Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game
Based on Wikipedia: Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game
The Night Basketball Became Impossible
One hundred points. In a single game. By one man.
To understand how absurd this is, consider that in modern professional basketball, scoring 50 points in a game makes headlines and earns a player a spot on SportsCenter. Scoring 60 is rare enough to be remembered for years. Scoring 70 has happened only a handful of times in the entire history of the National Basketball Association. And yet on a cold, rainy Friday night in March 1962, in a half-empty arena that smelled of chocolate, Wilt Chamberlain scored one hundred points.
No one has come close since. No one likely ever will.
The Forgotten Arena
The game wasn't played in Philadelphia, where the Warriors were based. It wasn't played in New York, where the Knicks called home. It was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a factory town 85 miles from Philadelphia, in a drafty old arena originally built for ice hockey.
The NBA in 1962 was not the global entertainment juggernaut it is today. It was a struggling league in its sixteenth season, barely clinging to relevance. College basketball was more popular. Television ratings were so poor that NBC was considering dropping its contract with the league entirely. Only one team, the Los Angeles Lakers, existed west of St. Louis. The league had just 37 Black players across all its rosters, though these players were beginning to transform how the game was played, making it faster and more athletic.
To drum up interest, the NBA occasionally scheduled games in small towns, hoping to cultivate new fans. Hershey was one such experiment. The Warriors had already played two "home" games there that season.
Only 4,124 people showed up on March 2nd. The arena could hold over 8,000. Most of those who came were there to watch a warm-up exhibition game between football players from the Philadelphia Eagles and Baltimore Colts, not the NBA contest that followed. No television cameras recorded the game. No New York reporters attended because they were all in Florida covering baseball spring training. The Warriors' own publicist had to file reports for the Associated Press, United Press International, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Just two photographers were present.
This is perhaps the strangest aspect of the most famous individual performance in basketball history. Almost no one saw it happen.
The Giant Who Couldn't Sleep
Wilt Chamberlain stood seven feet, one inch tall and weighed 260 pounds. He was, by any measure, the most physically dominant basketball player anyone had ever seen.
In his first season in the NBA, he averaged 37.6 points per game, shattering existing records. In his second season, he raised that to 38.4. By the time of the Hershey game, he was in the midst of a season in which he would average 50.4 points per game, a number so preposterous that it reads like a typo. No other player had ever scored 3,000 points in a season. Chamberlain was on pace for 4,000.
Earlier that season, in December, he had set the single-game scoring record by pouring in 78 points against the Los Angeles Lakers in a game that went to triple overtime. The record he broke that night had been 71, held by Elgin Baylor. After the game, Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn asked Baylor if it bothered him that Chamberlain had needed extra time to break his mark. Baylor reportedly shrugged. "Someday," he said, "that guy is going to score 100."
Even Bill Russell, Chamberlain's great rival and the best defensive player in the game, had seen it coming. "He has the size, strength, and stamina to score one hundred some night," Russell had predicted.
But on the night it finally happened, Chamberlain was in rough shape. He had spent the previous evening in New York City with a female companion, partying through the night and not dropping her off until six in the morning. With no sleep and nursing a hangover, he caught the eight o'clock train to Philadelphia, met some friends for a long lunch, and nearly missed the team bus to Hershey.
His teammates were similarly unenthusiastic. York Larese, a Warriors guard, later recalled: "There was nothing exciting about the Knicks playing the Warriors in Hershey. Chocolate was more exciting." Tom Meschery, a forward, called the arena "a god-forsaken place" and said the entire town was so saturated with the smell of chocolate from the nearby factory that people felt sick indoors. "I was just dreaming to leave the place as fast as I could."
The Missing Defender
The New York Knicks arrived with a significant problem. Their starting center, Phil Jordon, was out sick. The official report said influenza. The unofficial word was that he, like Chamberlain, was simply hungover.
This mattered enormously. Earlier in the season, Jordon had played Chamberlain to a near standstill, scoring 33 points while holding the Warriors' center to 34. He was one of the few players in the league who could compete with Chamberlain physically.
In Jordon's place, the Knicks started Darrall Imhoff, a second-year player who was shorter, lighter, and despite strong defensive credentials from his college days at California, hopelessly overmatched. Imhoff had led Cal to an NCAA championship and won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics, but those achievements meant little against Chamberlain. New York's backup center, Cleveland Buckner, was even less equipped for the task. Just two days earlier, Chamberlain had scored an NBA record 28 points in a single quarter against him.
The Knicks were walking into a mismatch. They just didn't know how badly it would go.
A Record No One Expected
According to coach Frank McGuire, the Warriors had no pregame plan to push Chamberlain toward 100 points. It simply happened.
Within minutes, Philadelphia led 19-3, and Chamberlain had already scored 13 points on five perfect shots. By the end of the first quarter, the Warriors were up 42-26, and their center had 23 points. What made this remarkable was not just the scoring but the free throws. Chamberlain was notorious for being one of the worst free throw shooters in the league, making barely half his attempts in his first two seasons. But that night, he made all nine of his first-quarter free throws.
Earlier in the season, McGuire had convinced Chamberlain to try shooting free throws underhanded, the way Rick Barry would later make famous. The technique was working. Chamberlain was actually thinking more about the free throw record, 24 makes in a game, than about his overall point total.
Imhoff was in foul trouble almost immediately. At one point, after being whistled for another foul, he snapped at the referee: "Well, why don't you just give the guy a hundred now and we'll all go home!"
By halftime, the Warriors led 79-68, and Chamberlain had 41 points. The team felt little excitement. He had scored 60 or more points fifteen times before. "I often came into the locker room with 30 or 35 points," Chamberlain later explained. "Therefore, 41 points was not a big deal."
But during halftime, something shifted. Guy Rodgers, the Warriors' point guard, proposed a simple idea: "Let's get the ball to Dip. Let's see how many he can get." McGuire agreed.
The Avalanche
The third quarter was a massacre.
Chamberlain scored 28 more points. The Knicks tried everything. They triple-teamed him. They quadruple-teamed him. They fouled him hard, trying to disrupt his rhythm. Nothing worked. By the end of the quarter, Philadelphia led 125-106, and Chamberlain had 69 points, just nine shy of his own record.
Dave Budd, the Knicks' third center, who had been rotating in with the foul-plagued Imhoff, later admitted the futility of the situation: "You couldn't play him conventionally because he was so big. The only thing you could attempt to do was either front him, and in that case they'd try to lob it in to him, or beat him down the floor and set up where he wanted to get and force him out a couple of extra steps. The guy weighed 300 or 270 pounds, so that wasn't easy, either."
The public address announcer, Dave Zinkoff, began announcing Chamberlain's point total after every basket. The sleepy crowd, which had come mainly to see football players shoot around, was now screaming.
The Race Against Time
With eight minutes left, Chamberlain needed 25 points to reach 100. That would require scoring at a rate equivalent to 150 points over a full game. Impossible, even for him.
He scored his 79th point with 7:51 remaining, breaking his own record and sending the arena into a frenzy. The 4,124 spectators began chanting: "Give it to Wilt! Give it to Wilt!" After he hit 80, the chant changed: "One hundred! One hundred!"
Chamberlain later admitted his exhaustion: "Man, these people are tough. I'm tired. I've got 80 points and no one has ever scored 80."
The Warriors abandoned any pretense of normal basketball. They wanted only to feed their center. Al Attles, a teammate, passed up an easy layup so Chamberlain could score points 88 and 89. "We wanted Wilt to get the record," Attles explained, "because we all liked him."
Tom Meschery sensed something troubling. The team concept had broken down entirely. Instead of cutting and moving without the ball, his teammates were simply passing to Chamberlain and then standing still to watch. It was no longer basketball in any traditional sense.
The Farce
With six minutes remaining, the Knicks made a decision that transformed the game into something surreal. They began intentionally fouling every Warrior except Chamberlain.
Think about what this means. A team trailing by nearly 20 points began deliberately giving the opposing team free throws, willingly increasing the deficit. Their goal was not to win. Their goal was to keep the ball out of Chamberlain's hands and deny him the record.
New York also began milking the shot clock on offense, running as much time as possible before shooting. They were playing the opposite of how a losing team should play, sacrificing any hope of a comeback to prevent a statistical milestone.
The Warriors responded in kind. With four minutes left, they began fouling the Knicks immediately to get the ball back faster. Coach McGuire pulled his entire starting lineup except Chamberlain and inserted bench players whose sole job was to commit fouls, get the ball back after New York's free throws, and pass to Chamberlain.
Both teams spent the final minutes fouling each other. Philadelphia finished with 25 personal fouls, New York with 32. The Knicks lost two players, Imhoff and Willie Naulls, to disqualification after fouling out.
The game had become a farce, but a glorious one.
The Final Minute
With 2:12 remaining, Chamberlain had 94 points. He hit a fadeaway jumper for 96.
At 1:19, York Larese threw a lob pass toward the basket. Chamberlain caught it and slammed it through for 98. This was notable because Chamberlain rarely dunked with force. He preferred finesse: finger rolls, fadeaways, soft touch around the rim. His usual "Dipper Dunk," as writer Gary Pomerantz described it, was "a considerably less emphatic basket stuff, like a rock that barely ripples the pond." But on this one, he threw it down.
With less than a minute left, Chamberlain set up in the post. Joe Ruklick passed to Rodgers, who found Chamberlain near the basket. He missed. Ted Luckenbill grabbed the rebound and passed it back. Chamberlain missed again. Luckenbill rebounded once more and this time passed to Ruklick, who saw an easy layup available but instead lobbed a high pass toward the rim.
With 46 seconds remaining, Chamberlain grabbed the ball and scored.
One hundred points.
Fans stormed the court. The game was stopped for several minutes as people mobbed Chamberlain. When order was finally restored, the Warriors won 169-147. The combined 316 points set another record.
The Ghost Record
No video footage of the game exists. The only audio recording that survives is of the fourth quarter, and in 2016, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry for preservation.
The most famous photograph from that night shows Chamberlain in the locker room afterward, holding a piece of paper with "100" written on it. He's smiling, but there's something almost bewildered in his expression, as if even he can't quite believe what happened.
In the six decades since, the closest anyone has come to the record is 81 points by Kobe Bryant in 2006. Devin Booker scored 70 in 2017. These are extraordinary performances, and they fell 19 and 30 points short.
What Chamberlain did that night in Hershey exists in a category by itself. It's not just the greatest scoring performance in basketball history. It may be the most untouchable record in all of professional sports.
The Context of Greatness
When debates arise about the greatest basketball player of all time, Chamberlain's name sometimes gets lost. Michael Jordan won six championships. LeBron James has played at an elite level for over two decades. Chamberlain won only two titles in his career, and critics have always questioned whether his statistical dominance translated to team success.
But consider this: in the 1961-62 season, Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points per game for the entire year. He also averaged 25.7 rebounds. He played an average of 48.5 minutes per game, which is notable because NBA games are only 48 minutes long. The extra thirty seconds per game came from overtime periods. Chamberlain essentially never came out.
The 100-point game was the apex of a season in which Chamberlain was playing a different sport than everyone else. He wasn't just the best player in basketball. For that one year, he was basketball, a force so overwhelming that the game had to bend around him.
Whether that makes him the greatest of all time depends on how you define greatness. But no one can deny that for one night in a chocolate-scented arena in central Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain did something that defied belief. Something no one had done before. Something no one has done since.
Something that, in all likelihood, no one will ever do again.