Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Wilt Chamberlain and the Conspiracy Factory: We Unearthed the True Story of the 100-Point Game About this episode It is the greatest individual performance in basketball history: Sixty-three years ago this weekend, a larger-than-life superhero conjured the supernatural. Why do so many people — including a player on the court — now think it was fake news? Our quest for irrefutable proof (and poetry) unpacks boxes that you won't find in the Hall of Fame: The recordings from author Gary Pomerantz, who spoke to 56 people in attendance and on the court. The tapes, which we unearthed from a rare-book library, a basement closet and a vault in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Plus: the last Warrior left standing to check the facts — and shake a fist at the naysayers.
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2:58 Pablo Torre? I am Pablo Torre. Today's episode is brought to you by DraftKings. DraftKings, the crown is yours. And today, we're going to find out what this sound is.
3:07 Speaker 02 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.
3:15 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
3:18 Speaker 03 You're listening to DraftKings Network.
3:33 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?
3:44 Speaker 04 My intuitive reaction was, here we go again. My second reaction was something approximating an eye roll. You know, it's a conspiratorial time.
3:57 Speaker 05 Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas.
4:07 Speaker 04 You go back to the 1960s, and there were still a lot of questions about the Kennedy assassination.
4:20 Speaker 04 Pardon, diet athletes are being tested.
4:24 Speaker 04 Did Neil Armstrong really touch the moon? Or was he in a studio somewhere 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.
4:51 Pablo Torre? Do we, though? Are we sure?
4:53 Speaker 04 We're pretty sure.
4:53 Pablo Torre? About that?
4:54 Speaker 04 We're pretty sure Lincoln was at Gettysburg. Yeah. And so, 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.
5:22 Pablo Torre? Do you remember the first time you heard somebody casting aspersions on the subject that you have literally written the book about?
5:30 Speaker 04 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. 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.
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10:06 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.
10:28 Speaker 05 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, whether it actually happens. No, we're not. Pac-Man is not, but I did not know that there was no documented footage of this until...
10:44 Speaker 04 Just now. So as soon as that happens, boom, my brain goes, whoa. The people always say they don't know if it's true or if it's false. Did Wilt actually score 100 points?
10:57 Speaker 05 Like even the scorer's table people like, did they all die like? Yeah, like that's why I'm curious who's on the Knicks. Is anyone still? 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. 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.
11:31 Pablo Torre? And on and on it goes across Reddit and Tik Tok 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.
11:44 Speaker 05 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 to close 100 point game.
12:03 Pablo Torre? And then we got another one.
12:06 Speaker 05 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. 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. 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.
12:50 Speaker 05 I need your help.
12:52 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.
13:22 Speaker 04 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.
14:06 Speaker 04 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.
14:23 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?
14:36 Speaker 04 By the river, down by the river.
14:46 Speaker 04 You know, he wasn't Frankie Valli. He wasn't very good, but they did cut a record of it.
15:03 Speaker 04 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.
15:17 Pablo Torre? That's the number that people are most, you know, had been most obsessed with. That statistic, 20,000.
15:25 Speaker 02 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? Well. And do you still receive? Well, you know, I still, I still receive.
15:40 Pablo Torre? What's the fact checking on that like?
15:41 Speaker 04 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?"
16:03 Speaker 02 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.
16:26 Pablo Torre? You're getting people thinking.
16:28 Speaker 02 Not only that, I'm teaching them mathematics, which is really the whole, the whole story here. You understand?
16:34 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.
16:40 Speaker 02 That's right.
16:43 Speaker 04 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 and the starting lineup, and then would introduce each fan.
17:24 Speaker 04 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.
17:55 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 2, 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,
18:39 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.
18:55 Speaker 04 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.
19:15 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.
19:38 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...
19:51 Speaker 05 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. 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 won.
20:19 Speaker 05 This is where I have the tape somewhere.
20:21 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.
20:34 Speaker 05 One of these is the tape, just don't know which one.
20:38 Speaker 05 Oh, that's a Floyd Patterson-Sunny Liston fight.
20:43 Speaker 05 Ah, this is the one.
20:46 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.
21:06 Speaker 03 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.
21:29 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.
22:05 Speaker 03 So I did some searching in our collections, and I was very excited to find this box right here. 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 1/4-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.
22:40 Pablo Torre? 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. 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.
23:14 Speaker 04 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.
23:45 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.
24:10 Speaker 05 WCAU, WCAU FM in Philadelphia. The time is 3:30. 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.
24:25 Speaker 04 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.
24:35 Speaker 05 Rogers, Rogers takes the jump shot. It's no good. Chamberlain with a rebound. Tucks it in.
24:42 Speaker 04 And he just scored 28 points in the third quarter. And the Knicks are just going through the motions. They're dead to 10, 15, 20-point lead the Warriors have.
24:55 Speaker 05 Inside to Adels, to Chamberlain. He's got it.
25:00 Speaker 05 133 to 114, and the fellas on the Warriors bench are jumping for joy for him. Every time he scores, they'll jump up in a body.
25:11 Speaker 04 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.
25:23 Speaker 05 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.
25:33 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, uh, talk to Joe Rucklick, um, is a time machine inside of a time machine.
26:03 Speaker 04 Well, Joe was the Kennedy liberal from Northwestern.
26:06 Speaker 05 When I got there as their first draft choice, uh, that season, uh, out of Northwestern, behind Wilt. Wilt was technically first.
26:16 Speaker 04 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, um, 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, had recreated it.
26:45 Speaker 05 Right. I don't think Campbell was there, but you know what? That's.
26:48 Speaker 06 So what are you saying? If I get a tape, what are you saying about the tape?
26:51 Speaker 05 I think you get the last few minutes.
26:52 Speaker 06 That's all. I think, I think it's only the last quarter.
26:55 Speaker 05 Uh, yeah, less than that. I've got it.
26:59 Speaker 06 You do?
26:59 Speaker 05 I think it's fake. But anyway, yeah.
27:02 Speaker 06 Real stuff? Why do you think it's fake?
27:03 Pablo Torre? 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.
27:12 Speaker 05 If it's a fake, it illustrates the nonsense that, that, that the NBA, uh, perpetuates about, about those days. It was a Bush league. I mean, it was really Bush.
27:28 Speaker 04 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.
27:37 Speaker 02 It was annoying because instead of doing a home game at home, we had to go to Hershey. Players weren't happy either.
27:43 Speaker 04 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.
27:50 Speaker 02 Wilt, in order to come to that game, took a train. I remember him being there early.
27:54 Speaker 04 But, um, he remembered vividly the game and the details.
27:59 Speaker 02 Everything was such constant and ease. It was effortless. They broke the ball up and he'd go out and get it and dunk it. They knew something unnatural was gonna happen here.
28:15 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.
28:41 Speaker 04 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, etc. 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.
29:16 Pablo Torre? But Wilt Chamberlain, as he later explained in an interview with Bob Costas, was keeping score.
29:22 Speaker 02 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. You made 28 of 32 from the foul line that night, which is good for anybody and staggering for you. I appreciate that. Right, staggering, staggering for me, you understand? But I was even better than that the first half, I was missing nothing. I was 100%, 100% remember, you understand? So I said, hey, you know, things are going pretty good. And I had, I think, like 40, 41 points at halftime, and I was shooting well.
29:52 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 50. 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.
30:28 Speaker 04 This is an interview with Darryl Imhoff, I M H O F F, in Eugene, Oregon, on July 8th, 2003. By the way, I double taped in case one tape failed. Okay. Isn't this interesting? Yeah, so. Gosh. Darryl was a second-year player, 6'10", left-handed, and, you know, he was primarily a defender, at times a rough defender. He would become known as "The Axe" for axing, you know, shooters' arms.
31:02 Speaker 05 You know, Wilt was an attraction and I was gonna have to spend the next, that night in his armpit, so I wasn't looking forward to that.
31:14 Speaker 04 And one of the things that was so interesting, he was then working in Eugene, Oregon, at the 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 was 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 would position himself behind Wilt when Wilt's down on the offensive left
31:59 Speaker 04 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, the collapsed leg. He would put his foot inside of Wilt's left foot to keep him from turning in. Darryl 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.
32:23 Speaker 04 The tallest, next tallest player the Knicks had was six foot eight rookie Cleveland Buckner.
32:33 Speaker 04 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, the 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. He has 79 points, breaking his 78 points scored in a three overtime game earlier that season.
33:15 Speaker 04 And while he's announcing that, Wilt makes shooting underhanded, two more free throws to go to 80 and 81.
33:24 Speaker 05 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 didn't even listen to it. He just made two straight fouls. He now has 81 points.
33:42 Pablo Torre? Granny's style.
33:43 Speaker 04 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.
33:53 Pablo Torre? What did Daryl say to you particularly, Gary, if you recall, in your interview with him about the refs?
33:59 Speaker 04 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.
34:07 Speaker 05 And he started backing in and I held my position and Willie Smith called me for a foul. And I said, Willie, 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 go home? I mean, you did say that, you said. I said that, why don't you give him 100 points while I go home? And he did. Going in for the layup, up with the shot, no good. Chamberlain rebounds, good. Chamberlain rebounds and scores and he's fouled.
34:33 Speaker 02 One forty-five to one twenty-six. Darrell Imhoff fouled him. He has eighty-three.
34:39 Speaker 04 And the game took on, you know, Darrell would call it a farce.
34:43 Speaker 05 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 sixty points. Elgin Baylor scored sixty points against us in the Garden. I mean, that was a legitimate great performance. Mm-hmm. Uh, Jerry West had sixty 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 hundred-point
35:23 Speaker 05 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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39:02 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."
39:37 Speaker 04 With 7 and 1/2 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. The Warriors start committing fouls of the Knicks to get the ball back quicker, to get the ball to Wilt.
40:01 Speaker 02 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 stall is to come out and foul the backcourt men themselves.
40:15 Speaker 04 If somebody walked into the arena and they see the Warriors fouling and the Knicks stalling, they're gonna think the Knicks are ahead by 20, not the Warriors. That's where it breaks down.
40:26 Speaker 02 Knowles is fouled by Joe Reckless. They almost came to blows. New York, of course, you can understand the Knickerbockers feeling, a little upset having rubbed in a little bit like this with a guy on a scoring ramp, right?
40:41 Speaker 04 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.
40:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, you've got a situation where you're feeding somebody intentionally, make something happen, but that's what was going on. I mean, it wasn't in the flow of the game. Now, the first, you know, the first half, if you will, or first three quarters, it was certainly in the flow of the game. But when they started doing some things intentionally to foul...
41:10 Pablo Torre? Getting the ball and left him in the game when the game was already over immediately. Obviously, they were out to prove something, and so they did. 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.
41:28 Speaker 02 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. Full history you're sitting in on tonight.
41:45 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?
41:59 Speaker 04 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.
42:39 Speaker 02 Larisi with the ball down the right side, passes to Chamberlain. He's open. He shoots. He scores. 167 to 145. He has 98.
42:55 Pablo Torre? What was the call? What was the the sequence of events to get to the number?
43:01 Speaker 04 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.
43:20 Speaker 04 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.
43:45 Speaker 02 Rogers throws long to Chamberlain. He's got it. He's trying to get up. He shoots. No good. The rebound Luckinbill.
43:53 Speaker 04 And Ted Luckinbill, a rookie, comes in, gets the rebound. Gets it to Wilt again.
43:58 Speaker 02 Back to Chamberlain. He shoots. Up. No good. In and out.
44:04 Speaker 04 He misses. Luckinbill again.
44:06 Speaker 02 Rebound Luckinbill. Back to Luckwicke. Into Chamberlain. He made it! He made it! He made it! A tip for Joe. He made it! The fans are all over the floor. They stop the game. People are running down on the court. 100 points! For Howard Chamberlain. They stop the game. People are shouting, pounding him, banging him. The Warriors players are all over him. Fans are coming out of the stands. 46 seconds left. The most amazing scoring performance of all of town. 100 points! For the Big Dipper.
44:47 Speaker 04 In 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.
45:35 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.
46:05 Speaker 04 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.
46:47 Speaker 04 That's a lot of work. 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.
47:07 Speaker 02 Fisher breaks down for an easy layup, but he's got it. 169 to 150.
47:15 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I was gonna mention this. Yeah.
47:17 Speaker 04 And the Knicks, now we look back on it and see the Knicks had 147. 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. Oh yeah, the Knicks. Well, it doesn't matter what the Knicks got. You know, all that matters is what Will got.
47:36 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, 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.
48:01 Speaker 04 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, 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,
48:43 Speaker 04 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.
48:58 Speaker 04 I don't know. But, 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.
49:25 Pablo Torre? 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. 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.
49:56 Speaker 02 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.
50:04 Pablo Torre? Or in the words of Gary Pomerantz.
50:07 Speaker 04 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.
50:28 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.
50:57 Speaker 05 Mishery.
50:58 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.
51:04 Speaker 05 My third grade teacher called me Mashery.
51:07 Pablo Torre? Mashery Amore, yes, a different nickname for a bruiser power forward.
51:14 Speaker 05 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. Because I learned how to play basketball.
51:48 Pablo Torre? And Tom Isheri 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.
52:18 Speaker 05 On my mother's side, I'm related to the old story.
52:23 Pablo Torre? He still thinks about Hershey. All the time. In part because it was his very first season in the NBA.
52:33 Speaker 05 Talk about lucking out, huh? I got off the plane, I was pretty naive, different. I just walked into this fantastic moment.
52:42 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.
52:52 Speaker 05 Well, 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. 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 those 100-point game was fake news, just because there was no video of it.
53:28 Pablo Torre? Yeah, look, the question of why people question it.
53:32 Speaker 05 For me, that's a very simple answer. I think we have a whole society that has, anybody can say anything they want. No, and there's no fact checks, and nobody believes in fact checks. Uh, nobody believes in honesty. I mean, it's, no, we're in a really troubled times. They'll believe all sorts of, you know, conspiracy stuff.
53:57 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?
54:10 Speaker 05 Sure, sure, I remember Daryl. I chased him in the stands and almost beat him to death.
54:17 Pablo Torre? Why, why did you do that, Tom?
54:21 Speaker 05 Because I hated Daryl.
54:23 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.
54:32 Speaker 05 Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that chair. Yeah, it just sort of, just sort of appeared in my head.
54:40 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,
55:11 Pablo Torre? "The 100-point game was a farce."
55:16 Speaker 05 Well, I say sour grapes, kid. You know, you got smoked and, you know, fouled out and 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, could have guarded Wilt that night. Wilt was indomitable that night. Everything
55:56 Speaker 05 he threw up on him, it was a miracle game. And if Daryl thinks it was manufactured, it was manufactured by the Lord God himself.
56:10 Speaker 05 I've never heard that Daryl said that. That makes me angry. That makes me really angry.
56:16 Pablo Torre? He accused you guys of pouring it on, as in...
56:19 Speaker 05 Of course we poured. Absolutely we poured it on. We poured it on because we were gonna help our teammates score 100 points. There's nothing wrong with that. What I saw was a destruction.
56:33 Speaker 05 Unless my eyes were failing me, I saw destruction.
56:37 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.
57:01 Speaker 05 I grew up listening to poetry from my mother and my father both.
57:08 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,
57:17 Pablo Torre? but also a muse.
57:19 Speaker 05 I wrote a poem last night.
57:23 Speaker 05 I don't know, I think because I was going to be on your Zoom and I was thinking about it.
57:29 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...
57:35 Speaker 05 Ah, I thought you'd never ask.
57:40 Pablo Torre? I was wondering when the mad Manchurian might read from his latest work.
57:48 Speaker 05 Okay, let me give it a try, okay?
57:51 Pablo Torre? Please.
57:54 Speaker 05 Rilt's ghost, March 2nd, 2025. Can you imagine on this day, when Rilt scored 100 points in a single game in Chocolate Town? His ghost striding onto the court of Chase Arena, six decades later? Followed by his teammates in that game, all gone.
58:25 Speaker 05 Harrison, Gola, Rogers, Adels and the rest. Except for me, waiting my turn to be a ghost. Cheering like crazy for the Dipper. Because he always belonged in the sky.
58:46 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.
59:01 Speaker 05 You're very welcome.
59:11 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.
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