Consider the scale of the Dipper’s accomplishment in Hershey: Denver’s David Thompson rates next highest in NBA history with seventy-three points in the final game of the 1978 season when he fell just six-hundredths of a point short of wresting the scoring title from George Gervin who, in response, scored sixty-three later that same night. Chamberlain’s hundred rates a startling thirty-seven percent higher than the next best single-game performance in NBA history.
Furthermore, no other player has ever averaged as many as forty points per game in a full NBA season. The second best—Michael Jordan’s 37.1-point average in 1986–87—would need to be pumped up 36 percent to equal Wilt’s 50.4. By comparison, to rise 36 percent above Ted Williams’s revered .406 batting average in 1941, a batter would need to hit .552.
Chamberlain’s hundred-point game and his fifty-point seasonal average are statistical outliers—so far beyond the norm as to be considered something entirely different.
In his 1973 book, Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door, the Dipper added to the myth of the hundred-point game, though not much to the truth. He wrote of how Frank McGuire, in the Hershey locker room before the game, had shown him two New York newspapers quoting the Knicks as saying they were going to run the Dipper ragged because they knew he was slow and lacked stamina. Chamberlain said that McGuire had grinned and said, “Let’s run ’em tonight, Wilt.” This tale nicely transformed Goliath into David but why would the Knicks say such a thing? Why would they call a player averaging fifty points per game slow? Why would they say that a player who only five days earlier had scored twenty-eight of his sixty-seven points against them in the fourth quarter was lacking in stamina? In his book, the Dipper also suggested he rode the team bus to Hershey (he did not), that he napped in his hotel room before the game (the team did not stay in a hotel), and that he played in an arcade shooting gallery before the game with Ike Richman (he played against Ken Berman).
Only in his final years did the Dipper publicly embrace the hundred-point game. On a radio show in San Francisco in March 1993 commemorating the game’s thirty-first anniversary, he said, “As the time goes by, I feel more and more a part of that hundred-point game. When it first happened—you must understand, I’m from the streets and when you throw up sixty-three shots in a game you are considered to be a gunner, understand? I always looked at that as me having my best day gunning, not really performing. But it has become my handle and I have begun to realize just how and what I did…. People who know nothing about basketball or nothing about sports will see me and they will point to their little kid and say, ‘See that guy right there: He scored one hundred in a game.’ I know that it has been my tag. I am definitely proud of it. But it was definitely a team effort. You had to see some of the things my teammates did to get me the ball…. It was almost like a circus out there for a while.” His words had the feeling of a fifty-seven-year-old father professing devotion to his long-lost thirty-one-year-old son. But he was still the Dipper, after all. That night on radio, he also said, “If the New York Knicks had decided to play basketball and not tried to concentrate on me scoring one hundred points, I might have had one hundred-forty or one hundred-fifty.”
Al Attles remains proud of his role in the hundred-point game: six assists, five rebounds, seventeen points. Speaking to a group of high school and college basketball players in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Attles said, “How many of you would want to play in a game where a guy on your team scores one hundred points?” Fewer than ten percent of the players raised a hand. One said, “I wouldn’t want to play in a game like that because you don’t get a chance to do what you do.” Attles posed a different question: “Okay, how many of you would like to play in a game where you score one hundred points?” About ninety percent raised a hand. “Wait a minute, something is wrong,” Attles said. “You don’t want to play the game when someone else on your team scores one hundred points, but you do want to play in a game where you score one hundred points.” Attles zeroed in on the larger point: “The single most important thing that you play for in a team sport—there’s only one reason you play—to try to win. You need to do whatever is necessary to win. If you win, that means you all share in it.”
As if in fear of Fitzgerald’s dark view, “There are no second acts in American lives,” the Dipper never wanted his first act to end. He invested well enough to become the rarest of NBA players from his generation, never working a day job. Upon his death, his estate would bequeath more than $6 million, the lion’s share to children’s causes, and $650,000 to his alma mater, Kansas University, according to the Dipper’s attorney, Sy Goldberg. After the 1961–62 season, the Dipper remained on the periphery of the civil rights movement and politics. A chauffeur driving Chamberlain’s new Bentley would drive him and his friend Cal Ramsey to LaGuardia Airport in August 1963. They flew to Washington, D.C., to attend the March on Washington where the Dipper stepped into the crowd of 200,000 gathered near the Lincoln Memorial and drew stares as Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” address. In the middle Sixties, Harry Edwards, a black sociologist at San Jose State University, would counsel with many black athletes as he led his human rights protests on college campuses across the nation. Edwards’s movement reached its zenith when American track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith bowed their heads and held up black-gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City in protest of racism in America. Edwards spoke with Bill Russell, Arthur Ashe, O.J. Simpson, and dozens of others, but not the Dipper. He thought Wilt Chamberlain too far removed from the civil rights struggle. “Wilt wasn’t a guy that existed at a level where you went up and got in his face and got into an argument and discussion with him about his politics,” Edwards would say. “You simply looked at him, saw him for what he was, and moved on.” The Dipper would move on, too, engaged momentarily by politics in 1968, announcing his endorsement of Richard Nixon’s presidential candidacy, a move that prompted some of his black friends to charge he was letting down his race. (Chastened by events, the Dipper would later say that Nixon cynically exploited him to get black votes.) “I’m just as aware of the injustices done to the black man as anyone,” the Dipper would explain years after. “I just don’t believe you help things by running around, saying how evil Whitey is. I figure I’ve done my share—the restaurants I integrated in Kansas, the busloads of black kids I used to take to summer camp from Harlem, the contributions I make, in name and money, to various black causes and programs. Just because I don’t call a press conference every time I do something like that doesn’t mean I’m insensitive to the black man’s plight.” Much later, his friend Lynda Huey would say, “Wilt would vacillate between feeling exempt from being black and seriously taking to heart the hardships of black America. I saw him waver between the two depending on what was going on and what mood he was in.”
The players of the hundred-point game necessarily moved on in their lives: Tom Gola as a Republican state legislator and city of Philadelphia comptroller (and unsuccessful mayoral candidate); Paul Arizin of IBM; Richie Guerin running with the bulls on Wall Street; the Rev. Willie Naulls; the poet Tom Meschery; and Joe Ruklick as editorial The Chicago Defender. The hundred-point game’s more obscure players still keep, close at hand, reminders of their participation in the famous game. In Texas, businessman Ted Luckenbill keeps folded in his wallet a yellowed newspaper clipping of a photograph, shot by AP’s Paul Vathis at game’s end, of Luckenbill and two young fans congratulating the Dipper. Many people don’t believe Indiana Pacers scout York Larese when he says he played as the Dipper’s teammate that night, let alone assisted on the basket that gave Chamberlain ninety-eight points. In his wallet, Larese keeps the game’s box score. He pulled it out so often he had it laminated. Meanwhile, Harvey Pollack donated his old Olivetti typewriter—one of several he used while becoming the only man to work for the NBA during all of its first fifty-eight seasons—to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. Bill Campbell’s vo
ice, still heard on Philly sports radio more than forty years later, was also heard for a while on NBA Commissioner David Stern’s office phone; when a caller was put on hold by Stern, he heard, among other famous NBA moments, Campbell’s call of Chamberlain’s hundred-point basket: “He made it! He made it! He made it! A Dipper Dunk!”
The Dipper himself did not boast of the hundred-point game, not ever. He spoke little of it as the decades spun past. When asked about it, typically he replied that he was prouder of his NBA record fifty-five rebounds in a game against Russell. He understood that the hundred-point game fed criticism that he was more interested in stardom than in winning—even though his teams did win two championships in his fourteen seasons. He never again came close to scoring one hundred points in a game, nor did he try to (he reached seventy-three and seventy-two a year later). He already had proven that he could do it. In the two seasons that followed his remarkable 1961–62 campaign, by which time the Warriors had moved to San Francisco, Chamberlain averaged 44.8 points and 36.9 points per game.
In an attempt to rein in the Dipper, the NBA in 1964 widened the lane by four feet, to sixteen feet, moving him further from the basket. Yet his style of play already was evolving. Traded back to Philadelphia in 1964, he would lead the 76ers to a world title in 1967, beating Russell’s Celtics in the playoffs and exploding one myth (that he couldn’t win a championship). A year later, he set out to prove his passing skill and led the league in assists, thereby exploding another myth (that he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, pass). Of winning the NBA’s assists title, the Dipper crowed, “It’s like Babe Ruth leading the league in sacrifice bunts.”
He left Philadelphia in 1968, returning again in a trade to California, this time to the Lakers. Los Angeles appealed to him for a few reasons: He wanted to get into the movie business; his parents and several siblings lived there; and as Nate Thurmond, his former San Francisco teammate, would say, “The West Coast was more Wilt’s style: faster, more liberal. It ain’t no secret about Wilt liking white girls. It was an accepted thing out here. When he got to L.A., he was bigger than life and he’s got a whole new playground.” The Dipper spent his last five seasons with the Lakers and helped the team win a record thirty-three consecutive games en route to the 1971–72 world championship. During his two championship seasons (1967 and 1972), he led the league in rebounding but also produced two of his smallest scoring outputs, averaging twenty-four points and nearly fifteen points per game. Whereas he had averaged forty shots per game in 1961–62, he took only nine shots a game when he won his second title a decade later, at age thirty-five. By then his body had changed—his chest, shoulders, and arms were bulked up from weightlifting, and he no longer ran the floor well—and his role on the team had changed, too. The transformation of his game was complete.
When he retired in 1973, his records glittered like Ursa Major itself. He led the NBA in scoring seven times, in field goal percentage nine times, in minutes played eight times, in rebounding eleven times, and in assists once. He never fouled out—never—in more than 1,200 games, including playoffs. He produced five of the six highest scoring games in history and fifteen of the top twenty. He scored more than 31,000 points (a thirty-points-per-game career average), the highest ever at that time (double the total of Bill Russell).
The Dipper and Russell met 142 times over ten seasons, an average of fourteen games per year. Russell’s team won eighty-five, the Dipper’s team fifty-seven; in playoff series, Russell’s teams won all four seventh games against the Dipper, the total margin in those games only nine points. A question was put forth: If Russell and Chamberlain had been traded, straight up, could the Celtics have won all of those titles with Wilt? Cousy said, “We might’ve won one with Wilt. We certainly wouldn’t have won eleven…. We had eight Hall of Famers on that unit [during the Sixties]—or seven surrounding Russ—and we lived and died with the transition game. There was no way we were going to put the brakes on and wait for the Big Fella to amble down and set up and run an offense.” Puffing on a cigar early one morning, the eighty-five-year-old Red Auerbach pondered the question and shrugged as if to say, Maybe. “If Wilt would have given in,” Auerbach said. “I mean I had the big ego, too.” But Chamberlain in his career had already proven that he could and would alter his game: Gotty wanted him to score big and he did. 76ers Coach Alex Hannum wanted him to pass and play stopper on defense and he did. The Dipper annihilated Russell in every statistical category but one—NBA titles captured. Russell won eleven, Chamberlain two: the Dipper’s cross to bear.
At the end of the 1961–62 season, the Dipper surpassed 4,000 points, an average of fifty per game. The Warriors finished at 49–31, three victories more than the year before but still eleven games behind Boston. The playoffs brought disappointment again. The Warriors struggled past Syracuse and then lost to the Celtics in a conference final series so tense that at one moment Guy Rodgers punched the Celtics’ Carl Braun and at another Boston’s Sam Jones defended himself against an angry Dipper by picking up a photographer’s wooden stool. Boston won a controversial seventh game, 109–107, as Jones converted a jump shot with four seconds to play. Frank McGuire exploded at referees Mendy Rudolph and Sid Borgia who, he said, had been intimidated by Red Auerbach’s courtside shouts. McGuire was heard in the locker room afterward, muttering, “Mendy threw the game….” The Celtics went on to defeat the Lakers in seven games to win their fourth consecutive NBA title. And Bill Russell again was named by players the NBA’s first-team all-star center, outpolling the Dipper.
Gotty sold the Warriors to a San Francisco syndicate a few months later. Wilt Chamberlain, of course, was the most valuable piece in the transaction. Gotty received $850,000, a neat return on his $25,000 investment made a decade earlier. At long last, the Mogul truly was a mogul.
The players of the hundred-point game scattered. Along with Chamberlain, five more Warriors went west—Gola, Attles, Meschery, Rodgers, and Luckenbill. Gotty went briefly, too, to help get the team on its feet, proudly telling his friends at home he was “going to S.F.” Arizin and Conlin retired; Ruklick, Larese, and Radovich never again played in the NBA. For a time, Ruklick played in a recreational league in Northbrook, Illinois. He wrote a letter to Gotty, by then an NBA consultant, asking for an official NBA leather basketball for his team and, just in case, enclosed a signed, blank check. Sure enough, the Mogul charged him $25. (The last little laugh went to Ruklick, though: he and Ed Conlin had taken their home uniforms from the 1961–62 season; Ruklick wore his “Phila 17” jersey in recreation league games for years.) Frank McGuire spent a year away from coaching and then took his Irish charm and good looks back to college. He spent sixteen seasons at the University of South Carolina.
The last-place Knicks shuffled their deck over the next year, too. Imhoff was traded to Detroit. Willie Naulls was dealt to the San Francisco Warriors where he briefly played, and lived with, the Dipper. Guerin’s all-star days were nearly done; the Knicks traded him to St. Louis in October 1963. The Leatherneck spent six seasons with the Hawks, becoming head coach of the team and winning NBA coach-of-the-year honors in 1967–68. Phil Jordon, the center who spent the night at the Hotel Penn Harris, played one more NBA season, in St. Louis, his dedication to late night frivolity driving him from the game prematurely. Jordon died in 1965 in a river rafting accident, drowned in the swollen night waters of the Puyallup River in the state of Washington; his three raft mates swam to safety. Jordon, employed on a county road crew at the time, was thirty-one years old. The Knicks finished each of the next four years in last place, though Eddie Donovan would make his mark later, as the team’s general manager, drafting Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, and Walt Frazier, and trading for Dave DeBusschere, a cadre of stars that Coach Red Holzman forged into the 1969–70 NBA champions.
When Gotty died in 1979 at the age of eighty-one, Dave Zinkoff felt like a star that had lost its sky. “You’re asking ‘How close is close?’” the Zink said. “Well, we’d kind of eat together and go to a movi
e together. I was his driver for a long time. Year in and year out, I was at the wheel of the car that took us to Springfield, Mass., for those Hall of Fame games. We’d make our annual chocolate-bar haul up to Hershey where he’d buy cases and cases. How much closer can guys get when, if there was a vacation, a ten-day break in the schedule, the two of us would go to Florida? Except for spending most of my waking minutes with him, day in and day out, for so many years of my life, I don’t know how to say how close Gotty and the Zink were.” The Mogul was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1971. The NBA also honors him by calling its annual rookie of the year award the Eddie Gottlieb Trophy. When the Zink died on Christmas day six years after Gotty, more than a thousand people came to mourn, including three Philadelphia mayors. The 76ers ceremoniously retired the Zink’s microphone the following spring and later dedicated Dave Zinkoff Boulevard. The team also recognized the Zink with a banner hung from the rafters of its arena, joined later by one honoring the Dipper.
A piece of the hundred-point game was uncovered by the NBA in 1988: a Philadelphian, using a Dictaphone, had taped part of Bill Campbell’s fourth quarter play-by-play call on WCAU, but only the Warriors possessions. His tape ended with the hundred-point basket. It wasn’t much, but it was something, a few pieces of gold pulled from the sunken galleon.
Two years later, an educational consultant arrived at the Hershey area to deliver a talk about reading aloud to children. His name was Jim Trelease. Meeting a member of the Hershey community archives, a repository of local history, Trelease asked, “What’s the single greatest historical sports moment in Hershey history?” Without hesitation, the man from the archives, Paul Serff, replied, “The Wilt Chamberlain hundred-point game.” Trelease smiled and said, “I’ve got a tape of that game.” In fact, Trelease had a reel-to-reel tape that was to become to the hundred-point game much like what the Zapruder film was to the Kennedy assassination. On the night of March 2, 1962, Trelease had been in his dormitory room at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. An avid Knicks fan and broadcaster of UMass basketball games on the student radio station, Trelease propped a radio in the corner of his room against a five-story drainpipe that made a splendid antenna on a clear night. Borrowing his girlfriend’s reel-to-reel tape machine, he recorded Campbell’s call of the entire fourth quarter—the biggest haul of treasures yet lifted from the galleon. The NBA learned of the Trelease tape and made a copy; through studio wizardry, technicians removed distracting sounds and merged this tape with the earlier Dictaphone tape (which included a brief postgame show), creating a new master version. Trelease was astonished to learn that the NBA did not have a copy of the WCAU coverage after so many years. NBA archivist Todd Caso had no doubts about the authenticity of the Trelease tape. “You can hear Dave Zinkoff’s voice [on the Hershey Sports Arena p.a.] in the background,” Caso said. “People might try to imitate Zinkoff, but who would really know how to do that?”
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