Sport: How Do You Stop Him?

He stood there, just to the right of the basket, a placid. 7-ft. 1 1/16-in, giant watching impassively as his teammates maneuvered the ball in backcourt. The New York Knickerbockers tried to box him in; they clutched at his jersey, leaned against his chest, stepped on his toes. Then Wilt Chamberlain came alive. With the aplomb of a cop palming an apple, he reached out one massive hand and plucked the basketball out of the air. Spinning violently, he ripped clear of the elbowing surge, took a step toward the basket and jumped. For an instant, he seemed suspended in midair, his head on a level with the 10-ft.-high basket. Slowly, gently, the ball dribbled off his fingertips, through the net, and the San Francisco Warriors went on to a 142-134 victory. New York Coach Ed Donovan sadly shook his head. “He’s phenomenal.” he sighed. “How does anyone stop Wilt Chamberlain?”

“A Sort of Anticipation.” Nobody does. At 26, Chamberlain is the best basketball player who ever lived. Alone, Chamberlain cannot make his team a consistent winner—last week the Warriors trailed the firstplace Los Angeles Lakers by 17 games—but he gives San Francisco fans plenty to crow about. In 1960, his first season as a pro, he was named the National Basketball Association’s Rookie of the Year and its Most Valuable Player as well. Nobody ever did that before. Nobody ever averaged 42 points a game throughout a pro career either, or scored 100 in a single night. And nobody comes near matching Wilt’s all-time season records for minutes played (3,882), points scored (4,029) and rebounds (2,149)—records that Chamberlain himself breaks almost every year. The N.B.A. record book lists 86 players who have scored more than 50 points in one game, and 57 of them are named Wilt Chamberlain. “Wilt has that something that separates the great from the near great,” says the Boston Celtics’ Bill Russell, Chamberlain’s good friend and bitterest rival. “It’s a sort of anticipation. You never know what he’s going to do, but you know it’s going to be out of the ordinary. The important thing about him is his originality. Nobody ever played basketball the way Wilt Chamberlain does.”

Most basketball stars have one great talent: Russell’s is defense, Elgin Baylor’s is shooting, Bob Cousy’s is setting up plays and passing. Chamberlain does almost everything, better than anyone else. He is the pros’ fiercest rebounder, and his shooting repertory includes such inimitable specialties as the “Dipper Dunk” (in which he simply stretches up and lays the ball in the basket), the “Stuff Shot” (in which he jumps up and rams the ball through the net from above), and the “Fadeaway Jump”—a delicate, marvelously coordinated push shot from 15 ft. away that defensive men literally cannot block without fouling. At the free-throw line, where he is most uncomfortable—and most criticized—Chamberlain does a journeyman’s job. He holds the all-time league record for foul shots in one season (835), once sank 28 out of 32 in a regulation-length game. The only man who ever beat that is Boston’s Cousy—and he needed four overtime periods to hit 30. “Wilt has backcourt set shots too,” says Warrior Coach Bob Feerick. “But he just shoots them now and then to show he can.”

Watch Him Walk. The son of a 5-ft. 8-in. handyman in Philadelphia, Chamberlain started drawing attention when he was 15 and playing junior-high ball. He was already 6-ft. 10-in. tall and towered over the other kids like a giraffe. But at first he yearned to be a track, not a basketball star. In high school, he could high-jump 6 ft. 4 in., and put the shot 45 ft. “I gave up track,” he says simply, “because there wasn’t any money in it.” Concentrating on basketball at Philadelphia’s Overbrook High School, Chamberlain averaged 36.3 points a game over a three-year span, spent his summers at a resort in New York’s Catskill Mountains playing with college stars on a team coached by the Boston Celtics’ Red Auerbach. Most overgrown teen-agers seem to have two left feet. Auerbach recalls being startled by Chamberlain’s remarkable poise and his lynx-like grace on a basketball court. “The first time I saw Chamberlain,” he says, “I just stood and watched him walk. Just watched him walk. It was incredible.”

College coaches watched him lope the length of a court in what seemed like five or six giant strides, and some 200 schools eagerly sought Wilt’s services—for pay, of course. He was promised room, board, tuition, a car, plane rides home to Philadelphia and $60 a week “pocket money” to go to the University of Dayton, but Chamberlain decided on Kansas, partly because Coach Forrest (“Phog”) Allen was the only recruiter who suggested that he could get an education at college too. In his sophomore year, Chamberlain led the Kansas Jayhawkers to the N.C.A.A. finals. Then he quit school, toured the world with the Harlem Globetrotters, and signed on with the Warriors.

Good, Clean & Green. For playing as nobody else does, Wilt Chamberlain gets paid more than anybody else (about $65,000 a year), and he spends it carefully, on himself. Unlike many Negro champions, he does not champion Negro causes. “The best way to help integration,” he says, “is to live a good, clean life”—and Wilt Chamberlain’s life has the good, clean smell of new money. He owns a swinging Harlem nightclub named Small’s Paradise, a summer basketball camp in upstate New York, real estate in Philadelphia, a bulging portfolio of mutual funds, and a 38-apartment development in Los Angeles that he calls “Villa Chamberlain.” He sports a sparkling three-carat diamond ring on his left pinky, lives in a comfortable five-room apartment, and rides around San Francisco in a $24,000 Bentley. “I love business,” he says. “I love it! Love it! Love it! You have to love something to be successful at it. And if I continue to be this successful, I’ll be a millionaire.”

There are times, though, when Chamberlain wishes he were a little less successful—and a lot less tall. A 7-ft. man walking down the street is the kind of oddity that children point at and drunks snarl at; he has been asked “How’s the weather up there?” in a dozen languages, and people have been calling him “freak” to his face all his life. He even sticks out, drawing all eyes, on a court full of huge men. Says his friend Bill Russell: “Wilt is not only very famous; he’s very obvious. He has a special problem. Mickey Mantle, or Roger Maris, or even Willie Mays, can walk into a room and leave it, and maybe nobody will notice them. Wilt can’t.”

At first Chamberlain would not admit that he really was 7 ft. tall (he used to claim that he was 6 ft. 11¾ in.), and even today he is wary and withdrawn with all but his closest friends. “It’s not that I don’t trust people,” he says. “I do trust people—but it’s impossible for me to hide. I can’t just put on dark glasses. The only way I could get any privacy would be to cut off my legs.”