Wilt Chamberlain Claimed He Slept with 20,000 Women During His Life
Wilt Chamberlain‘s NBA statistics make you question whether someone made a typo when writing them down. 31,419 points. 23,924 rebounds. 100 points in a single game. You would think Chamberlain was playing against a group of high schoolers with the dominant stats and records he put up during his career. Although his basketball statistics are unfathomable, he has an even more incredible stat to his name off the court.
Wilt Chamberlain’s dominant NBA career
Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain was a man amongst boys in the NBA in the 1960s. At 7-foot-1, Chamberlain towered over the competition and dominated his opponents in every aspect.
As a rookie, Chamberlain averaged 37.6 points and 27.0 rebounds per game. Let’s say that again. 37.6 points and 27.0 rebounds. As a rookie!
Two seasons later, Chamberlain put together the most impressive statistical season in NBA history. Chamberlain scored 50.4 points per game and 25.7 rebounds per game during the 1961-62 season. Nowadays, the NBA world explodes when one player drops 50 points in a game. Chamberlain was doing it every night. He even scored 100 points in a single game, the most in NBA history.
Over the course of his career, Chamberlain averaged 30.1 points and 22.9 rebounds per game. He scored the seventh-most points in NBA history and grabbed the most rebounds of all time. He probably would be No. 1 in blocks too, but that wasn’t an official stat in the 1960s.
Chamberlain made 13 All-Star games in his 14-year NBA career. The only season he wasn’t named an All-Star was the year he only played 12 games.
Chamberlain claimed he slept with 20,000 different women during his life
In 1991, Chamberlain wrote a book called A View From Above. He detailed his life in the NBA and his views on other all-time basketball greats. In the book, Chamberlain made a claim about his love life that’s widely debated to this day.
In A View From Above, Chamberlain claimed he slept with 20,000 different women throughout his life. Even with all the mind-numbing stats Chamberlain put up in the league, that might be an even more unbelievable number.
“I was just doing what was natural – chasing good-looking ladies, whoever they were and wherever they were,” Chamberlain said in his book.
Chamberlain wrote his book when he was 55 years old. That means he had to sleep with 500 different women every year from ages 15-55 to reach the massive number he claimed.
Is it even possible to sleep with 20,000 women in 40 years?
The 20,000 figure came from Chamberlain himself, so there’s no way to fact check his claim. Unless someone devotes their life to finding all 20,000 women, we’ll never know if Chamberlain was telling the truth or exaggerating.
What we do know is Chamberlain had a knack for enjoying multiple women at once. His teammates said Chamberlain once slept with 23 different women in a 10-day stretch. Talk about stamina.
Chamberlain never married, and he died in 1999 at the age of 63. He never had a single child despite claiming to sleep with 20,000 different women. The NBA legend was either extremely cautious or just extremely lucky. Either way, it’s fun to debate whether 20,000 women in 40 years is even remotely possible.
If anyone could’ve done it, though, it had to be the best basketball player in the world for over a decade.
All stats courtesy of Basketball Reference
