Word: chamberlain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. WILT ("The Stilt") CHAMBERLAIN, 63, 7 ft. 1 in., "gentle giant" of the NBA and the only player to have scored 100 points in a game; of congestive heart failure; in Bel Air, Calif. (see EULOGY and ESSAY...
...ought to be remembered that, as indisputably great a player as Wilt Chamberlain was, he often evoked a public awe closer to loathing than admiration. "No one roots for Goliath," he lamented to his Los Angeles Lakers teammate Jerry West. The observation was both personally felt and generally interesting in what it says about the way people look at giants. Size (which matters) is an accident of biology, but we tend to treat it as an implicit assault on the averageness of the rest of us--a potential menace, an insulting excess--and there is a universal desire...
...Chamberlain, who died last week at the age of 63, not only dominated basketball, his presence clarified the character of the game. If sports were poems, baseball would be a sonnet, basketball free verse; the thing finds its form according to who is doing it. Chamberlain was responsible for major rule changes that altered basketball's structure--all delimiting the ability of giants to operate in the sky over a 10-ft.-high basket. By his athleticism, he proved that basketball required the world's best athletes, not simply the tallest. And, in a way, he also showed...
...once did he foul out of a game, which says something about the way he played and who he was. Chamberlain hardly ever got into a fight--partly because only the ostentatiously suicidal would start up with him, more because he seemed to appreciate the gentleness that his construction required. He picked opposing players off the floor when they tripped and fell. That weird shot of his--the monstrous and graceful Dipper Dunk--had the look of a man pouring lava from a vat into a teacup...
...while this Milosevic-Hitler has been rampaging through the former Yugoslavia? And whose Administration has been seeking peace in our time by negotiating with him? So perhaps, after all, Clinton is not Churchill but the British Prime Minister whose policy of appeasement Churchill fiercely criticized in the 1930s: Neville Chamberlain...