Wilt Chamberlain's 100-Point Game: Century Mark Glory

On March second, nineteen sixty two, was the most mythological game in NBA history. Did it happen? Did it not? Who knows? What is the story behind it? And that's what we're gonna get to today talking about Wilt Chamberlain's one hundred point game today on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Rees, your guide to a rapid deep dive into sports history every day. To most of us, Wilt Chamberlain is this mythological figure, someone we didn't even see play, and honestly, there's not a whole lot of highlights of him as well. He retired in nineteen seventy three as TV was becoming more of a boom in the basketball world, and most of us weren't even alive yet, so to have seen him play was rare, and to see his one hundred point game was even more rare. So first, let's go over Wilt Chamberlain. Now, I could do a whole episode and I probably will do a whole episode just about who he was and all the things he did in his career, because there's a lot, and I'm not gonna go through every little thing. I'm just gonna go through some big heavy point some big points, because ken, I gotta understand how did wil get to this point good in track and field at the size of six ' eleven, he still grew a few more inches to be his reported seven to one height when he played in the NBA, but at that time his high jump was six feet six inches. He ran the four hundred and forty yard dash with forty nine seconds, and he shot put fifty three feet in long jump twenty two feet. He was just an athletic marvel at his size. There's no real comparison. The closest comparison we can get to being as athletic as he was today would be Lebron James, and he was about five inches taller than Lebron, So he not only was he big and physically fit, he was just dominated. It's reported that he could bench press over five hundred pounds ten times, So the main thing was that he was an athletic freak. And in high school he averaged over thirty seven points a game, setting the Philadelphia high school scoring record, so that grew the attention and led him to Kansas University. He debuted with a bang, setting a record for a college player's first game with fifty two points and thirty one rebounds. He entered college dominating, but he didn't start his professional career in the NBA. No, he went to the Harlem Globetrotters because he left college early, as he had to wait four years to enter the NBA, So he played a year with the Harlem Glowtrotters and actually took a pay cut to join the NBA, but he was able to join his hometown team in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Warriors. He took the NBA world by storm, leading the league in rebounds in points his first two seasons and continued that trend for multiple years. But in nineteen sixty one was when he really took off, averaging over fifty points a game, a record that still holds to this day and this year. Before his one hundred point game, he had already set the record for the most points in the game at seventy eight. But what made this game different? What made it have the chance on March second, nineteen sixty one to score a hundred points, Well, it required a lot of things to happen. One, the New York Knicks were a terrible team at the time. They were in last place and didn't have a whole lot of quality players. And then their starting center Phil Jordan had the flu, although many of his teammates think that he actually was just hung over and couldn't play. That put Darryl Imhoff in to start. Now, he was young and it would eventually make one All Star Game, so he was a quality NBA player, but he was still young trying to learn the position, and he would eventually fall out after only twenty minutes, So they had to turn to the third string sinner, Cleveland Bunker, a six ' nine rookie from Jackson State who was a six round pick that year, who just was undersized and could not handle Wilt Chamberlain. This made easy work Will to score at will, and when he started to rack up points, that's when his team realized, well, he has a shot to go for one hundred, as they had already known him to go for seventy multiple times. So the team got together and decided they were going to start fouling more and more to stop the clock to actually go for one hundred points. These fouls actually made it possible for him to get to that, but with the clock stopping in them getting the ball back over and over. It allowed more and more chances for him to score, but that didn't stop the other team from fouling him. This actually was hopeful in this game, as it wasn't in other games. Normally, his free throw percentage was about fifty one percent, so he was a terrible free throw shooter. But this one game he shot twenty eight thirty two. Maybe it was just his focus or he just got lucky, but this was the main factor in him scoring one hundred points. If he would have shot his average, he would have been somewhere in the eighties, still would have been the record all time, but wouldn't been that one hundred number. That's so clean and crisp, that made it mythological. And that night from the field he shot thirty six for sixty three, shooting over fifty percent from the field. You add that up and you get the one hundred. Now, what makes this game so mythological that we often just pass over it, don't even think about it. Sometimes we just mentioned it in passing Well, it's mainly because it wasn't televised at this time. Television was still new in the sports world, but it was also because they were playing it on a neutral site in Hersty, Pennsylvania. They didn't have their regular crew there and the radio broadcast wasn't recorded as normal. There's a few snippets I've gotten recorded that people have been able to find throughout the years, But it wasn't like they were all prepared for this. You didn't know that was going to happen, and it was just a one off and normally we wouldn't have cared except for a legendary thing happened that very night, another thing that made it mythological. And there's only about four thousand people in attendance, meaning there was just almost no one there to talk about it. He had the journalist in that famous photo with the paper that said one hundred. Maybe that's all we need. My question is do we think Wilt would have been successful in today's basketball world. I like to think he would have, as he was very athletic, but I don't think he would add a chance at hitting one hundred in today's game. Thank you for listening to today's Daily Sports History. I want to thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for listening today. I hope you enjoyed this. If you liked it, please follow and subscribe wherever you're listening. We'd love to see that are to be growing, and it makes me very excited and proud that you guys are enjoying this as well. And come back tomorrow for more Daily Sports history