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 Chamberlain was a 'force of nature'
Posted: Tuesday October 12, 1999 09:33 PM
Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford spoke with CNNSI.com about Wilt Chamberlain's life and legacy. CNNSI.com: You spent a lot of time with Wilt throughout the years. Did you ever get a sense of what made him tick? Frank Deford: Wilt was a very complex person. I'm not so sure anyone really altogether understood what made him tick. He was a very lonely guy, but on the other hand he could be very gregarious, he traveled all over the world and met thousands of people, yet he was very protective of his identity. I'll say one thing, Wilt was good company. I enjoyed being with him. He loved to argue, he had an opinion on everything, and he was convinced he was the font of all information.CNNSI.com: How competitive was he? Deford: Everything he did, he had to be the best in. That was both a strength and a weakness. He tended to quantify everything: he had to score so many points, sleep with so many women, go so many places. That was Wilt all the way. He didn't understand the subtleties of things. But he had a good sense of humor, he enjoyed going out and he enjoyed traveling -- in fact, I tried to get in touch with him within the last few weeks and he was down in South America. CNNSI.com: How would you describe his most lasting impact on the game? Deford: I'm not sure many people have a sense of what an historic figure he was in basketball, and not for the reasons people think. When he went to Kansas, that changed college basketball. His nemeses were the Noo Yawk guys who were going down to North Carolina, four Catholics and a Jew, and he was the black guy who was going from Philadelphia to Kansas. When they met in the triple-overtime championship game in 1957, it was the greatest college basketball game ever. Wilt and the North Carolina guys made college basketball a national sport -- before that it was regional. CNNSI.com: How does Wilt compare to his ultimate nemesis, Bill Russell? Deford: Wilt was so much bigger than Russell, there was no comparison. Wilt blocked out the sun. There have been taller people who've played basketball, but the sense of size that Wilt Chamberlain presented was just incredible. It was almost like an optical illusion. You had a sense that he was indestructible. It's very difficult to accept that Wilt Chamberlain is mortal. Russell always said that if Wilt had truly used his size, if he had been a mean person, no one ever could have stopped him. He could have simply destroyed people. But Wilt had a certain amount of self-consciousness. He didn't want to just defeat you with his size. He wanted to show that he wasn't just another giant. CNNSI.com: He really victimized himself by claiming in his book that he had slept with 20,000 women, didn't he? Deford: That was the dumbest, stupidest thing he ever did. It was typical Wilt, trying to make a point with quantity. The ironic thing is, people could say he was sexist or a womanizer, but he was always a tremendous advocate for women's athletics. He put up money for volleyball teams, he was supportive, you'd see him at women's tennis matches. There was always a confusing side to Wilt Chamberlain, he was so difficult to understand. He did more damage to himself with that than with anything else. People should not remember Wilt Chamberlain for that, though God knows he did sleep with a lot of women. CNNSI.com: So how should he be remembered? Deford: He was the greatest physical force ever to set foot on a basketball court. But perhaps because he was such a physical force, he didn't always do what was best for the team. Early in his career, Wilt thought the best thing he could do for his team was to score a lot of points, so he did that. Then later in his career he decided the best thing he could do for his team was to set records for assists, so he did that. You know, people always argued about whether Russell or Chamberlain was better -- it almost showed what kind of person you were, by which one you chose. They were so diametrically opposed in terms of the kind of game they played. I think Russell was the best center in history, and Chamberlain was the second-best. But as an individual force, no one, not even Michael Jordan, comes close. When Wilt was at his best, he was a force of nature.
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