football mural painted on his bedroom wall, nine-year-old Aaron asked for Mary Poppins on his, and there she was, flying away with her umbrella. As a teenager Aaron bought the cast album of the musical Annie and heard “Maybe,” a wistful song in which young orphans wonder who their biological parents are and where they might be. It reflected his own yearnings: “Betcha they’re good/Why shouldn’t they be?/Their one mistake/Was giving up me!”

His adoptive father, Don, a rabbi’s son and a retired University of Ore­gon philosophy professor, said, “Aaron has been, I won’t say obsessed, but he’s been preoccupied for some time about this.”

“It’s been a burden on me to feel that I am her secret,” Aaron said of his biological mother, “and I am Wilt’s secret, and I am the Chamberlain family’s secret. That’s been hard for me. . . . I already know what’s going to happen if I don’t do anything. I’m going to have an unfinished journey.”

In 2003, nearing 40, Levi finally began to search for answers to his questions. When he found and spoke with his biological mother,[Elizabeth] he heard in her accent that she was British. But that wasn’t the most surprising revelation...His biological mother...told him that he was conceived in a one-night stand with Chamberlain in San Francisco in 1964. She said she had kept his birth a secret from her own family and had struggled ever since with guilt over his birth and adoption. Levi added that in 2010 he reached out to two of Chamberlain’s sisters, by letter and by phone, but they spurned him.

His biological mother, Elizabeth, says that when she found out she was pregnant, she told Wilt and he didn’t act like he wanted a child, so she told him she was putting him up for adoption and he didn’t say anything. They didn’t have much contact after that and she put Levi up for adoption after hiding her pregnancy from her family.

Levi was eventually able to meet his mom in person and she wasn’t able to offer him much help, other than telling him that he was Wilt’s child. After he finally met his mom when he was an adult, here’s what the conversation was like:

Aaron and Elizabeth met for the first time in...2010 in Boston. When [Elizabeth] arrived, he hugged her at the doorway and said, “Oh, my God, this is the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”

She became emotional, turned away and said, “Don’t say that. You’ll get me going and I won’t be able to stop.”

Outside, rain fell as they sipped tea in the living room.

“Were you friends with him?” Levi asked.

“No, we were not. It was really just two days.”

“What was he like?” he said.

“He seemed very charming, but I really can’t remember.”

She was hardly a groupie, Levi [said]. She knew nothing about basketball or U.S. sports. She knew little about Chamberlain’s history. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked Levi at one point.

“It’s hard to accept that you are a product of a one-night stand,” Levi told me. “I wanted her to tell me something good about him, but that wasn’t going to happen. I realized that we had different feelings about him. She sees him as a womanizer. . . . To me, he’s my father.”

When Levi asked for clarity about how Wilt responded after Elizabeth told him she was pregnant here’s what she said:

“Well, he kind of chuckled,” she said, “and said, ‘Oh, so I’m gonna have a kid out there, huh?’ ”

“Did he offer you help?” Levi asked.

“No. I was very clear about what I was planning to do.”

[Levi said] “I think [Chamberlain] probably realized that he had lucked out, that she was not the type to seek something out of it. My mother took the burden completely on herself to take care of this problem of an unwanted child.

Here’s what happened when Levi tried to reach out to Chamberlain’s sister.:

Barbara Lewis, Wilt’s sister,...serves as lead custodian of her brother’s legacy. “He and I were very close,” she said. “Extremely close.” When Goldberg (Wilt's lawyer) first told her about Levi and his desire to meet her, she said she told him, “Sy, I’m not interested. Wilt’s dead.”

She hasn’t changed her mind. “I’m not interested in meeting him because I just don’t believe it,” she said. Nor is she interested in seeing photos of Levi. “He’d have to look very much like Wilt,” she said. “That is a distinct look. I can’t even imagine that.”

According to the article, Levi doesn’t want one penny from the Chamberlain family and he…