The opening tip  Wilt Chamberlain won an NBA title with the Lakers in 1972 after pushing to be traded to Los Angeles years earlier. (AP) | Wilt Chamberlain launched the NBA's trade request culture LAS VEGAS — An all-time great scorer decided he wanted to leave Philadelphia for Los Angeles. He issued a trade request shortly after an inexplicable playoff collapse against the Boston Celtics and during a dispute with the 76ers over his compensation. Critics derided him as a selfish loser and a choker, but he pressed ahead anyway, undeterred by the backlash and negative headlines. A full 55 years before 76ers guard James Harden tied up the NBA offseason with his ongoing desire to be shipped to the Clippers, Wilt Chamberlain authored virtually the same story. The Hall of Fame center got his way with a July 9, 1968, trade to the Lakers that set him up for a historic 1972 title run and a sunny retirement marked by beach volleyball games, Hollywood cameos and debaucherous house parties. That landmark deal is explored at length in "Goliath," a new Showtime documentary that argues Chamberlain was a founding father of basketball's player empowerment era. "He was the NBA's first rock star," said Hall of Fame forward Kevin Garnett, an executive producer on the project. "Wilt was the first pure athlete: his leaping ability, running ability. He was a track star, and that made him a super weapon. I see similarities [between our games] obviously, but I was no athlete like that. … The first thing [my uncles and grandfather] would always tell me about was [Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's] skyhook and Wilt's 100 points, and how the young boys would never break that."  Chamberlain is shown in the iconic photo taken the night he scored 100 points in 1962. (Paul Vathis/AP) | Chamberlain towered over his contemporaries and his record 100-point game has never been seriously challenged, but he spent the 1960s living in the shadow of Bill Russell's Celtics. After the 76ers took a 3-1 lead in the 1968 Eastern Division finals, Boston stormed back to win in seven games. Chamberlain, a seven-time scoring champion who had once averaged 50 points for a season, managed only 14 points on 4-for-9 shooting in the finale as Russell eliminated him from the playoffs for the sixth time in nine years. Even though Philadelphia had just won 62 games and had assembled Hal Greer, Billy Cunningham and Chet Walker around its star center, an unhappy Chamberlain was ready for a change of scenery. In those days, star players had relatively little sway compared with their teams and tended to remain with the same team throughout their careers. Chamberlain, a Philadelphia native, had been assigned to the Philadelphia Warriors in the 1959 draft because the franchise successfully argued they held his territorial rights. He went on to play his entire career before the NBA instituted free agency in 1976 under mounting legal pressure from players. Still, Chamberlain sought to maximize his earning power by signing one-year contracts, and he cultivated a close friendship with 76ers co-owner Ike Richman, who verbally promised to give Chamberlain a share of the organization. After Richman suffered a heart attack and died during a 1965 game against the Celtics, Irv Kosloff, Philadelphia's other co-owner, refused to honor the equity agreement with Chamberlain without a binding contract. With no better alternative, Chamberlain decided to flex his power in the press by declaring, "I'll trade myself." He eventually got his wish when the Lakers acquired him for Darrall Imhoff, Archie Clark, Jerry Chambers and cash, thereby forming a superstar trio of Chamberlain, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. "I feel very, very happy that I've been traded to a team that has a chance to go down as one of the best teams in basketball ever," Chamberlain said at the time.  Chamberlain teamed up with Elgin Baylor (22) and Jerry West (not pictured) with Los Angeles. (Charles Knoblock/AP) | Chamberlain acknowledged that his headstrong behavior, his clashes with coaches and his struggles against Russell, combined with his playboy lifestyle and his flashy personality, made him a "classic bad guy" throughout his career. And his boastful claim that he had slept with 20,000 women, made in the 1991 book "A View from Above," sparked a frenzy that contributed to his family's reluctance to participate in media projects following his 1999 death. "Goliath" traces Chamberlain's childhood in Philadelphia, his college years at the University of Kansas, his 14 seasons in the NBA and his retirement in Los Angeles across three hour-long episodes. At each step, director Rob Ford said the documentary aimed to provide a "humanizing" portrayal of Chamberlain while revealing how he was ahead of his time. When Chamberlain sprouted to 7 feet as a teenager, he drew national interest like Victor Wembanyama. Upon his 1956 arrival in Kansas, his star power enabled him to integrate Whites-only restaurants. During and after his professional career, he wore showy outfits like Russell Westbrook, appeared in movies like Shaquille O'Neal and sought to build a business empire like LeBron James. Moving to the Lakers enriched Chamberlain and raised his profile, but it didn't pay immediate dividends on the court. Los Angeles had to overcome some early chemistry concerns and a knee injury that cost Chamberlain most of the 1969-70 season before winning a record 33 straight games en route to the 1972 title. That triumph gave Chamberlain his second ring and West his only championship. Without Chamberlain, Philadelphia didn't return to the East finals until 1977, and it didn't win another championship until 1983. "[That trade] would have changed the course of history," West said in the documentary. "If that [76ers] team could have stayed together and stayed healthy, no one would have beaten them for a few years. They had it all." The impact of Chamberlain's power play extended far beyond the short-term fates of the Lakers and 76ers. Abdul-Jabbar followed in Chamberlain's footsteps by forcing a trade to the Lakers in 1975, as did Anthony Davis in 2019. The stigma that greeted Chamberlain's trade request has somewhat faded, as Harden, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and Damian Lillard have all asked to be moved over the past year. A superstar pulling levers to determine his own fate has become the norm rather than the exception, while former players such as Michael Jordan and O'Neal have claimed the type of ownership stakes that Chamberlain was denied in Philadelphia. "We got to see what it was like to be the first of firsts," director Christopher Dillon said when "Goliath" premiered in Las Vegas this month. "He was a super athlete and an African-American giant at a time when the world was set up to stop him and they changed the rules to prevent his success. He got recruited to Southern colleges. Jim Crow just stepped back and said, 'You're too good.' I didn't ever think of him as that revolutionary, but his greatness made him so." | 
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