Some dad was there with a camera, pestering Chamberlain to pose with his young son, and Chamberlain was graciously obliging. Lapchick figured he’d be doing a lot more of that in the years ahead.

“I’m Joe Lapchick,” the coach said, “and it’s been a pleasure to watch you perform.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lapchick,” Chamberlain said. “Coming from you, that’s very nice.”

“If I was still at St. John’s, I’d be after you.”

“That’s all right,” Chamberlain said. “Everyone else is anyway.”

That was no exaggeration. “It was a manhunt probably unprecedented in the history of college athletics,” Irv Goodman declared in Sport. More than two hundred colleges—Michigan State, Penn, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Holy Cross, Missouri, Oklahoma, Purdue, UCLA, to name just a few—expressed interest in recruiting Chamberlain. “About the only place I didn’t hear from was Alaska,” Chamberlain later recalled. Many people assumed this put Chamberlain in an enviable position, but in fact the deluge of interest—the pleas of desperate recruiters and the unsubtle insinuations of wealthy alumni—had a nightmarish quality, and made him feel both paranoid and megalomaniacal. “I couldn’t walk into my house without finding someone waiting for me,” Chamberlain remembered. “The telephone and doorbell never stopped ringing. Coaches were coming through the windows to get at me. Every mail brought more offers. I was hounded.”

 

Wilt Chamberlain grew up in Haddington, a largely black neighborhood of West Philadelphia where small row houses were tightly packed on treeless streets. His parents, William and Olivia Chamberlain, had a total of eleven children, but two died in infancy, and Wilt and his two brothers and six sisters—he was the sixth child—were raised in a semidetached two-story gray brick house on North Salford Street. The house had four bedrooms, one for the parents and three for the nine children. It was extremely crowded, especially given his growing size, and while Chamberlain remained close to his family throughout his life, he never married, always living alone, and eventually built for himself in Los Angeles a huge, sprawling mansion that, among its many distinctive features, had only a single, if enormous, bedroom. Guests were consigned to a separate wing.

Chamberlain’s father was originally from rural Virginia, had only a sixth-grade education, and worked as a janitor for the Curtis Publishing Company. He was taciturn but sober and responsible, the neighborhood handyman who could serve as an electrician, carpenter, mason, or plumber. Chamberlain’s mother, more outgoing than her husband, worked as a maid, but also kept the Chamberlain household clean and the nine children in washed clothes. While the children never went hungry, the family had very little money, and Chamberlain and his brothers and sisters all worked, delivering groceries, shoveling snow, and collecting newspapers and scrap metal to sell to the junk dealer. “Wilt worked with the milkman, the iceman, and the ragman,” recalled his sister Barbara Lewis.

While Wilt’s father was only five feet eight, throughout his childhood Wilt was always a head taller than the other kids in the class photo. The milkman who’d hired him to help with deliveries when he was seven was under the impression he was twelve. He was also disproportionately long-legged, with an enormous stride, and at George Brooks Elementary School, he became the anchor leg and youngest member of the three-hundred-yard shuttle relay team. By the time he actually turned twelve, Wilt was six feet tall. That year Don Barksdale became the first black to play on the U.S. Olympic basketball team, and the sport seemed to hold out possibilities for young black boys in a way it had not before. The following year, the city built the Haddington Recreational Center a few blocks from the Chamberlain house, and Wilt began to spend long hours there playing pickup basketball games, tutored by Blinky Brown, the man who ran the center.

Brown thought Wilt’s legs were so thin that he was surprised that they supported him. Wilt was also a timid kid who allowed other, shorter kids to shove him around.