Wilt Chamberlain and the Conspiracy Factory: We Unearthed the True Story of the 100-Point Game

Speaker 1 Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

Speaker 2 I am Pablo Torre.

Speaker 3 Today's episode is brought to you by DraftKings.

Speaker 2 DraftKings, the crown is yours.

Speaker 1 And today, we're going to find out what this sound is.

Speaker 6 I used to hate the fact that there was no video of it, but as time goes on, I think it kind of adds to the mystique of the game.

Speaker 7 Right after this ad.

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Speaker 19 When you heard from us, Gary Pomerance, that we wanted to do this topic because of what people had been saying on the internet, were you excited?

Speaker 5 My intuitive reaction was, here we go again. My second reaction was something approximating an eye roll.

Speaker 5 You know, it's a conspiratorial time.

Speaker 23 Here is a bulletin from CBS News.

Speaker 23 In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas.

Speaker 5 You go back to the 1960s, and there was

Speaker 5 still a lot of questions about the Kennedy assassination.

Speaker 25 That's one small step for man.

Speaker 25 One scient leap for man.

Speaker 5 Did Neil Armstrong really touch the moon or was he in a studio somewhere in

Speaker 5 the United States? So it was that kind of a time and now, you know, we're unfortunately a bit of a historically illiterate country. If there's no video, then it didn't happen.

Speaker 5 Well, we know the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, but there's no video of that. We know about Lincoln at Gettysburg.
There's no video of that.

Speaker 26 Do we, though?

Speaker 12 Are we sure? We're pretty sure.

Speaker 5 Are you sure about that? We're pretty sure Lincoln was at Gettysburg, yeah. And so,

Speaker 5 you know, for sports fans, you got to lock in on how different the NBA was then and how different sports media was then.

Speaker 5 When Kobe scores 81, 15 minutes later online, you can buy a DVD of his performance. So that's what we're used to.
That's the the immediacy of today with technology. It wasn't so then.

Speaker 22 Do you remember the first time you heard somebody casting aspersions on the subject that you have literally written the book about?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, there was always questions of how could he have done this? How could anybody score 100 points? Kobe's 81 is second best, and that's not even close.

Speaker 5 There's something too about the number 100, the symbolism of 100. It's a century.
It's a perfect score on a test. If Wilted scored 102 or 97, we wouldn't embrace it or question it even as we do.

Speaker 5 And so I decided all these decades later, I got to find out what happened here. This is one of the most famous and famously unknown stories in sports history.

Speaker 5 The deeper I went, it became, you know, like Ellis in Wonderland, curiouser and curiouser.

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Speaker 13 So the anniversary of one of the most iconic performances in the history of sports is approaching on Sunday.

Speaker 3 But what most distinguishes Wilt Chamberlain's single game scoring record is that right now, for each of his points on March 2nd, 1962, there appears to be just as many questions 60 plus years later.

Speaker 5 If I'm understanding correctly, on the Pat McAfee show, we are now questioning the veracity of Wilt Chamberlain's Chamberlain's 100-point game.

Speaker 5 We're questioning whether this is whether or not this factually happens.

Speaker 11 No, we're not.

Speaker 34 Pac-Man is not, but I did not know that there was no documented footage of this until just now.

Speaker 25 So as soon as that happens, boom, my brain goes, whoa,

Speaker 5 the people always say they don't know if it's true or if it's false. Did Wilt actually score 100 points?

Speaker 35 Like even the scores table, people like, did they all die? Like, yeah, like, that's why I'm curious who's on the Knicks. Is anyone still...

Speaker 35 You just, that's, that was the only thing that could, like, sell me on. And, like, there was people like, yeah, I was actually at that game.

Speaker 36 People know what happened 10 billion years ago. They know how the earth was created.
They know what the Egyptians were talking about, what they were saying, even though that is. I've seen aliens.

Speaker 36 Even though that is six languages removed from what we're talking about right now. And nobody knows outside of a sheet of paper with crayon on it that says 100.

Speaker 13 And on and on it goes across Reddit and TikTok and YouTube to the point where we here at Pablo Torre finds out got a voicemail about this topic at our detective agency hotline 513-85 Pablo.

Speaker 37 Hey Pablo,

Speaker 37 long time first time.

Speaker 37 There's been a lot of stuff going around the internet lately about whether or not we'll score 100 points because there's a lot of old footage. from the 50s and 60s of the NBA,

Speaker 37 but nothing really about that supposed 100-point game.

Speaker 38 And then we got another one.

Speaker 37 Hi, Pablo. My name is Matthew.
I have a question, and it's actually kind of a conspiracy theory that perhaps only I believe in, but maybe others do. We shall find out.

Speaker 37 It revolves around Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game.

Speaker 37 We have no video evidence of this happening as far as I know, and the only photographic evidence of this is a locker room photo and a piece of paper that says 100 on it.

Speaker 37 I'm not sure that I truly believe and trust that Wilt Chamberlain actually scored 100 points in a game. I know that sounds crazy, but

Speaker 37 I need your help.

Speaker 3 Now, those callers sounded reasonable enough to us that we finally decided it was time to get to the bottom. of what seems to be a global mystery.

Speaker 32 And the first person we called was Stanford professor Gary Pomerance, the aforementioned author of the book Wilt 1962.

Speaker 38 And Gary immediately established something.

Speaker 39 He established that one tricky thing about fact-checking Wilt Chamberlain is that Wilt Chamberlain's whole brand was to be larger than life.

Speaker 5 Wilt was a luminous star at that time. He's just 25 years old.
He's got a nightclub in Harlem called Big Wilt Small's Paradise. Small's Paradise dates the Halcyon days of the Harlem Renaissance.

Speaker 5 And Wilt walked through that place like he owned all of Harlem, like he owned all of New York. Red Fox, Edded James, Cannonball Adderly.

Speaker 5 Wilt's the greeter, the tallest greeter in NBA history. Wilt had a Goliath syndrome.
He was 7'1, 260 pounds.

Speaker 5 Dolph Shays of the Syracuse Nationals said his body was the most perfect instrument made by God to play basketball.

Speaker 5 You know, another writer likened Wilt's Wilt's body to a first sight of the New York skyline. I mean, think about this.
7'1, 260 pounds, his back triangulates down to a 31-inch dancer's waist.

Speaker 5 The guy was cut. The guy could run the floor like a train.
Everything about him was magnificent.

Speaker 9 I had to do a lot of just

Speaker 9 reacquainting myself with history as well for this.

Speaker 2 Wilt was singing his own tune, literally, on American bandstand, right?

Speaker 5 By the river, down by the river.

Speaker 5 You know, he wasn't Frankie Valley, he wasn't very good, but they did cut a record of it.

Speaker 5 You know, he had had a racehorse named Spooky Cadet. It never won.
He had an Asian motif apartment off Central Park West in New York.

Speaker 5 And then, of course, there was Will telling stories about his womanizing.

Speaker 19 That's the number that people are most,

Speaker 3 you know, had been most obsessed with, that statistic.

Speaker 30 20,000.

Speaker 6 If I had to count my sexual encounters, I'd be closing in on 20,000 women.

Speaker 6 That equals to having sex with 1.2 women a day, every day since I was 15 years old what kind of reaction did you receive after that well you still receive I well you know I still I still receive

Speaker 5 what's the fact-checking on that like well the fact checking is difficult to do

Speaker 5 as a matter of fact

Speaker 5 but I interviewed one of the 20,000 a woman named Linda Huey who became a great friend of Wilts at the end of his life she said Wilt why did you say 20,000 and Wilts' response was to wink and say what's an extra zero between friends but you know I thought maybe one of the reasons you invited me on the show was to give me an award from the Board of Education.

Speaker 6 Let's see, he must have started when he was like 15, and he's now maybe 55.

Speaker 6 So let's see, 20,000, 365, and 20,000.

Speaker 6 And, you know, and then

Speaker 42 you're getting people thinking.

Speaker 6 Not only that, I'm teaching them mathematics, which is really

Speaker 6 the whole whole story here. You understand?

Speaker 42 I don't think that's going to be a word problem for kids.

Speaker 42 If Wilt Chamberlain is with 10 women on a train headed east.

Speaker 12 That's right. That's a really good job.
That's right.

Speaker 5 I got this sense as I was working on this book, you know, excavating this 100-point game. There's a comic book superhero quality to Wilt, his life, his numbers.

Speaker 5 I interviewed ultimately 56 people who were there. 15 of them players, the broadcaster, the statistician, the shot clock operator, a number of fans.

Speaker 5 Look, Pablo, when you go back into this time, you're going back into

Speaker 5 a time when the NBA was a lounge act. It was a league in search of itself.
The crowds weren't very big.

Speaker 5 The joke used to be that the PA announcer would introduce the players in the starting lineup and then would introduce each fan. It was...
nine teams in the league, only one team west of St. Louis.

Speaker 5 That would be the Lakers who'd moved out a year before to the west. And the league was trying to grow new fans, and that's why they played in outlying areas that had insizable arenas.

Speaker 5 The Lakers played a game in Portland, they played a game in Seattle, the Celtics played in Providence, and the Philadelphia Warriors played three games that year in Hershey.

Speaker 5 This was the third of those games.

Speaker 31 You should know that Hershey, Pennsylvania, population in 1962, about 7,000, sits in the shadow of Amish Country.

Speaker 14 That's where the chocolate capital of America is located.

Speaker 38 Which doesn't entirely explain why there is no full recording of the Philadelphia Warriors game against the visiting New York Knicks on March 2nd, 1962.

Speaker 10 But electricity, in general, was scarce.

Speaker 45 The game wasn't televised.

Speaker 16 The NBA, as Gary said, was basically a lounge act.

Speaker 45 But the sport was big enough for an AM radio station, WCAU Philadelphia.

Speaker 3 Except it soon became clear, particularly to legendary play-by-play man Bill Campbell, who was frantically calling technicians back at the station in Philly,

Speaker 15 that nobody involved with this broadcast had actually kept a tape of the game,

Speaker 1 which then created a puzzle of its own.

Speaker 5 Well, you have to realize back then, TV stations didn't save tapes. They were saving money and they were re-taping over these tapes.
That's why they disappear with television.

Speaker 5 That's why they disappear some with radio. It was a game 75 in an 80-game season.

Speaker 39 But very recently, about 60 plus years later, something kind of crazy happened.

Speaker 2 Because we here at Pablo Torre, Finds Out, found a Philly basketball fan by the name of Sammy Marcus.

Speaker 18 And Sammy Marcus had never given an interview about this before, but in 1962, Sammy used to listen to every Warriors radio broadcast.

Speaker 11 On March 2nd, however, that Friday,

Speaker 3 he decided to do something different.

Speaker 19 He went to go see the Elizabeth Taylor film Butterfield 8.

Speaker 17 And then

Speaker 48 I came home from that, turned on the radio, just in time to hear Bill Campbell say, World Chamberlain just scored 100 points. 100 points, fans.

Speaker 48 Oh my God, what a game to miss

Speaker 48 so i didn't give up i thought where else can i get this recorded called up a friend the next day and he said that he had recorded it but only the fourth quarter and only when the warriors had the ball

Speaker 2 this is where i have the tape somewhere and so sammy ran over to his friend's house with his own recorder and microphone and he bootlegged that puzzle piece right off the speakers and it's a tape he still has today

Speaker 5 One of these is the tape. Just don't know which one.

Speaker 48 Nope, that's a Floyd Patterson Sonny Liston fight.

Speaker 4 Ah, this is the one.

Speaker 14 All of which is how the NBA got a copy of a grainy secondhand recording of history, or at least a fraction of that history.

Speaker 38 But as for the rest of Wilt's pivotal fourth quarter, including the Knicks possessions, the way we wound up finding that involved a different box entirely.

Speaker 50 Hi, my name is Tessa Burns, and I'm Archivist here at Hershey Community Archives. We are inside of our collection storage facility here at the Hershey Story Museum in Hershey, PA.

Speaker 50 We heard from the producers at Pablo Torre Finds Out asking us about one particular event in Hershey Sports history, which was Wilp Chamberlain's 100-point game at the Hershey Arena.

Speaker 49 And this puzzle piece, it turns out, was the full fourth quarter, But it wasn't taped in Hershey at all, actually.

Speaker 3 It was taped at UMass Amherst by an aspiring student broadcaster named Jim, who listened by rigging his transistor radio to the five-story heating pipe in his dormitory.

Speaker 12 And that night, in that dorm, Jim broke out a reel-to-reel tape recorder, apparently, the one his girlfriend had been using for elocution lessons.

Speaker 38 And many years later, those reels would finally find their way back home.

Speaker 50 So I did some searching in our collections and I was very excited to find this box right here.

Speaker 50 So this is from our Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Company collection. And when we look inside, you can see we have some audiovisual material, some CDs, cassette tape.

Speaker 50 And then the most exciting item here

Speaker 50 is this five and three-quarter inch reel-to-reel tape. So this is an audio recording format.
It's magnetic media. If we look inside, you can see that we do have, in fact, the original tape.

Speaker 3 Not even the Basketball Hall of Fame has the tape of Will Chamberlain's 100-point game, by the way.

Speaker 26 As their historian explained to us, they've never even had an official exhibit devoted to Wilt.

Speaker 3 But this show now has two independently sourced recordings of the pivotal fourth quarter.

Speaker 32 Plus a third entirely different box of tapes that I need to tell you about.

Speaker 15 Because this is a box of tapes that contains Gary's interviews, which we're going to curate for you as part of this exhibit here today.

Speaker 5 Well, that's the joy of it to me. You know, that's what the attorneys call discovery.
You know, you go and immerse yourself, full immersion. And I would travel far and wide to find these people.
And

Speaker 5 it becomes an obsession. You know, what about that? I called Bill Campbell so many times.

Speaker 5 Last time I called him, I said, Bill, it's Gary Pomerance. And he said, not again.

Speaker 5 And that's just, Bill, one more thing. One more question.

Speaker 47 We can relate.

Speaker 27 We can relate here.

Speaker 29 You know, Gary, one of our joys was that we actually did unearth your 22-year-old interview tapes because at Emory University, at the Rare Book Library manuscript collection number 890, we found your archive.

Speaker 3 And just tell me how you feel as we go back to March 1962.

Speaker 24 WCAU, WCAU, FM in Philadelphia. The time is 3:30.
Off, and we're ready to go. And here's Bill Campbell.
Here's the big fourth quarter. And everybody's thinking, how many is Wilt going to get?

Speaker 24 He's got 69 going in. Here's the pass talk.

Speaker 5 He's got another one. Well, Wilt's got 69 points going into the fourth quarter, right? And so he still needs 31 points.

Speaker 5 You know, that's a lot of points. Rogers.

Speaker 24 Rogers takes the jump shot. It's no good.
Chamberlain with a rebound.

Speaker 5 And he just scored 28 points in the third quarter. And the Knicks are just going through the motions.

Speaker 5 It's a 10, 15, 20-point lead the Warriors have.

Speaker 24 Inside, two Addles to Chamberlain. He's got it.

Speaker 24 133 to 114. And the fellas fellows of the warrior fetch a jumping for joy farm.
Every time he scores, they will

Speaker 24 chip up at a body.

Speaker 5 Here's Gary. Now, the NBA didn't find out about this tape until 1990.
And it's like, wait, what?

Speaker 5 That's just the way things were then.

Speaker 24 We're just conjecturing here. How many can he make? He's got nine minutes and 24 seconds left, and the guesses are running as high as 100.

Speaker 20 This is Bill Campbell that you're hearing.

Speaker 3 This is the play-by-play announcer in Philly, WCAU, the radio broadcast.

Speaker 12 But it's one of your interviewees, a primary source here who is in the game somewhere on the court, Joe Rucklick, that I wanted to ask you about because Joe Rucklick sounds like he might be a guest on the McAfee show at times, revisiting some of these tapes.

Speaker 45 Hearing you in 03

Speaker 13 talk to Joe Rucklick, is a time machine inside of a time machine.

Speaker 5 Well, Joe was the Kennedy liberal from Northwestern.

Speaker 43 When I got there as their first draft choice

Speaker 43 that season,

Speaker 43 out of Northwestern,

Speaker 43 behind Wilt. Wilt was technically first.

Speaker 5 He was Wilt's backup. Now, think about it.
When you're the backup to a player who never comes out of the game, you don't play very much. But he observed a lot, and he was a very

Speaker 5 keen observer. Joe also was into conspiracy theories.
And Joe said, wait a minute, why did this tape just appear 28 years later? And Joe said

Speaker 5 he questioned whether Bill Campbell had recreated it.

Speaker 43 I don't think Campbell was there. But you know what? That's...

Speaker 5 So what are you saying?

Speaker 43 If I get a tape, what are you saying about the tape? I think you get the last few minutes.

Speaker 43 I think it's only the last quarter.

Speaker 43 Yeah.

Speaker 43 Less than that. I've got it.
You do? I think it's fake. But it was.
Yeah. Real tape.

Speaker 12 Why do you think it's fake?

Speaker 20 Well, his allegation seems to be even a little more pointed than that. It was that Bill Campbell wasn't even there, actually.

Speaker 22 He wasn't really the announcer.

Speaker 39 It's a fake.

Speaker 43 If it's a fake,

Speaker 43 it illustrates the nonsense that the NBA

Speaker 43 perpetrates about those days. It was a Bush league.

Speaker 43 I mean, it was really bush.

Speaker 5 Bill Campbell was there. Bill Campbell and I spoke, and he talked about dreading going to Hershey, Hershey, you know, for game 75 of an 80-game season.

Speaker 24 It was annoying because instead of doing a home game at home, we had to go to Hershey. The players weren't happy either.

Speaker 5 It's a long drive, and it sure would be nice to be playing it, you know, at home in Philadelphia.

Speaker 24 Worked in order to come to that game. He took a train.
I remember him being there early.

Speaker 5 But he remembered vividly the game and the details.

Speaker 51 Everything was such consummate ease.

Speaker 24 It was effortless. They broke the ball up and he'd go out and get it and dunk it.
They knew something unnatural was going to happen here, and they

Speaker 3 as for just how Bush League Game 75 really was,

Speaker 13 I should acknowledge that Joe Rucklick, dead wrong about the tape of the fourth quarter being this false flag operation.

Speaker 31 Also, relatedly, it's funny that none of the online conspiracists that you mentioned before did enough research to be able to cite Joe Rucklick's theory in the first place.

Speaker 17 But it is pretty easy to imagine why the whole event

Speaker 39 did feel a bit confused.

Speaker 5 This is played in an arena that's built for a hockey, the hockey team, the Hershey Bears. There's not during this game a big screen where it says number 13, big fella.

Speaker 5 How many shots attempted, made, free throws attempted, made, assists, etc.

Speaker 5 There's just a cold, metallic, boxy scoreboard up in the Netherland of this place that says, you know, Philadelphia, New York. Even the people who are watching the game don't have context.

Speaker 32 But Wilt Chamberlain, as he later explained in an interview with Bob Costas,

Speaker 18 was keeping score.

Speaker 24 The game starts, I'm fairly warm.

Speaker 43 I'm really warm from the foul.

Speaker 51 I'm not missing anything from the foul.

Speaker 6 That should have gave me some kind of hint that, you know. Hey, you made 28 of 32 from the foul line that night, which is good for anybody and staggering for you.
I appreciate that. Right.

Speaker 6 Staggering, staggering for me. You know what I'm saying? But I was even better than that the first half.
I was missing nothing.

Speaker 36 I was 100%, 100%, remember?

Speaker 6 So I said, hey, you know, things are going pretty good. And I had, I think, like 44, 41 points at halftime, and I was shooting well.

Speaker 3 And one big reason Wilt was playing so well is that the Knicks starting center was out sick and apparently kind of hung over.

Speaker 39 And so, yes, Wilt would go on to average 50 points a game that season, but the man primarily tasked with stopping the single most unstoppable offensive performance in basketball history, arguably all of sports history, was not supposed to be starting that night.

Speaker 41 And instead, what he became was the answer to a trivia question

Speaker 43 forever.

Speaker 5 This is an interview with Daryl Imhoff, I-M-H-O-F-F,

Speaker 5 in Eugene, Oregon on July 8th, 2003.

Speaker 51 By the way, I double-tape in case one tape failed. Okay.

Speaker 25 Isn't that interesting?

Speaker 33 Yeah, so.

Speaker 43 Gosh.

Speaker 5 Daryl was a second-year player, 6'10, left-handed. And, you know, he was

Speaker 5 primarily a defender. At times, a rough defender, he would become known as the axe for axing, you know, shooters' arms.

Speaker 25 You know,

Speaker 43 wilt with an attraction and and uh and i you know i i was gonna have to spend the next

Speaker 43 uh that night in his armpits so i wasn't looking forward to that stuff

Speaker 5 and one of the things that was so interesting he was then working in eugene oregon at the uh u.s basketball academy a training ground and we walked by an open court and i said daryl could you come here for a second I stood in the middle of the lane.

Speaker 5 I said, show me how you defended Wilt that night. Wilt, Imoff said, would arch his back and it was like a tree, and Daryl's behind him, down low.

Speaker 5 He said it was like a tree was going to fall down on me. I said, so what would you do? And he said, I did this.

Speaker 5 And he took the point of his elbow and put it in my rhomboids right between the shoulder blades. And Daryl could still inflict some pain all these years later.

Speaker 5 But he said he would position himself behind Wilt

Speaker 5 when Wilt's down on the offensive left side down by where we would now see the block. The block didn't exist then.

Speaker 5 And he would put his knee into Wilt's, the back of his thigh to collapse his leg. He would put his foot inside of Wilt's left foot to keep him from turning in.

Speaker 5 Daryl played only 20 minutes and fouled out. He was in and out of the game, so he played some in the second half.
Six fouls covering Wilt.

Speaker 5 The tallest, next, next tallest player the Knicks had was 6'8 rookie Cleveland Buckner.

Speaker 5 6'8 ⁇ , they said 210 pounds. Uh-uh.

Speaker 5 He's probably 185, 190. He was a stick.
He scored 33 points that night, too, I might add. It was a career night for him.
What a night to have a career night.

Speaker 5 Seven and a half minutes are left when Wilt, he scores and Harvey Pollack, statistician, he passes over a sheet of paper to the PA announcer, the great Dave Zinkoff.

Speaker 5 Zinkoff then announces Wilt Chamberlain has just set a new record for most points in a game. He has 79 points, breaking his 78 points scored in a three overtime game earlier that season.

Speaker 5 And while he's announcing that, Wilt makes shooting underhanded two more free throws to go to 80 and 81.

Speaker 5 On the PA, they're announcing the new record of 79.

Speaker 24 And during the announcement, Chamberlain goes right ahead through the announcement and makes a foul. They're still making the announcement.
He makes another foul. Chamberlain didn't even win the show.

Speaker 24 He just made two straight fouls.

Speaker 24 He now has 81 points.

Speaker 9 Granny's style.

Speaker 5 Granny style. I mean, he looked ridiculous doing it because he's so big.
He would squat down low. His knees would flare out.
He looked like an adult trying to sit in a kindergartner's chair.

Speaker 16 What did Daryl say to you particularly, Gary, if you recall, in your interview with him, about the refs?

Speaker 5 He just thought they loved Wilt. And, you know, that at one point they called a foul against Imhoff that M Hoff did not think was a foul.

Speaker 25 And he started backing in, and I held my position. And Willie Smith called me for a foul.
And I said, really?

Speaker 25 I got a lot of position. And I said,

Speaker 25 why don't you give the guy 100 points? We'll all go home. I mean, you did say that.
You said, right. I said that.
Why don't you give him 100 points and we'll go home?

Speaker 43 And he did.

Speaker 24 Going in for the layup. Up with the shot.
No good. Chamberlain rebounds.
Good.

Speaker 24 Chamberlain rebounds and scores, and he's fouled.

Speaker 24 145 to 126. Darrell Immoff fouled him.
He has 83.

Speaker 5 And the game took on, you know, Daryl would call it a farce.

Speaker 25 My word is a farce. It was a farce of a game.
It was not, I don't think it was a legitimate

Speaker 25 type of thing where a guy goes out in the course of event. I mean, we had guys score 60 points.

Speaker 25 Elgin Baylor scored 60 points against

Speaker 25 the guard.

Speaker 25 I mean, that was a legitimate great performance.

Speaker 25 Jerry West had 60 against us in the sports arena

Speaker 25 against

Speaker 25 that year.

Speaker 25 It was one of those things where guys had individual performances that were great, but it wasn't done the way that one was done. And that's what makes that a force.
I just don't

Speaker 25 see it as one of the great games ever, and I think the 100-point game is totally

Speaker 25 out of context with what you would consider the great games that were played in the NBA by great players.

Speaker 2 So this is where I need to observe that everybody who's been trying to undermine Wilt's record by asking if it really happened

Speaker 9 has been asking the wrong question.

Speaker 39 Because what Daryl Imhoff is arguing here as one of the principles is not that the 100-point game never took place.

Speaker 16 What Daryl is arguing is that compared to other great performances, Wilts 100 was abnormal and ultimately illegitimate to the point of being, quote, a farce.

Speaker 5 With seven and a half minutes to play and everybody realizing now what the stakes were,

Speaker 5 The Knicks started

Speaker 5 not quite stalling, but sort of a couple extra passes. Then they start running a weave down court, taking the ball in 94 feet from the basket.

Speaker 5 The Warriors start committing fouls of the Knicks to get the ball back quicker to get the ball to Wilt.

Speaker 24 Cross-court the butchers, they eat up as much time as they can. Butcher to the circle and fouled by Rodgers.

Speaker 24 Warriors figure the only way to combat the New York stall is to come out and foul the backcourts on themselves.

Speaker 5 If somebody walked into the arena and they see the Warriors fouling and the Knicks stalling, they're going to think the Knicks are ahead by 20, not the Warriors. That's where it breaks down.

Speaker 24 Knowles is fouled by Joe Rutlick. And all they almost came to blows.

Speaker 24 New York, of course, you can understand the Knickerbockers feelings. They're a little upset.
I would have rubbed in a little bit like this with a guy on a scoring rampage.

Speaker 5 Whether or not it became a farce is a serious question. You know, when the structure of the game breaks down and the team that's 20 points behind is staling, something's weird.
Something's strange.

Speaker 51 Yeah, you've got a situation where you're beating somebody intentionally to make something happen. But that's what was going on.
I mean, it wasn't in the flow of the game.

Speaker 51 Now, the first, you know, the first half, if you will, the first three quarters, it was certainly in the flow of the game.

Speaker 51 But when they started doing some things intentionally to follow him and get him the ball and left him in the game when the game was already over, I mean, it was obviously they were out to prove something.

Speaker 51 And so they did.

Speaker 30 There's a moment, you know, just in terms of recreating when people began to realize we're witnessing something that we'll be talking about forever.

Speaker 20 There's the moment where Bill Campbell, the play-by-play guy on the radio broadcast, says,

Speaker 2 This brings us, as we get deeper into the fourth quarter, Gary, to the 98-point mark.

Speaker 30 So the psychology of the 98-point moment here.

Speaker 22 Who gets the ball to Wilt?

Speaker 28 How does this play unfold here?

Speaker 5 Well, there's a guard named York Larisi, and he's leading the fast break. And so he doesn't see Wilt behind him, but he hears the big fella, the mighty huff and puff.

Speaker 5 He feels the vibration of the floor when Chamberlain's moving. And so he just, as he's going straight at the basket, he doesn't doesn't distribute left or right he just sort of throws the ball up

Speaker 5 and continues on underneath the basket past the baseline and out of play at which point he looks back and sees wilt the mighty dipper grabbing the ball fully extended my arms leaving the screen and then slams it in one movement Larisi with the ball down the right side passes to Chamberlain he's opening shoots he scored

Speaker 5 167 to 145.

Speaker 5 He has a 98.

Speaker 22 What was the call?

Speaker 30 What was the sequence of events to get to the number?

Speaker 5 Well, Will would have three attempts at the 100-point basket. And in fact, one of them came after he scored on that slam dunk to hit 98.

Speaker 5 He started to run down court and quickly turned around and stole the ball.

Speaker 5 No good.

Speaker 5 And missed it from around the free throw line. Then he'd get two more attempts.

Speaker 5 And there's 50 seconds left. And now the Warriors have the ball.
And Guy Rogers, who would have 20 assists on this night, a wonderful passer,

Speaker 5 he throws the ball down court, length of the court,

Speaker 5 to Wilt, who jumps, catches it because the next tallest Nick is

Speaker 5 five inches short.

Speaker 24 Rogers throws one to Chamberlain. He's got it.
He's trying to get up. He shoots.
No good. The ringbound Luckinbill.

Speaker 5 And Ted Luckinbill, a rookie, comes in, gets the rebound. Gets it to Wilt again.

Speaker 24 Back to Chamberlain. He shoots up.
No good.

Speaker 5 He misses Luckinbill again.

Speaker 5 Ringbound Luckinbill.

Speaker 24 Back to Luckwood. Into Chamberlain.
He made it. He made it.
He made it.

Speaker 24 of twenty.

Speaker 24 100 points. The next trader has got the game.
People are drowning, pounding them, dining them.

Speaker 24 The Warrior players are all over them. Fans are coming out of the stand.

Speaker 24 46 seconds left. The most amazing scoring performance of all time.

Speaker 24 100 points. It was a big difference.

Speaker 5 An adrenalized moment for the fans and for Wilt

Speaker 5 until he gets to the locker room and sees the stat sheet. He's sitting next to Al Adles.

Speaker 5 And he's shaking his head. And Adels says, what's the matter, big fellow? He said, I can't believe I took 63 shots, 21 of them in the fourth quarter.
And Adel said, that's okay. You made 36 of them.

Speaker 5 That's all right. The criticism against Wilt is not his athleticism.

Speaker 5 it's always that he cared more about himself and his own statistics rather than the greater good of the team and this night he thought for many years

Speaker 5 reflected that criticism

Speaker 43 in a big way

Speaker 14 and yeah i understand why i mean it's worth remembering here that the most enduring image of that night the thing that everybody remembers still today

Speaker 46 was the Big Dipper holding a piece of paper with the number of points he scored written on it.

Speaker 44 But the person responsible for that meme, it turns out, was not Will Chamberlain.

Speaker 32 It was the same Warriors statistician that Gary mentioned earlier, a man named Harvey Pollock.

Speaker 5 Harvey Pollack was a legend in Philadelphia basketball. He was an employee of the Philadelphia Warriors, then

Speaker 5 the Philadelphia 76ers for six decades.

Speaker 5 And at the time this game is being played, he's known as the octopus because he would send out a Christmas card every year with the octopus, each arm representing another thing he did.

Speaker 5 On this night, when Will scores 100,

Speaker 5 Harvey is the statistician.

Speaker 5 He is a publicist who's got to arrange any interviews. He's writing the game story for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who didn't care enough about it to send anybody.

Speaker 5 He's writing for AP and he's writing for United Press.

Speaker 5 That's a lot of work.

Speaker 5 And in fact, when he finished the scorekeeping and added stuff up, he thought, oh my, what if Will ends out with 98 points?

Speaker 5 Well, you know, one of the things you hear on the radio is, I think, three times the final score is 169 to 150.

Speaker 24 Butcher breaks down for an easy layout, but he's got it.

Speaker 24 169 to 150.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I was going to mention this. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And the Knicks, now we look back at it and see the Knicks at 147.

Speaker 5 And no one could reconcile that for me. I think it was just sort of the slapdash nature of the whole night.
And this was one more aspect of it.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah, the Knicks, well, it doesn't matter what the Knicks got.

Speaker 12 You know, all that matters is what Will. Right.
There is the disc.

Speaker 20 Well, that's it, right? The discrepancy between what the radio announcer was saying versus the official score.

Speaker 21 There's all this confusion. You hear it on the tape a couple of times.

Speaker 20 But what the octopus, he makes sure to establish that there is no ambiguity around how many points Will Chamberlain scored because he does the thing that results in the one piece of evidence that I think every basketball fan has seen.

Speaker 5 Pollack looks around and says, heff to Jim Heffernan, the sports writer of the Philadelphia Bulletin.

Speaker 5 Let me borrow a sheet of paper. And he takes out what was a magic marker.
I don't think they had Sharpies in 1962. I may be wrong on that.
And he writes 100.

Speaker 5 And it's the backstory to this classic photo. And that might be the best picture in basketball history because of what it represents and who it represents.
It's the dipper on his night.

Speaker 5 Remember, this is a time when the NBA, even its statistics in the way stats were kept,

Speaker 5 They didn't count block shots. You know, somebody said, how many shots did Will block? I don't know.
I don't know. We just have the numbers that they kept.
Did the Knicks score 147 or 150?

Speaker 43 I don't know.

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 5 But to me, it was about getting to the essence of this story. There are some questions.
Whether or not it happened is not a question.

Speaker 4 So, this is where I should point out what might now feel obvious, which is that every person that Gary Pomerance has mentioned to this point, every voice you've heard on this episode, has passed away.

Speaker 45 This will forever be a story about hidden boxes and lost recordings and secondary sources and truly tricky ambiguities, which is something that Will Chamberlain himself, who died in 1999, eventually learned to accept.

Speaker 6 I used to hate the fact that there was no video of it, but as time goes on, I think it kind of adds to the mystique of the game.

Speaker 7 Or in the words of Gary Pomerance.

Speaker 5 And, you know, the baseball great Ted Williams used to say His dream was that when he walked down the street, people would point at him and say, there goes the greatest hitter in baseball history.

Speaker 5 Will came to realize that people would point at him as he walked down the street and say, There goes the guy who scored 100 points in a game.

Speaker 5 And he came to like it.

Speaker 14 But in our research near the end, here, we were able to find one last primary source for the online exhibit we've been building.

Speaker 33 A person who, at 86 years young, still has a unique and even poetic perspective on what really happened in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on March 2nd, 1962.

Speaker 40 Tom, give me the pronunciation of your name.

Speaker 10 I just want to make sure I'm getting it right.

Speaker 33 Masheri.

Speaker 16 Masheri. Okay, good.
Good, good, good.

Speaker 30 Didn't know where the accent or the stress was going to be, but Masheri makes

Speaker 25 sense.

Speaker 33 My third grade teacher called me Mashery.

Speaker 40 Masheria Moore.

Speaker 11 Yes, a different nickname for

Speaker 11 a bruiser power forward.

Speaker 33 The one that pretty much stuck was the NAB Manchuria. That had to do with my birthplace.
I was born in Manchuria, which is in China now, white Russian parents. And I was an

Speaker 33 immigrant kid. I came to the United States after the Second World War.
My parents, my mother and I and my sister were interned in a Japanese concentration camp in Japan during the war.

Speaker 33 And then we came to the United States via the Red Cross to San Francisco, where my father was. was waiting for us.
And that's kind of where I learned.

Speaker 33 San Francisco is where I learned how to play basketball.

Speaker 22 And Tom Asheri really was good at basketball.

Speaker 46 The Warriors, who eventually relocated from Philly to the Bay Area, retired his number.

Speaker 19 And Tom was in the starting lineup, playing 40 minutes right alongside his teammate, Will Chamberlain, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on the day in question.

Speaker 1 And while Tom would go on to spend 24 years as a high school English teacher and also write five books of poetry and six novels and two memoirs,

Speaker 33 On my mother's side, I'm related to the old little story.

Speaker 19 He still thinks about Hershey

Speaker 18 all the time, in part because it was his very first season in the NBA.

Speaker 33 Talk about lucking out, huh? I got off the plane, I was pretty naive, gentle, and I just walked into this fantastic moment.

Speaker 21 I'm getting the sense that as much as you were a guy who was not there to shoot that night, you enjoyed spectating yourself.

Speaker 33 Oh no, I was mesmerized. I mean, for one thing, I was a rookie.

Speaker 33 Imagine being a rookie from the West Coast, coming to the East Coast, being part of the NBA. I mean, this was like a dream for me.

Speaker 33 Will deserves not to be questioned.

Speaker 33 My daughter called me up. She's a eighth grade middle school teacher and she provided me with the news that some of her kids uh

Speaker 33 you know think that well this hundred-point game was fake news just because there was no video of it

Speaker 33 yeah look the the the question of why people question it for me that's a very simple answer i think we have a whole society that has anybody can say anything they want you know and there's no fact checks and nobody believes in fact checks uh nobody believes in honesty i mean it's now, we're in a really

Speaker 33 troubled times. They'll believe all sorts of conspiracy stuff.

Speaker 3 Well, one of the things I wanted to fact-check with you was

Speaker 26 a theory of a different kind, because one of the people that was interviewed by Gary Pomerance in his book is a gentleman by the name of Daryl Imhoff.

Speaker 2 You remember Daryl in some?

Speaker 33 Sure. Sure, I remember Daryl.
I've chased him in the stands and almost beat him to death.

Speaker 41 Why, why did you do that, Tom?

Speaker 33 Because I hated Daryl.

Speaker 29 I'm getting the sense that the Mad Manchurian may have also earned that nickname because you also tried to hit Daryl with a chair.

Speaker 33 Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that chair. Yeah, it just sort of just sort of appeared in my hand.

Speaker 29 But I bring up Daryl Imhoff now, not simply because you have this personal backstory with him, but because I need you to help fact-check something that he told Gary Pomerance that we discovered in the course of fact-checking the story of that night.

Speaker 3 Because the allegation that Daryl makes, of course, is not that the hundred points did not happen.

Speaker 29 He was there.

Speaker 15 He, in fact, personally was responsible for quite a number of those points, trying to guard Wilts.

Speaker 2 The allegation that Daryl Imhoff made on tape was this: quote:

Speaker 40 The 100-point game was a farce.

Speaker 33 Well, I say sour grapes, kid. You know, you got smoked and, you know, fouled out and

Speaker 33 somebody else filled in for you and you couldn't stop Wilt. Nobody could stop Wilt that night.
So it's just sour grapes. I can just say your defense was a farce.
That's why Wilt scored.

Speaker 33 If you want to be a farce,

Speaker 33 maybe I should have punched him off a little more.

Speaker 33 I don't think anybody could have guarded Wilt that night. I don't think Shaq at his very best guarded Wilk that night.
Will was indomitable that night. Everything he threw up was in.

Speaker 33 It was a miracle game. And if Daryl thinks it was manufactured, it was manufactured by the Lord God himself.

Speaker 33 I've never heard that Daryl said that. That makes me angry.
That makes me really angry.

Speaker 15 He accused you guys of pouring it on.

Speaker 33 Of course we poured it. Absolutely reported on.
Reported on because we were going to help our teammates score 100 points. There's nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 33 What I saw was a destruction.

Speaker 33 Unless my eyes were failing me, I saw destruction.

Speaker 9 So this is where I do need to jump in here and let cooler heads prevail for a second for the sake of posterity, if nothing else.

Speaker 3 Because yes, I have apparently goaded the Bad Manchurian at age 86 back into bloodlust.

Speaker 45 But also, because the thing that courses inside of Tom, the thing in his blood, as mentioned before,

Speaker 27 is really

Speaker 28 poetry.

Speaker 33 I grew up listening to poetry from my mother and my father, both.

Speaker 4 And so you may not be surprised to find out at this point that the Big Dipper was not just a teammate and a friend to Tom,

Speaker 4 but also a muse.

Speaker 33 I wrote a poem last night.

Speaker 33 I don't know. I think because I was going to be on New York Zoom and I was thinking about it.

Speaker 10 Would you mind reading some of the poem that you just wrote last night for me?

Speaker 30 Would you, is that, is that?

Speaker 33 I thought you'd never ask.

Speaker 7 I was wondering when the Mad Manchurian might read from his latest work.

Speaker 25 Okay,

Speaker 33 let me give it a try. Okay.
Please.

Speaker 33 Wilts Ghost, March 2nd, 2025.

Speaker 33 Can you imagine on this day when Wilch scored 100 points in a single game in Chocolatown?

Speaker 33 His ghost striding onto the court

Speaker 33 of Chase Arena six decades later,

Speaker 33 followed by his teammates in that game, all gone.

Speaker 33 Harrison, Gola, Rogers, Adles, and the rest.

Speaker 33 Except for me, waiting my turn to be a ghost.

Speaker 33 Cheering like crazy for the dipper.

Speaker 33 Because he always belonged in the sky.

Speaker 15 Tom, the Mad Manchurian, the poet laureate of the NBA, you contain multitudes and you observed multitudes. And I very, very sincerely thank you for joining us.

Speaker 33 You're very welcome.

Speaker 7 This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production.

Speaker 13 And I'll talk to you next time.