At the Dipper’s death in October 1999, the poet Tom Meschery thought of the sports axiom, “The game’s not over until the fat lady sings.” By then he was a high school English teacher in Reno, Nevada, who had published a second book of poetry, Nothing We Lose Can Be Replaced, about his family’s Russian past, the NBA, and his years of teaching. Now, in “Mourning Wilt the Day After His Death,” Meschery wrote, in part:
Remember, if I can,
Aquinas’ five proofs for God’s existence:
The Uncaused Cause or was it The Divine Plan
that toppled Wilt? It might help reading
about the Prime Mover, but I doubt it.
Words alone are never enough. Today,
I need opera—Wagner’s Ring—a blonde sopranowith big bosoms belting out her last aria.
In Gainesville, Florida, the Rev. Willie Naulls would recall the hundred-point night as a statement about race and freedom. Naulls had spent his last three NBA seasons with the Celtics, winning three championship rings, and then had prospered over the decades as a businessman. He turned to the ministry in the early 1990s. Just two months before Chamberlain’s death, Naulls had been thinking of his old friend. In his church newsletter that August, he wrote extensively of the NBA and of the hundred-point game: “Wilt had rung the bell of freedom loud and clear, shouting, ‘Let my people be free to express themselves.’ For we were and will be for all time those who withstood the humiliation of racial quotas even to the point of the NBA’s facing extinction because of retarded expression and stagnating growth.”
Remembering their shared car ride home from Hershey, Naulls wrote, “The ride and the fellowship on the night of the 100 point explosion is exclusively ours; and in that regard, we are Brothers, in the Night of His Flight, Forever.”
At a fishing store in Portland, where he went to buy waders, Imhoff learned of the Dipper’s death. He heard a voice in the store say, “Wilt Chamberlain just died.” Imhoff turned and said, “Whaaaat?” He had been carrying a game photo for the Dipper to sign—the Sixers’ Wilt Chamberlain going up for a dunk against the Lakers’ Imhoff, the Axe chopping the Dipper’s right forearm. Stunned now, Imhoff returned to his car where he heard a radio news report confirming the death. He sat for a while in silence.
In the newsroom of The Chicago Defender, Ruklick got word from a CNN news flash. A year before, at the Dipper’s invitation, Ruklick went to Lawrence, Kansas, to see Wilt’s college jersey retired. “Always glad to see you, Ruh-da-lick,” the Dipper had said, remembering his first college game, “because I scored fifty-two against you.” Ruklick noticed the Dipper perspiring and how his confident walk had become an old man’s shuffle, the result of an ailing hip. The Dipper looked old, vulnerable. Chamberlain would later send his college jersey as a gift for Ruklick’s son. But when they shook hands late that night in Lawrence, they parted forever. After leaving the NBA, Ruklick had followed his intellectual curiosity back to Northwestern where he earned a master’s in literature. For many years an investment manager, he decided at the age of fifty, divorced and with three children, to earn another master’s, in journalism. An intellectual renegade still, he took a reporter’s job at The Defender, becoming the only white on the newspaper’s twenty-two member staff. He had long been thinking about race. Ruklick looked back at the NBA with a jaundiced eye, seeing everything more clearly, he believed, and more objectively. He saw how the Dipper was treated as an oddity, exploited by Gotty and the league (“Eddie put on a circus, and Wilt was his sideshow”), and how the NBA’s white players had rejected Chamberlain. “When Wilt came along, the attitude [among white players] was, in my opinion, ‘This is a freak who will come and go. There will never be a black guy doing this again.’” To have told the NBA’s white players in 1962 what the league would become … why, it was enough to make Ruklick laugh. “Oooooh!” he said. “To say to Conlin or Gola or Arizin, ‘There’s going to be a time when a guy named Shaquille O’Neal—Whaaaaat?!! What do they call him?—he’s going to make untold millions of dollars and have white girls on his arms in television commercials. And he and eighty percent of the guys in the league are going to be black and earning millions.’” Ruklick shook his head. “Gola would have gone to Gottlieb and said, ‘Cut this guy. He’s crazy.’” To Ruklick, the hundred-point game was “part of the mythology. It’s part of the dream world, the field of dreams counterpart in basketball, that the NBA grew into this marvelous thing that it is with pioneers like Bob Cousy and Wilt Chamberlain … and to see it extend inevitably to Wilt’s mythological 20,000 [women] is part of the whole tawdry history of those early days.” In summer 2004, a massive eighteen-foot, three-ton bronze sculpture of the Dipper was unveiled outside the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia, and Ruklick, Attles, and Arizin attended the dedication. There they saw a bronzed avant-garde, multifaceted likeness of Wilt Chamberlain, including the Dipper slam-dunking at a forty-five-degree angle, with an accompanying plaque that read: “The worth of a man is measured by the size of his heart.” Earlier, Ruklick had seen the work in progress and casually mentioned to the sculptor that the Dipper wore a rubber band at his wrist. The artist added that touch to the final product and Ruklick, recalling his role in the hundred-point night, would note proudly, “So I give Wilt another assist—this one eternal, forever memorialized as art.”
Attles was the only player from the hundred-point game who attended the Chamberlain memorial service in a Los Angeles church. He was among many notable sports figures that day: Jim Brown, Elgin Baylor, Bill Walton, Nate Thurmond, and the old Globetrotter, Meadowlark Lemon. Bill Russell delivered a tribute to the Dipper, saying, “As we got older, the more we liked each other because we knew basically that we were joined at the hips…. We were both important to each other…. The only person who knew what we were doing was the other guy. I knew how good he was”—here, the Dipper’s fiercest rival smiled—“and he knew that I knew how good he was.” A slow, rolling laughter filled the church. Russell concluded by saying, “And so I’ll just say, as far as I’m concerned, he and I will be friends through eternity.” The Dipper’s death was hard on Attles. They’d stayed in touch over the years. Attles once said, “People would never be happy with what he did, and beneath that veneer, I knew how much it was hurting him. He was so misunderstood. So few people took the time to try and appreciate Wilt. Most everybody just assumed that a great player couldn’t possibly also be a great person.” The miracle of Al Attles was that nearly forty years later he remained with the team now known as the Golden State Warriors. He had played eleven years, coached fourteen (winning the 1974–75 NBA title), and now served as a vice president. In the church, Attles saw the picture of the Dipper from the hundred-point game. Attles had made all eight of his shots in Hershey, and years later the Dipper presented him with a basketball and a plaque for Attles’s perfect shooting night: To Al: Who Did All the Right Things at the Wrong Time.
Gola and Arizin attended a memorial church service for the Dipper in west Philadelphia, not far from Overbrook. Gola spoke of his enduring appreciation for Chamberlain. He pointed to the crook at the bridge of his nose, the product of a Dipper elbow nearly a half-century before. An emotional Arizin told of how Chamberlain had befriended his sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Stephanie, as she was dying of an inoperable brain tumor. The Dipper corresponded with her for months and phoned her regularly; when the NBA in 1997 honored its greatest fifty players at the all-star game in Cleveland (including Arizin and the Dipper), Stephanie came with her grandfather, hoping to collect autographs. The Dipper embraced her and pushed her wheelchair around the room, getting all fifty NBA legends to sign her book, including Russell, long notorious for refusing to sign autographs. “Wilt, I’m in your debt,” Arizin told him in Cleveland. “I owe you.” Five months later, Stephanie Arizin died and Chamberlain sent a Dipper-sized floral arrangement. Paul Arizin had hardly known him in 1962. There was the age difference, the racial separation, Arizin was married, the Dipper single. Wilt was hard to know. What
Paul Arizin felt, but struggled to say, was that only now did it feel like they truly were teammates.
CHAPTER 22
The Ball
ON THE DAY THE DIPPER DIED, in a town called Annville, eight miles from Hershey, Kerry Ryman worked a fifteen-ton remote control crane, its movements directed from a small box strapped to his stomach. At fifty-one, plumped up and with his thick wavy hair gone gray, Ryman unloaded steel just arrived to the factory, plate steel and coiled steel, used in prefabricated buildings. He had twenty-three years on this job. Divorced, with his grown daughter married and moved away, Ryman lived alone in a rented place; in his spare time he watched TV, old shows from the Sixties, Mayberry RFD and the like, and played a little golf. He didn’t own a computer or a VCR. He preferred the quieter, simpler days of his boyhood when everyone in town was like family. Since the hundred-point game, Hershey had changed more than Kerry Ryman. For one thing, HersheyPark had been fenced-in so that cars could be charged entrance fees to an amusement park that seemed to have Disneyland-like aspirations. The Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, meanwhile, grown since 1970 to more than 5,000 employees, had brought in a new, more diverse population. According to the 2000 Federal Census, among Derry Township’s more than 21,000 residents were 843 Asian-Americans, 297 Latino-Americans, 355 African-Americans, and fifteen American Indians. While this didn’t exactly make the township diverse in a big-city way—it was still more than 92 percent white, after all—Kerry Ryman felt Hershey growing less familiar, more complicated. To him, Hershey seemed more determined to connect with the world than with its old families—that is, with the people who knew and loved Milton S. Hershey. Now, what began as just another day for the $30,000-a-year crane operator changed dramatically when a worker named Mike Blouch said excitedly, “D’ya hear? Wilt Chamberlain just died.”
Blouch wasted no time: “Kerry, I want that ball.”
“Aww, Mike—”
“Just give me that ball now!”
“Let it alone. Just forget about it.”
This conversation had been going on for years, ever since Blouch first learned that Ryman had, in a big plastic bag in his closet, Wilt Chamberlain’s hundred-point basketball. Wow, what a treasure, Blouch thought. “Give you five hundred dollars for it,” he’d told Ryman. Ryman had taken the ball on that long-ago night for one reason—to play with it—and he had done just that, for years, in the school gym, outside in the back alley. The ball had turned black, its texture rubbed raw. The printed words, including the NBA insignia, were gone by the middle Sixties. The ball had literally and figuratively deflated. It looked as if it had spent the last thirty-seven years in a vat of Hershey’s chocolate.
Ryman’s stock reply: “Mike, that ball’s not worth a damn thing. Look at it.” But Blouch was persistent. Scrappy and resourceful, Blouch would describe his modest upbringing as “upper-lower class.” He would say, “I have that used-car salesman mentality at times.” He was forty, had a wife and kids, and forever searched for new ways to make a buck. He said, “Kerry, we’re working-class people. We don’t get opportunities like this very often in life.” With the Dipper’s death, Blouch saw an opportunity. He told himself, When things happen … that’s when things happen.
Kerry Ryman gave in. He gave Blouch the ball. Soon, it was being sold on eBay, with a $1 million reserve; a $2 million bid surfaced, but the bidder couldn’t be found and Blouch considered it all a hoax. Horrified, Ryman told Blouch, “I want that ball back.” Ryman thought about giving the ball to charity. He had another passing thought: It would be nice to bury the ball with Wilt. Shortly after the hundred-point game, Ryman’s father had contacted the Hershey arena to explain about the ball. Word came back: the Dipper didn’t want it. Kerry Ryman kept it.
The sports memorabilia market had barely been born. A nineteen-year-old fan sitting in the Yankee Stadium bleachers five months before Hershey had caught Roger Maris’s sixty-first home run of the season that broke Babe Ruth’s famed record. Maris told the teen to keep the ball, make some money on it. A restaurateur gave the teenager $5,000 for the ball and then presented it to Maris, who then gave it to baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Kerry Ryman hadn’t heard a word about any of that. Besides, that was the New York Yankees and Babe Ruth. Cooperstown had been collecting baseball relics since the Thirties. Basketball hadn’t even established its own Hall of Fame yet. Decades later, in 1991, a Philadelphia 76ers official would contact Ryman as the team prepared to honor the Dipper, asking if Ryman would give the ball back to Wilt. Sure, Ryman said. The official called back, though, and said never mind, the Dipper doesn’t want it.
After the eBay debacle, Blouch had bigger ideas. He contacted auction houses in Chicago and New York. Agents agreed his story was unusual, odd, remarkable, though one New York dealer advised, “Don’t say the ball was ‘stolen.’ Just say that it was ‘borrowed.’” Blouch struck a deal with Leland’s, a New York house specializing in sports memorabilia. He hired a local attorney who drew up papers for his agreement with Ryman: Since Blouch was putting out his own time and money (mostly, attorney’s fees), Blouch would get three-eighths of the proceeds from the sale of the ball and Ryman five-eighths. Ryman signed the papers even as his father told him that selling the ball was a bad idea. “You ought to just put that thing in a burn barrel,” Reuel Ryman said. As Christmas 1999 approached, Leland’s president Mike Heffner sat in Blouch’s living room and looked at the ball. It wasn’t what he had expected. Is this it? Heffner had authenticated sports memorabilia worth tens of millions of dollars and consulted with the FBI on fakes and frauds. The hundred-point ball didn’t have a hologram on it or any special tagging like Mark McGwire’s seventieth home run baseball. It wasn’t an autograph that could be substantiated by exemplars. The authenticity of the hundred-point ball would be based entirely on someone’s word. Heffner met Kerry Ryman and listened to his story. He found Ryman credible; his story had an essential integrity. Local newspaper articles from the past decade quoted fans at the game who saw him take the ball. Mike Heffner decided, It doesn’t matter what this ball looks like, this is it. Heffner thought the ball might sell for as much as $100,000.
As Leland’s publicity machine kicked in, Blouch grew increasingly nervous. He didn’t get the cover of the Leland’s catalog for the April 2000 auction. Charlie Sheen did. The actor was selling his private baseball memorabilia collection, which featured some remarkable items, including Babe Ruth’s white mink overcoat, a piece of Joe DiMaggio’s wedding cake (from his 1941 marriage to actress Dorothy Arnold), and the ball hit by the New York Mets’ Mookie Wilson that went through the legs of Boston first baseman Bill Buckner helping the Mets win the 1986 World Series. Besides, Heffner told Blouch he couldn’t put the hundred-point ball on the cover: “People would look at it and say, ‘What the hell is that?’” In its catalog, though, Leland’s described the ball as “the most important piece of basketball memorabilia on the face of the earth.” That, Blouch liked.
Blouch rented a big car and drove Ryman to New York. Leland’s put them up near Central Park, not far from the Dipper’s old place. Ryman appeared at a press conference at Mickey Mantle’s restaurant. Early the next morning, a limousine picked him up and took him to The Today Show, where a woman applied makeup for him. Blouch paced nearby; he knew The Today Show was huge exposure. Just then, an assistant to the Leland’s publicist showed up with the ball. Blouch nearly had a seizure. The ball was concave! He’d told everyone to make certain the ball was kept in a warm place overnight. Otherwise, it would collapse and look like … this. The hundred-point ball looked like it had been stored in an igloo.
Blouch needed to do something, and fast. Beneath a desk in the guests’ waiting room, beside a table brimming with bagels, fruit, and coffee, Blouch spotted a room heater. “Can we use this?” he asked. He plugged it in and held the hundred-point ball in front of the blowing heat. Five minutes passed and the ball began to fill out. After ten minutes, to Blouch’s great relief, the ball
looked beautiful.
He looked up on the TV monitor and saw Kerry Ryman sitting with Tom Brokaw. After his lead-in, Brokaw said, “Kerry Ryman joins us this morning. He’s obviously no longer a teenager.” Ryman smiled wanly. “Exactly,” he said.
Ryman told of how he’d taken the ball at the arena. “And what did you do with it?” Brokaw asked. “I played with it,” Ryman said. “We played with it for years in the alley, at the playgrounds.”
Wilt, 1962 Page 25