Yago Colás witnesses a basketball Clash of the Titans and reflects on what Wilt Chamberlain and his dad have in common.
This is the second part of a two-part post. Read part one here.
The Big Men were in a separate category altogether and Wilt Chamberlain was the biggest and the baddest of the Big Men. Neither loved nor hated, nor unnoticed, I felt for the Big Men a vertigo-like combination of attraction and terror. They were like dinosaurs to me, absurdly large, another species with a whole different way of moving than anyone else on the court. And like dinosaurs, I was fascinated with them, but also frightened by them. I don’t think my mind really knew yet how to assimilate their difference. But it was more than just their size that was inassimilable to me.
Rationally, I could comprehend their function on the court as shot blockers, rebounders, and inside scorers, but emotionally and aesthetically I couldn’t really understand or connect to their style and their values. What did it mean—what could it mean?—to be so huge, to take up so much space, to live so close to the rim? What would it be like to be unable to handle the ball and to be OK with just receiving passes? Wouldn’t you feel anxious depending on others like that? What if they didn’t pass to you? What if they fumbled the ball away?
But also, wouldn’t there be a lot of pressure on you, just someone else doing all the work and you get the pass? You better put it in the hole every time or else everyone would surely hate you. I’d rather be the one passing. Then, when the big-for-nothin’ doofus misses the bunny, I can seethe inside and sublimate my anger by telling him not to worry about it, that I understand he’s trying his best. Just like Jesus. Just like my mom.
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What I do feel certain of, though, is that—justly or not, and certainly unconsciously—I identified Wilt and my father, and I believe that in my secret love of Wilt I found a way to express not only a secret love and admiration for my father, but also a secret desire to be like him.
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Enter my very own snake in the garden. For, despite my steady self-fashioning, along the lines of God’s own point guard
and his proxy my mother, no player excited more than Wilt Chamberlain, the Big Dipper. And I was never more excited to see a Bucks game than I was to see Wilt’s Lakers play in person in Madison on March 1, 1972. I knew about Wilt’s 100-point game, of course. I knew about his 50-points-per-game, 26-rebound-per-game season in 1961-62. I knew about all his individual records. I knew about his rivalry with Bill Russell of the Celtics, about how Wilt struggled to gain recognition as a winner and so belie the perception that he was a selfish individualist who never learned to accommodate his massive talent with a successful team framework.
Wilt was unreal to me as a person, like JFK or Michael Jackson. Even seeing him in person, from just a few yards away as I did that night, my mind struggled to assimilate his reality. With even the greatest of the other players I saw live during those years I was able to enjoy the way their mythical greatness was incarnated before my eyes, rendering them human and accessible: I might never walk its full length, but there was a single basketball court linking me to Walt Frazier. Not so with Wilt. He played on a different court entirely. He played in a universe of his own. With Wilt, my intellectual and emotional gears creaked a bit and stalled. He was, undeniably, there, a living individual, walking and talking before my eyes. But somehow I couldn’t quite accept it. He was truly, as they say, larger than life, more than real. My young mind and heart were thrilled and blown by the dimensions of his presence.
Also, my dad hated Wilt. I’d always thought it was because Wilt endorsed Nixon in the 1972 presidential campaign, but when I recently asked my dad about it he didn’t remember that at all. He remembers preferring Russell to Chamberlain in the context of their rivalry because of the usual thing: Russell was able more intelligently to integrate his own astonishing abilities with those of his teammates. In my dad’s words, “Chamberlain was blessed (or cursed) with a powerful physical presence which he used to neglect team play.”
Now, this is a much more muted and reasonable expression of his aversion than what I recall, which makes sense since my dad has mellowed considerably. Also, I am no longer a small six-year-old. But at the time, my dad’s preferences and desires seemed enormous to me: they were the most important desires in a household in which everyone’s desires seemed more important than mine. On Christmas Eve, when we opened our presents, we opened them in descending order of age. So if he hated Wilt Chamberlain, it was as though, when I looked at Wilt on the television screen, the big man slowly morphed into a scowling, bullying, roaring demon. Even his jersey number, 13, looked menacing and vaguely evil to me.
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Except it wasn’t quite that simple because already at that age I was finding secret ways to rebel and one of them was by secretly loving the player my dad obviously hated. Sure. But that doesn’t quite explain it either because, in many ways, though he disliked him, my dad was the Chamberlain of our family: our offense revolved entirely around him, he was unapologetically self-assertive to say the least, he was a dominating presence, and he wasn’t a great team player, at least that’s how it looked to me. So maybe in disliking Chamberlain on the grounds that he wasn’t a team player, my dad was unconsciously expressing a dislike for himself and a wish to be more like Russell.
That sort of analysis is tricky business and I don’t really believe I know what the situation really was or what my dad was really thinking. What I do feel certain of, though, is that—justly or not, and certainly unconsciously—I identified Wilt and my father, and I believe that in my secret love of Wilt I found a way to express not only a secret love and admiration for my father, but also a secret desire to be like him. Which is to say, to be the opposite of a point guard, to be the guy who could take 60 shots a game and not feel bad because he knew that he could make 36 of them, knew that he could score 100 points. What would that be like? It must feel awesome to be Wilt! The center of everyone’s attention, all the energy of the game directed toward you, and it doesn’t make you feel bad, like you’ve done something wrong or are hurting someone else, it just feels natural and right because it is natural and right because you are bigger and stronger than everyone else and, well, you cannot be stopped. You should do whatever you want because you can do whatever you want. If it was wrong, someone, something should stop you.
To this day, to the degree that I understand success in life, I articulate it in terms of basketball, perhaps as something like “know when to take your shot, and know when to give it up” and a series of other corollary metaphors related to defense and rebounding. The elements of that vocabulary and the mythological figures that would stand for some basic forces were forged back in those days I am recalling. I spent much of my life (spend some of it still today) veering madly between my outward worship of the abstract, unselfish, point-guard ideal and my shameful, secret fascination with the scoring machine, the player who, as they say, has no conscience. Point guard or scorer? Mom or Dad? Christ or Satan? These were the extreme dichotomies that shaped my growing up and learning to blur them, or elude them altogether might be one way that I would describe what it means to me, in my life, to become a man.
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During the 1971-1972 season, when Wilt and I converged at the Dane County Coliseum, the NBA had 17 teams divided into two conferences, Eastern and Western, and four divisions, Atlantic and Central in the East and Midwest and Pacific in the West. My defending champion Milwaukee Bucks were 55-15 and sitting comfortably in first place in the Midwest Division. The Lakers were an
Now I love it, but back then I felt ashamed to be in the minority among my friends in Madison as a basketball fan. They were baseball and football and hockey fans and basketball hadn’t gripped the imaginations of my suburban, almost all white friends. I often wished that I could love baseball and football and hockey as much as they did. I wished that my father, a Spanish immigrant, did and that he was adept at those sports like their fathers always seemed to be. I wished that I wasn’t afraid of a pitch, wasn’t afraid of a collision in football, wasn’t afraid of falling on the ice. I wished, in that way, to be more clearly an American boy. But it wasn’t that way: I played soccer and basketball, and while my dad was always unequivocally and enthusiastically supportive of my playing and I enjoyed watching games with him, he was never very good at basketball, which was new to him. So for a few years at least, I feel that I was the only kid in Madison who loved and played basketball, and I was certainly the only one of my friends to see the Bucks and the Lakers that night. I hated that then. I am grateful for it now.
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That Lakers team was named one of the top 10 teams of the NBA’s first 50 years. The Bucks team of the previous season, for that matter, substantially the same team I would be watching that night, could easily have been included in that list—in fact, by one reckoning the 1970-71 Bucks are the most dominant team of all time. In any event, among the 10 players who started that game for their respective teams were five who would be inducted into the Hall of Fame as players: Chamberlain, Abdul-Jabbar, Robertson, Gail Goodrich, and Jerry West, whose silhouetted image is now the logo for the NBA. Four of them—all but Goodrich—would be named to the list of the 50 greatest players in the NBA’s first half-century. Indeed, I’d say most honest fans would put those four on their list of the top 10 players in NBA history. The remaining starters were role players on these two teams but would have been stars on other teams. And one player, a Lakers reserve who actually had a big game that night, would become a Hall-of-Fame coach: Pat Riley.
I don’t remember very much about the game, almost nothing in fact, except for the quick, swirling movements of West, Goodrich, and Robertson on the perimeter, and, especially, Kareem posting up Wilt near the hoop, their massive legs like tree trunks straining at eye-level in a duel for position, like my dinosaur books with drawn images of Triceratops battling Tyrannosaurus Rex to the death. I remember that the Bucks lost a close one. So I looked up an old newspaper account and found that the Bucks had taken a four-point lead into the fourth quarter, extended it to five with just over a minute to play, and then blown the game in the final minute, losing by a point on a Gail Goodrich—my God I hated him!—jump shot with four seconds to go. Chamberlain had missed three free throws with the Lakers down by one, but the last was rebounded by Lakers’ forward Happy Hairston, who passed it out to Goodrich for the game winner.
I doubt that in the excitement of what I’d seen I cared very much about the loss. About a month or so later, the Bucks would lose in the Western Conference Finals to the Lakers, who would in turn go on to defeat the Knicks for the championship, Wilt’s second as a player. Before too long, Oscar would retire, Kareem would be traded to L.A., and I struggled to maintain my love for the Bucks even though they stopped playing in Madison and their roster was now populated with mere mortals rather than the mythical heroes of my early years.
But that night I would go back home dumbly trying to assimilate the magnitude of what I had witnessed: Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain, the greatest players ever. And then, the next day, as on so many days after that, I would ask my father to move the car out of the driveway, put on several layers of clothes, grab a rubber Wilson basketball out of the garage, my fingers already growing cold (they would soon be numb), and try desperately and joyfully, through practice and imagination, to grow my very ordinary self to the size of what I had witnessed, to the extraordinary dimensions of the Big Dipper.
A decade later, during my junior and senior years in high school, the apex of my own basketball career, I was the point guard on my team. We had different jersey numbers for home and away: even at home, odd away. I was 12 at home. I loved 12, which seemed benign and soft to me. The number of quarterbacks. The number of point guards. The number of intelligence. By contrast, I always felt a little uncomfortable in 13, Wilt’s number, which was stitched on my away jersey. This was long before the days of Steve Nash, of course. Back then, 13 was wrinkled and hard—it was ugly and looking for a fight. And to me, somewhere in the depths of my soul, when I no longer thought regularly about Wilt Chamberlain, 13 both attracted and threatened me. Lord knows what I might do when I’m wearing number 13.
—Photo zabriensky what?/Flickr; malicemusic213/Photobucket