Wilt Chamberlain, whose outsized presence and overwhelming talent helped reshape the National Basketball Association and rewrite its record books over a 14-year career, died yesterday at 63 of an apparent heart attack.
Mr. Chamberlain was found dead in bed at his Bel-Air home in Los Angeles at about 12: 30 p.m., police said. Mr. Chamberlain was hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat in 1992, and Sonny Hill, the Philadelphia basketball guru who was one of his closest friends, said Mr. Chamberlain was going to be getting a pacemaker.
"We've lost a giant of a man in every sense of the word," NBA Commissioner David Stern said in a statement released by the league. "The shadow of accomplishments he cast over our game is unlikely ever to be matched."
Mr. Chamberlain's single-game record of 100 points, scored against the New York Knicks during a game in Hershey, Pa., in 1962, will likely remain untouched.
But it was not merely the points This line is longer than measure/can't be broken he scored (31,419, a record later broken by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) or the record number of rebounds he snatched (23,924, including an NBA-best 55 in one game) or the shots he swatted away that identified Mr. Chamberlain as the most dominant player of his era.
It was his massive size: At 7 feet 1 and between 275 and 300 pounds, he played Gulliver to a league filled mostly with Lilliputians. And like Gulliver, he was well-traveled.
Leaving the University of Kansas after his junior year, Mr. Chamberlain played with the Harlem Globetrotters before being the territorial draft choice of the Philadelphia Warriors in 1959. Mr. Chamberlain had been a basketball and track star at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia.
Mr. Chamberlain wound up moving with the team to San Francisco after the 1961-1962 season -- a season in which he averaged an astounding 50.4 points a game -- and returned to the Philadelphia 76ers in a trade three years later. He was traded again in 1968 to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he was teamed with two of the game's other superstars, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor.
"I'm personally shocked and saddened," said Mr. West, the Lakers' executive vice president of basketball operations. "I've known Wilt for 40 years, and he was a great friend of mine as well as a great teammate. When we acquired Wilt, he rejuvenated my enthusiasm for playing the game and was one of the people who helped all of us achieve our dream of winning an NBA championship."
