Report: Wilt Chamberlain may have fathered a child in 1964
That Wilt Chamberlain passed away in 1999 without ever marrying is understandable. Wilt’s ascension as a basketball star came just as the culture began a sexual revolution of sorts, and he enjoyed his status as a bachelor with spouse to answer to. That he passed in 1999 having never fathered a child is far less believable, especially in light of Chamberlain’s 1991 boast that he’d slept with 20,000 women between the ages of 15 and the publication of his book ‘A View From Above.’
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That admission or boast (depending on whom you believe) made Chamberlain a national punchline for years. A recent update from Sports Illustrated, however, makes the legendary figure seem all the more human.
Aaron Levi, a 50-year old artist from San Francisco who stands 6-5, claims that he is Chamberlain’s son. In an interview with Gary Pomerantz, Levi describes a one-night affair between Wilt and Levi’s possibly alcohol-besotted biological mother, who later gave her son up for adoption.
In his email to me, Levi said that after he finally identified a British woman as his biological mother, she told him that he was conceived in a one-night stand with Chamberlain in San Francisco in 1964. She said she had kept his birth a secret from her own family and had struggled ever since with guilt over his birth and adoption. Levi added that in 2010 he reached out to two of Chamberlain’s sisters, by letter and by phone, but they spurned him.
Levi said he did not want a dime from the Chamberlain family and did not want to sully Wilt’s name. Rather, he wanted to meet members of the black side of his family and learn more about his biological father; to correct the “false history” that Chamberlain had no children; and to find out if Chamberlain had any other children, who would be his half-siblings. Levi said the search occupied nearly his every waking moment. He was ready to go public with his story.
I talked with Levi by phone the day after receiving his email. Then we met for coffee. I’ve interviewed him 10 times, three of them at his two-bedroom apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where he lives alone. “I am simply an adopted person who has been on a long journey of self-discovery,” he wrote, “and [am] reaching out to people to learn more about where I came from.” His aunt Victoria (Vicki) Levi, a Boston-area psychiatrist, said his essential questions are, “Who does he belong to? Where are you in the world? Who are you? Who claims you as theirs?”
Levi has met his biological mother, who declined to be mentioned by name nor interviewed for the SI feature. According to Aaron, his British-born biological mother had no idea who Chamberlain was prior to meeting him, and had no working knowledge of his status as the most popular basketball player in the world at the time of their 1964 liaison. This, and the anonymous adoption proceedings, would seem to go a long way toward dismissing the Chamberlain family’s claims that the mother only picked Wilt’s name for some odd strain of publicity.
The adoptive birth documents list Levi’s biological father as a 28-year old African-American professional basketball player who worked out of San Francisco, one that was born in Kansas. Wilt was far taller than 6-10, but he was the only African-American player on the then-San Francisco Warriors of that height and ethnicity. While Chamberlain wasn’t born in Kansas, he did attend college at the University of Kansas, and it is more than possible that some of the facts included in the discussions the mother and father had on that fateful night may have been either smudged or exaggerated. The father is also listed as having earned a master’s degree, which Chamberlain did not receive while at Kansas.
Gary Pomerantz knows all about Chamberlain’s legacy, his exaggerations, and his ability to sometimes match what would usually be exaggerated figures with his on and off-court exploits. Pomerantz penned ‘Wilt, 1962,’ an absolute must-read of a book that detailed the Basketball Hall of Famer’s 100-point outing against the New York Knicks in 1962. It was that book, and Pomerantz’s accessibility, that allowed Levi to reach out to the author and detail his years’ worth of work in both locating his birth mother, and receiving confirmation from her mother that Chamberlain, indeed, was Levi’s father.
Wilt Chamberlain was one of 11 siblings, and his two surviving sisters want absolutely nothing to do with either acknowledging Aaron Levi, much less submitting for a DNA test. One sister refused to be interviewed for the Sports Illustrated feature. The other claimed she couldn’t “understand why this is important,” blithely ignoring the idea that a grown man who spent the majority of his adult life not knowing who is biological father is might want some sort of closure in regards to the circumstances behind his birth.
(One of Wilt’s sisters even refused to look at photographs of Aaron Levi. One side-by-side capture of both men, as re-published by SI, shows off striking similarities.)
The entire feature is well worth your time. Aaron Levi may never find out for certain whether or not Wilt Chamberlain is his biological father via a DNA test. However, his own research, confirmation from a mother that he has no reason not to believe, and the physical similarities are truly hard to slough off.
