Goliath Review: Wilt Chamberlain Doc on Showtime Amuses but Requires More Depth.
This is not the Billy Bob Thornton series on Amazon; rather, it’s a brand-new three-part series helmed by Rob Ford and Christopher Dillon, which centers on the great NBA player known as “The Dipper.”
The three-part Wilt Chamberlain documentary on Showtime and the three-part Bill Russell documentary on Netflix would have premiered on the same day if the television world had a finer sense of poetry. We would have debated the relative benefits of each sort of success and concluded that ranking either of them based only on that one metric was reductive. The Chamberlain document would have had higher ratings, but the Russell document would have garnered better evaluations.
Alternatively, Rob Ford and Christopher Dillon’s Goliath, about Chamberlain, will air on Showtime and related platforms through the end of July. Sam Pollard’s Bill Russell: Legend debuted back in February.
The two documentaries about potential candidates for the title of greatest basketball player of all time are both well-made analyses of their challenging subjects, but neither is even the most current GOAT in terms of multi-parters about vocal NBA centers. That title belongs to ESPN’s Bill Walton series with Steve James. However, that doesn’t mean Goliath isn’t an engaging, if formally erratic, attempt to present a man who is typically treated in unapproachably epic terms like a grounded human being.
As any casual basketball fan can attest, Wilt Chamberlain is a famous figure characterized by numbers, which makes sense considering how frequently during his career he was accused of being all about, well, numbers. The game with 100 points. He scored 50 points a game on average that season. Yes, the twenty thousand women he said he had slept with. The significance of numbers to “The Dipper” (the moniker he chose over the corny rhyme of “The Stilt”) is so great that it even defines other people’s numbers, particularly 11, which represents the number of championships that Bill Russell’s Celtics team has won, many of which have come at the expense of teams led by Chamberlain.
From the outside, Chamberlain was perceived as a loser and selfish, even in the one season when he said he would lead the league in assists, which he duly accomplished. However, the majority of these accusations were directed at him when it came time to draw comparisons. For example, “This explains why Wilt Chamberlain was only the second-best player of all time,” rather than the top five or ten.
So, was Goliath really Wilt Chamberlain? If that’s the case, does that way make Russell, the leader of clubs that occasionally had up to eight Hall of Famers, David? How is that even logical? Does Chamberlain become any better when we attempt to view him as a whole instead of as someone who is larger than life? Even worse? or
