It happened in the press box at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. He was tallest man I’d ever seen in person. He was intimidating just to observe, and I wasn’t about to ask questions of a basketball player at a baseball game because, well, there was a baseball game to cover that night in 1976.
Besides, what could you ask Wilt Chamberlain except maybe: “Do you know, up there in the clouds, when it’s going to rain before the rest of us know?” At that distance, he probably wouldn’t have heard me anyway.
So I took a pass, something Chamberlain had done thousands of times in 14 National Basketball Association seasons, often just before he drained a jump shot or lay-up. He was a freak of nature, like Robert Wadlow before him and Andre the Giant after him. Wadlow is considered the world’s tallest man, ever, at eight feet 11 inches (2.72 metres). Andre, by comparison, was relatively diminutive at seven feet, four inches (2.24 metres).
Wilt Chamberlain was one inch over seven feet.
Curiously, if you think big men don’t die (first), the sizes and ages of their deaths are contradictions. Wadlow was 22, Andre The Giant was 46, Wilt Chamberlain was 63. All died because, in layman’s terms, their hearts weren’t large enough or strong enough to support their enormous bodies.
Chamberlain was also a freak of efficiency. He was Rookie-of-the-Year and Most Valuable Player in his inaugural season, when he led the NBA in scoring. He proved it was no fluke by winning the next five scoring championships. He was unstoppable. In 1962, his third season, Chamberlain scored 100 points to lead the Philadelphia Warriors to a 194-147 victory over the New York Knicks. The late Kobe Bryant once came “close” by scoring 81 against the Toronto Raptors. On 15 occasions one player has scored 70 points or more, and six times Chamberlain was that player. Nobody else did it more than once. He broke the 60-point barrier 32 times. Bryant was next, at six.
Chamberlain scored 47,859 points in his career, or a basket for each of the 20,000 woman he claimed [in his autobiography] to have slept with, and yet there are no descendants who played in the NBA. That’s mainly because, never married, he apparently had no children.
“I have no need to raise any little Wilties,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford in 1986.
Since high school, he’d been called “Wilt the Stilt” because, well, compared to everybody else he appeared to be playing on stilts. As a rookie he was the NBA’s tallest player, later replaced by many “big” names, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Yao Ming, Ralph Sampson and today’s tallest player, San Antonio’s Victor Wembanyama, who is 7’3”. The tallest ever: Gheorghe Mureșan and Manute Bol, both six inches higher than Chamberlain.
The Stilt was in Montreal in 1976, like many visitors, to see the Olympic Games. On that one evening, we were both in the baseball press box watching the worst team in baseball, the Montreal Expos. I was there because it was my job. I often wondered why he was.
Maybe Chamberlain just curious if any baseball writers had intelligent questions for him. This one didn’t.
