Is Michael Jordan the greatest of all time? Wilt Chamberlain, a former KU standout and NBA player, didn’t….
Is Michael Jordan the all-time great basketball player?
Wilt Chamberlain disagreed.
“How would Michael Jordan respond to me?” previously inquired the 7-foot-1 Chamberlain. “I can jump higher than he can. Michael had a 43-inch vertical, while my vertical was 52 inches, and I am already seven inches higher than him. He was unable to run as quickly as I could. We used to hold races against the fastest guards when I played for the 76ers, and I would always win.
“I handled the ball as well as he did, and he could not shoot the ball much better than at the foul line. How in the world is he going to protect me? When facing Wilt Chamberlain one-on-one, what will Michael Jordan do?
Remarks made by Chamberlain during what may have been his final in-depth interview occurred just months before he died on October 13, 1999, from a heart attack. He was sixty-three. In late June of that year, we sat down for a nearly forty-minute one-on-one chat with him while he signed two hundred posters for a Tri-State autograph exhibition in Kansas City.
I spoke with Chamberlain three times total. This was one of them. On January 16, 1998, he made his first appearance at the University of Kansas to see the retirement of his No. 13 jersey. After a 50-minute media meeting, he left to meet with the Jayhawks basketball team and fielded questions from the audience. Not one of them, not even the ones concerning his notorious 20,000 dates with women, did he back down from.
