I had a dream about Wilt Chamberlain last night. Wilton Norman Chamberlain, his full name came to me when I was still half-asleep. In my dream, I was hanging out with Wilt, hearing his stories as we sat at a bar at Kutsher’s Country Club in Monticello, N.Y., where I first met him in the summer of 1970. I thought Wilt was so cool, always have, always will.
Wilt was there to play, as he did every year, in the Maurice Stokes Game, a fundraiser to help a former NBA foe. Stokes had played at Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh and at St. Francis of Loretto (Pa.) near Altoona. He had struck his head falling to the floor in the last regular season game and was knocked unconscious. A few days later, in the opening playoff game against the Pistons in Detroit (in which he scored 12 points and had 15 rebounds), Stokes became ill on the flight home to Cincinnati. He had a seizure, and a brain injury left him paralyzed the rest of his life. Teammate Jack Twyman, also from Pittsburgh, became his guardian and created fundraisers such as the game at Kutsher’s to raise money for Maurice’s care.
Stokes and Wilt Chamberlain were the biggest and most fearsome players in the league, and the sight of Stokes in a wheelchair–for the rest of his life–was a sobering scene.
Stokes was born in Rankin, Pa., where his father worked in the nearby mill and his mother cleaned homes for other people. The family moved to Homewood when Maurice was eight years old. He did not start on the basketball team until his junior season but then led Westinghouse to consecutive City League championships in 1950 and 1951. Ed Fleming, who later played at Niagara University and in the NBA, was a teammate at Westinghouse.
Photo by Roger Kutscher: Wilt Chamberlain at far right in lineup of pros playing in the Stokes Game at Kutsher’s Country Club in Catskill Mountains.
So why was I dreaming about Wilt Chamberlain at 5 o’clock on a Wednesday morning, May 6, 2020? I woke up at 5:15 a.m., trying my best not to wake up my wife Kathie. I had asked her a couple of questions but got no answer.
After thinking about Wilt, I began to recall about some of great experiences I had while writing about basketball in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
I wasn’t in Hershey, Penna., the night Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the New York Knicks. No member of the New York Press was present that night at the Hershey Arena. There’s no video of the feat.
I was in New Orleans the night “Pistol Pete” Maravich scored 68 points against the New York Knicks. I was in Anaheim, Calif., the night Roger Brown of the Indiana Pacers scored an ABA playoff record 53 points against Bill Sharman’s LA Stars.
Wilt Chamberlain was my favorite athlete when I was a kid growing up—oh so slowly—on Sunnyside Street in the Glenwood section of Pittsburgh. That’s just southeast of Greenfield and Squirrel Hill and before you hit Hays, West Homestead, and Homestead.
I was a teenager whose reading was limited to Sport magazine, The Police Gazette, True magazine, and Classics Illustrated comics. Wilt was a wunderkind at the University of Kansas, a seven-foot-one center for the Jayhawks, and a definite standout on the school’s track and field team.
A true decathlon man, he could run the quarter mile with the best of them, toss the discus and shot—he threw a 16-pound shot 47 feet in high school—, and glide over the hurdles. When he matured, he even considered boxing Muhammad Ali. He weighed 275 pounds when he was playing pro basketball and was the best-proportioned big man I ever saw.
When sportwriting great and Pitt alumnus George Kiseda was covering the Philadelphia Warriors for The Philadelphia Bulletin, he conducted a test with Wilt Chamberlain as a willing participant. He had Chamberlain run up and down steps and then had a doctor check his heart rate. Unusually tall men in those days often had heart problems. Not Wilt. He passed the test with flying colors. Kiseda, one of the best and most enterprising newspaper reporters of his time, knew he had someone special to write about.
I read magazine stories about Chamberlain and became fascinated with him. He was from Philadelphia, at the other end of our state, but we had little in common. He was black and I was white. He was a giant—called “Wilt the Stilt” and “Goliath”—and I was a shortish guy called “Scoops” because of my newspaper interest. He hated both of his nicknames, by the way, preferring “The Big Dipper,” which was given to him by boyhood friends because he had to dip his head or duck when he passed through most doorways. I remember him dipping to enter my room at Kutsher’s.
Over 100 schools sought his services while he was a junior in high school. Once in college, he scored 42 points to lead the freshmen to a first-time ever victory over the varsity at Kansas, and the first-year players drew more fans to their games at Allen Field House than the varsity did. In his first varsity game, Chamberlain scored 52 points and brought down 31 rebounds.
I was one of the smallest kids in the freshman class (1956-57) at Central Catholic High School and had been at the front of the parade at St. Stephen’s Grade School when I made my First Communion and later my Confirmation. The smallest kids were in the front of the procession, and the tallest kids, mostly the girls, brought up the rear.
Maybe I loved Wilt because I wanted to be tall like him and stand above the crowd. I read somewhere that short people have a great perspective on life because they are always looking up. Wilt boasted that he had a view unlike most people.
It wasn’t until I was well past 70 that I realized I should have gone out for soccer instead of football, and I could have been a crack marksman on the school rifle team. But I had never played a game of soccer or shot a rifle when I went to high school.
In Little League, I had worn the number 1. I have always told people I had that number because it was the only one that fit on my back, not because I was the best player on the team.
When it came time to go to college, we were asked to list three choices. Mine were Pitt and Duquesne and, needing a third, I wrote Wheeling College. Wheeling was across the Ohio River from Bridgeport, Ohio, my mother’s birthplace, and that was about all I knew in those days. Before I went to Pitt, I had never traveled beyond Bridgeport. That’s also the hometown, by the way, of John Havlicek. I always mentioned that my mother was from Bridgeport before interviewing Havlicek. It wasn’t necessary. Hondo was nice to everyone. He said it was because of how and where he was raised.
I was 14 when I started the Sunnyside Athletic Club in 1956 and coordinated all sports activity on our street. Marty Wendell, one of my boyhood friends who now is retired to South Carolina, used to be an usher at PNC Park and the PPG Paints Arena. He once said, “We never had to worry about what we were doing on any particular day, because Jim would have something scheduled for us.” I had a basketball league consisting of four three-man teams that played half-court under a hoop I had erected on a telephone pole across the street from our home at 5410 Sunnyside Street. Wendell and Butchie Boyle, a big kid who later became a career Navy man, were on my team.
I also had my own track and field team, with a quarter-mile track I’d laid out on our street. I had my dad run the course one day and then worried that I could have killed him. He was all of 50, and I thought he was so old. I also built a broad jump pit in a dirt sidewalk—that was before the event was called a long jump—and shot put and discus circle in an open stretch between houses called The Horseshoe Lot. I recruited a couple of black kids from a nearby community because I knew they were faster than the other kids on Sunnyside Street. (One was Chuck Adams, who later played football for Joe Paterno at Penn State, and the other was Benny Rice, who was tragically killed in a boating accident, cut up by the whirling power blades on the back of the boat.) I fashioned a discus with some wood putty and a piece of scrap wood I’d come by at the Hazelwood Lumber Yard, and we used a purloined black duckpin bowling ball from the Hazelwood Recreation Bowling Center for our shot-put event.
A teenager named Dick Caliguiri looked after the second-story bowling alley for his father—yes, the same Dick Caliguiri who became the mayor of Pittsburgh and provided the preface for my first book on our city called Pittsburgh: The Story of the City of Champions, published in 1981.
We also played baseball and softball in that lot, which had hills and dales and drainage ditches here and there, and a distant yard high on a hill that was good for a home run if you could hit the ball that far. When we got older, it became a ground-rule double, and the yard above it became a home run. The lot was flanked by two homes and we always wondered why the home owners to the right were so hostile to us if a foul ball bounced off the aluminum siding of their home. The row house on the left was all brick and the Buffos didn’t complain because Joey, Larry, and Butchie Buffo were playing ball with us.
I’d organize a work crew of the kids on our street to clear the field and put down bases and such. I kept statistics on stuff such as home runs and scoring averages for basketball. I bought little trophies at the Murphy’s 5 & 10 store in Hazelwood that read “World’s Greatest Athlete” and gave them to event winners. Then I started writing short stories about our activities, and that’s when I got dangerous.
I started slipping these stories under the front door at the local bi-weekly tabloid newspaper, The Hazelwood Envoy, and the owners began running these short items. They grew longer and longer until one day there was my byline—"by Jim O’Brien”—and I was sure I wanted to be a sportswriter. I was hooked once I saw my name in the newspaper. I only wish I had gone with Jimmy O’Brien because some of my favorite writers that I would later meet were Jimmy Cannon and Jimmy Breslin of New York, and Jimmy Jordan of Pittsburgh.
The owners of that newspaper were both Hungarians, Michael Michaliszyn and Frank Rakaczky. I still have to look up their names in order to spell them correctly. They were printers with those old hot lead linotype machines, and they published a paper mainly to publicize and promote the businesses for which they did printing work. I was the sports editor of The Hazelwood Envoy until I was 19, when, as sophomore at Pitt, I became the sports editor of The Pitt News, the first non-senior to ever hold that position.
There were a lot of Hungarians in Hazelwood. Many came after Russia invaded Hungary in the late 50s. The Hungarian Club was the last ethnic club remaining in Hazelwood before it was relocated to Homestead around 2015. I played for a Little League team called the Hungarians. That name wrapped around my shoulders. My mother wasn’t so thrilled about me walking around or playing ball with HUNGARIANS across my back, but I told her the Hungarians probably weren’t thrilled about it, either. A national newspaper for Hungarians called Magyarsag was published a block from my home by a printer named Eugene Zebedinski. His son was a classmate of mine.
It all started during the Christmas season in 1950. When I was eight years old, my mother, Mary O’Brien, bought me a small printing press at the Hazelwood Variety Store. I asked her for it, and she seldom turned down any of my wishes. I started posting stories I’d set in type myself on the front door of my home. It didn’t cause as much commotion as when Martin Luther posted his reform suggestions in the form of Ninety-Five Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, but it caught the attention of my playmates and their parents. It became “must” reading. Many years later, when they learned about this, our daughters, Sarah and Rebecca, asked me what the other kids thought about me doing stuff like that. It was a way for the parents to know what their kids were up to. We had no parental guidance for any of our games, and maybe that’s why we had so much fun. We played street games, too, like “buck-buck how many fingers up?” and “tin-can alley” and “it-tag.” No one plays street games these days. At night, we’d play a form of football, more like rugby, in poorly lit yards of an apartment or a home on Sunnyside Street. Our field was about 15 to 20 yards long.
I had everyone in our basketball league—12 or 14 players at best—buy T-shirts and have their mothers iron on the letters that spelled SUNNYSIDE A.C. My team had black jerseys, and the other teams had blue, red and yellow jerseys. Since I was the commissioner of the league, I outlawed the man-to-man defense. I had difficulty freeing myself from a defender focused on me, but I could shoot over a zone defense. I positioned spotlights in the windows of my parents’ bedroom so we could play at night.
My team was called the Royals because the Rochester Royals had so many players with Pittsburgh connections, such as Maurice Stokes, Jack Twyman, Dick Ricketts, Sihugo Green, and Dave Piontek. In 1990, I would take my daughter Sarah, then 16, to the NBA All-Star Game in Miami, and when we got on an elevator at our hotel one day, I spotted Lester Harrison at the back of the elevator. Who else had any idea about the identity of Lester Harrison?
He had been the owner of the Rochester Royals. I recognized him from seeing his picture in basketball guides. I introduced myself to him and told him that his team had been my favorite when I was a kid. Bob Davies, Otto Graham, Bobby Wanzer, Al Cervi, and Red Holzman were also players on that team. I would go on to cover the Knicks when Holzman was the coach, and we became friends. That day in Miami, Sarah had a chance to meet Michael Jordan’s dad, James Jordan, and it hurt when she heard two years later that he had been murdered and dumped on the side of a road in South Carolina. Jordan’s dad, by the way, stood only five feet, six inches. Wilt Chamberlain’s father was the same size. How’d that happen?
In the early ‘60s, when I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh, I practiced Wilt Chamberlain’s famous fade-away and finger-tip roll shot. You just let the ball roll off the end of your fingertips and gave it a little flip at the time of release. Admittedly, it was a much more effective shot if you were seven-one than around my height. In my sophomore year of high school, I finally shot up to five-eight or so. And stopped there.
Photo: Michael Jordan with Jim O'Brien, the Club at Nevillewood
What would be the odds that I would go from play activity to writing about Wilt Chamberlain for The New York Post one day? Or that I would be the editor to revive Street & Smith’s Basketball Yearbook and continue in that role for 23 years and then eight more as editor emeritus? I was also the editor of The Complete Handbook of Pro Basketball for three years and the pro basketball columnist for The Sporting News—six years on the ABA and three more on the NBA.
So there I was a Kutsher’s Country Club in 1970. This was in what was called the Borscht Belt, a summer getaway for New Yorkers, mostly Jewish people. Chamberlain had been a bellboy at Kutsher’s before his senior year at Overbrook High School, and it changed his life. He worked for $2 an hour and got great tips from the guests. He played basketball on the courts at Kutsher’s under the guidance of the summer camp counselor and coach Red Auerbach. This was in Red’s early years with the Boston Celtics before they captured a string of NBA titles. Clair Bee of Long Island University also had a basketball camp at Kutsher’s.
Jim Bukata of Munhall, who was an assistant to NBA publicist Haskell Cohen—the same Haskell Cohen who was originally from Pittsbugh and directed Sihugo Green of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Boys’ High School to go to Duquesne University to play for his friend Dudey Moore—knew I was a big fan of Wilt Chamberlain.
Wilt Chamberlain, photo by Jim O'Brien
Bukata was at Kutsher’s that weekend as well. He asked Wilt if he would go to my room—as a surprise—and visit with me. So, I am in my room at Kutscher’s and there’s a knock at the door. Imagine my surprise when I opened the door and Wilt Chamberlain was standing there. He had to duck his head to come into the room. He stayed for a while and we talked. He wore a dark blue muscle shirt. He had impressive biceps, but they weren’t as well defined as all the fellows today who pump iron as part of their training regimen. He sat at a small round table, and I took a few photos of him. I am still amazed at the clarity of those shots taken with a cheap camera and how they have remained in good condition all these years. I am proud of those photos. I believe they capture Chamberlain at his noble best.
I don’t remember a word Wilt said to me when he visited my room, except something like, “Hello, Jim O’Brien, I’m told you’d enjoy meeting me.” I have a framed photo of Wilt’s face in the room next to where I am writing this. He signed it this way: “To Jim, Peace, Wilt Chamberlain.” He has a great smile in the picture, which I have high on the wall so I am still looking up when I check it out. Former Pirates who are in the Baseball Hall of Fame—Robert Clemente, Ralph Kiner and Bill Mazeroski—are next to him on my Wall of Fame, along with a photo signed to me by Jerry West of the Lakers.
Later that night at Kutsher’s, Wilt stood and leaned over the end of the bar where sportswriters were sitting and kept us entertained and ,in my case, enthralled with his warm voice and funny stories. I knew he had a terrible stutter in his student days at Overbrook High School, but now he spoke in a clear voice, a rich radio voice. He was a delight. I remember he wore a white shirt with puffy sleeves—more like a blouse—and had the collar turned up. That image stays with me.
I first came to New York as a writer in 1970 and was soon assigned to a team of four writers covering the New York Knicks in the NBA playoffs. That started with the Baltimore Bullets, then the Milwaukee Bucks, and, at last, with the Los Angeles Lakers.
Leonard Lewin was the beat man. Milton Gross and Larry Merchant were the main columnists. I was the sidebar man, the one who picked up the leftovers and looked for off-beat stories to complement what the three other staffers were doing. They all looked after me and offered suggestions.
The championship series between the Knicks and Lakers was a classic that went seven games. Chamberlain’s teammates included Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Jim McMillan, Happy Hairston, Pat Riley, and Gail Goodrich. I was a courtside witness to West hitting a 60-foot shot to send a game into overtime. Afterwards, he insisted it was a shot and not a desperate heave.
Bill Bradley of the Knicks told me his mother had recently uncovered a Wilt Chamberlain scrapbook he kept as a schoolkid in Crystal City, Mo., and he said he mimicked certain court moves of West and Baylor during his development days.
I had a seat at midcourt, where there was a break between sections of the press row at Madison Square Garden. The Post had four seats there, and mine was the last one by the break. They don’t have a press row there anymore for college or pro games. They sell those seats for thousands of dollars per game.
When Willis Reed appeared late in the pre-game warm-up, he pushed off my right shoulder to make the step onto the court. Wilt Chamberlain looked at Reed as if he were seeing a ghost. Reed, who had a badly-bruised thigh and was limping up and down the court, made two short jump shots from the lane early in the game, and Chamberlain and the Lakers lost the title right then and there. Walt Frazier was the scoring star of the game, but Reed’s abbreviated return to action was the difference.
I recall after one game in Los Angeles that I was waiting for Wilt Chamberlain to come out of the showers so I could interview him.
He was swiping a large towel behind his backside as he came my way. Now he’s directly in front of me and he’s picking lint—yes, lint—out of you-know-what.
I didn’t want to stare so I started looking up at Chamberlain’s chin. Most of us sportswriters spent a lot of time looking up when we were interviewing basketball players. They thought we were all a pain in the neck, but really it was the other way around. Once, during the 1970 playoffs when Lew Alcindor of the Milwaukee Bucks was in a locker room at Madison Square Garden, I stood on a bench so I could be face-to-face with him. He was an inch taller than Chamberlain. I thought I was being enterprising. Alcindor, who was a difficult interview to begin with, glared at me. He thought I was being another wise-ass white guy, the kind that asked him, “How’s the weather up there?” I got the message and stepped down off the bench. Once again, I was looking up. In 1971, at age 24, he and Oscar Robertson led the Bucks to the NBA title and he adopted the Muslim name of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Walt Bellamy, a big man from Chamberlain’s playing days, about six-eleven with a big butt, was on an elevator once when someone asked him, “How’s the weather up there?” Bellamy had a drink in hand. He poured the drink on the man’s head and said with a smile, “It’s raining up here, my man.”
I was driving home on Route 30 from a speaking engagement at Latrobe High School—Arnold Palmer’s alma mater—on October 12, 1999, driving by St. Vincent College, where the Steelers conducted their summer training camp, when I heard on the radio that Wilt Chamberlain had died. He was 63, about the same age, I thought then, as my father, Dan O’Brien, when he died. Wilt’s birthday was August 21, the day after mine. I still think about him every time I drive along that stretch of road.
Whenever I have a basketball in my hands these days, I usually let the ball roll off the fingertips of my right hand, with a little flip at the end. Into an imaginary basket. George “Iceman” Gervin was great with that same shot. Einstein said true insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. That might be true of me continuing to write all my books. But here we go again … and what you’re reading is the introduction to yet another of my books, Looking Up. I’m going to be flying high with Wilt, The Hawk, Bird, Dr. J, MJ, Magic and “Pistol Pete,” on a magic carpet. Hope you enjoy the trip.
—Jim O’Brien
Retired sportswriter Jim O’Brien (BA, 1964) has written 30 books to date in his Pittsburgh Proud series and has sold nearly 300,000 books over the last 40 years. He lives in Washington County.