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I really don’t want to own stuff, but I am fascinated by great product design, whether the thing we’re talking about is a chair, a push-button telephone or a pencil. I think the classic VW Beetle is pretty much perfect, and this 1966 commercial, featuring Wilt Chamberlain and some still photography, is likewise flawless.
Tags: Wilt Chamberlain
Wilt Chamberlain was a remarkable athlete (basketball, volleyball, track and field), but it’s probably a good thing he never realized his dream to fight Muhammad Ali. Howard Cosell presides over the ridiculousness, as he often did.
From East Side Boxing: “Springtime, 1971. Inside an office within the Houston Astrodome, a most unusual negotiation is about to take place. Seated at one end of the table is Muhammad Ali, former Heavyweight Champion of the World and self-proclaimed greatest fighter of all time. Next to him: Bob Arum, the former Justice Department attorney turned boxing promoter who had worked with Ali since his 1966 fight with George Chuvalo.
A few minutes later, they are joined by one of the most imposing figures in all of sport, the towering titan of professional basketball Wilt Chamberlain. Ali and Chamberlain knew each other well and had appeared together on numerous occasions in the past, from television talk shows to press conferences addressing civil rights issues. The purpose of this meeting, however, was far different from their previous encounters.
Today no media cameras are present, no reporters scramble for sound bites. The two most famous athletes in the world isolated themselves within the cavernous empty stadium to quietly discuss an event without precedent in the annals of sport. For on this day, Muhammad Ali and Wilt Chamberlain will agree to face each other in a 15-round boxing match, to be held in the Astrodome on July 26, 1971.
For Chamberlain, fighting Ali represented the pinnacle in his quest to conquer not only his own sport, but the entire sporting world.”
Eugene Selznick, who just passed away, was one of the fathers of American volleyball and no slouch at ballyhoo, either. He recruited basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain to play on a tour in the early 1970s, which helped further popularize the game and make it an Olympic sport. An excerpt from Selznick’s New York Times obituary, which was written by Paul Vitello:
“Chamberlain, the 7-foot-1 N.B.A. star, was near the end of his basketball career in the early 1970s when he took up beach volleyball to help rehabilitate his battered body. Selznick proceeded to cajole Chamberlain into joining him and other top players for a nationwide exhibition tour in the summer of 1973, the year he retired from basketball.
The publicity generated by the Chamberlain tour, as it was known, brought a new generation to volleyball and laid the groundwork for a boom in popularity that began in the ’80s. Beach volleyball became an official Olympic sport in 1996. Selznick coached the men’s Olympic beach volleyball team of Sinjin Smith and Carl Henkel to a fifth-place finish in Atlanta in 1996, and the women’s Olympic team of May-Treanor and McPeak to fifth place in Sydney in 2000.”
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Home-movie footage from the Chamberlain-Selznick tour.
Chamberlain visits Ed Sullivan after scoring 100 points in a game, 1962.