Personal Life of Wilt Chamberlain

Personal Life Of Wilt Chamberlain

Wilt Chamberlain was the first big earner of basketball: his 1959 $30,000 rookie contract was $5,000 more than the previous best earner, Celtics star guard Bob Cousy. He was basketball's first player to earn more than $100,000 a year, and earned an unprecedented $1.5 million during his Lakers years. As a Philadelphia player, he could afford to rent a New York apartment and commute to Philadelphia. In addition, he would often stay out late into the night and wake up at noon, a point that became notorious in the 1965–66 NBA season.

When he became a Laker, Chamberlain built a million-dollar mansion he called the "Ursa Major" in Bel-Air, as a play on his nickname "The Big Dipper". It had a 2,200-pound pivot as a front door and contained great displays of luxury. Robert Allen Cherry, journalist and author of the biography Wilt: Larger than Life, describes his house as a miniature Playboy Mansion, where he regularly held parties and lived out his later-notorious sex life. This was also helped by the fact that he was a near-insomniac who often simply skipped sleeping. Chamberlain lived alone, relying on a great deal of automated gadgets, with two cats named Zip and Zap and several Great Dane dogs as company. In addition, Chamberlain drove a Ferrari, a Bentley, and had a Le Mans-style car called Searcher One designed and built at a cost of $750,000 in 1996. Following his death, in 2000 Chamberlain's estate was valued at $25 million.