February 28, 2022 • 45 mins
Hosted by Sarah Kustok, NBA Flashback is the podcast that takes you back to the best moments in NBA history through exclusive archival audio from the NBA vault, along with new interviews with the players and coaches who were in the building.
In this special episode of NBA Flashback we go back to March 2nd, 1962 and relive the night Wilt Chamberlain scored an unthinkable 100 points in a win over the New York Knicks in Hershey, PA. We talk with the guy who literally wrote the book on Wilt, Gary Pomerantz, Stanford lecturer, and the author of "Wilt - 1962" about that mythical night 60 years ago, Wilt's larger impact on the NBA, and if anyone will ever score 100 again.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
NBA Flashback is a production of I Heart Radio in
the n b A. I'm sarahcu Stock and you're listening
to NBA Flashback, the show that takes you back to
the greatest moments in NBA history, using archival audio from
the NBA as well as new interviews with the players
and coaches who were in the building. On this special
(00:22):
edition episode, we flashback to sixty years ago March two
two in Swede Hershey, Pennsylvania, when wil Chamberlain, the Big Dipper,
scored an incomprehensible one points in a single game. If
you listen closely, you'll hear a lot of conflicting stories.
(00:45):
But much like Wilt, that's what makes this story part myth,
part reality. A team of basketball was it featuring one
of the most talked about payers, ye will remember a
little electrified to crowd with it, delebrated Dipper up at
(01:08):
the start of this season. We have some of today's players.
If anyone will ever score one hundred points again, the
Scenics team, we have Anthony Davis and James Harden. Congrats,
it's a will again on a hundred. Do I think
we'll ever see somebody score a hundred points again now,
just because it's so competitive now that guys will want
allow it to happen. You know, you might have night
and guys are like not allowing you to score hundreds.
(01:30):
So god stel that when you get fifty. I don't
think every anybody's or whatever catch will puts a hundred.
That's just that's just different. Kemba Walker had a little
more hope. Guy's a game close. Devin Book is out
here scoring seventy. It really wants surprised me to see
Steph or Clay score a hundred. It wants surprised to
(01:52):
see Trade Young score a hundred. I can see Yannis
scoring a hundred points. Just the next generation the players
man like, they just have so much skew. Tim Hardaway Jr.
Nominated Clay Thompson. I feel like Clay would have guided
if he's played all four quarters, especially after having that
plays the third quarter, that record will never be broken.
(02:15):
I think I had a shot at it back, you know,
sixty and twenty nine minutes, but still forty points away.
That is incredible. That means I had to play the
rest of the game and go for forty and like that,
it's hard to even process how he did that, and
he was facing double and triple teams. But Will Chamberlain
is a timeless talent. You could play in any era
(02:37):
and be the best athlete on the four. Today we're
joined by Stanford University lecturer Gary Pomeranz, the author of
Wilt nineteen sixty two, a biography of the one hundred
point Game, to talk about the stories in legends surrounding
Wilt Chamberlain the big deer. You know, he came with
a body, an ego that was perfectly sculpted for dominating
(03:01):
his game. The eagle was essential. For a player to
score a hundred points in an NBA game, he must
not only want to do it on a deeper level,
he must need to do it to take an opponent
an entire sport and bend it to his will, to
show that it could be done and only by him.
(03:22):
Will Chamberlain of the Sabrancisco Warrings, the league's leading score
for the last five years. Chamber the One, made nearly
three thousand points during the last season, averaging over thirty
six points per game, the league's deadliest man under in
the number one hundred. There was Hubris, but there's also
a symbolic magic in our culture. The number of connotes
(03:43):
a century. A ripe old age is perfect score on
a test, scoring a hundred points means infinitely more than scoring,
say would score one hundred points and one ball game
it was done one hundred is a monument. Gar Are
Your words are beautiful? And first, let me say thank
(04:04):
you so much for joining us here, uh to not
only learn more about Wilt, learn more about this game,
but just so many of the amazing memories and stories
that we hear about him. What's a great pleasure to
be on with you. Thank you. Will was known to
make himself larger than life, and he would tell so
many stories about himself. Can you tell us about some
(04:25):
of those stories and in your thoughts about the truth
behind them? Well? Will was in this n season. He
was twenty five years old, and he was already a
luminous figure than He had his own racehorse named Spooky Goodet.
It hardly ever won, by the way. He had a
custom made Bentley and a Harlem nightclub, Big Wilt smallst
(04:49):
Paradise that dated to the days of the Harlem Renaissance
that he co owned, and it featured the likes of
red Fox and at a James Will it was in
a spine suit. He would greet his guests, and he
moved through that club like he owned all of Harlem,
maybe like he owned all of New York. He told
a lot of embellished stories about himself. Wilt have this
(05:10):
goliath syndrome. He had to be impressive, taller than he
even was larger than life. And already in that season
sixty two, Will was acting like a young Goliath. Because
the new scoring sensation in the league was a center
for the Chicago Packer's name Walt Bellamy, and he Bellamy
(05:31):
average thirty points a game that season, and when they
met for the first time in the International Amphitheater in Chicago,
Will got charged up. He was fired up to play
this game. He got fired up to play against Bill
Russell and Oscar Roberts and Elgin Baylor and now Bellamy.
So Bellamy comes out to half court for the opening
tip and says, hello, Mr Chamberlain, I'm Walter Bellamy, and
(05:55):
he extends his hand. Will shakes his hand and says, hello, Walter.
You won't get a shot off in the first half,
and Will block Bellamy's first nine shots taken from inside
the free throw line. That night, Bellamy couldn't he couldn't shoot,
he couldn't breathe. He was in shell shock when he
came out for the second half tip and Will says
(06:18):
to him, Okay, Walter, now you can play. And Will
it ends out out scoring Bellamy that night. To fourteen,
Let's table would scored more than fifty points in forty
three games that season. His teammate Tomas Sherry would say
(06:38):
even Wilt's truths were larger than truths. One of Wilt's
boasts to his teammates was that he drove his car,
a Cadillac convertible, across the country NonStop in thirty six
hours New York to l A and his teammate Guy
Rodgers said, wait a minute, dip. That means you would
have had to go a hundred ten miles per hour
(06:59):
a whole way, said hundred and twenty. And there's no
speed limits in Kansas. In the stories he told, Will
always was the manly hero. Once he told Cal Ramsey
of the Knicks that when he was alone out west
in the mountains, a mountain lion had attacked him, leaped
out from the rocks, and Will says, I killed it
(07:21):
with my bare hands, and Ramsey's like right, Will right.
One time we were talking and he has all these
scars on his arm, so I said, Wolfe, how'd you
get those cars? That's cal Ramsey, he said, when I
was going across the country and I stopped for a break,
and his mountain lions jumped out of over rock and
jumped on me. And I grabbed him and he scratched me.
Not killing with my bare hands. I said, come on.
(07:42):
He said it's true, and he know he did so
many great things. I kind of believe them. Then Will
pulls back his shirt to reveal two long scars on
his shoulder, which Ramsey, I'd admit a lot like clar marks.
Great attitude and sense of humor and sense of respect
(08:03):
for other people. That's Wild's teammate Joe Ruklick in two
thousand five. I think the worst thing that he probably
figured he could do would be too borer people, And
that may explain some of his outlandish I said, outlandish tales.
With that being said, in those larger than life stories
off the court, did Will have any weaknesses on the court? Well,
(08:26):
he couldn't shoot free throws. Later in his career. His
father heard Will say that Will was thinking about boxing
Muhammad Ali in an exhibition, and his father looked at
him and said, wouldn't should be better off practicing free throws.
His teammate ten time NBA All Star pitching Paul Arison,
had a theory in a two thousand five interview. He
(08:48):
disliked to do anything he thought was easy, and he
saw it making free shows was easy, and it should
be easy. So he never really put the attention in
that he showed up. That's what I was my thinking.
It's purely personal, and I could be way off pace,
but we'll like to do things that were difficult. That's why,
as I said before, he didn't like to dunkt the
(09:09):
ball because if any big guy can dunct the ball,
he'd liked to be categorized as a shooter. Joe respectfully disagreed.
He was a free throw shooter. He practiced regardless of
what people say. It wasn't We didn't applaud when he
made one, and we weren't surprised when he missed one.
He wasn't a great free throw shooter, although he was
(09:31):
that night in Hershey. But his statistics in every way
broke through the Ozone path. I know, well he's got it.
He worked it. And one of the little known statistics
is that Will averaged forty eight and a half minutes
a game that season. That's more than a game because
of overtimes. He missed only eight minutes and thirty three
(09:54):
seconds of games because he got thrown out of one
game by the referee Norm Drucker for saying something unkind
about Drucker's mother of all Wilts insane stats. He didn't
seem keen on that one in hindsight. Just one game
forty admits a game, it's really enough to say. But
playing a whole season forty eight minutes a game, I mean,
when I look back in retrospect, I said, what were
(10:16):
they doing to me? Jesus? It must have been some
time when I could have gotten gotten arrested. So, you know,
fifty points a game he averaged. No one else in
the NBA ever has averaged forty or forty. I mean,
it was to be expected that he would just produce
these astronomical numbers. Once Red Kerr the Syracuse Center walked
(10:38):
into a local bar in Syracuse after a home game
against Will, Bartender says how made you get read? And
Kurrs says, thirty six. Well, then set him up, the
bartender says, and he gives him his drink. And as
he gives him his drink, he said, how many will get?
And kurs said sixty two? I think you know he
he was glad he'd been served as win for the
(11:00):
or an audience. Is there anyone that you could compare
Will too? You know, for the modern audience that studied
Greek mythology, maybe Zeus in the NBA to eight physically,
maybe Dwight Howard, although Howard six ten and Will was
seven one. Um As a player, there's really nobody like Wilt.
(11:20):
I mean, Joel embiads numbers plays for Philadelphia UM as Will.
Did you know? Maybe you could draw a comparison and
beads averaging nearly thirty points a game right now? But
it's hard to find someone who's exactly like Will, particularly
in that sixty two season, because there were three iterations
(11:41):
of Will. First, well, we all remember the old muscled
up guy who played for the Lakers, wore the yellow headband,
only took fourteen shots a game. There was the middle
iteration of Will, who was determined to prove that he
could um lead the league and assists because everyone said
he was an individualist, cared on me about patting his stats,
(12:02):
and he led the league and assists, and he quoted
at that time that would be like Babe Ruth leading
the league and sacrifice bunts. But then there was that
first iteration of will. To the hundred point game, Will
years old, seven one, two sixty pounds ran the floor
like a train, had a massive back sloping in a
(12:22):
triangle down to a dancers thirty one in waist. I mean,
I think, I think, Sarah, if you define athleticism purely
as a combination of size, speed, strength, and agility, then
the young dipper Will Chamberlain might have been the greatest
pure athlete of the twentieth century. And if not, he's
(12:43):
at least in the conversation. Can you describe for us
and paint the picture that game that night, what was
going on in the season leading up to that, and
just where you feel like these players mindset, attitudes were
at as they were heading into too that evening and
that game. So it's game of an eight game season.
(13:05):
They're just playing out the string at this point, right.
The Knicks are a last place team. They're not going anywhere.
They're gonna finish wins and fifty one losses. The Warriors
are going to go to the playoffs, but there are
too many games behind the Celtics to catch them. They're
playing the game in Hershey because the NBA was trying
(13:25):
to grow new fans at that time. The NBA was
not to be confused with today's NBA. It was a
little bit like a lounge act, you know, in search
of itself, in search of something that would generate more excitement,
which is where wild came in. You know, they played
three games the Warriors that season in Hershey, the chocolate town,
(13:46):
you know, surrounded by the Amish and Dutch craftsmen. And
in fact, when when the Warriors went home on the
team bus after that game, they saw some of the
Amish in the countryside on their wagons, lantern lid moving along.
So here's Will producing the everest of sports statistics, the
(14:10):
only single triple in NBA history, and he's doing it
in Milton, Hershey's company town, surrounded by the Ash and
the Dutch craftsman. Paint the picture inside. You're in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
There's little to no media coverage. Um, there was not
a television broadcast. The arena, as we have heard, is
(14:33):
half empty. Who was at the game, and what do
you feel like? That atmosphere was like, well, it was
four thousand, one and twenty four officially. Now. Eddie Gottlieb,
the owner of the Philadelphia Warriors, famously increased his crowd counts.
He didn't count, He just looked at the crowd and
(14:54):
came up with a number that was not like Gotti,
as his nickname was. Wasn't around like Gotti. It was
fort a four and half empty arenas. Eight thousand people
could sit there, and it was locals. Those locals included
Kerry Ryman, Larry Wagner, and Earl Whitmore. You could the
first thing you'd smells the popcorn and he came in here.
(15:15):
Oh yeah, yeah, the first thing you'd smells that popcorn.
It was it was locals, and the arena is filled
with cigarette smoke. Marl Borrow's Parliament's Lucky Strikes. There's a
carnival atmosphere just in that you know something is happening here.
And the Knicks were the perfect foils. Earlier that year
(15:38):
they'd given up sixty three points in the game to
Jerry West of the Lakers, a guard, and the year
before they gave up seventy one to the Lakers Elgin Baylor,
a forward. The Philadelphia writer Jack Geyser wrote that you
can find better benches than the Knicks half in Central Park.
So the Knicks were not a very good team, but
they had a few players. Was formidably Richie Garrin the guard,
(16:03):
and um Willie Knowles, who was a sweet shooter from
u C. L A. Who was Harvey Pollock. Well, Harvey
Pollock was the statistician, long time statistician. He would be
a part of that team which became San Francisco Warriors.
Then Philadelphia brought a new team, the seventies six Ors,
(16:24):
and Harvey was with the NBA for fifty eight years
and he did everything that night. Next time you have
a busy day at work, I think of Harvey all
the years I've been in the league. That was the
busiest night that I ever had in the NBA. Because
it was late in the season, the game was played
in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The game meant nothing to either team.
(16:46):
A lot of reporters were unning in president the inquiry.
The Philipphia inquired. The Daily User didn't send a reporter,
and I was the PR director of the team, the statistician, etcetera,
so they asked me to cover the game. Meanwhile, the
eight P and the U P also asked me to
cover the game, so I had three assignments other than
my normal duties. I realize, you know a Will's coach
(17:09):
was sometimes taping his ankles that season, that this was
done on a shoe string, particularly with Eddie Gottlieb. You've
gotta place this game in context. I mean, historically, that
night the night Wild scores a hundred points. Will It
comes in here having scored seventy eight points in a
triple overtime game and seventy three points in another game.
(17:31):
The numbers were just mind bending, you know, they just
kept going and going. And you know, when the guy
scored seventy eight points, if he makes a half dozen
more free throws ins into the mid eighties and a
few more shots, and he's in ninety and all things
are possible. Well, four thousand, one twenty four people were there.
Hundreds of thousands have claimed to have been there. I
(17:54):
have a few big stories out to get a little
bigger like the fish stories. Well, this is the one
true story that I might have. I'll tell you there
was a little of the four thousand people there at
the game, but I have at least fifty thousand people
who have told me, oh, yeah, you know, I was
there when you scored the hundred points, and so yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know. I live in New York City, you know,
(18:14):
so my father took me to the guide. And I'm saying,
you know, some people would say Philadelphia. No one ever
says hershey, pencil, and who tells me any story? But
I think it's what you're saying to you is that
we remember you will and the thing we remember the
most about you was an hundred point game. They were
(18:39):
never so early that they had something a while away
their time. By going here into this penny arcade, which
is quite different today than it was then, because over
right over in this section was a shooting, and I
started shooting rifles and so on and so forth, and
I couldn't miss anything, said one of my closest friends, Richmond.
(19:00):
He had talked to the guy out of the door,
had worked in the arena for twenty years. Is that
the highest numbers ever posted? Here was such and such
a thing, so he would bet me that I couldn't
beat that. But I just blew all the numbers away.
So if it was ever a clue that I was
gonna have a hot day, this was definitely the clue.
Was there any indications early on before the game started
(19:21):
that that Will was going to have a hot night?
So we'll you'll find plenty of clips of Will talking
about the Hunter Point game. And I did not get
the opportunity to interview him, but and I would have
liked to have interviewed him, of course, But the clips
I've seen, he just makes stuff up, which is what
he always did. Will always fuse myth and reality. He
(19:44):
said that he took the team Bust to Hershey. He
didn't take the team bus. He drove down from New
York in his attorney's car. I gretch mean his attorney.
I had not had an hour sleep. I lived in
New York City. I had to commute from New York
to Philadelphia to catch your Team Bust around eleven or
twelve o'clock. And if anyone knew me at that time,
I had insomniact and I never really went to bed
(20:05):
before four or five and in the morning, and so
sometimes it's aboutter just we just stay up. Plus I
had a date that night before, and so everything led
to me not having a night's sleep. I remember getting
into the bus going to Hershey from Philadelphia and said, oh, Am,
I tired. I didn't realize he wasn't on the bus
with us until we got on the bus. But he
liked to travel in his own way, in his own style,
(20:26):
and he was living in New York, and he evidently
had taken Knowles and so Johnny Green and some of
the other players back to New York. But no, he
wasn't there, he said. Before the game, Frank McGuire, his coach,
had shown him what was New York newspapers that they
were saying Will, it was, you know less than he
(20:46):
seemed to be, that he got tired easily. And I
checked the New York newspapers from that week. There was
no such thing. Will had said that he had spent
the night partying of this nightclub Chill Rutlix. He didn't
think that that was the case. That Will knew better.
I heard. We'll tell stories about a lot of things,
(21:07):
from weights that he could lift with one hand to
his close personal friendship with Richard Nixon, and his and
Will's dimensions two d and ninety pounds, seven ft one
and one eight were Uh, we're commensurate with his Uh,
with his tendency to exaggerate, Will was not partying all
(21:31):
night before the game, although he said he spent the
night at his place in Harlem. Small's Uh. Will knew better.
And I've seen him push away a glass of champagne
and watched him three seasons airplanes, hotels, coffee shops, locker rooms, restaurants, bars, ah,
(21:55):
he trained. I would be astonished if he had had
one drink the night before the game. He wasn't a drinker,
who wasn't a smoker. No, that's Smith. I hope you'll
forgive me. But wherever he is, he knows. What do
you make of those two two opposing stories. Well, you know,
people are remembering something that happened so long ago, and um,
(22:19):
Will spend a lot of nights at his night calm
in a very fancy apartment off Central Park and only
came to Philadelphia for games and practices. I believe he
did go there. Now part of the story that that's
somewhat well, I guess revealing about the time is after
that game, after Wild scores underpoints against the Knicks, he
(22:40):
drives Willie Knowles of the Knicks back to his home
in New Jersey and route to his nightclub in Harlem.
Now can you imagine scoring you drop a hundred on
him and then drive them all. Will said he fell
asleep on that ride home, so hopefully he wasn't actually driving,
and I merely fell asleep. Now while I'm falling asleep
and we had a toll road stop, I gonna wake up.
(23:02):
I'm not gonna hear them saying can you believe that
sl be going a hundred points against us? And the
whole conversation with john't have hours for them calling me
these names. But finally dropping off of my house first
and I get out the car, I said, hey, fellas,
thanks for this, you know, and I'm so sorry about
that hundred points, I said, I mean, I didn't really
mean to be s ob but what the hell? So
(23:25):
halftime of this game, Will has forty one points, and
the inquirer asked Harvey Pollock to start describing every shot
Will took. What did these shots look like? And what
what were Will's favorites when you describe him as an
athlete and as a player, what what were his favorite shots,
his favorite spots. He had one favorite spot above all others,
(23:49):
and that was today we would say down on the block,
but there was no block at that time. And remember
this is an important fact about the hunder point game.
The lane was twelve ft in with the key was
only twelve and they widened it by four ft a
few years later. So when Will just standing down on
what we would now think of as the block, just
(24:10):
outside the key, he can take one large step, sort
of a lunge, and he's covering those six ft and
he's at the basket. But Will didn't like the idea
that people thought he was a great player only because
he was so tall. He wanted to prove that there
was more to him than just that. So he would
(24:31):
take this fall away shot, falling away from the basket,
shooting over his right shoulder, banking and in wrote yelling
for help. Paul's away got it, and he would call
it basketball's greatest shot. Of course, Paul Arison explained how
Will's perception of himself played into his favorite shot. Will
(24:52):
favorite shot, and it's been mentioned many times by many
people he didn't want, did not want to be consider
and a great player because he was big. He did
not like the dunk. He felt any big guy can dunk,
et cetera. Like that. He had a issue like the
position himself on the left hand side of the court
in the pivot, close pivot, and the ball would come
(25:15):
in and he would fade away and play a jump
shot about a twelve fifteen ft jump shot off the board.
That was his favorite shot. And when he was hitting that,
it was almost impossible to stop front because he was
so big falling away and with his jumping and everything,
and he was hitting that very well. The only way
you can stop it was prevented him getting the ball,
which is not easy when the guy is that big
(25:37):
and strong. Opposing players, including Bill Russell, wanted him to
take that shot because he's fallen away from the basket
and he's not going to get the rebound. So again,
Egos playing in there a little bit. Wilt is scoring
in transition in this game. You know, Will goes twenty
three points in the first quarter, eighteen points in the
second quarter, so at halftime he's got forty one. Harvey
(25:59):
Pollock is typing Harvey Pollock is writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Harvey Pollock is writing for the Associated Press and United
Press International. No one was there knowing that none of
the New York writers cared enough to show up, because
it's only the Knicks. In fact, Jerry Eisenberg, one of
the New York newspapermen, told me that later that night
(26:20):
he ripped off copy off the copy machine and said, Hey,
the knickser in hershean and night. Anybody know that. No
one in the sports department says a word. And Eisenberg said, huh,
he scored a hundred points, scored under points, and so
you'd like to think that. I mean, if someone scores
a hundred points today, we know it instantly because everyone's
tweeting from the arena. ESPN sound trucks are gonna show
(26:43):
up in the beginning of the fourth quarter and we're
gonna see break in and we're gonna watch it. Happened
when Kobe scores eighty one points. You could buy a
DVD of that performance within an hour of the game's end.
So so technology changes some of this too, do things
for you. What you said when we were talking about
all the ways what was scoring and you alluded to
(27:05):
this earlier. He was knocking down free throws, plus he
was twenty eight out of thirty two pounds. It was
incredible that that's got to be the best night that
Will has ever had. From the foul line. If you've
watched Bill Chamberlin play as much as I have, going
back to Overbrook High School and saw what a terrible,
terrible foul shooter he was. That's Bill Campbell, longtime Philadelphia broadcaster,
(27:27):
to me the tip off, that's something I don't say,
God is gonna score a lot of Something unusual was
going to happen here because he was making allst foul shots.
He wouldn't listen to any and the ones he missed
were hanging on the rim. Now I've heard charges which
is the baskets were soft and all that kind of nonsense.
I don't know what that's true or not. All I
(27:48):
know is that the guy shot forty two and I
said to somebody this, this guys gonna score a lot
of points. There was an indication that something unusual and
remarkable was going to happen. What is different about this night?
So as Carrie Ryman, the fourteen year old Hershey Boy,
tells the story when the circus came to town, came
(28:10):
to Hershey, they would have clowns who use springboards, and
and he Ryman and his buddies would sneak into the
arena when no one was there. They would take those
springboards they brought up basketball and they would go over
to the baskets and run, hit the springboard into the
air and dunking and holding onto the rim because it's
(28:31):
a long way down, positioning themselves, holding, holding, holding, and
dropping catlike to the floor. Those were soft rims. Those
were soft rims, perhaps for that reason, or perhaps they
were just old and Hershey arena wasn't gonna buy new ones. Well,
the Warriors led by nineteen points going into the fourth quarter,
(28:51):
and Wilt had sixty nine points. And Bill Campbell leans
forward into his microphone and tells the w c a
U audience in philadel You everybody's thinking, how many points is?
Will can I get? Roger takes the jump shot. It's
no good. We're just conjectural, how many make There's a
(29:13):
time out now with about nine minutes to go, and
Frank McGuire and the huddle says, all right, everybody get
the ball to wilty, get the ball to wilt. They generally,
you know, our offense, the best way for us to
win was it get the ball to wilt. So, as
I said, we most of us didn't have to be
told that that's what we were going to do, and
especially when he was having a good night. This is
(29:34):
another thing that people don't often consider about that game.
For a player to score a hundred points, his teammates
have to agree to be a part of it. They
have to get him the ball and give up their
own shots. When I see a shooter like Paul Hours
and passing up Paul is a good shooter. When I
see Paul and Tomas Sherry and these guys passing up
(29:58):
easy jump shots, I started thinking, oh man, you know
he flash in the world. We're gonna predict the gosh,
what score a hundred points? But he was going to
get a lot of points. But my teammates, once they
got the ball, made sure that they couldn't get foul.
They ran positions where he couldn't be and got me
the ball under any circumstances. These guys are in the
(30:18):
NBA because they're fine players, and they have their salary
negotiations coming after the season with a skin Flynn owner,
and they decided to go with it on this night
in Hershey, they would see how high Will could get.
With about seven minutes to play, Harvey Pollock leans over
to the p A announcer Dave zincoff the zinc as
(30:41):
he was now not thinking the new record at seventy
nine and join the announced, But Tramerman goes right ahead
through the announcement that makes the foul vaal one point.
He broke his own record at seventy eight earlier in
(31:03):
the season, and and so Zenkov, who had raffled off
cigars and foremost salamis at halftime to fans, says, ladies
and gentlemen, a new scoring record has been set by
Wilt Chamberlain. He has seventy nine points. The thick managed
(31:24):
broken the record and he's gone for you know what.
The fans they're thinking of the magic number. Until that point,
no one, including Will, had any idea how many points
he had. It's not like today's arena where you look
up and you see number thirteen and the points are
are adding up as the game plays on. But now
everyone knows he only needs twenty one points to get
(31:47):
to a hundred and for the Philadelphia Warriors, whilst teammates
the curiosity ratchets up. Can he get there? And for
the New York Knicks, it's complete dread. Got three bet
in front of him, whatever, don't roll around though. He's
(32:09):
got it now, how do you thanks to him? Ninety
point ninety points? The Knicks were twenty points behind during
the last three or four minutes of the game, and
(32:31):
they were freezing the ball. You don't see a team
losing by twenty or thirty freezing the ball. Thinking about
this just starting for time. And while they were freezing it,
we were failing them so that we get the ball back.
And then consequently when we did get the ball back,
they were trying to foul our guards before the bull
would get into will. With a few minutes left, Frank
(32:53):
McGuire took out three of his starters and put in
three guys on the bench, including Joe Ruklick, the Kennedy
liberal from Northwestern who would intellectually challenge his teammates and
later many years later, became the only white employee as
the editorial page editor for The Chicago Defender, the black
(33:13):
inchest newspaper in Chicago. Dr vow in the lane between
Richard John and Joe Ruckler down I almost came to
broad So Wills gets against Barici with a ball down
the right side path of the trainer and the hope.
(33:37):
And now the fans, mostly kids, chocolate factory workers. Kids
are pressed into the court. There are three four deep
around the court, and Ted Luck and Bill, a teammate,
gets the ball, and you here Bill Campbell on w
c A. You say, Chamberlain, mrs rebound Luck and Bill
back to Wilt. He shoots no good, rebound to Luck
(33:59):
and Bill out to Rooklick. One minute and one stuck
at the players. Rogers goes wrong the tram. He's got it.
He's trying to get up so good about luckin bill
Buck and about luckin bill Buck to Lucklick. And now
here comes Richie Garren barn down on Ruklick, and he's
(34:22):
got fumes coming out of his ears. He is furious.
This is not gonna happen. Rootli sees will go who
that's the signal? Right here? Get it to me. Well,
the New York Knicks had two centers, both of them
six ft ten one. The rookie Darryl him off m
all fouled out in twenty minutes that night. Twenty minutes,
(34:44):
six fouls. That's a lot of fouls, and twenty it
wasn't you know the first twenty minutes he'd go in
and out. During the game, the other six ft ten center,
Phil Jordan's, wasn't playing because he'd had a late night
out and had consumed too much and was vomiting in
the hotel room thirteen miles away in Harrisburg, PA. So
(35:05):
at least six ft eight rookie Cleveland Buckner to cover Wilt.
Buckner was built like olive oil. He was two pounds
and he's going up against the Mighty Dipper. The arc
is everywhere, the time's running out, the fans are going nut.
Zinc is probably yelling at me, Joe, get the ball
to the world with the mic off. But their guys
(35:28):
collapsed all around him, and I'm wide open. I've got
a shot that's twelve ft. I can get into the
score column in this game with a little quick term shot.
I stopped dribbling and I hold the ball, and I
see Wilt moving around, and he says, and he puts
his hands like this, he bumps the guy off of
his hip and there he is. I threw in the ball. Boom.
(35:52):
The rest is history. So he goes whoo Rocklex sees it,
lobs the ball into wild. The Knicks verge around Wilt
as they had been the whole fourth quarter, and you
hear Bill Campbell say he made it. He made it
a dipper dunk coming out of the fans are rushing
(36:25):
the floor, as they say, mostly chocolate factory workers. So
now we'll scored. The kids are rushing the floor. It
was still forty six seconds on that clock when I
scored a hundred points. But since that's all the fans
wanted and the officials feel like that was enough to
(36:47):
you said the game was over. That people came on
the floor. And so that's one of maybe the few games.
And here's the the NBA that never ever finished, although
we'll claim the game ended there. We can hear the
ask couple of seconds and the Bill Campbell radio broadcast,
(37:08):
are there any other questions that you still have about
this game, anythings that you wonder about. I think my
questions relate more to history and the importance of history
and taking it on to understand that when we in
this case, when we look at the NBA, and see
these remarkable athletes, truly the best in the world. Now
(37:29):
they're coming from all over the world to play this
great game. It wasn't always that way. I came into
a game that was very limited to having black players.
It was so limited that the only real black player
of any high white collar jobs, so to speaking, scoring
points was Elgin Bailey. Every other black player ever was
(37:52):
in the league was a blue collar worker. He was
a guy who was getting rebounds for his team and
passing it out to all the scores and also forth
and along comes me, and I don't care about giving
the ball to somebody else. I'm gonna do it myself.
You know, most people couldn't tell you that the names
of the first black players in the NBA who came
in a nineteen fifty Chuck Cooper or a Lloyd Hanked
(38:12):
his Zony, they should be known, and and Wilt his
role in all this should be known. I think the
thing that people do always remember is that iconic photo
of Will holding the slip of paper It says one
hundred on it. How did that come to be? Whose
idea was that? Well? Harvey Pollock. Harvey Pollock was a
machine that night, he probably had the second best performance
(38:34):
of the night by dictating these stories off the top
of his head to the wires and rewrites and sending
a story to the Philadelphian Choir, which did not send
anyone to the game because it didn't matter. Now, there
was one photographer who had been at the game for
the Harrisburg newspaper, but he took his photos and left
(38:56):
after the first quarter. So there's no working photograph for there.
There's no television, there's no New York sports writers. There's
two sports writers from Philadelphia who are there. But there's
an off duty photographer for the Associated Press named Paul
Bathis who's sitting right near the basket. He was there
(39:16):
with his son. Took him there for his tenth birthday. Now,
Baptists had won a pull a surprise the year before
for a photograph of John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower, the
young president with the former president. They were walking down
a path at Camp David, which isn't too far away
from there, and now he's got twenty shots in his camera.
He'd gone out to his car after the third quarter
(39:38):
to get his camera, told his son, you stay right here,
and he comes back, he positions himself near the basket
um and in the locker room, Paul Bathis shows up,
the AP photographer and said to Harvey, can we get
a photo of Wilt? And this isn't a fancy NBA
locker room. Will sitting in a chair. Behind him on
hooks are his shirt, his hants, his overcoat, and his
(40:02):
shoes are beneath the chair. That's how elegant the locker
room was. And Harvey goes to Jim Heffernan, a sportswriter
from Philadelphia there with the bulletin to cover the game.
Says hef you've got a sheet of paper I can borrow,
And Heffernan gives him a sheet of paper, and Pollock
takes a pen and writes one zero Zero's hands it
to Will and said, Will hold this. You know there's
(40:24):
a a slip of paper. If you ever see a
picture of Will holding says a hundred on it. Well,
that's my handwriting on that hundred on there. And Will
sitting down on the in his chair and holds it.
And there's kind of a sheepish grin on his face.
Not much in Wild's life you would call sheepish. But
(40:44):
that look was and you know, you can see the sweat.
You can see he's got those rubber bands on his wrists.
He wore rubber bands to hold his socks up when
he was younger, and he kept worrying him to remind
him of his friendships to childhood. And there it is.
It's arguably the most important photograph of basketball ever. It's
(41:08):
not even taken on the court, but it's about a
man and a moment, his moment. Will didn't like the
hundred point game for a long time. He thought it
fed the belief that he was interested only in patting
his own statistics. And in fact, in the postgame locker room,
(41:28):
when he saw the stats and realized he'd taken sixty
three shots, he he mourned that fact. He he couldn't
believe it. And al Addles, his good friend was sitting
on the bench next to him in the locker room
and said, don't worry about a dip. You know you
made thirty six of him. It wasn't until later in
(41:49):
life that Will came to embrace it. It was almost
like a father and son estranged, you know, coming back
together thirty one years later. How would you describe will
impact on race in the NBA. Well, Oscar Robertson has
said that will save the NBA at that period, and
(42:11):
I believe that. Um, the NBA wasn't that interesting in
the late fifties in the St. Louis Hawks now the
Atlanta Hawks, we're the last all white team to win
an NBA championship. We were seeing a transition from the
(42:32):
game that was to the game that is today. And
in two the league was about black s white, but
the players who were breaking in the black players had,
in particular Will Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Elgin Baylor.
(42:57):
That's a pretty impressive four. Um. They brought this new athleticism,
this luminous kind of style of play. They took it
what was a horizontal feed on the floor game vertical
above the rim, and made it their's. So when we
see this luminous athleticism today, this is where we can
(43:18):
see the seed planet. This is where it begins. Do
you think the record will ever be broken? Well, Kobe
hit eighty one on a shooter's night. Will didn't have
the advantage of the three point play, not to say
he would have scored too many of them. Anyway, but
he didn't, and players today do. I suspect if anyone
(43:38):
breaks it, it'll be a big man who can shoot
threes and free throws, you know, someone in the style
of a Kevin Durant. You know Dirk Norvitsky could could
do that in his time, but didn't. Gary. We can't
thank you enough for taking us back to that moment,
making us feel like we're there, we experienced it. I
know all of us need to read your book, but
(44:01):
these stories are just absolutely incredible and your time is
so precious. So thank you so much. Well, Sarah, thank you.
It's fun to spend some time talking about this game.
I loved working on this book. And um, it's you know,
World ninety two is about the season, but it's really
a biography of the game. And um, thank you for
having me on the show. To close us out, here
(44:22):
some of our favorite answers for what it would take
to see another one hundred point game courtesy of Spencer
Dinwoodie and D'Angelo Russell. You see a duplicate, You need
a combination with certain factors and so hard because you
know you could point to a Janice or k d
um Is. Guys that have a shot at that right
with the problem is they're all phenomenal teams. If they're
(44:44):
keeting on paces score a hunter, they're probably blowing the
other team out and probably are gonna play the fourth quarter.
I wouldn't be surprised, especially if they add the fourth
point um shot in there. I mean, it could happen.
Why not? Who Chamberlain did it? NBA for Flashback is
a production of I Heart Radio and the NBA. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart
(45:06):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast
m
NBA Flashback is a production of I Heart Radio in
the n b A. I'm sarahcu Stock and you're listening
to NBA Flashback, the show that takes you back to
the greatest moments in NBA history, using archival audio from
the NBA as well as new interviews with the players
and coaches who were in the building. On this special
(00:22):
edition episode, we flashback to sixty years ago March two
two in Swede Hershey, Pennsylvania, when wil Chamberlain, the Big Dipper,
scored an incomprehensible one points in a single game. If
you listen closely, you'll hear a lot of conflicting stories.
(00:45):
But much like Wilt, that's what makes this story part myth,
part reality. A team of basketball was it featuring one
of the most talked about payers, ye will remember a
little electrified to crowd with it, delebrated Dipper up at
(01:08):
the start of this season. We have some of today's players.
If anyone will ever score one hundred points again, the
Scenics team, we have Anthony Davis and James Harden. Congrats,
it's a will again on a hundred. Do I think
we'll ever see somebody score a hundred points again now,
just because it's so competitive now that guys will want
allow it to happen. You know, you might have night
and guys are like not allowing you to score hundreds.
(01:30):
So god stel that when you get fifty. I don't
think every anybody's or whatever catch will puts a hundred.
That's just that's just different. Kemba Walker had a little
more hope. Guy's a game close. Devin Book is out
here scoring seventy. It really wants surprised me to see
Steph or Clay score a hundred. It wants surprised to
(01:52):
see Trade Young score a hundred. I can see Yannis
scoring a hundred points. Just the next generation the players
man like, they just have so much skew. Tim Hardaway Jr.
Nominated Clay Thompson. I feel like Clay would have guided
if he's played all four quarters, especially after having that
plays the third quarter, that record will never be broken.
(02:15):
I think I had a shot at it back, you know,
sixty and twenty nine minutes, but still forty points away.
That is incredible. That means I had to play the
rest of the game and go for forty and like that,
it's hard to even process how he did that, and
he was facing double and triple teams. But Will Chamberlain
is a timeless talent. You could play in any era
(02:37):
and be the best athlete on the four. Today we're
joined by Stanford University lecturer Gary Pomeranz, the author of
Wilt nineteen sixty two, a biography of the one hundred
point Game, to talk about the stories in legends surrounding
Wilt Chamberlain the big deer. You know, he came with
a body, an ego that was perfectly sculpted for dominating
(03:01):
his game. The eagle was essential. For a player to
score a hundred points in an NBA game, he must
not only want to do it on a deeper level,
he must need to do it to take an opponent
an entire sport and bend it to his will, to
show that it could be done and only by him.
(03:22):
Will Chamberlain of the Sabrancisco Warrings, the league's leading score
for the last five years. Chamber the One, made nearly
three thousand points during the last season, averaging over thirty
six points per game, the league's deadliest man under in
the number one hundred. There was Hubris, but there's also
a symbolic magic in our culture. The number of connotes
(03:43):
a century. A ripe old age is perfect score on
a test, scoring a hundred points means infinitely more than scoring,
say would score one hundred points and one ball game
it was done one hundred is a monument. Gar Are
Your words are beautiful? And first, let me say thank
(04:04):
you so much for joining us here, uh to not
only learn more about Wilt, learn more about this game,
but just so many of the amazing memories and stories
that we hear about him. What's a great pleasure to
be on with you. Thank you. Will was known to
make himself larger than life, and he would tell so
many stories about himself. Can you tell us about some
(04:25):
of those stories and in your thoughts about the truth
behind them? Well? Will was in this n season. He
was twenty five years old, and he was already a
luminous figure than He had his own racehorse named Spooky Goodet.
It hardly ever won, by the way. He had a
custom made Bentley and a Harlem nightclub, Big Wilt smallst
(04:49):
Paradise that dated to the days of the Harlem Renaissance
that he co owned, and it featured the likes of
red Fox and at a James Will it was in
a spine suit. He would greet his guests, and he
moved through that club like he owned all of Harlem,
maybe like he owned all of New York. He told
a lot of embellished stories about himself. Wilt have this
(05:10):
goliath syndrome. He had to be impressive, taller than he
even was larger than life. And already in that season
sixty two, Will was acting like a young Goliath. Because
the new scoring sensation in the league was a center
for the Chicago Packer's name Walt Bellamy, and he Bellamy
(05:31):
average thirty points a game that season, and when they
met for the first time in the International Amphitheater in Chicago,
Will got charged up. He was fired up to play
this game. He got fired up to play against Bill
Russell and Oscar Roberts and Elgin Baylor and now Bellamy.
So Bellamy comes out to half court for the opening
tip and says, hello, Mr Chamberlain, I'm Walter Bellamy, and
(05:55):
he extends his hand. Will shakes his hand and says, hello, Walter.
You won't get a shot off in the first half,
and Will block Bellamy's first nine shots taken from inside
the free throw line. That night, Bellamy couldn't he couldn't shoot,
he couldn't breathe. He was in shell shock when he
came out for the second half tip and Will says
(06:18):
to him, Okay, Walter, now you can play. And Will
it ends out out scoring Bellamy that night. To fourteen,
Let's table would scored more than fifty points in forty
three games that season. His teammate Tomas Sherry would say
(06:38):
even Wilt's truths were larger than truths. One of Wilt's
boasts to his teammates was that he drove his car,
a Cadillac convertible, across the country NonStop in thirty six
hours New York to l A and his teammate Guy
Rodgers said, wait a minute, dip. That means you would
have had to go a hundred ten miles per hour
(06:59):
a whole way, said hundred and twenty. And there's no
speed limits in Kansas. In the stories he told, Will
always was the manly hero. Once he told Cal Ramsey
of the Knicks that when he was alone out west
in the mountains, a mountain lion had attacked him, leaped
out from the rocks, and Will says, I killed it
(07:21):
with my bare hands, and Ramsey's like right, Will right.
One time we were talking and he has all these
scars on his arm, so I said, Wolfe, how'd you
get those cars? That's cal Ramsey, he said, when I
was going across the country and I stopped for a break,
and his mountain lions jumped out of over rock and
jumped on me. And I grabbed him and he scratched me.
Not killing with my bare hands. I said, come on.
(07:42):
He said it's true, and he know he did so
many great things. I kind of believe them. Then Will
pulls back his shirt to reveal two long scars on
his shoulder, which Ramsey, I'd admit a lot like clar marks.
Great attitude and sense of humor and sense of respect
(08:03):
for other people. That's Wild's teammate Joe Ruklick in two
thousand five. I think the worst thing that he probably
figured he could do would be too borer people, And
that may explain some of his outlandish I said, outlandish tales.
With that being said, in those larger than life stories
off the court, did Will have any weaknesses on the court? Well,
(08:26):
he couldn't shoot free throws. Later in his career. His
father heard Will say that Will was thinking about boxing
Muhammad Ali in an exhibition, and his father looked at
him and said, wouldn't should be better off practicing free throws.
His teammate ten time NBA All Star pitching Paul Arison,
had a theory in a two thousand five interview. He
(08:48):
disliked to do anything he thought was easy, and he
saw it making free shows was easy, and it should
be easy. So he never really put the attention in
that he showed up. That's what I was my thinking.
It's purely personal, and I could be way off pace,
but we'll like to do things that were difficult. That's why,
as I said before, he didn't like to dunkt the
(09:09):
ball because if any big guy can dunct the ball,
he'd liked to be categorized as a shooter. Joe respectfully disagreed.
He was a free throw shooter. He practiced regardless of
what people say. It wasn't We didn't applaud when he
made one, and we weren't surprised when he missed one.
He wasn't a great free throw shooter, although he was
(09:31):
that night in Hershey. But his statistics in every way
broke through the Ozone path. I know, well he's got it.
He worked it. And one of the little known statistics
is that Will averaged forty eight and a half minutes
a game that season. That's more than a game because
of overtimes. He missed only eight minutes and thirty three
(09:54):
seconds of games because he got thrown out of one
game by the referee Norm Drucker for saying something unkind
about Drucker's mother of all Wilts insane stats. He didn't
seem keen on that one in hindsight. Just one game
forty admits a game, it's really enough to say. But
playing a whole season forty eight minutes a game, I mean,
when I look back in retrospect, I said, what were
(10:16):
they doing to me? Jesus? It must have been some
time when I could have gotten gotten arrested. So, you know,
fifty points a game he averaged. No one else in
the NBA ever has averaged forty or forty. I mean,
it was to be expected that he would just produce
these astronomical numbers. Once Red Kerr the Syracuse Center walked
(10:38):
into a local bar in Syracuse after a home game
against Will, Bartender says how made you get read? And
Kurrs says, thirty six. Well, then set him up, the
bartender says, and he gives him his drink. And as
he gives him his drink, he said, how many will get?
And kurs said sixty two? I think you know he
he was glad he'd been served as win for the
(11:00):
or an audience. Is there anyone that you could compare
Will too? You know, for the modern audience that studied
Greek mythology, maybe Zeus in the NBA to eight physically,
maybe Dwight Howard, although Howard six ten and Will was
seven one. Um As a player, there's really nobody like Wilt.
(11:20):
I mean, Joel embiads numbers plays for Philadelphia UM as Will.
Did you know? Maybe you could draw a comparison and
beads averaging nearly thirty points a game right now? But
it's hard to find someone who's exactly like Will, particularly
in that sixty two season, because there were three iterations
(11:41):
of Will. First, well, we all remember the old muscled
up guy who played for the Lakers, wore the yellow headband,
only took fourteen shots a game. There was the middle
iteration of Will, who was determined to prove that he
could um lead the league and assists because everyone said
he was an individualist, cared on me about patting his stats,
(12:02):
and he led the league and assists, and he quoted
at that time that would be like Babe Ruth leading
the league and sacrifice bunts. But then there was that
first iteration of will. To the hundred point game, Will
years old, seven one, two sixty pounds ran the floor
like a train, had a massive back sloping in a
(12:22):
triangle down to a dancers thirty one in waist. I mean,
I think, I think, Sarah, if you define athleticism purely
as a combination of size, speed, strength, and agility, then
the young dipper Will Chamberlain might have been the greatest
pure athlete of the twentieth century. And if not, he's
(12:43):
at least in the conversation. Can you describe for us
and paint the picture that game that night, what was
going on in the season leading up to that, and
just where you feel like these players mindset, attitudes were
at as they were heading into too that evening and
that game. So it's game of an eight game season.
(13:05):
They're just playing out the string at this point, right.
The Knicks are a last place team. They're not going anywhere.
They're gonna finish wins and fifty one losses. The Warriors
are going to go to the playoffs, but there are
too many games behind the Celtics to catch them. They're
playing the game in Hershey because the NBA was trying
(13:25):
to grow new fans at that time. The NBA was
not to be confused with today's NBA. It was a
little bit like a lounge act, you know, in search
of itself, in search of something that would generate more excitement,
which is where wild came in. You know, they played
three games the Warriors that season in Hershey, the chocolate town,
(13:46):
you know, surrounded by the Amish and Dutch craftsmen. And
in fact, when when the Warriors went home on the
team bus after that game, they saw some of the
Amish in the countryside on their wagons, lantern lid moving along.
So here's Will producing the everest of sports statistics, the
(14:10):
only single triple in NBA history, and he's doing it
in Milton, Hershey's company town, surrounded by the Ash and
the Dutch craftsman. Paint the picture inside. You're in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
There's little to no media coverage. Um, there was not
a television broadcast. The arena, as we have heard, is
(14:33):
half empty. Who was at the game, and what do
you feel like? That atmosphere was like, well, it was
four thousand, one and twenty four officially. Now. Eddie Gottlieb,
the owner of the Philadelphia Warriors, famously increased his crowd counts.
He didn't count, He just looked at the crowd and
(14:54):
came up with a number that was not like Gotti,
as his nickname was. Wasn't around like Gotti. It was
fort a four and half empty arenas. Eight thousand people
could sit there, and it was locals. Those locals included
Kerry Ryman, Larry Wagner, and Earl Whitmore. You could the
first thing you'd smells the popcorn and he came in here.
(15:15):
Oh yeah, yeah, the first thing you'd smells that popcorn.
It was it was locals, and the arena is filled
with cigarette smoke. Marl Borrow's Parliament's Lucky Strikes. There's a
carnival atmosphere just in that you know something is happening here.
And the Knicks were the perfect foils. Earlier that year
(15:38):
they'd given up sixty three points in the game to
Jerry West of the Lakers, a guard, and the year
before they gave up seventy one to the Lakers Elgin Baylor,
a forward. The Philadelphia writer Jack Geyser wrote that you
can find better benches than the Knicks half in Central Park.
So the Knicks were not a very good team, but
they had a few players. Was formidably Richie Garrin the guard,
(16:03):
and um Willie Knowles, who was a sweet shooter from
u C. L A. Who was Harvey Pollock. Well, Harvey
Pollock was the statistician, long time statistician. He would be
a part of that team which became San Francisco Warriors.
Then Philadelphia brought a new team, the seventies six Ors,
(16:24):
and Harvey was with the NBA for fifty eight years
and he did everything that night. Next time you have
a busy day at work, I think of Harvey all
the years I've been in the league. That was the
busiest night that I ever had in the NBA. Because
it was late in the season, the game was played
in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The game meant nothing to either team.
(16:46):
A lot of reporters were unning in president the inquiry.
The Philipphia inquired. The Daily User didn't send a reporter,
and I was the PR director of the team, the statistician, etcetera,
so they asked me to cover the game. Meanwhile, the
eight P and the U P also asked me to
cover the game, so I had three assignments other than
my normal duties. I realize, you know a Will's coach
(17:09):
was sometimes taping his ankles that season, that this was
done on a shoe string, particularly with Eddie Gottlieb. You've
gotta place this game in context. I mean, historically, that
night the night Wild scores a hundred points. Will It
comes in here having scored seventy eight points in a
triple overtime game and seventy three points in another game.
(17:31):
The numbers were just mind bending, you know, they just
kept going and going. And you know, when the guy
scored seventy eight points, if he makes a half dozen
more free throws ins into the mid eighties and a
few more shots, and he's in ninety and all things
are possible. Well, four thousand, one twenty four people were there.
Hundreds of thousands have claimed to have been there. I
(17:54):
have a few big stories out to get a little
bigger like the fish stories. Well, this is the one
true story that I might have. I'll tell you there
was a little of the four thousand people there at
the game, but I have at least fifty thousand people
who have told me, oh, yeah, you know, I was
there when you scored the hundred points, and so yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know. I live in New York City, you know,
(18:14):
so my father took me to the guide. And I'm saying,
you know, some people would say Philadelphia. No one ever
says hershey, pencil, and who tells me any story? But
I think it's what you're saying to you is that
we remember you will and the thing we remember the
most about you was an hundred point game. They were
(18:39):
never so early that they had something a while away
their time. By going here into this penny arcade, which
is quite different today than it was then, because over
right over in this section was a shooting, and I
started shooting rifles and so on and so forth, and
I couldn't miss anything, said one of my closest friends, Richmond.
(19:00):
He had talked to the guy out of the door,
had worked in the arena for twenty years. Is that
the highest numbers ever posted? Here was such and such
a thing, so he would bet me that I couldn't
beat that. But I just blew all the numbers away.
So if it was ever a clue that I was
gonna have a hot day, this was definitely the clue.
Was there any indications early on before the game started
(19:21):
that that Will was going to have a hot night?
So we'll you'll find plenty of clips of Will talking
about the Hunter Point game. And I did not get
the opportunity to interview him, but and I would have
liked to have interviewed him, of course, But the clips
I've seen, he just makes stuff up, which is what
he always did. Will always fuse myth and reality. He
(19:44):
said that he took the team Bust to Hershey. He
didn't take the team bus. He drove down from New
York in his attorney's car. I gretch mean his attorney.
I had not had an hour sleep. I lived in
New York City. I had to commute from New York
to Philadelphia to catch your Team Bust around eleven or
twelve o'clock. And if anyone knew me at that time,
I had insomniact and I never really went to bed
(20:05):
before four or five and in the morning, and so
sometimes it's aboutter just we just stay up. Plus I
had a date that night before, and so everything led
to me not having a night's sleep. I remember getting
into the bus going to Hershey from Philadelphia and said, oh, Am,
I tired. I didn't realize he wasn't on the bus
with us until we got on the bus. But he
liked to travel in his own way, in his own style,
(20:26):
and he was living in New York, and he evidently
had taken Knowles and so Johnny Green and some of
the other players back to New York. But no, he
wasn't there, he said. Before the game, Frank McGuire, his coach,
had shown him what was New York newspapers that they
were saying Will, it was, you know less than he
(20:46):
seemed to be, that he got tired easily. And I
checked the New York newspapers from that week. There was
no such thing. Will had said that he had spent
the night partying of this nightclub Chill Rutlix. He didn't
think that that was the case. That Will knew better.
I heard. We'll tell stories about a lot of things,
(21:07):
from weights that he could lift with one hand to
his close personal friendship with Richard Nixon, and his and
Will's dimensions two d and ninety pounds, seven ft one
and one eight were Uh, we're commensurate with his Uh,
with his tendency to exaggerate, Will was not partying all
(21:31):
night before the game, although he said he spent the
night at his place in Harlem. Small's Uh. Will knew better.
And I've seen him push away a glass of champagne
and watched him three seasons airplanes, hotels, coffee shops, locker rooms, restaurants, bars, ah,
(21:55):
he trained. I would be astonished if he had had
one drink the night before the game. He wasn't a drinker,
who wasn't a smoker. No, that's Smith. I hope you'll
forgive me. But wherever he is, he knows. What do
you make of those two two opposing stories. Well, you know,
people are remembering something that happened so long ago, and um,
(22:19):
Will spend a lot of nights at his night calm
in a very fancy apartment off Central Park and only
came to Philadelphia for games and practices. I believe he
did go there. Now part of the story that that's
somewhat well, I guess revealing about the time is after
that game, after Wild scores underpoints against the Knicks, he
(22:40):
drives Willie Knowles of the Knicks back to his home
in New Jersey and route to his nightclub in Harlem.
Now can you imagine scoring you drop a hundred on
him and then drive them all. Will said he fell
asleep on that ride home, so hopefully he wasn't actually driving,
and I merely fell asleep. Now while I'm falling asleep
and we had a toll road stop, I gonna wake up.
(23:02):
I'm not gonna hear them saying can you believe that
sl be going a hundred points against us? And the
whole conversation with john't have hours for them calling me
these names. But finally dropping off of my house first
and I get out the car, I said, hey, fellas,
thanks for this, you know, and I'm so sorry about
that hundred points, I said, I mean, I didn't really
mean to be s ob but what the hell? So
(23:25):
halftime of this game, Will has forty one points, and
the inquirer asked Harvey Pollock to start describing every shot
Will took. What did these shots look like? And what
what were Will's favorites when you describe him as an
athlete and as a player, what what were his favorite shots,
his favorite spots. He had one favorite spot above all others,
(23:49):
and that was today we would say down on the block,
but there was no block at that time. And remember
this is an important fact about the hunder point game.
The lane was twelve ft in with the key was
only twelve and they widened it by four ft a
few years later. So when Will just standing down on
what we would now think of as the block, just
(24:10):
outside the key, he can take one large step, sort
of a lunge, and he's covering those six ft and
he's at the basket. But Will didn't like the idea
that people thought he was a great player only because
he was so tall. He wanted to prove that there
was more to him than just that. So he would
(24:31):
take this fall away shot, falling away from the basket,
shooting over his right shoulder, banking and in wrote yelling
for help. Paul's away got it, and he would call
it basketball's greatest shot. Of course, Paul Arison explained how
Will's perception of himself played into his favorite shot. Will
(24:52):
favorite shot, and it's been mentioned many times by many
people he didn't want, did not want to be consider
and a great player because he was big. He did
not like the dunk. He felt any big guy can dunk,
et cetera. Like that. He had a issue like the
position himself on the left hand side of the court
in the pivot, close pivot, and the ball would come
(25:15):
in and he would fade away and play a jump
shot about a twelve fifteen ft jump shot off the board.
That was his favorite shot. And when he was hitting that,
it was almost impossible to stop front because he was
so big falling away and with his jumping and everything,
and he was hitting that very well. The only way
you can stop it was prevented him getting the ball,
which is not easy when the guy is that big
(25:37):
and strong. Opposing players, including Bill Russell, wanted him to
take that shot because he's fallen away from the basket
and he's not going to get the rebound. So again,
Egos playing in there a little bit. Wilt is scoring
in transition in this game. You know, Will goes twenty
three points in the first quarter, eighteen points in the
second quarter, so at halftime he's got forty one. Harvey
(25:59):
Pollock is typing Harvey Pollock is writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Harvey Pollock is writing for the Associated Press and United
Press International. No one was there knowing that none of
the New York writers cared enough to show up, because
it's only the Knicks. In fact, Jerry Eisenberg, one of
the New York newspapermen, told me that later that night
(26:20):
he ripped off copy off the copy machine and said, Hey,
the knickser in hershean and night. Anybody know that. No
one in the sports department says a word. And Eisenberg said, huh,
he scored a hundred points, scored under points, and so
you'd like to think that. I mean, if someone scores
a hundred points today, we know it instantly because everyone's
tweeting from the arena. ESPN sound trucks are gonna show
(26:43):
up in the beginning of the fourth quarter and we're
gonna see break in and we're gonna watch it. Happened
when Kobe scores eighty one points. You could buy a
DVD of that performance within an hour of the game's end.
So so technology changes some of this too, do things
for you. What you said when we were talking about
all the ways what was scoring and you alluded to
(27:05):
this earlier. He was knocking down free throws, plus he
was twenty eight out of thirty two pounds. It was
incredible that that's got to be the best night that
Will has ever had. From the foul line. If you've
watched Bill Chamberlin play as much as I have, going
back to Overbrook High School and saw what a terrible,
terrible foul shooter he was. That's Bill Campbell, longtime Philadelphia broadcaster,
(27:27):
to me the tip off, that's something I don't say,
God is gonna score a lot of Something unusual was
going to happen here because he was making allst foul shots.
He wouldn't listen to any and the ones he missed
were hanging on the rim. Now I've heard charges which
is the baskets were soft and all that kind of nonsense.
I don't know what that's true or not. All I
(27:48):
know is that the guy shot forty two and I
said to somebody this, this guys gonna score a lot
of points. There was an indication that something unusual and
remarkable was going to happen. What is different about this night?
So as Carrie Ryman, the fourteen year old Hershey Boy,
tells the story when the circus came to town, came
(28:10):
to Hershey, they would have clowns who use springboards, and
and he Ryman and his buddies would sneak into the
arena when no one was there. They would take those
springboards they brought up basketball and they would go over
to the baskets and run, hit the springboard into the
air and dunking and holding onto the rim because it's
(28:31):
a long way down, positioning themselves, holding, holding, holding, and
dropping catlike to the floor. Those were soft rims. Those
were soft rims, perhaps for that reason, or perhaps they
were just old and Hershey arena wasn't gonna buy new ones. Well,
the Warriors led by nineteen points going into the fourth quarter,
(28:51):
and Wilt had sixty nine points. And Bill Campbell leans
forward into his microphone and tells the w c a
U audience in philadel You everybody's thinking, how many points is?
Will can I get? Roger takes the jump shot. It's
no good. We're just conjectural, how many make There's a
(29:13):
time out now with about nine minutes to go, and
Frank McGuire and the huddle says, all right, everybody get
the ball to wilty, get the ball to wilt. They generally,
you know, our offense, the best way for us to
win was it get the ball to wilt. So, as
I said, we most of us didn't have to be
told that that's what we were going to do, and
especially when he was having a good night. This is
(29:34):
another thing that people don't often consider about that game.
For a player to score a hundred points, his teammates
have to agree to be a part of it. They
have to get him the ball and give up their
own shots. When I see a shooter like Paul Hours
and passing up Paul is a good shooter. When I
see Paul and Tomas Sherry and these guys passing up
(29:58):
easy jump shots, I started thinking, oh man, you know
he flash in the world. We're gonna predict the gosh,
what score a hundred points? But he was going to
get a lot of points. But my teammates, once they
got the ball, made sure that they couldn't get foul.
They ran positions where he couldn't be and got me
the ball under any circumstances. These guys are in the
(30:18):
NBA because they're fine players, and they have their salary
negotiations coming after the season with a skin Flynn owner,
and they decided to go with it on this night
in Hershey, they would see how high Will could get.
With about seven minutes to play, Harvey Pollock leans over
to the p A announcer Dave zincoff the zinc as
(30:41):
he was now not thinking the new record at seventy
nine and join the announced, But Tramerman goes right ahead
through the announcement that makes the foul vaal one point.
He broke his own record at seventy eight earlier in
(31:03):
the season, and and so Zenkov, who had raffled off
cigars and foremost salamis at halftime to fans, says, ladies
and gentlemen, a new scoring record has been set by
Wilt Chamberlain. He has seventy nine points. The thick managed
(31:24):
broken the record and he's gone for you know what.
The fans they're thinking of the magic number. Until that point,
no one, including Will, had any idea how many points
he had. It's not like today's arena where you look
up and you see number thirteen and the points are
are adding up as the game plays on. But now
everyone knows he only needs twenty one points to get
(31:47):
to a hundred and for the Philadelphia Warriors, whilst teammates
the curiosity ratchets up. Can he get there? And for
the New York Knicks, it's complete dread. Got three bet
in front of him, whatever, don't roll around though. He's
(32:09):
got it now, how do you thanks to him? Ninety
point ninety points? The Knicks were twenty points behind during
the last three or four minutes of the game, and
(32:31):
they were freezing the ball. You don't see a team
losing by twenty or thirty freezing the ball. Thinking about
this just starting for time. And while they were freezing it,
we were failing them so that we get the ball back.
And then consequently when we did get the ball back,
they were trying to foul our guards before the bull
would get into will. With a few minutes left, Frank
(32:53):
McGuire took out three of his starters and put in
three guys on the bench, including Joe Ruklick, the Kennedy
liberal from Northwestern who would intellectually challenge his teammates and
later many years later, became the only white employee as
the editorial page editor for The Chicago Defender, the black
(33:13):
inchest newspaper in Chicago. Dr vow in the lane between
Richard John and Joe Ruckler down I almost came to
broad So Wills gets against Barici with a ball down
the right side path of the trainer and the hope.
(33:37):
And now the fans, mostly kids, chocolate factory workers. Kids
are pressed into the court. There are three four deep
around the court, and Ted Luck and Bill, a teammate,
gets the ball, and you here Bill Campbell on w
c A. You say, Chamberlain, mrs rebound Luck and Bill
back to Wilt. He shoots no good, rebound to Luck
(33:59):
and Bill out to Rooklick. One minute and one stuck
at the players. Rogers goes wrong the tram. He's got it.
He's trying to get up so good about luckin bill
Buck and about luckin bill Buck to Lucklick. And now
here comes Richie Garren barn down on Ruklick, and he's
(34:22):
got fumes coming out of his ears. He is furious.
This is not gonna happen. Rootli sees will go who
that's the signal? Right here? Get it to me. Well,
the New York Knicks had two centers, both of them
six ft ten one. The rookie Darryl him off m
all fouled out in twenty minutes that night. Twenty minutes,
(34:44):
six fouls. That's a lot of fouls, and twenty it
wasn't you know the first twenty minutes he'd go in
and out. During the game, the other six ft ten center,
Phil Jordan's, wasn't playing because he'd had a late night
out and had consumed too much and was vomiting in
the hotel room thirteen miles away in Harrisburg, PA. So
(35:05):
at least six ft eight rookie Cleveland Buckner to cover Wilt.
Buckner was built like olive oil. He was two pounds
and he's going up against the Mighty Dipper. The arc
is everywhere, the time's running out, the fans are going nut.
Zinc is probably yelling at me, Joe, get the ball
to the world with the mic off. But their guys
(35:28):
collapsed all around him, and I'm wide open. I've got
a shot that's twelve ft. I can get into the
score column in this game with a little quick term shot.
I stopped dribbling and I hold the ball, and I
see Wilt moving around, and he says, and he puts
his hands like this, he bumps the guy off of
his hip and there he is. I threw in the ball. Boom.
(35:52):
The rest is history. So he goes whoo Rocklex sees it,
lobs the ball into wild. The Knicks verge around Wilt
as they had been the whole fourth quarter, and you
hear Bill Campbell say he made it. He made it
a dipper dunk coming out of the fans are rushing
(36:25):
the floor, as they say, mostly chocolate factory workers. So
now we'll scored. The kids are rushing the floor. It
was still forty six seconds on that clock when I
scored a hundred points. But since that's all the fans
wanted and the officials feel like that was enough to
(36:47):
you said the game was over. That people came on
the floor. And so that's one of maybe the few games.
And here's the the NBA that never ever finished, although
we'll claim the game ended there. We can hear the
ask couple of seconds and the Bill Campbell radio broadcast,
(37:08):
are there any other questions that you still have about
this game, anythings that you wonder about. I think my
questions relate more to history and the importance of history
and taking it on to understand that when we in
this case, when we look at the NBA, and see
these remarkable athletes, truly the best in the world. Now
(37:29):
they're coming from all over the world to play this
great game. It wasn't always that way. I came into
a game that was very limited to having black players.
It was so limited that the only real black player
of any high white collar jobs, so to speaking, scoring
points was Elgin Bailey. Every other black player ever was
(37:52):
in the league was a blue collar worker. He was
a guy who was getting rebounds for his team and
passing it out to all the scores and also forth
and along comes me, and I don't care about giving
the ball to somebody else. I'm gonna do it myself.
You know, most people couldn't tell you that the names
of the first black players in the NBA who came
in a nineteen fifty Chuck Cooper or a Lloyd Hanked
(38:12):
his Zony, they should be known, and and Wilt his
role in all this should be known. I think the
thing that people do always remember is that iconic photo
of Will holding the slip of paper It says one
hundred on it. How did that come to be? Whose
idea was that? Well? Harvey Pollock. Harvey Pollock was a
machine that night, he probably had the second best performance
(38:34):
of the night by dictating these stories off the top
of his head to the wires and rewrites and sending
a story to the Philadelphian Choir, which did not send
anyone to the game because it didn't matter. Now, there
was one photographer who had been at the game for
the Harrisburg newspaper, but he took his photos and left
(38:56):
after the first quarter. So there's no working photograph for there.
There's no television, there's no New York sports writers. There's
two sports writers from Philadelphia who are there. But there's
an off duty photographer for the Associated Press named Paul
Bathis who's sitting right near the basket. He was there
(39:16):
with his son. Took him there for his tenth birthday. Now,
Baptists had won a pull a surprise the year before
for a photograph of John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower, the
young president with the former president. They were walking down
a path at Camp David, which isn't too far away
from there, and now he's got twenty shots in his camera.
He'd gone out to his car after the third quarter
(39:38):
to get his camera, told his son, you stay right here,
and he comes back, he positions himself near the basket
um and in the locker room, Paul Bathis shows up,
the AP photographer and said to Harvey, can we get
a photo of Wilt? And this isn't a fancy NBA
locker room. Will sitting in a chair. Behind him on
hooks are his shirt, his hants, his overcoat, and his
(40:02):
shoes are beneath the chair. That's how elegant the locker
room was. And Harvey goes to Jim Heffernan, a sportswriter
from Philadelphia there with the bulletin to cover the game.
Says hef you've got a sheet of paper I can borrow,
And Heffernan gives him a sheet of paper, and Pollock
takes a pen and writes one zero Zero's hands it
to Will and said, Will hold this. You know there's
(40:24):
a a slip of paper. If you ever see a
picture of Will holding says a hundred on it. Well,
that's my handwriting on that hundred on there. And Will
sitting down on the in his chair and holds it.
And there's kind of a sheepish grin on his face.
Not much in Wild's life you would call sheepish. But
(40:44):
that look was and you know, you can see the sweat.
You can see he's got those rubber bands on his wrists.
He wore rubber bands to hold his socks up when
he was younger, and he kept worrying him to remind
him of his friendships to childhood. And there it is.
It's arguably the most important photograph of basketball ever. It's
(41:08):
not even taken on the court, but it's about a
man and a moment, his moment. Will didn't like the
hundred point game for a long time. He thought it
fed the belief that he was interested only in patting
his own statistics. And in fact, in the postgame locker room,
(41:28):
when he saw the stats and realized he'd taken sixty
three shots, he he mourned that fact. He he couldn't
believe it. And al Addles, his good friend was sitting
on the bench next to him in the locker room
and said, don't worry about a dip. You know you
made thirty six of him. It wasn't until later in
(41:49):
life that Will came to embrace it. It was almost
like a father and son estranged, you know, coming back
together thirty one years later. How would you describe will
impact on race in the NBA. Well, Oscar Robertson has
said that will save the NBA at that period, and
(42:11):
I believe that. Um, the NBA wasn't that interesting in
the late fifties in the St. Louis Hawks now the
Atlanta Hawks, we're the last all white team to win
an NBA championship. We were seeing a transition from the
(42:32):
game that was to the game that is today. And
in two the league was about black s white, but
the players who were breaking in the black players had,
in particular Will Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Elgin Baylor.
(42:57):
That's a pretty impressive four. Um. They brought this new athleticism,
this luminous kind of style of play. They took it
what was a horizontal feed on the floor game vertical
above the rim, and made it their's. So when we
see this luminous athleticism today, this is where we can
(43:18):
see the seed planet. This is where it begins. Do
you think the record will ever be broken? Well, Kobe
hit eighty one on a shooter's night. Will didn't have
the advantage of the three point play, not to say
he would have scored too many of them. Anyway, but
he didn't, and players today do. I suspect if anyone
(43:38):
breaks it, it'll be a big man who can shoot
threes and free throws, you know, someone in the style
of a Kevin Durant. You know Dirk Norvitsky could could
do that in his time, but didn't. Gary. We can't
thank you enough for taking us back to that moment,
making us feel like we're there, we experienced it. I
know all of us need to read your book, but
(44:01):
these stories are just absolutely incredible and your time is
so precious. So thank you so much. Well, Sarah, thank you.
It's fun to spend some time talking about this game.
I loved working on this book. And um, it's you know,
World ninety two is about the season, but it's really
a biography of the game. And um, thank you for
having me on the show. To close us out, here
(44:22):
some of our favorite answers for what it would take
to see another one hundred point game courtesy of Spencer
Dinwoodie and D'Angelo Russell. You see a duplicate, You need
a combination with certain factors and so hard because you
know you could point to a Janice or k d
um Is. Guys that have a shot at that right
with the problem is they're all phenomenal teams. If they're
(44:44):
keeting on paces score a hunter, they're probably blowing the
other team out and probably are gonna play the fourth quarter.
I wouldn't be surprised, especially if they add the fourth
point um shot in there. I mean, it could happen.
Why not? Who Chamberlain did it? NBA for Flashback is
a production of I Heart Radio and the NBA. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart
(45:06):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast
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