YouTube Gold: The One Time Wilt Chamberlain Hit Another Player

This is a guy you never, ever, wanted to piss off enough to go after you.

Wilt Chamberlain stories are endless, which is what you’d expect from a near-mythical player. He retired in 1973 and while some games were televised and some were recorded, many were not. So we don't have his 100 point game on video.

We probably don’t have video of his only fight, either.

Chamberlain was the strongest man to ever play in the NBA and he was keenly aware of his power. He said that he was “paid to score, not to fight,” and assiduously avoided raising his hand to an opponent.

On one occasion, he warned Boston’s Sam Jones to stay out of the lane, but hit him? Chamberlain never wanted to go there.

But he did, once. His victim? Boston’s Clyde Lovellette.

Described here as the Bill Laimbeer of his day, Lovellette was widely considered a dirty player. He elbowed Chamberlain in the jaw once, causing serious dental damage.

Yet Chamberlain was willing to let it go - until he wasn’t.

In a playoff game in 1964, Lovellette angered Chamberlain with an elbow, then shoved him and talked some junk too.

Chamberlain had finally had enough and he leveled Lovellette, hitting him so hard that he was on the floor for five minutes.

Chamberlain later said that he didn’t actually hit Lovellette that hard and that when he didn’t get up, “it scared me.”

You can kind of get an idea of what scared him from the Kermit Washington punch that shattered Rudy Tomjanovich’s face. Chamberlain was strong enough to kill a man with a single punch. He understood this and governed himself accordingly.

However it’s also worth mentioning that after that, absolutely no one wanted to go there with Chamberlain again.