But Brown believed that all Wilt had to do was develop. He not only had his amazing height, but unlike most tall kids, who tended to be uncoordinated and slow, he was graceful and quick. Brown thought Chamberlain had such potential that sometimes in the summer, when Wilt and his friends begged him, he’d lock the rec-center gym and let them play undisturbed for hours at a time.

Once he reached adolescence, Chamberlain’s growth rate, remarkable to begin with, accelerated dramatically. The summer he turned fourteen he grew four inches in two months, requiring a new pair of pants every four weeks, and reached a height of six feet seven with no sign of his growth leveling off. Jack Ryan, who covered high school sports for the Philadelphia Bulletin, watched Chamberlain play when he was still at Shoemaker Junior High School and was so struck by his heron-like legs that he nicknamed him Wilt the Stilt, a phrase Chamberlain always hated. He was also known as the Hook and Ladder and as Dipper—the only one nickname he ever liked—which came about because even before he became a teenager, he had to duck his head to get through a doorway.

By the age of sixteen, when he was at Overbrook High School, Chamberlain could stand flat-footed under the basket, reach up, and almost get a finger on the rim. His combination of height and athleticism made him so freakishly good—and the Overbrook victories such decisive routs—that opponents felt playing the school was not just challenging, it was pointless. The team regularly won by margins of fifty points or more. In his senior year, in a game against Roxborough High School, Chamberlain scored twenty-six points in the first half. Roxborough, hoping to avoid a record rout, tried to stall, passing the ball to run down the clock, but Chamberlain went on to score thirty-one points in the third quarter, and thirty-three in the fourth quarter—twenty-seven of them in the last four minutes. His total score, including free throws, came to ninety. The final game score was 123–21. Joe Goldenberg, a player on the West Philadelphia High School team, had been asked by his coach to scout Overbrook in the game against Roxborough. Afterward, Goldenberg told his coach that Chamberlain scored ninety points.

“Where does he shoot from?” the coach asked.

“Anywhere he wants,” Goldenberg said.

Eddie Gottlieb, who ran the Warriors, had naturally gone out to Overbrook to watch Chamberlain play. Gottlieb figured Wilt was one of the few high school basketball players who could, if he wanted to, join the NBA right out of high school. He was ready. And it would have been good for the league, Gottlieb figured, since it did not in the mid-fifties have many truly big men. George Mikan was the best big man in the league, but he was past his prime. Wilt was faster and could jump higher. Gottlieb had Neil Johnston playing at center for the Warriors, but Gottlieb was certain that Wilt, even as a high school student, would make sliced bananas out of Johnston.

If the rules had permitted it, Gottlieb would have taken Chamberlain that very year and made him a starter. But that would have required changing the rule that players were eligible only after graduating from college, and he knew the other owners wouldn’t go for it. “They didn’t want to wreck their relationship with the colleges,” Gottlieb later recalled. “The colleges were their minor leagues. They polished the prospects for us, and it didn’t cost the pro teams a dime. But I’d have taken Wilt. Wilt was special. It was a waste of time for Wilt to go to college.”

Gottlieb tried to persuade Chamberlain to go to college in the Philadelphia area so the Warriors could claim him in a territorial draft, but he learned that Wilt was determined to go out of state. So at a league meeting in early 1955, before Chamberlain had graduated from Overbrook High, Gottlieb proposed a rule extending the territorial draft to high school. To Gottlieb, it was entirely logical. The league was still struggling.