Wilt Chamberlain is mostly known for two numbers, 100: the amount of points he scored in a game and 20,000: the amount of women he allegedly slept with. One of the most astonishing numbers associated with Wilt however is 0: the amount of children he has. Well that final number might also be false as a man has emerged claiming Chamberlain is his father.
In his 1991 memoir, A View from Above, Chamberlain famously boasted of having slept with 20,000 women. But until the day he died, at 63, from a heart attack at his Bel-Air mansion in October 1999, Chamberlain made it clear there would be no “little Wilties.” He was right in a way. Aaron Levi is 6’ 5″ and weighs 250 pounds.
In his email to me, Levi said that after he finally identified a British woman as his biological mother, she told him that he was conceived in a one-night stand with Chamberlain in San Francisco in 1964. She said she had kept his birth a secret from her own family and had struggled ever since with guilt over his birth and adoption. Levi added that in 2010 he reached out to two of Chamberlain’s sisters, by letter and by phone, but they spurned him.
Levi said he did not want a dime from the Chamberlain family and did not want to sully Wilt’s name. Rather, he wanted to meet members of the black side of his family and learn more about his biological father; to correct the “false history” that Chamberlain had no children; and to find out if Chamberlain had any other children, who would be his half-siblings.
“It’s hard to accept that you are a product of a one-night stand,” Levi told me. “I wanted her to tell me something good about him, but that wasn’t going to happen. I realized that we had different feelings about him. She sees him as a womanizer. . . . To me, he’s my father.”
For more read this intriguing feature on Sports Illustrated.
