At the other end, Naulls missed a jumper. Attles rebounded and cleared the ball to Rodgers for a fast break. Rodgers swept down the left side. Chamberlain stormed the middle, a portrait of athletic grace, the huff-and-puff cadence of his breath so familiar to Attles. The Dipper wanted the ball. From Rodgers, as ever, he got it. Chamberlain charged toward the basket and tried to shoot but was fouled. At the courtside table, Harvey Pollack notified Zinkoff that Chamberlain had broken the all-time scoring record. Zink, the showman, nodded. Breathing heavily at the free-throw line, Chamberlain squatted down low and shot his free throw underhanded as he heard the Zink say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a new scoring record has been created by Wilt Chamberlain.” Four thousand voices rose as one. The Zink broke his syllables into small bits and stretched them like taffy. “He has seven-teee niiiiine poooooinnttts!” The Dipper made his first free throw to reach eighty. He bent low again—his sweat-soaked face revealing total focus and intensity—and made the second, too. He’d missed only two of twenty-six free-throw attempts thus far, for him unprecedented. The Zink caught up: “He now has eight-teee onnnnne poiiiiinnttttssss!!” A roar passed like a wave through the Hershey Sports Arena.
Until this announcement, Imhoff had had no idea how many points Chamberlain had scored. Few of the Knicks or Warriors had known. Neither had the Dipper. The impact of Zink’s announcement was instant. It intensified everything, the crowd’s excitement, the Knicks’ dread, the Warriors’ curiosity, Chamberlain’s scoring impulse and desire. How high could this go? Reputations were at stake. The game had a new urgency, purpose, and meaning.
His fury ratcheted up a notch by the Zink’s announcement, Guerin knifed through the lane for a layup, 143–126. That gave the Leatherneck thirty-five points, twenty-two in the second half. No one noticed.
On the trip back up the court, Attles spotted Chamberlain open. The Dipper took the pass, too eagerly, and dropped the ball. Meschery dove for it. So did Darrall Imhoff. A tie-up, jump ball, seven minutes to play.
CHAPTER 17
The Dipper
FOR ALL THE ELBOWS, MINOR daily media slights, and humiliations of persistent segregation, this was the Dipper’s revenge. The single-game scoring record, already his, was not enough. He wanted more, triple digits. Following his big scoring nights in the NBA he had typically passed along modest comments to sportswriters, such as “Winning is more important,” and “Luck plays a big part in scoring streaks like this,” and “I believe I’ve just about reached my limit.” He made these comments without conviction, as if they’d been rehearsed, and now that the opportunity showed itself in Hershey, the humble routine vanished. He wanted one hundred. It was only a number, of course, but there was much in it: proof of his own outsized greatness, satisfaction for his ego, and a prophecy fulfilled. Only a month before, even Bill Russell had said, “The only way to stop Wilt and his dunk shot is to lock him in the dressing room or use a shotgun. He has the size, strength, and stamina to score one hundred some night.”
A tradition runs deep in black culture and athletics to respond to the challenge of humiliation with just this kind of gorgeous, awe-inspiring overkill as proof of value in a world that would devalue black life and performance: Willie Mays’s basket catch in baseball, an unnecessary and showy display of virtuosity; the young Cassius Clay’s big-mouthed showmanship in boxing; Malcolm X’s overheated rhetoric on street corners in Harlem; James Baldwin’s snaking, furious sentences. The Dipper’s climb to one hundred had those same qualities: a gorgeous, showy, overheated, snaking, furious display of overkill and virtuosity. He played now with relentlessness, as if working alone in a single white-hot spotlight, one against five, his body punished by opponents whose size, talent, and ambition couldn’t match his own. In his dominance, he revealed the magnitude of his skill, and even more so, the magnitude of his will. It was colossal. He felt the game becoming a one-man show; a team concept no more. He set up on the left side, down low (“We couldn’t put our hands around that spot and say, ‘You can’t come here,’” Johnny Green would say), and held his right hand high, calling for the ball.
Philosophically, the Dipper’s only concern was that he might be perceived as a gunner. That was the term he’d heard playing at the Haddington Recreation Center in west Philadelphia, a code from the streets: If you took too many shots, you were a glory-hound, a gunner. Averaging forty shots per game, he’d heard that criticism all season, anyway. The Hershey kids, with different ideas, screamed, “We want one hundred!”
The Dipper had heard these screams seven years before, in February 1955, at Overbrook High School’s cramped gymnasium in west Philly. As a gangly eighteen-year-old tagged “Wilt the Stilt” by a local sportswriter, the Dipper had toyed with the overmatched Roxborough High Indians as fans stood against the walls of the gym and chanted, “We want one hundred! We want one hundred!” Chamberlain had scored seventy-four points against the hapless Roxborough team a few weeks earlier, and this time he threatened to go higher. Overbrook’s gym looked like someone’s garage: Poorly lit and with steam radiators along the walls, it featured a tile floor, wooden backboards, and metal girders at the ceiling that reduced shots to low line drives. The Overbrook court measured just sixty-eight feet in length, twenty-six feet shy of regulation. Dippy Chamberlain covered it, baseline-to-baseline, in about nine strides.
Chamberlain tore into Roxborough for twenty-six points in the first half, at which point Mosenson told him, “Okay, Wilt, we’re going for the record”; in Philadelphia, the high school record then was seventy-eight points. By the end of the third quarter, Roxborough had scored only thirteen points, and Chamberlain fifty-seven. Teammate Dave Shapiro had scored a season-high fourteen points largely because the undersized Roxborough players fully surrounded Chamberlain, leaving Shapiro alone beneath the basket to rebound and put back missed shots easily. In the third quarter, though, Shapiro got the message from his teammates: “Don’t shoot anymore. Give it to Wilt. He’s got a chance to get one hundred.” All passes went to the Dipper. His teammates lobbed the ball to him or simply threw it against the backboard, allowing him to catch and dunk it, over and over. As Overbrook’s lead grew to more than eighty points, the Dipper himself reached seventy points. Mosenson felt conflicted about running up the score without mercy. He’d earlier asked the school’s athletic director: “We could run up the scores. What should we do?” The athletic director, who also served as the school’s track coach, replied, “I never tell my runners to slow down because they might beat another runner by ten yards or twenty yards. We’re out to break records.” Okay, then, Mosenson decided, as long as records are kept, Wilt Chamberlain is entitled to them. He knew that one day Chamberlain would become the greatest player in the history of the game. That much already was obvious. Who better deserves to set records than Wilt Chamberlain? He heard the several hundred fans lining the walls inside the Overbrook gym calling for blood: “We want one hundred! We want one hundred!” But with two minutes, fifteen seconds remaining, Overbrook leading by nearly one hundred points, Mosenson couldn’t bear to watch anymore. He removed Chamberlain from the game. Overbrook won, 123–21.
Chamberlain finished with ninety points, a local record, even though he sat out four minutes, forty-five seconds. He had converted thirty-six of forty-one shots and eighteen of twenty-six free throws. Remarkably, playing eleven minutes and fifteen seconds of the second half, he scored sixty-four points. The next morning The Philadelphia Inquirer theorized, “Chamberlain might have hit 100 if he had played the entire 32 minutes.” In the Overbrook locker room after the game, the celebration was muted. Dave Shapiro would say, “We were disappointed that he didn’t get one hundred.”
Now, at home in Philadelphia, Cecil Mosenson was listening to the game in Hershey on WCAU on his bedroom radio. All those points and the crowd’s chants reminded him of Roxborough. Intrigued, Mosenson waited to hear how Frank McGuire would handle it.
Of course, McGuire was not about to pull Chamberlain from the game. He neve
r pulled the Dipper, not in any game all season, no matter the score. (When replaced by Russell during the second quarter of January’s All-Star Game in St. Louis, Chamberlain had hesitated for a moment, and a writer cracked, “See there, Wilt doesn’t know where to go. He thinks it’s half-time.”)
A night such as this had been on Chamberlain’s mind from the beginning. Only twenty games into his NBA career, he had talked of one day breaking Baylor’s NBA scoring record, then sixty-four points. The way defenses ganged up on him, though, would make that a supreme challenge, he admitted. On some plays, he said, “I start a play in the pivot, end up in the corner, and never know how I got there.” To reach sixty-five points, the rookie Dipper had calculated he would have to average fifteen points for three quarters and then bust out for a twenty-point fourth quarter. Given the way teams collapsed around him, “I would have to set such a record on three shots: the jump, rebound tap-in, and foul. If I could move around more to add the hook and the dunk, I’d have a better shot at records.” He said he would have to play the full forty-eight minutes to surpass Baylor’s mark, aggressively run with Rodgers on fast breaks, and his team would, like Baylor’s, have to give him the ball. He understood early on that the way to react to a collapsing defense was to pass the ball to an unguarded teammate, but Gola and Rodgers (and now Attles) did not excel as outside shooters. He could pass to them as they cut to the basket, but the lane was too cluttered with defenders for them to pass through. His best alternative was to pass to Arizin in the corner.
His Warriors teammates had spoon-fed him the ball all season, McGuire’s orders. The Dipper knew about their resentments on and off the court. It would be only logical for him to wonder: If he had the opportunity to score one hundred points, how would his teammates react? He did not know the answer—until now. They would acquiesce. His talent would bend them to his will, too.
CHAPTER 18
Ruklick
FROM THE BENCH, ALWAYS FROM THE BENCH, Joe Ruklick watched the Dipper’s point total rise. Much like Edgar Allan Poe’s famous raven—“And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting…” —Ruklick sat for three years, watching Chamberlain score nearly 10,000 points. As the games, the cigarettes, and his life passed by, Ruklick scarcely played, scoring just 398 points during those three seasons. He was a hundred-point guy, too—he scored about a hundred points per season. For a living … he sat. Not that he had expected anything more as a six-foot-nine backup to Chamberlain. Each year he entered games for a few minutes, typically at forward, made a basket or two, and heard people ask, “Why doesn’t he play more?” The simple answer: the Dipper. “Joe Ruklick’s beautiful hook shot apparently is doomed to bench rust again,” Jack Kiser wrote at the season’s start. Later, nearly taunting, Kiser typed, “Whatever happened to the Joe Ruklick fan club?”
What Ruklick did best was pay attention, not only to the team but the world: to race, politics, literature. Now, sitting at his usual spot at the end of the bench next to Frank Radovich, Ruklick thought the Dipper’s performance seemed a replay of so many other games, a mighty and swollen example of what the Dipper could do, only more so. Forty-three times this season, he had watched the Dipper score fifty points or more. The way he scored most of those points—forcing himself toward the basket, lunging, finger-rolling the ball downward, Dipper Dunking, falling away with his jumper, returning rebounds as if he were plucking bird eggs from a tree limb and gently putting them back, pushing himself ahead on fast breaks, catching so many lob passes from Rodgers and Attles and Gola and dropping them in—had ceased to amaze Ruklick. Oh, he would appreciate an isolated play revealing a new twist on the Dipper’s athletic elegance, but the Dipper’s performances, viewed in full, didn’t raise in him the visceral thrill of a Mickey Mantle homer or, in years past, a Joe Louis haymaker. Then again, if on each night he’d seen Mantle hit twenty-five homers and Louis throw twenty-five haymakers, they might have bored him as well.
Ruklick watched Woozie Smith toss the ball, Meschery and Imhoff leaping, Meschery winning, tapping the ball back to Attles. The Dipper missed his fall-away, Imhoff well positioned on defense. Buckner’s outlet down the court to a streaking Guerin sailed over his head and into the crowd.
The Dipper wanted this; you could see it in his taut expression. From Ruklick’s view, Chamberlain nearly always hustled. As long and lean as the Dipper was, Ruklick thought, If Wilt ever shut down, he would look like a marionette out there. From the bench now Ruklick saw Guerin’s rage. He figured that if the Knicks were angry, truly angry, at the Dipper and the Warriors for what was happening, they had no one to blame but themselves. If a guy goofs off at work and his boss screams at him, why would he be mad at the boss? That was confusing the messenger with the message. Same here. If Wilt scores one hundred points, whose fault is it?
Conlin missed a layup. Chamberlain scored on a put-back and was fouled. He had eighty-three. “What a night!” Bill Campbell said. “Mark this day down!” The Dipper made his free throw for eighty-four. The Warriors led by twenty points, 146–126. “If you know anybody not listening, call them up,” Campbell said. “A little history you are sitting in on tonight.”
Once, Ruklick asked the Dipper about the rubber bands he wore at his wrists. “You wear them all of the time, don’t you?” Ruklick asked. Typically, the Dipper said he wore rubber bands to warmly remind him of childhood friendships. This time, though, for whatever reason, perhaps to impress Ruklick, the team’s social justice intellectual, Chamberlain replied, “Yeah. When I feel like I’m doggin’ it, I snap them to remind me of when my people were under the lash.” That was the thing about Wilt Chamberlain, Ruklick understood: There was so much more to him than most people knew.
Ruklick was earning $8,000. He knew that if Gotty had really wanted an NBA title, he would’ve spent a few thousand dollars more and signed a frontline forward such as Rudy LaRusso or Ray Scott. Instead, Gotty chose to save a little money with Ruklick and Radovich as backups to the Dipper.
Already Ruklick had played five minutes in the game, more than usual. With six and a half minutes to play, Chamberlain’s eighty-four points demonstrated not only a scoring machine’s efficiency but mastery over an entire sport. Entranced, his teammates moved to the front edge of their seats. They sat up a little straighter. Ruklick wondered if the Dipper would hit one hundred. He wondered, too, if Frank McGuire might put him back in the game. If he had to guess, it was more likely the Dipper would hit one hundred.
CHAPTER 19
One Hundred
SENSORY OVERLOAD NOW in the dimly lit arena: squeaking Converse high-tops and the echoing of a leather basketball against a clicked-together maple hardwood floor designed for roller skating; the olfactory sensations of chocolate, hot dogs, and popcorn mixing together, the smell of a small-town carnival. Nearer the court, the gym smell—sweat—Chamberlain bathed in it and Eddie Donovan, too, his neckline saturated. And smoke, cigarette smoke, filling the pores of this arena: Parliaments, Marlboros, Lucky Strikes. The ham-it-up calls of the Zink on the p.a. and the prepubescent cheers for the Dipper coming from the chocolate factory workers’ kids pressed close to the court, “C’mon, Wilt!” The scoreboard clock high up in Peanut Heaven—everyone’s looking at it now, after every basket, after every foul—cold, boxy, and metallic. Wilt Chamberlain’s own sense of touch on high alert: Imhoff ’s elbow in his back, the stilettoish Buckner sticking into his ribs, Guerin and Butcher adhering to the front of his jersey, all but replacing the “1” and the “3” stitched into it. At such tense moments, the telltale tics of rookie coaches emerge: Donovan biting his lower lip, McGuire tugging at his cufflinks, as if to remind himself of his gentleman’s reputation even as he allowed the Dipper to embarrass the visitors.
Earl Whitmore, the man in the crowd because he’d purchased a refrigerator, pointed to the Dipper. “Look!” he said to his friend. “Four men are on Wilt.” Whitmore ticked them off: “One on his left hip, one on his right hip, one standing on his foot, one yanking
on him.” A part-time local high school and college referee, Whitmore knew his basketball. He also knew the ushers at the arena. They let him and his friend move to prime seats, down low. To one usher now, Whitmore said, motioning toward a five-foot wall, “You won’t care if I hop over this at the end of the game, will you?” Not a problem, said the usher. Whitmore noted how Chamberlain planted himself inside a swarm of Knicks, immovable.
Naulls converted two free throws, 146–128. Now, as Rodgers dribbled at the circle, Guerin rushed out to foul him. Watching, Donovan admired Guerin’s intensity and his pride. The game stretched out, another foul stopping the clock. This gave Harvey Pollack time to type on his Olivetti, his son waiting for the next sheet to run to Western Union, to send to The Philadelphia Inquirer for the early edition. The newspaper beat men, Jack Kiser of The Daily News, Poison Pen himself, and Jim Heffernan of The Evening Bulletin, had half-suspected this day might come. Watching now, Heffernan thought, This might be the best chance anyone ever has to reach a hundred points in an NBA game. On the court, Al Attles had the same number in mind.
Rodgers made one free throw. Imhoff missed a jumper from the right side. Running now, Chamberlain took a fast break pass from Attles only to drop the ball. Butcher recovered it. The Dipper sensed the magnitude of the moment. His nerves began to show.
Guerin’s attitude was defined by a sneer. From the crowd, the two Harrisburg weightlifters taunted him. “You’re a bum, Richie!” Guerin threw a fancy pass behind his back. The ball sailed into the crowd. “Nice pass, Richie!” a weightlifter shouted. “NICE PASS!!”
Again the Knicks quickly fouled Guy Rodgers near half-court. Their strategy was clear: To keep the ball from Wilt, they would foul the Warriors guards and let them shoot all the free throws they wanted. Imhoff, meanwhile, seemed nearly attached to Chamberlain, trying to deny him the ball.
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