Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Wilt Chamberlain and the Conspiracy Factory (PTFO Vault) About this episode Why do so many people still think the 100-point game is fake news? We crate-dig with author Gary Pomerantz, from a rare-book library... to a basement closet... to a vault in Hershey, Pennsylvania — and end up with a poem from the last Warrior standing.
(This episode originally aired February 28, 2025.)
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0:00 Pablo Torre? We have a bit of incredible news to share. Our show, Pablo Torre Finds Out, was not only named one of the best of 2025 by Apple Podcasts, but our episode, "The Silent Superstar and the Rotting Apple Tree", which was, you know, the whole investigation into aspiration and Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers, was also chosen as one of Apple Podcasts' Best Episodes of the Year. You can check both of those things out, the Best Shows and Best Episodes list, right now in the Apple Podcasts app. So, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for making clear what "Apple time, Apple time" actually means. And today, you are going to find out what this sound is.
0:39 Speaker 01 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.
0:47 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
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2:54 Pablo Torre? When you heard from us, Gary Pomerantz, that we wanted to do this topic because of what people had been saying on the internet, were you excited?
3:05 Speaker 05 My intuitive reaction was, here we go again. My second reaction was something approximating an eye roll. You know, it's a conspiratorial time.
3:19 Speaker 05 Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. You go back to the 1960s and there were still a lot of questions about the Kennedy assassination.
3:36 Speaker 06 It's one small step for man,
3:41 Speaker 06 one giant leap for mankind.
3:46 Speaker 05 Did Neil Armstrong really touch the moon, or was he in a studio somewhere in in 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. 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.
4:12 Pablo Torre? Do we, though? Are we sure?
4:14 Speaker 05 We're pretty sure.
4:15 Pablo Torre? About that?
4:15 Speaker 05 We're pretty sure Lincoln was at Gettysburg, yeah. And, and so, um, you know, for sports fans, you gotta lock in on how different the NBA was then. And how different sports media was then. 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 immediacy of today with technology. It wasn't so then.
4:43 Pablo Torre? Do you remember the first time you heard somebody casting aspersions on the subject that you have literally written the book about?
4:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, there was always questions of, 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. 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 Wilt had scored 102 or 97, we wouldn't embrace it or question it even as we do. And so I decided, all these decades later, I gotta find out what happened here. This is one of the most famous and famously unknown stories in sports history. The deeper I went, it became, you know, like Alice in Wonderland, curiouser and curiouser.
6:00 Pablo Torre? So the anniversary of one of the most iconic performances in the history of sports is approaching on Sunday. 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. If I'm understanding correctly, on the Pat McAfee Show, we are now questioning the veracity of Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game. We're questioning whether this is...
6:31 Speaker 02 The weather not exactly happens.
6:32 Speaker 07 So, no, we're not.
6:33 Speaker 02 Pac-Man is not, but I did not know that there was no documented footage of this until just now. So as soon as that happens, boom, my brain goes, whoa.
6:43 Speaker 05 The people always say they don't know if it's true or if it's false. Did Wilt actually score 100 points?
6:51 Speaker 07 Like even the scores table people like, did they all die like?
6:54 Pablo Torre? Yeah, like that's why I'm curious who's on the Knicks. Is anyone still?
6:58 Speaker 07 You just, that's, that was the only thing that could like sell me on it. Like there's people like, yeah, I was actually at that game. 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 like, We've seen aliens.
7:14 Pablo Torre? Even though that it's 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. 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.
7:39 Speaker 04 Hey Pablo, uh, long time, first time. Uh, there's been a lot of stuff around the internet lately about whether or not Wilt scored 100 points because there's a lot of old footage from the 50s and 60s of the NBA, but nothing really about that supposed 100 point game.
7:58 Pablo Torre? And then we got another one.
8:00 Speaker 06 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.
8:13 Speaker 06 It revolves around Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game. 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.
8:33 Speaker 06 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.
8:44 Speaker 06 I need your help.
8:46 Pablo Torre? 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. And the first person we called was Stanford professor Gary Pomerantz, the aforementioned author of the book Wilt 1962. And Gary immediately established something. He established that one tricky thing about fact checking Wilt Chamberlain is that Wilt Chamberlain's whole brand was to be larger than life.
9:16 Speaker 05 Wilt was a luminous star at that time. He was just 25 years old. He's got a nightclub in Harlem called Big Wilt Smalls Paradise. Smalls Paradise dates the halcyon days of the Harlem Renaissance. And Wilt walked through that place like he owned all of Harlem, like he owned all of New York. Red Fox, Etta James, Cannonball Adderley. Wilt's the greeter, the tallest greeter in NBA history. Wilt had a Goliath syndrome. He was 7'1", 260 pounds. Dolph Schayes of the Syracuse Nationals said his body was the most perfect instrument made by God to play basketball. You know, another writer likened Wilt's body to the first sight of the New York skyline.
10:01 Speaker 05 I mean, think about this, 7'1", 260 pounds, his back triangulates down to a 31-inch dancer's waist. The guy was cut. The guy could run the floor like a train. Everything about him was magnificent.
10:17 Pablo Torre? I had to do a lot of just reacquainting myself with history as well for this. Wilt was singing his own tune, literally, on American Bandstand, right?
10:30 Speaker 05 By the river, down by the river.
10:40 Speaker 05 You know, he wasn't Frankie Vault. He wasn't very good, but they did cut a record of it.
10:57 Speaker 05 You know, he had a racehorse named Spooky Cadet. It never won. He had an Asian motif apartment off Central Park West in New York. And then, of course, there was Wilt telling stories about his womanizing.
11:12 Pablo Torre? That's the number that people are most, you know, had been most obsessed with. That statistic, 20,000.
11:19 Speaker 01 If I had to count my sexual encounters, I'd be closing in on 20,000 women. 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? And do you still receive? Well, you know, I still, I still receive.
11:34 Pablo Torre? What's the fact checking on that like?
11:35 Speaker 05 Well, the fact checking is difficult to do, as a matter of fact. But I interviewed one of the 20,000, a woman named Linda Huey, who became a great friend of Wilt's at the end of his life. She said, "Wilt, why did you say 20,000?" And Wilt's response was to wink and say, "What's an extra zero between friends?"
11:57 Speaker 01 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. Because whenever people see me now, they go, "20,000." And let's see, he must have started with like 15, and he's now maybe 55. So let's see, 20,365 into 20,000. And, you know, and then...
12:21 Pablo Torre? You're getting people thinking.
12:22 Speaker 01 Not only that, I'm teaching them mathematics, which is really the whole, the whole story here, you understand?
12:29 Pablo Torre? I don't think that's gonna be a word problem for kids. If Wilt Chamberlain is with 10 women on a train headed east...
12:35 Speaker 01 That's right.
12:37 Speaker 05 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. I interviewed ultimately 56 people who were there. 15 of them players, the broadcaster, the statistician, the shot clock operator, a number of fans. Look, Pablo, when you go back... Back into this time, you're going back into a time when the NBA was a lounge act. It was a league in search of itself. The crowds weren't very big. The joke used to be that the P A announcer would introduce the players in the starting lineup and then would introduce each fan.
13:19 Speaker 05 It was nine teams in the league, only one team west of St. Louis. 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 its sizeable arenas. 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. This was the third of those games.
13:49 Pablo Torre? You should know that Hershey, Pennsylvania, population in 1962, about 7,000, sits in the shadow of Amish country. That's where the chocolate capital of America is located, 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. But electricity, in general, was scarce. The game wasn't televised. The NBA, as Gary said, was basically a lounge act. But the sport was big enough for an A M. radio station, W C A U, Philadelphia. Except it soon became clear, particularly to legendary play-by-play man Bill Campbell,
14:33 Pablo Torre? who was frantically calling technicians back at the station in Philly, that nobody involved with this broadcast had actually kept a tape of the game, which then created a puzzle of its own.
14:49 Speaker 05 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. That's why they disappear some with radio. It was a game 75 in an 80-game season.
15:09 Pablo Torre? But very recently, about 60-plus years later, something kind of crazy happened. Because we here at Pablo Torre Finds Out found a Philly basketball fan by the name of Sammy Marcus. And Sammy Marcus had never given an interview about this before. But in 1962, Sammy used to listen to every Warriors radio broadcast.
15:32 Pablo Torre? On March 2nd, however, that Friday, he decided to do something different. He went to go see the Elizabeth Taylor film Butterfield 8. And then...
15:45 Speaker 06 I came home from that, turned on the radio, just in time to hear Bill Campbell say, "Wilt Chamberlain just scored 100 points. 100 points, fans." Oh my God, what a game to miss.
16:00 Speaker 06 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. This is where I have the tape somewhere.
16:15 Pablo Torre? 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.
16:28 Speaker 06 One of these is the tape, just don't know which one.
16:32 Speaker 06 Oh, that's a Floyd Patterson-Sunny Liston fight.
16:37 Speaker 06 Ah, this is the one.
16:40 Pablo Torre? 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. 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.
17:00 Speaker 06 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. We heard from the producers at Pablo Torre Finds Out, asking us about one particular event in Hershey sports history, which was Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game at the Hershey Arena.
17:23 Pablo Torre? And this puzzle piece, it turns out, was the full fourth quarter. But it wasn't taped in Hershey, at all, actually. 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. 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. And many years later, those reels would finally find their way back home. So I did some searching in our collections, and I was very excited to find this box right here.
18:04 Pablo Torre? 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, set tape. And then, the most exciting item here is this 5- and 3/4-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. Not even the Basketball Hall of Fame has the tape of Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game, by the way, as their historian explained to us. They've never even had an official exhibit devoted to Wilt.
18:46 Pablo Torre? But this show now has two independently sourced recordings of the pivotal fourth quarter, plus a third, entirely different box of tapes that I need to tell you about. 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.
19:09 Speaker 05 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 it becomes, it becomes an obsession. You know, what about that? I called Bill Campbell so many times. I called, the last time I called him, I said, "Bill, it's Gary Pomerantz." And he said, "Not again." And that's just, Bill, one more thing, one more question.
19:39 Pablo Torre? We can relate, we can relate here. 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. And just tell me how you feel as we go back to March 1962.
20:04 Speaker 06 WCIU, WCIU 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's Wilt gonna get? He's got 69 going in. Here's the pass to him.
20:19 Speaker 05 Well, Wilt's got 69 points going into the fourth quarter, right? And so he still needs 31 points. You know, that's a lot of points.
20:29 Speaker 06 To Rogers. Rogers takes the jump shot. It's no good. Chamberlain with a rebound. Taps it in.
20:36 Speaker 05 And he just scored 28 points in the third quarter. And the Knicks are just going through the motions. They're dead. It's a 10, 15, 20-point lead the Warriors have.
20:49 Speaker 06 Inside to Adels, to Chamberlain. He's got it.
20:54 Speaker 06 133 to 114, and the fellas on the Warrior bench are jumping for joy for him. Every time he scores, they'll jump up in a body.
21:06 Speaker 05 Now, the NBA didn't find out about this tape until 1990. And it's like, wait, what? That's just the way things were then.
21:18 Speaker 06 We're just conjectural here. How many can he make? He's got nine minutes and 24 seconds left, and the guesses are running as high as 100.
21:27 Pablo Torre? So this is Bill Campbell that you're hearing. This is the play-by-play announcer in Philly, WCAU, the radio broadcast. 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. Hearing you in '03, talk to Joe Rucklick is a time machine inside of a time machine.
21:56 Speaker 05 Well, Joe was the Kennedy liberal from Northwestern.
22:00 Speaker 06 When I got there as their first draft choice that season out of Northwestern, behind Wilt. Wilt was technically first.
22:11 Speaker 05 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 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 he questioned whether Bill Campbell had recreated it.
22:39 Speaker 06 I don't think Campbell was there, but you know what? That's...
22:43 Pablo Torre? So what are you saying? If I get a tape, what are you saying about the tape?
22:45 Speaker 06 I think you get the last few minutes.
22:47 Pablo Torre? I think it's only the last quarter.
22:49 Speaker 06 Uh, yeah. Less than that. I've got it.
22:53 Pablo Torre? You do?
22:54 Speaker 06 I think it's fake.
22:55 Pablo Torre? Really?
22:56 Speaker 06 Yeah.
22:57 Pablo Torre? Real stuff? Why do you think it's fake? Well, his allegation seems to be even a little more pointed than that. It was that Bill Campbell wasn't even there, actually. He wasn't really the announcer.
23:06 Speaker 06 If it's a fake, it illustrates the nonsense that the NBA perpetrated about those days. It was a bush league. I mean, it was really...
23:22 Speaker 05 Bill Campbell was there. Bill Campbell and I spoke and he talked about dreading going to Hershey, you know, for game 75 of an 80 game season.
23:31 Speaker 06 It was annoying because instead of doing a home game at home, we had to go to Hershey. Players weren't happy either.
23:38 Speaker 05 It's a, it's a long drive and it was sure would be nice to be playing it, you know, at, at home in Philadelphia.
23:44 Speaker 06 Wilt, in order to come to that game, took a train. I remember him being there early.
23:48 Speaker 05 But, um, he remembered vividly the game and the details.
23:54 Speaker 06 Everything was such constant and ease. It was effortless. They broke the ball up and he'd go up and get it and dunk it. They knew something unnatural was gonna happen here and they all.
24:09 Pablo Torre? As for just how Bush League game 75 really was, I should acknowledge that Joe Rucklick dead wrong about the tape of the fourth quarter being this false flag operation. Also, relatedly, it's funny that none of the online conspiracists that we mentioned before did enough research to be able to cite Joe Rucklick's theory in the first place. But it is pretty easy to imagine why the whole event did feel a bit confused.
24:36 Speaker 05 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, how many shots attempted, made, free throws attempted, made, assists, et cetera. There's just a, 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.
25:10 Pablo Torre? But Wilt Chamberlain, as he later explained in an interview with Bob Costas, was keeping score.
25:17 Speaker 01 The game starts, I'm fairly warm. I'm really warm from the foul. I'm not missing anything from the foul. That actually gave me some kind of hint that, you know.
25:24 Pablo Torre? You made 28 of 32 from the foul line that night, which is good for anybody and.
25:29 Speaker 01 staggering for you. I appreciate that, right, staggering, staggering for me, you understand? But I was even better than that the first day, but I was missing nothing. I was a hundred percent, a hundred percent, remember, you understand? So, uh, I said, hey, you know, things are going pretty good. And I had, I think, like forty four, forty one points at halftime, and I was shooting well.
25:47 Pablo Torre? And one big reason Wilt was playing so well is that the Knicks' starting center was out sick. And apparently, kind of hungover. And so, yes, Wilt would go on to average fifty 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. And instead, what he became was the answer to a trivia question forever.
26:23 Pablo Torre? This is an interview with Darryl Imhoff, I M H O F F, in Eugene, Oregon, on July 8th, 2003.
26:34 Speaker 05 By the way, I tape, I double tape in case one tape fails. Okay. Isn't this interesting? Yeah, so. Gosh. Darryl was a second-year player, six-ten, left-handed. And, um, you know, he was primary, primarily a defender, at times a rough defender. He would become known as the Axe for axing, you know, shooters' arms.
26:56 Speaker 01 You know, Wilt, Wilt was an attraction and, and, uh, and I, you know, I was gonna have to spend the next, uh, the next, uh, that night in his armpit, so I wasn't looking forward to that.
27:08 Speaker 05 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, Darryl, could you come here for a second? I stood in the middle of the lane. I said, show me how you defended Wilt that night. Wilt, Imhoff said, would arch his back, and it was like a tree, and Darryl's behind him down low. He said it was like a tree was gonna fall down on me. I said, so what would you do? And he said, I did this. And he took the point of his elbow and put it in my rhomboids, right between the shoulder blades. And Darryl could still inflict some pain all these years later. But he said he, he would position himself behind Wilt with, when Wilt's down on the
27:52 Speaker 05 offensive left side, down by where we would now see the block. The block didn't exist then. 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. 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.
28:17 Pablo Torre? Uh.
28:18 Speaker 05 The tallest, next, next tallest player the Knicks had was six foot eight rookie Cleveland Buckner. Six eight, they said 210 pounds. Uh-uh. 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. Well, seven and a half minutes are left when Wilt, he scores and Harvey Pollak, statistician, he passes over a sheet of paper to the P A announcer, the great Dave Zinkoff. Zinkoff then announces, Wilt Chamberlain has just set a new record for most points in a game.
29:02 Speaker 05 He has 79 points, breaking his 78 points scored in a three overtime game earlier that season. And while he's announcing that, Wilt makes shooting underhanded, two more free throws to go to 80 and 81.
29:18 Speaker 06 On the P A, they're announcing the new record is 79. 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 in the whistle door. He just made two straight fouls. He now has 81 points.
29:36 Pablo Torre? Granny's style.
29:37 Speaker 05 Granny's style. 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 kindergarten nurse chair.
29:47 Pablo Torre? What did Daryl say to you particularly, Gary, if you recall, in your interview with him about the refs?
29:53 Speaker 05 He just thought they loved Wilt and, you know, that at one point they called a foul against Emhoff that Emhoff did not think was a foul.
30:01 Speaker 06 And he started backing in and I held my position and Willie Smith called me for a foul and I said, Willie, I got, I'm allowed a position. And I said, why don't you, you know, why don't you give the guy 100 points while I'll go home?
30:11 Pablo Torre? I mean, you did say that. You said.
30:12 Speaker 06 I said that. Why don't you give him 100 points while I'll go home? And he did. Going into the layup, up with a shot, no good. Chamberlain rebounds. Good.
30:22 Speaker 06 Chamberlain rebounds and scores and he's fouled.
30:28 Speaker 06 145 to 126. Darrell Imar fouled him. He has 83.
30:34 Speaker 05 And the game took on, you know, Darrell would call it a farce.
30:37 Speaker 06 A farce. My word is a farce. It was a farce of a game. It was not, I don't think it was a legitimate, uh, type of thing where a guy goes out in the course of the event. I mean, we had guys score 60 points. Uh, Elgin Baylor scored 60 points against us in the Garden. I mean, that was a legitimate great performance. Mm-hmm. Uh, Jerry West had 60 against us in the sports arena, uh, against, uh... Same year? Uh, in, uh, this, in that year. Mm-hmm. Uh, 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 farce. I just don't, I don't see it as one of the great games ever, and I think the 100-point
31:17 Speaker 06 game is totally out of, out of context with what we consider the great games that were played in the NBA by great players.
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33:10 Pablo Torre? 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, has been asking the wrong question. Because what Daryl Imhoff is arguing here as one of the principles is not that the 100-point game never took place. What Daryl is arguing is that compared to other great performances, Wilt's 100 was abnormal and ultimately illegitimate, to the point of being, quote, "a farce."
33:45 Speaker 05 With seven and a half minutes to play and everybody realizing now what the stakes were, the Knicks started, not quite stalling, but sort of, couple extra passes, then they start running a weave down court, taking the ball in 94 feet from the basket.
34:04 Speaker 05 The Warriors start committing fouls of the Knicks to get the ball back quicker, to get the ball to Wilt.
34:10 Speaker 06 Cross-court to Butcher as they eat up as much time as they can. Butcher to the circle and fouled by Rogers. Warriors figure the only way to combat the New York store is to come out and foul the backcourt men themselves.
34:23 Speaker 05 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.
34:35 Speaker 06 Knowles is fouled by Joe Rucklick and they almost came to close.
34:41 Speaker 06 New York, of course, you can understand the Knickerbockers feeling. They're a little upset. I would have rubbed in a little bit like this with a guy on a scoring ramp, though.
34:49 Speaker 05 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 stalling, something's weird, something's strange.
35:00 Speaker 06 Yeah, you've got a situation where you're feeding somebody intentionally to make something happen, but that's what was going on. I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't in the flow of the game. Now, the first, you know, the first half, two over, first three quarters, it was certainly in the flow of the game. But when they started doing some things intentionally to foul him, getting 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, and so they did.
35:24 Pablo Torre? 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. There's the moment where Bill Campbell, the play-by-play guy on the radio broadcast, says...
35:36 Speaker 06 On a night, work this night down. Chamberlain on the line, foul shot up in the air, he has 84. 146 to 126. If you know anybody not listening, call them up. Little history you're sitting in on tonight.
35:53 Pablo Torre? This brings us, as we get deeper into the fourth quarter, Gary, to the 98-point mark. So the psychology of the 98-point moment here. Who gets the ball to Wilt? How does this play unfold here?
36:06 Speaker 05 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. 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 distribute left or right, he just sort of throws the ball up 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.
36:48 Speaker 06 Larisi with the ball down the right side, passes to Chamberlain, he's open, he shoots, he scores. 167 to 145. He has 98.
37:03 Pablo Torre? What was the call? What was the, the sequence of events to get to, to the number?
37:10 Speaker 05 Well, Wilt 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. He started to run down court and quickly turned around and stole the ball.
37:28 Speaker 05 And missed it from around the free throw line. Then he'd get two more attempts. And there's 50 seconds left and now the Warriors have the ball. And, and Guy Rogers, who would have 20 assists on this night, a wonderful passer. He throws the ball down court, length of the court, to Wilt, who jumps, catches it because the next tallest Nick is five, five inches shorter.
38:01 Speaker 05 And Ted Luckinbill, a rookie, comes in, gets the rebound, gets it to Wilt again.
38:11 Speaker 05 He misses. Luckinbill again.
38:53 Speaker 06 ...
38:55 Speaker 05 An adrenalized moment for the fans and for Wilt. Until he gets to the locker room and sees the stat sheet, he's sitting next to Al Adels. And he's shaking his head and Adels says, what's the matter, big fella? He said, I can't believe I took 63 shots, 21 of them in the fourth quarter. And Adels said, that's okay, you made 36 of them, that's all right. The criticism against Wilt is not his athleticism. 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, reflected that criticism in a big way.
39:43 Pablo Torre? 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, was the Big Dipper holding a piece of paper with the number of points he scored written on it. But the person responsible for that meme, it turns out, was not Wilt Chamberlain. It was the same Warriors statistician that Gary mentioned earlier. A man named Harvey Pollak.
40:13 Speaker 05 Harvey Pollak was a legend in Philadelphia basketball. He was an employee of the Philadelphia Warriors, then the Philadelphia 76ers, for six decades. 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. On this night, when Wilt scores 100, Harvey is the statistician. 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. He's writing for AP and he's writing for United Press. That's a lot of work.
40:58 Speaker 05 And in fact, when he finished the scorekeeping and added stuff up, he thought, oh my, what if Wilt ends up with 98 points? Well, you know, one of the things you hear on the radio is, I think, three times, the final score is 169 to 150.
41:15 Speaker 07 Put your brakes down for an easy layup, but he's got it. 169 to 150.
41:22 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I was gonna mention this, yeah.
41:25 Speaker 05 And the Knicks, now we look back and see the Knicks had 147, and no one could reconcile that for me. I think it was just sort of this slapdash nature of the whole night, and this was one more aspect of it. Oh, yeah, the Knicks, well, it doesn't matter what the Knicks got, you know, all that matters is what Will got.
41:44 Pablo Torre? Right, there is, well, that's it, right? The discrepancy between what the radio announcer was saying versus the official score, there's all this confusion, you hear it on the tape a couple of times, but what the octopus, he makes sure to establish that there is no ambiguity around how many points Wilt Chamberlain scored, because he does the thing that results in the one piece of evidence that I think every basketball fan has seen.
42:09 Speaker 05 Pollock looks around and says "Heff" to Jim Heffernan, the sportswriter of the Philadelphia Bulletin, "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 1-0-0. 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. Remember, this is a time when the NBA, even its statistics, in the way stats were kept,
42:51 Speaker 05 they didn't count blocked 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? I don't know. I don't know. 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.
43:26 Speaker 06 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini.
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45:04 Speaker 06 So this is where I should point out what might now feel obvious, which is that every person that Gary Pomerantz has mentioned to this point, every voice you've heard on this episode has passed away.
45:18 Pablo Torre? This will forever be a story about hidden boxes and lost recordings and secondary sources and truly tricky ambiguities, which is something that Wilt Chamberlain himself, who died in 1999, eventually learned to accept.
45:35 Speaker 01 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.
45:43 Pablo Torre? Or in the words of Gary Pomerantz.
45:46 Speaker 05 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. Wilt 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. And he came to like it.
46:07 Pablo Torre? 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. 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. Tom, give me the pronunciation of your name. I just want to make sure I'm getting it right.
46:35 Speaker 06 Mishery.
46:36 Pablo Torre? Mishery, okay, good, good, good, good. Didn't know where the accent or the stress was going to be, but Mishery makes total sense.
46:43 Speaker 06 My third grade teacher called me Mashery.
46:45 Pablo Torre? Mashery Moore, yes, a different nickname for a bruiser power forward.
46:52 Speaker 06 The one that pretty much stuck was the Mad 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 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. And then we came to the United States via the Red Cross to San Francisco, where my father was waiting for us. And that's kind of where I learned, San Francisco is where I learned how to play basketball.
47:27 Pablo Torre? And Tom Mishery really was good at basketball. The Warriors, who eventually relocated from Philly to the Bay Area, retired his number. And Tom was in the starting lineup, playing 40 minutes, right alongside his teammate, Wilt Chamberlain, in Hershey, Pennsylvania on the day in question. 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.
47:57 Speaker 06 On my mother's side, I'm related to the old story.
48:02 Pablo Torre? He still thinks about Hershey. All the time. In part because it was his very first season in the NBA.
48:12 Speaker 06 Talk about lucking out, huh? I got off the plane, I was pretty naive, different. I just walked into this fantastic moment.
48:21 Pablo Torre? 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.
48:31 Speaker 06 Probably, I was mesmerized. I mean, the one thing, I was a rookie. 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. A world deserves not to be questioned. My daughter called me up, she's a eighth grade middle school teacher and she provided me with the news that there, some of her kids, you know, think that Will's 100-point game was fake news, just because there was no video of it.
49:07 Pablo Torre? Yeah, look, the question of why people question it.
49:12 Speaker 06 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, we're in a really troubled times. They'll believe all sorts of, you know, conspiracy stuff.
49:36 Pablo Torre? Well, one of the things I wanted to fact check with you was a theory of a different kind, because one of the people that was interviewed by Gary Pomerantz in his book is a gentleman by the name of Daryl Imhoff. You remember Daryl in some?
49:50 Speaker 06 Sure, sure, I remember Daryl. I chased him in the stands and almost beat him to death.
49:56 Pablo Torre? Why, why did you do that, Tom?
50:00 Speaker 06 Because I hated Daryl.
50:02 Pablo Torre? 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.
50:11 Speaker 06 Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that chair. Yeah, it just sort of, just sort of appeared in my hand.
50:19 Pablo Torre? 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 Pomerantz that we discovered in the course of fact checking the story of that night. Because the allegation that Daryl makes, of course, is not that the 100 points did not happen. He was there. He, in fact, personally was responsible for quite a number of those points, trying to guard Wilt. The allegation that Daryl Imhoff made on tape was this, quote,
50:51 Pablo Torre? "The 100-point game was a farce."
50:55 Speaker 06 Well, I say sour grapes, kid. You know, you got smoked and, you know, fouled out and
51:04 Speaker 06 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. If you want to be a farce, maybe I should have punched Imhoff a little more. I don't think anybody could have guarded Wilt that night. I don't think Shaq, at his very best, guarded Wilt that night. Wilt was indomitable that night. Everything he threw up on him. It was a miracle game. And if Daryl thinks it was manufactured, it was manufactured
51:46 Speaker 06 by the Lord God himself. I've never heard that Daryl said that. That makes me angry. That makes me really angry.
51:55 Pablo Torre? He accused you guys of pouring it on, as in...
51:58 Speaker 06 Of course we poured. Absolutely reported on. Reported on because we were going to help our teammates score 100 points. There's nothing wrong with that. What I saw was a destruction.
52:12 Speaker 06 Unless my eyes were failing me, I saw destruction.
52:16 Pablo Torre? 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. Because yes, I have apparently go to the bad Manchurian at age 86 back into bloodlust. But also because the thing that courses inside of Tom, the thing in his blood, as mentioned before, is really poetry.
52:41 Speaker 06 I grew up listening to poetry from my mother and my father both.
52:47 Pablo Torre? 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, but also a muse.
52:59 Speaker 06 I wrote a poem last night.
53:02 Speaker 06 I don't know, I think because I was going to be on your Zoom and I was thinking about it.
53:08 Pablo Torre? Would you, would you mind reading some of the poem that you just wrote last night for me? Would you, is that, is that?
53:14 Speaker 06 Ah, I thought you'd never ask.
53:20 Pablo Torre? I was wondering when the mad Manchurian might read from his latest work.
53:27 Speaker 06 Okay, let me give it a, let me give it a try, okay?
53:31 Pablo Torre? Please.
53:33 Speaker 06 Rilt's Ghost, March 2nd, 2025. Can you imagine on this day when Rilt scored 100 points in a single game in Chocolate Town?
53:49 Speaker 06 His ghost striding onto the court of Chase Arena six decades later, followed by his teammates in that game, all gone.
54:04 Speaker 06 Harrison, Gola, Rogers, Adels, and the rest, except for me waiting my turn to be a ghost,
54:16 Speaker 06 cheering like crazy for the Dipper because he always belonged in the sky.
54:25 Pablo Torre? 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.
54:40 Speaker 06 You're very welcome.
54:50 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
54:56 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
55:15 Pablo Torre? Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer.
55:23 Speaker 02 With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover.
56:08 Speaker 02 Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.
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