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Murphy: Wilt Chamberlain crashed glass ceilings

WHOEVER WROTE the laws said the echoes never stop. Time is an infinite pond, the present a patch still rippling with the energy of earlier times. All of us are ripples, tiny pieces of string, the vibrating remnants of history's disruptions, reactions in a chain we trace back through stories and pictures and newspaper pages. Some of them whisper with the force of a butterfly's wings. Others resound.

WHOEVER WROTE the laws said the echoes never stop. Time is an infinite pond, the present a patch still rippling with the energy of earlier times. All of us are ripples, tiny pieces of string, the vibrating remnants of history's disruptions, reactions in a chain we trace back through stories and pictures and newspaper pages. Some of them whisper with the force of a butterfly's wings. Others resound.

Wilt Chamberlain was a cannonball, 86 inches and 275 pounds dropped onto the surface of a country's status quo. He was the first one, not ahead of his time but the inventor of it, the patriarch of a modern age of professional sports in which the fittest among us wrested control from those who'd spent decades requiring them to bow. The America of the 1950s was not an unfamiliar place, the pursuit of capital a virtue only for those who already possessed it, the rest expected to subscribe to a mass-produced ethos that peddled abstractions as wealth: faith in God, love of country, acceptance of one's proscribed lot.

From the start, Wilt made it clear he would not abide by anybody's charade, not that of the parochial East Coast press, nor that of the NBA. He left Kansas before he was eligible for the draft, earning his first riches when Sports Illustrated paid him to explain his decision in print.

"I need the money," he said, and then he charted that course through the rest of his career.

At 22, he announced that he was retiring from the game, that no amount of money could bring him back to the NBA. It was a tactic he deployed often, always with great effect. At one point he suggested he become player-coach. At another, part owner of the team.

There are those who didn't see greatness in any of this, who cringed at the destruction of the system they'd grown comfortable with.

In 1961, one Daily News reader opined in letter to the editor that Philadelphia Warriors owner Eddie Gottlieb "should put five men on the team that will play basketball and give the fans a run for their money," opining that "players like Wilt Chamberlain should play for a team such as the Globtrotters, who do not play basketball but just put on a show."

But Greatness in America is funny thing. We fancy ourselves a revolutionary people, but only when the revolt is something we're comfortable with. Maybe it's a human thing, this propensity to force our heroes into binary groups. There's a hero for Group A, and a hero Group B. Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood. Hank Aaron and Muhammad Ali.

Chamberlain defied categorization. He raised eyebrows for his advocacy on the behalf of Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign, igniting a firestorm for his racially charged explanation of why he'd dated more white women than black. Yet his willingness to fight for his piece of the pie affected changes that earned him the respect of his peers.

"The blacks never got a fair hand until Wilt came along," longtime rival Bill Russell told the Inquirer in 1986. "I'm talking about being underpaid, never getting endorsements, and weird things like not getting cars. The white players often were given cars for advertising reasons. The black players got discounts. But Wilt – I have to give him credit. He was the first to have leverage and the first to exercise it. Whether he was threatening to box professionally or play tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, he was getting his money. I guarantee that."

Perhaps this ambiguity is why the talk about Wilt always turns to his physicality, his size. In both, no doubt, he was ahead of his time. The numbers are almost laughable to repeat: 30.1 points, 22.9 rebounds, 45.8 minutes per game for his career. But it was his unapologetic quest to monopolize their profits that, in hindsight, was the true paradigm shift.

It came at a cost that still confronts athletes today, his exploits qualified with the kinds of adjectives that can alter even the greatest of legacies. He was labeled selfish, uncoachable, a malcontent with no heart.

When he jumped to the ABA to become a player-coach for the San Diego Conquistadors, the Daily News ran a story under the headline, "Wilt to be a con artist for $1.8 million," with a lead graf that read, "Wilt Chamberlain has finally found a coach he can play for – himself."

Yet there's another image buried in those same news archives, February 1953, a description of those first reports of a 16-year-old kid nearly 7 feet tall. You read about his decision to leave the East Coast for Kansas, "to get away," about his commutes to Philadelphia from the more anonymous confines of New York, about the early neighborhood talk of "that great big boy with the long legs walking down Haverford Ave. bouncing a ball."

Perhaps, more than anything, Wilt Chamberlain was a person who had nowhere to hide.

dmurphy@phillynews.com

@ByDavidMurphy