This story appears in the July 16, 2018, issue of Sports Illustrated. For more great storytelling and in-depth analysis, subscribe to the magazine—and get up to 94 percent off the cover price. Click here for more.
Late in the afternoon of Saturday, March 11, 1972, Wilt Chamberlain, 35, and in the 13th season of a career that would last only one more year, began welcoming a few hundred of his closest friends to a party at his recently-completed Bel-Air mansion. He had christened the massive 7,100-square-foot pleasure palace Ursa Major, after the constellation that contains the stars that compose the Big Dipper, the nickname he vastly preferred to Wilt the Stilt.