PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Dave Richman was going to burst. He was a teenager sitting on the biggest sports secret on the planet, but had to keep his mouth shut.
“I was going to Cheltenham High School knowing the trade was going to be announced, and I wasn’t allowed to say anything to anybody,” Richman said.
A few days later, the news broke.
The Philadelphia 76ers landed superhuman 7-footer Wilt Chamberlain in a deal with the San Francisco Warriors.
The Sixers parted ways with three pedestrian players and some cash in exchange for a guy who had already won an MVP and appeared in six All-Star games in 5 ½ NBA seasons.
Chamberlain was going to make the Sixers relevant. He was going to give the fledgling franchise, which had only been in existence for about a year-and-a-half, a desperately-needed identity.
“I could put it this way,” said Richman. “[Wilt] created the Sixers. Before Wilt was on the Sixers, they were not Philadelphia’s team.”
Technically, it was Dave’s dad Ike who created the Sixers. He and Irv Kosloff bought the Syracuse Nationals, then moved them to Philadelphia.
Dave knew about the trade before it happened, because his dad told him.
The deal that would lead Chamberlain to play Sixers home games just miles from his alma mater of Overbrook High School was finalized on Jan. 15, 1965.
“The whole sports world went nuts,” Dave Richman said. “Wilt flew into Philly and he worked out with the team the first night at the arena at 48th and Market [streets], and 900 people showed up just to watch the practice.”
Considering the Sixers were drawing about 2,500 fans to Convention Hall at the time, it was a pretty good initial return on investment.
That Chamberlain, who started the season averaging 39 points and 23.5 rebounds per game in San Francisco, was going to make the Sixers better was a foregone conclusion.
They finished the 1964-65 season with a .500 record (41-41), then went on to win a then-franchise-best 55 games the following year.
The more immediate concern to Chamberlain and the Sixers after he got back to Philadelphia: Where was the Overbrook native going to live?
“When my father made the trade for Wilt,” Dave Richman said, “he was a little concerned about how much he was partying. That's why my father said to him that you have to move in with us.”
Dave was less plugged in to this part of Ike’s plan.
One afternoon not too long after the trade, Dave came home from school and, to his complete surprise, his mom and family housekeeper were cleaning stuff out of his bedroom at the Richmans’ house in Elkins Park.
They needed his help tying two twin beds together.
“What’s going on?” Dave asked.
“Wilt’s moving in,” his mother told him.
All of a sudden, The Big Dipper was ‘The Big Roommate.’
“He had my room. I was in the guest room. We shared a bathroom,” Dave Richman said. “My sister was also on that floor and I got to know him quite well.”
From February through April 1965, Richman and Chamberlain shared more than a house. They played the four-deck card game War and talked about life.
“He’d eat dinner with us, then he’d go hang out in my father’s office with him for a while. He’d come upstairs and we would hang out and talk and have a great time. He was a very heartfelt character.”
The family's relationship with Chamberlain predated his trade to the Sixers.
Ike, who was a lawyer by trade, first got into basketball as general counsel for the Warriors. When Chamberlain was a junior at Overbrook High School, he hired Ike Richman to be his agent.
“My father was the owner of the team. He was also the team's attorney, and he negotiated Wilt’s contract with himself,” Dave Richman said. “He always gave Wilt the most amount of money that anybody ever made.
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“Sometimes, the Celtics would goof around and try to [raise the offer] by $1. And my father would immediately raise it by $10 because he never wanted anybody making more money than Wilt.”
On December 3rd, 1965, Ike Richman suffered a massive heart attack during the first quarter of a game at Boston Garden. The score was tied, 13-13.
A few days later, the Richman family went to the funeral home to take a look at Ike.
When they got back to their house in Elkins Park, Wilt was there waiting for them.
“I looked at him and I just lost it,” Dave said, “because first of all, the only people that were there were very, very close friends and guests.
The entire Sixers team attended Ike Richman’s funeral, standing together alongside a wall. Chamberlain was in the center of the group.
“He was absolutely as sad as you think he would have been,” said Dave Richman. “This was one of the closest people [to him] for a really long time.”
Chamberlain and the 76ers ultimately fulfilled Richman’s vision in 1967, winning the team’s first NBA championship.
In a fitting twist, the Sixers beat the Warriors, Ike and Wilt’s first team, in the Finals.
“That was a very bittersweet moment when they won because that was my father's team,” said Dave Richman. “He hand-picked [the players]. He put that team together. Every one of those players had been to our house many times, they were all friends.”
After the Sixers clinched the title in San Francisco, Dave and his brother drove to meet the team at the airport.
“[Chamberlain] walked off the plane carrying the ball from the game,” Richman said. “He saw my brother and me and he walked over to us. He said, ‘Here. This is for your mother. Give it to her with my love.’”
The following summer, in 1968, the 76ers traded Chamberlain to the Los Angeles Lakers. He would win one more championship, then retire in 1973.
A few years after that, Dave Richman and his old roommate briefly reunited at a book signing event in New York.
Richman brought his mother with him. He never forgot Chamberlain’s reaction.
“He looked up and saw me and my mother, and rocked back on his heels like he was going to fall over backwards and his eyes welled up with tears for a second, then he blinked him away and got himself back together and sort of became this presence again.
“But for that instant in time, he connected with the old days. Nothing moves the body or the mind like the heart.”