Wilt Chamberlain
Wilt Chamberlain is the 7’1, 275 Pound Center of the NBA from 1960-1973. He was born into a large middle-class family on August 21st, 1936 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At birth, Wilt was 9 inches longer then the national average and it seemed that he was destined to reach great heights. People would always bug him about his height. Sometimes if he was in a good mood, he’d joke around with it. It’s funny how gullible some people are. And people always ask if he played basketball. “What else can a group of tall black guys walking around the streets be doing?” He says. Besides being a basketball star, he was also a track star. When he went to Kansas University, he excelled in track before he excelled in Basketball.
Wilt Chamberlain loves joking around. People don’t call him Wilt, his friends and family started calling him “dip” or “dipper” when he started having to dip under doors just to get in. Now he is known as the Big dipper. Wilt had the chance to enter the NBA right out of high school. But he chose to go to college instead. By his senior year, over 200 colleges and universities wanted to draft Wilt. But he went to the University of Kansas on a Basketball and Track Scholarship. When he first joined the NBA, he immediately took over. He won the Most Valuable Player award and the Rookie of the Year award in his first year.
Wilts parents felt strongly about family values and the importance of hard work, so they instilled these principals into their children. Wilt was a very determined person. At age 5, he went around town looking for odd jobs. He washed windows, shoveled snow, cleaned cellars, delivered prescriptions and became the neighborhood junk collector. His height made it easy for him to get jobs because he looked so much older then he really was. He says that if he wasn’t 7’1, he probably wouldn’t have even touched a basketball. If he was like 6’3, he probably would’ve been making money as a Philadelphia lawyer. He never really liked basketball when he was young. But his friends kept on making him play because he was so tall, and on top of that his school never really had a track system, so he played.
Wilt in the beginning would talk about how people always asked him about his height, and how annoying it got after a while. But he would get used to it after a while. If he was in a good mood, he would joke back and answer the question with a witty comment. Wilt could’ve quit basketball if he wanted to. He said that when the warriors were about to trade him, he was ready to quit. He had made investments in San Francisco and could support himself for the rest of his life. But through to words of his friends, he didn’t quit. [next page]