If there’s one player in NBA history that lived life king-size, it’s Wilt Chamberlain. The legendary big man did everything on a large scale. His stats are monstrous, nobody will ever be close to some of the averages he put up during his time in the league. And even off the pitch, Chamberlain was prolific; the stories about him and his legend are both larger than life.
There is the claim that Wilt Chamberlain was involved with 20,000 women throughout his life, something he addressed himself. The revelation from famous director Quentin Tarantino that Wilt dated his mother for a while is also a story that is hard to believe. And it’s not just the ladies that the late NBA legend was fond of, it was also fast cars. Chamberlain was a giant of a man, though, standing at 7 feet tall, which led to an interesting situation when he wanted to drive the flashy cars he loved so much.
Wilt Chamberlain Had A Race Car Built For Him Worth $750,000 In 1996
Even though contracts in the NBA and commercial opportunities weren’t as lucrative as they have become in the last few decades when Wilt was around, he made a lot of money. Being the best at a sport has always been valuable, and as such, Chamberlain had some money to fund his expensive tastes. And the New York Times revealed how Wilt had a car built for himself in 1996 after years of coming up with different solutions to be comfortable in a race car.
“Wilt Chamberlain’s powerful 7-foot-1 frame made him one of the N.B.A.’s greatest scorers, but it also made it nearly impossible for him to drive the fast cars that he loved.
“He had to sit on a padded mat that snapped to the floor of his Lamborghini Countach because he and the driver’s seat could not fit comfortably inside. Chamberlain finally had a car built for him, a Le Mans-style racecar called the Searcher One. It cost about $750,000 in 1996.
‘Wilt never knew what it was to be comfortable in a sports car until we built the Searcher,’ said Richard Paul, an automotive engineer who built the engine and the interior of the Searcher One and worked on vehicles for Chamberlain from the mid-’80s until he died in 1999.”
It’s hard to think that anyone as athletically gifted and physically blessed as Wilt Chamberlain could be disadvantaged by those things, but this is a clear case of that. He managed to find a way around it, though he was not a man that could be denied whatever he wanted.
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