The following article is dedicated to Steve Mackler, without question the greatest Wilt Chamberlain fan of all time!!!!!

By GARY M. POMERANTZ

Think of the enduring sports images of the 1960s. The euphoric Bill Mazeroski bounding through fans toward home plate to end the 1960 World Series. Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in Lewiston, Maine, in 1965, screaming, “Get up and fight, sucker!” John Carlos and Tommie Smith in protest at the 1968 Olympics, black-gloved fists raised.

And Wilt Chamberlain in 1962, holding up a piece of scrap paper with a number scratched onto it: “100.”

That last photo, an improvisational beginning to sports’ promotional wizardry of today, is an artifact that has become—like Warhol’s soup cans—a piece of Americana worthy of careful study for what it tells us about Wilt and the onlysingle-triple in NBA history.

Fifty years ago Friday—March 2, 1962—Chamberlain threw down his 100-point thunderbolt against the New York Knicks. In the Philadelphia Warriors’ 169-147 victory, he made 36 of 63 field-goal attempts on an array of fall-aways, dunks and put-backs. The night’s more astonishing numbers came at the free-throw line where the notoriously poor shooter, the Shaq of the 1960s, made 28 of 32 tries. Always searching for an answer, Chamberlain that season shot free throws underhanded, knees flared wide.

Chamberlain’s 100 is the statistical Everest of sports. Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers scored 81 against the last-place Toronto Raptors in 2006, the NBA’s second-highest single-game total. But Bryant’s performance, available for purchase on DVD online immediately after the game, could carry none of Chamberlain’s mythology.

The mystique of that night in Hershey, Pa., was born of its isolation. Virtually no one saw it. No TV cameras were there. No New York sportswriters were either, with the last-place Knicks’ season in ashes. Hershey Arena was half-empty, just 4,124 paying fans. At halftime, the irrepressible Philadelphia public-address announcer Dave Zinkoff gave away Formost salamis and New Phillies Cheroots cigars. The only working photographer left after one quarter.

But after Chamberlain reached 69 points at the end of the third, an off-duty Associated Press photographer named Paul Vathis realized that history was in the air. He had brought his son to the game as a 10th birthday present. Vathis went outside to his car for his camera. Planting himself beneath a basket, he took several action photos and a perfectly framed shot of Chamberlain at game’s end walking off the floor, surrounded by the sons of chocolate factory workers, backslapping, reverential, packed 10 deep.

Vathis had been in the presence of history before. The previous spring, at Camp David for a meeting between President Kennedy and his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, Vathis watched the men walk down a stone path.

“OK, boys, that’s it. Lids on,” Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary, said to gathered photographers.

The kneeling Vathis held his position, though, and clicked off one more shot, capturing the men from behind, heads bowed, Ike’s hat in his hands behind his back. His photo would win the 1962 Pulitzer Prize.

“In 100 there was a symbolic magic. It meant much more than, say, 98.”

In the Warriors’ locker room, Vathis wanted a photograph that would tell the story of Chamberlain’s Bunyanesque accomplishment. Team publicist Harvey Pollack offered help. Already Pollack had recorded the official statistics and written separate game stories sent by Western Union to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Associated Press and United Press.

“How about if we write ‘100’ on a sheet of paper and have Wilt hold it?” Pollack asked. Vathis replied, “You think Wilt will do it?”

He would. Through Vathis’s Mamiyaflex 2 ¼-inch square camera, we see the Dipper sitting on a low-slung bench, his right arm shielding part of the “PHILA 13” on his white jersey. His body glistens with sweat—and such a body! Chamberlain was, at 25 years old, 7 feet 1 and 260 pounds, with a broad muscular back that formed a triangle over his 31-inch waist. When he ran the floor he covered nearly eight feet of hardwood with each elongated stride.

On this night, when one of the Knicks’ centers (Phil Jordon) didn’t play because of an illness, and the other center (Darrall Imhoff) fouled out after playing just 20 minutes, Chamberlain had five inches and 50 pounds on the next-biggest Knick for 28 minutes. Dolph Schayes of the Syracuse Nationals would call Chamberlain’s body “the most perfect instrument ever made by God to play basketball.”

His face is arresting, a long, narrow brow over almond eyes lit by youth and restless ambition, high cheekbones and a cool jazz man’s trimmed mustache. Chamberlain lived in a stylish apartment off Central Park in Manhattan and commuted to Philadelphia for practices and games. He co-owned a historic Harlem nightclub, Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise, and there Etta James, Redd Foxx and Cannonball Adderley performed, and the Dipper moved through its rooms like he owned all of Harlem, perhaps all of New York.

The photo shows us the ego, unmistakable and essential. To average a still-standing record of 50 points per game, as Chamberlain did in 1961-62, and to score 100 points on a single night, a player must not only want to do it, but must, on a deeper level, need to do it. In 100 there was a symbolic magic. It meant much more than, say, 98.

We see the good-luck rubber bands at his wrists. He wore rubber bands atop his socks, to keep them from falling, and these were his spares. He’d worn them during his youth, and usually he explained that he wore them now to remind him of old friends. But once he told teammate Joe Ruklick, “When I feel like I’m doggin’ it, I snap them to remind me of when my people were under the lash.”

Chamberlain was hardly a civil-rights activist. “I’m no Jackie Robinson,” he said in 1960. “Some persons are meant to be that way…others aren’t.” Even so, his 100-point night carried social import. It was a hyperbolic announcement of the ascendancy of the black athlete in pro basketball. No longer could the NBA sustain the quota system limiting the number of black players on a team. In Hershey, the Dipper symbolically blew that quota to bits.

The big man died of a heart attack at 63 in 1999. The Paul Vathis photo stood on the church dais at Chamberlain’s memorial service.

1. 

   freddy from boca

   Philadelphia Warriors
   Player Pos Min FGM FGA FTM FTA Reb Ast PF Pts
   Paul Arizin F 31 7 18 2 2 5 4 0 16
   Tom Meschery F 40 7 12 2 2 7 3 4 16
   Wilt Chamberlain C 48 36 63 28 32 25 2 2 100
   Guy Rodgers G 48 1 4 9 12 7 20 5 11
   Al Attles G 34 8 8 1 1 5 6 4 17
   York Larese 14 4 5 1 1 1 2 5 9
   Ed Conlin 14 0 4 0 0 4 1 1 0
   Joe Ruklick 8 0 1 0 2 2 1 2 0
   Ted Luckenbill 3 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 0
   Team rebounds 3
   Team totals 240 63 115 43 52 60 39 25 169

   Reply ·   11/12/2019

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