping through the first half of every season he’d get hurt a little so I could fill in. Wilt never fouled out, and he never, ever rested, averaging more than 48 minutes a game in 1961-62 because of the occasional overtime.
Then, my timing gone and my conditioning compromised, I’d hope Wilt wouldn’t get hurt through the second half of every season so we would do well and make a little money in the playoffs.
My wife told me it’s no wonder I ended up with one of those split personalities.
Wilt scored 100 against the Knicks in March 1962, my third season, and I became a footnote.
Playing forward, I got the assist on the basket that brought him from 98 to 100 points, a dunk following his bumping his man off his hip and spinning to the basket. Instead of shaking hands with him, I ran over to the scorer’s table, waited for the official scorer to stop clapping and sit down, and pointed to the assists column in the score sheet to make sure he checked the box next to my name.
After the game a photographer took a shot of Wilt seated in the locker room holding up a sheet of note paper on which somebody had scrawled “100.” That was about it.
A white player, say Bob Cousy or Bob Pettit, would have been lionized around the country for hitting 100, but Wilt received no endorsements or serious public attention. It was sort of expected of him during a season in which he was averaging more than 50 a game.
Think of the street demonstrations you’d see if Michael Jordan scored 100. Think of what that piece of note paper would be worth . . . if only I had grabbed it from the wet locker room floor.
Wilt got hurt only once during my three-year tenure as Philadelphia’s backup for him.
Fellow Kansas alum Clyde Lovellette, notorious as the NBA’s dirtiest player, flung his fist back into Wilt’s jaw as they ran up the floor one night, causing a severe cut, later an infection. Cal Ramsay, a Lovellette teammate, had warned Wilt before the game that his KU predecessor was going to “get” him. After the cheap shot, Lovellette and his white teammates postured threateningly, but everybody backed off. Including the NBA office.
On an exhibition tour one afternoon, we stopped at a Fulton, Mo., eatery for lunch. The team filled the place, sprawling in booths and taking two seats per man at the counter. The white owner took his fellow Caucasians’ lunch orders, mostly breaded pork sandwiches and mashed potatoes with gravy, as I recall. Then, when he got to Wilt, he said, “The kitchen’s closed.”
Nobody said a word. Wilt and my other black teammates got up, walked out of the place and got back on the bus. We remained and ate our pork sandwiches. The incident was never discussed. Implicit was the understanding that that’s the way it was in those days.
Whenever I hear the word dignity, I think of the sight of Wilt and those three guys walking out of that roadside eatery. Their heads were high, their chins were out, and they didn’t say a word as they played their part in that apron-clad proprietor’s defense of his customs, his honor and the virtue of his region’s womanhood.
My last intersection with Wilt as a player came in the seventh game of the 1962 Eastern Division finals against the Celtics.
We were down by one with a few seconds to go, and during the timeout coach Frank McGuire dreamed up a winner. Veteran Ed Conlin was supposed to fake a long shot while actually lofting the ball to Wilt. Forward Tom Meschery’s job was to block Bill Russell, which would free Wilt to grab Conlin’s pass and dunk the ball for the winning basket. Meschery succeeded and Wilt was wide open, but the ball Conlin rainbowed toward Wilt sailed just over his pleading fingers and banged off the rim.
“A pass, hell,” Conlin, my roommate on the road, told me in the shower. “That was a shot.”
Conlin, son of a Brooklyn police officer, was one of three or four white players who never spoke to Wilt. It was if Wilt didn’t represent an opinion, an identity or anything more than an abberation in an NBA whose competitors would always be white, clever ballplayers who resembled what somebody called slow waltzers and who considered the dunk a hot-dog move.
It’s hard to imagine. They didn’t talk to him except maybe in huddles or to convey a message such as what time the coach said we’d be leaving for the airport.
After three seasons with the team, I demanded that owner Eddie Gottlieb trade me so I could actually play in the NBA and even lift a few of my hook shots over Wilt as his opponent again. But Gottlieb told me to stay with the team, which he was in the process of moving to San Francisco to become the Golden State Warriors. I kept asking Gottlieb and team lawyer Ike Richman why they wouldn’t trade me, and Richman, fed up, told me one afternoon:
“Because you’re white.”
My response cost me an NBA salary of $8,000 a year. I quit pro basketball.
I like to think my defiant personal statement resembled what Wilt had done after his rookie season of 1959-60.
I was on my way home after the season, seated in the bar of Philadelphia International Airport watching the “Huntley-Brinkley Report.” Chet Huntley delivered the news in these approximate words:
“Wilt Chamberlain retired from professional basketball today, citing racism in the National Basketball Association.”
Years later, after the fire of the civil rights movement, I realized that Chamberlain had made a stronger personal and political declaration than any athlete had ever made in behalf of civil rights. None, including Paul Robeson, Jesse Owens, Rafer Johnson or Jackie Robinson, did anything similar.
In a way, Wilt’s extravagant act of principle, undertaken on the cusp of the civil rights movement, introduced the movement. It certainly speeded along its progress.
He played for the Globetrotters that summer and did come back in September for his second NBA season. But, like all things Wilt, the theatricality of his political statement thundered loudly around his reputation. He never did, never does things in a small way.
Like part with a souvenir.
Ten years or so ago, he sent one of my kids the jersey he wore in that first college game against us. Its market value is something like $15,000.
“Keep it,” Wilt told me. “I gave Al Attles the game ball I got 100 with. We’re friends.”
This month Wilt is in the limelight again. They’re retiring his old No. 13 at the University of Kansas, and although the backdrop of race that has always been behind Wilt’s public life has changed, it’s still part of the picture.
The president of the United States has called for a national dialogue on race. Last month Sports Illustrated published an article about the end of the white athlete. Deep thinkers continue arguing about affirmative action.
Wilt is disturbed because his alma mater recruits too few male and female black athletes, so we can probably expect more public action from him.
He never leaves the room quietly anymore.
