Wilt Chamberlain remains the only player in NBA history to score 100 points in a single game.
As a boy in Los Angeles, Gary M. Pomerantz knew of Wilt Chamberlain as a heavily-muscled defensive and rebounding specialist in a rare yellow headband playing center for the Lakers late in his career.
So when he heard that Chamberlain once had scored 100 points in an NBA game, there was a disconnect. This guy?
“What I would come to find out, it wasn’t that guy,” Pomerantz said this week in a phone interview. It was one of many calls he got from radio stations and media outlets as the 60th anniversary of Chamberlain’s single-game scoring record neared.
Pomerantz’s book, “Wilt, 1962: The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era” (Crown, 2005) grabbed that night of March 2, 1962, fleshed out and colorized a performance that endures all these years later and pulled it into a new century for readers fighting their own disbelief.
“It was a much earlier iteration of that guy,” Pomerantz continued. “When he was 7-foot-1, 260 pounds, ran the floor like a train and was 25 years old. I decided to try to reclaim that day, to bring it back.”
Editor’s Note: The following conversation has been condensed and edited.
NBA.com: Why Wilt? Why that game, magical as it was?
Gary Pomerantz: Friends would say to me, “You’re doing an entire book about one day.” My answer was “Yes … but it’s more than that.” It’s really about an era. Nothing happens in a vacuum. This was 1962. Twelve days after [astronaut] John Glenn circled the Earth. It’s a time when Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s freedom struggle was in full flight.
There are moments in sports history that carry real meaning. Babe Ruth’s called shot in the 1932 World Series mattered because we were in the Depression and America needed heroes. Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin shattered the notion of Aryan superiority as Adolph Hitler watched from a box seat. Wilt scoring 100 points was like a flare shot into the sky that announced, “The NBA would be a white man’s enclave no more.”
Interesting you mention that because Chamberlain’s famous rival, Bill Russell, built a reputation as a civil rights activist. Wilt, meanwhile, was bodacious in his confidence and outsized accomplishments. In his size and his bluster, he was almost like an early Muhammad Ali. Maybe it didn’t go over well for someone in a team sport. But he wasn’t just looking to fit into America’s status quo – he was determined to make his mark and be the greatest basketball player ever.
Wilt fought a freedom struggle for and about Wilt. Wilt crushed in his fists any race-based impediment to who he was. At 25, he owned a race horse named Spooky Cadet. He drove his sports cars and Cadillacs at high speeds. He dated white women indiscreetly at a time when 16 states still outlawed interracial marriage. Night after night, he annihilated the best white players in the NBA. He was unapologetically and flagrantly the Dipper.
He integrated restaurants in Kansas when he went to school there. He talked of sending busloads of black children to summer camps. He lent his name to various civil rights causes. Later, he would announce himself as the “world’s tallest Republican” and become a delegate to the [Richard] Nixon convention in 1968.
What did it say about Chamberlain at that point in his career – his third NBA season – that he set the single-game scoring record that still stands?
For a guy to score 100 points, he’s got to one: have an ego. But he also has to have teammates who are willing accomplices. Teammates who give him the ball. This was game No. 75 of an 80-game season, Philadelphia wasn’t going to catch the Boston Celtics [in the standings]. The Knicks were in last place. So this game was very much playing out the string.
Not played in Philadelphia but rather in Hershey, Pa., adds to the mystique.
It was the third game that season the Warriors played in Hershey. The NBA was trying to draw new fans and the arena there had a capacity of 8,000. It was barely half-full [4,124].
By halftime, Wilt had scored 41 points. He scored 28 more in the third quarter. But it wasn’t until seven-and-a-half minutes remained that the legendary statistician, Harvey Pollack, slid a sheet of paper over to the equally beloved P.A. announcer, Dave Zinkoff. And the Zink announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Wilt Chamberlain has just broken the all-time scoring record! He now has 79 points.”
Remember, the NBA was sort of a lounge act in search of itself at that point. The old joke was that the announcers would introduce the starting lineups – and then they would announce each fan.
Once Zinkoff made that announcement, you had the Warriors’ curiosity – how high could the big fella go? And the Knicks’ sense of dread. They knew that if they gave up 100 points to this guy, people still were going to be talking about it 60 years later.
He could have finished at 98. Or maybe 102, since the crowd rushed the floor with 46 seconds left to abruptly end the game. But those totals wouldn’t have resonated the same, would they?
The number 100 is a perfect score on a test. It’s a century. For Wilt, 100 was a monument.
Many fans make the mistake of thinking Wilt only was good because he played against a bunch of insurance salesmen and plumbers. But this guy was a superb track & field athlete and still is regarded by many in the post-Shaq NBA as the strongest player ever. If we had a high-definition video of his entire career, a lot of skeptics might be awed by what they’d see.
If you judge athleticism purely on the size, speed, strength and agility, the young Wilt Chamberlain – a basketball sensation, a decathlete – might have been the greatest pure athlete of the 20th Century.
Where do you stand on the possibility that someone, someday, will tie or break the record?
We’re all inclined to say no. But it happened once, so why couldn’t it happen again? Not just with the 3-point shot but a big man like Kevin Durant, who shoots the three so well. If you have a 7-footer who can shoot threes and free throws, and he has one of those nights, maybe all bets are off.
Kobe’s 81 ranks second right now. But there’s a vast chasm between 81 and 100.
In celebrating the NBA’s 75th anniversary and the balloting for its Top 75 players, people invariably want to rank the greatest. What’s your take on Chamberlain’s place in the pantheon?
I saw that he had been named No. 6 by, I think, The Athletic. But was Zeus the sixth-best Greek god? I don’t know. I will say this: By virtue of the time in which they played, Michael Jordan cannot be higher-ranked than Wilt Chamberlain. Because Wilt Chamberlain kept the NBA alive. By the time Jordan joined the league, it already had been resuscitated by Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. The NBA was doing just fine.
Oscar Robertson has said, “Wilt saved the game when it needed saving.” That’s when people said, “I want to see this guy who scored 100 points. Who averaged 50 points for a season. Who that season averaged 48.5 minutes per game.”
How challenging was it – more than 50 years at the time you were reporting for the book – to track down sources, chase down details and separate fact from fiction on an event that was hazy enough in its day?
Part of the fun for me in reconstructing that night, I interviewed 56 people who were there, including about 15 or 16 of the players and some of the game’s officials. What I found was, a period piece of America just beyond mid-century. Fascinating backgrounds, first-generation Americans, former Marines. Set in the chocolate town of Hershey. It’s a fun story to talk about.
Wilt had died several years before. I saw many interviews where he was asked about the 100-point night. Some of what he said was true, some was just made-up. Wilt sort of fused myth and reality throughout his life.
I happened to interview Wilt in 1987 for a story I wrote on the 25th anniversary of the game. He was what I’d call a reluctant interview, though he got rolling eventually. He had tried to blow off the whole thing, saying, “I just doubled my average. Lots of guys have games where they double their average.” By the time I saw him 10 years later at the NBA’s 50th anniversary event in 1997, he seemed much more proud of it.
For the longest time, Wilt didn’t talk much about the 100-point game. It was decades later that he came to embrace it. He had worried that it would foster the notion that he only cared about padding his own stats.
But as he got older, it was like Ted Williams, the Red Sox star. He had said, when he walks down the street, he wanted people to point at him and say, “There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.” Well, Wilt came to realize later in his life, when he walked down the street, people would point at him and say, “There goes the guy who scored 100 points in a game.”
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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.
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