The new Showtime documentary “Goliath,” tells the story of Philadelphia’s own Wilt Chamberlain, his impact on basketball, his rise to prominence, and the nuance of his life.
By Chris Murray
For the Philadelphia Sunday SUN
If you were to create a Mount Rushmore of both the NBA and Philadelphia basketball, Wilt Chamberlain would have to be a part of it.
During his playing career, his ability to score, pass and rebound made Chamberlain such a dominant figure in basketball that — and his 7-foot-1 physical presence — sparked rule changes to the game such as the widening of the lane. This was a man who once scored 100 points in one game and that was one of many records that Chamberlain holds that may never be broken.
There are many sports writers and those who study culture who will tell you that Chamberlain was the NBA’s first crossover pop culture superstar. He was such an iconic figure that he’s one of the few athletes to appear on an American postage stamp. Yet, Chamberlain was an enigma to some who thought he was a selfish player who couldn’t win a championship and those who raised their eyebrows when he revealed that he had sex with 20,000 women.
The Showtime documentary, “Goliath,” is a three-part series which premiered on July 14, and that explores the complex life of Chamberlain’s life and basketball career.
“At the end of the day, you’ll see him outside of his basketball feats,” said his nephew, Oliver Chamberlain. “You’ll see his entrepreneurial background, his friends, and how he hung out. … You’ll see how he thought about things outside of basketball. It wasn’t his whole life.”
Through interviews with Chamberlain’s former teammates, family members, friends like Sonny Hill, and local and national sports journalists who covered him both on and off the court, the filmmakers attempted to explore all the complexities and little-known stories of his life on and off the court.
“The approach was to really uncover the true man and who (Chamberlain) was,” said Jacob Mosler, one of the film’s producers. “His feats are extraordinary, but where we were headed with the narrative is to try to get to know him as a person. I think we really did a wonderful job of finding who Wilt was and what moved him.”
Mosler said he and his film company interviewed 44 people — former teammates, past and present-day sportswriters, coaches, friends and relatives, psychologists, and sports sociologists in an attempt to unravel Chamberlain’s well-celebrated, yet complicated life from his humble beginnings here in Philadelphia to his untimely death in his home in Los Angeles in 1999.
One of the unique features of this documentary is the use of artificial intelligence in which the actor recorded the words from three books written by Chamberlain himself that were written in the first person. Mosler said the recordings were sent to a production company in Ukraine that created a replica of Chamberlain’s voice to help narrate the documentary.
“They took 30 hours of Wilt’s archives, they built an algorithm and then they modified it,” Mosler said. “They took our voiceover of Wilt’s words being read and then converted into Wilt’s voice. Wilt is posthumously narrating his own documentary.”
Mosler said because there was a paucity of Chamberlain archives from his youth and his early days as a high school and college basketball player, the filmmakers used “animation puppet” photography” at various points throughout the film.
The three-part documentary inevitably breaks down some of the age-old issues when it comes to the complex nature of Chamberlain as an athlete and as a man.
While Chamberlain was a dominant force in the game of basketball and hold more than a few records that will never be broken, but the big rap on the “Big Dipper,” as his friends and family called him, was that he couldn’t win the “big game.”
Throughout his basketball career, whether it was his college days at the University of Kansas or in the NBA, Chamberlain was always wrongfully labeled as a loser because his teams couldn’t win the big games, even though he won a championship with the 76ers in 1967 and the Los Angeles Lakers in 1972.
The conversation that included scholars like Todd Boyd and Marc Lamont Hill and sports writers like Jackie MacMullen and Jemele Hill, along with Chamberlain’s teammates and former NBA players and coaches like Kevin Garnett and Pat Riley about that particular subject was definitely more nuanced than anything you would hear on contemporary sports talk radio or Twitter.
Perhaps the most compelling comment about Chamberlain, who was often described as the biblical giant Goliath, and his wars with Bill Russell’s Celtics teams of the 1960s came from University of Southern California professor Todd Boyd: “When you think about Russell and Chamberlain, Russell had a lot more help, so you can be the ‘baddest maf—cka’ in the world. It’s really hard for one to beat five. So, who’s David and who’s Goliath?
The film does an outstanding job of breaking down the black, white, and gray of one of the most iconic legends in the history of sports. You can catch “Goliath” on Showtime On Demand, on the Paramount+ app, and on Friday nights at 10 p.m on Showtime.
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