Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  More than insatiable, though, Chamberlain’s need to prove his greatness was a connective tissue in his life. His good friend in Harlem, Cal Ramsey, who played briefly with the Knicks in 1959–60, had recognized this in the early Sixties by the way the Dipper cheated at cards (by sneaking glances at Ramsey’s hand) and by criticizing the way Ramsey hung up his pants in a hotel room once (“Damn,” Ramsey said, after the Dipper had demonstrated how to neatly fold the crease, “you’re the best pants hanger-upper in the world, too!”) and by the stories Chamberlain told about himself, nearly always positioning himself in the role of manly hero. Once, alone in the country, the Dipper said he was attacked by a mountain lion that had leaped from rocks. “I killed him with my bare hands,” the Dipper related, and as Ramsey raised a brow in doubt, Chamberlain pulled back his shirt to reveal several long scars on his shoulder, which Ramsey had to admit looked like claw marks.

  The Dipper’s death brought new attention to his signature performance, the hundred-point night against the New York Knicks on March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a performance that lives in the pantheon of sports history, both famous and famously obscure. Chamberlain’s line score that night—thirty-six field goals in sixty-three shots and twenty-eight of thirty-two free throws—seems too fantastic to be believed, a basketball equivalent of the steel-driving folk hero John Henry, a hammer in his hand, outpounding the steam drill.

  Four decades later, only four National Basketball Association teams averaged one hundred points a game.

  In the history of professional team sports in America, there is no statistical equal of the Dipper’s hundred-point game, no other individual accomplishment in a single game so remarkable and outsized. Such a declarative statement is possible because of the way basketball is played. Chamberlain that night handled the ball more than 125 times, including his sixty-three shots from the floor, thirty-two free throws, and twenty-five rebounds. Extended over forty-eight minutes of play, the Dipper’s performance became a marathon of excellence that not only broke the existing scoring record in regulation (which was, of course, his own record), it exceeded it by twenty-seven points—and that year only six other NBA players averaged 27 points a game. Baseball allows for moments of greatness, but not for sustained effort that builds mountainous numbers in a single game; certainly, no batter will hit ten home runs one night, no pitcher will have forty strikeouts. Football aficionados celebrated a Gale Sayers game in December of 1965 when, in a 61–20 Chicago Bears victory over San Francisco on a quagmire at Wrigley Field, he rushed for four touchdowns, caught a touchdown pass, and returned a punt eighty-five yards for another touchdown—six touchdowns on 336 all-purpose yards. But Sayers touched the ball only sixteen times that day, and as brilliant a performance as his was—Bears owner George Halas, who founded the pro game a half century before, called it the greatest individual effort he ever saw—it had none of the unimaginable aspects of Chamberlain’s. Indeed, Sayers’s all-purpose yardage total has been exceeded several times, and other players have scored six touchdowns in a game.

  In professional basketball, great scorers have come and gone—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Elgin Baylor, Julius Erving, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson—but in the forty-three years since the hundred-point game no player has approached the Dipper or, for that matter, even reached seventy-five points. Wilt Chamberlain’s hundred-point night stands like a statistical Everest over the landscape of American sports.

  It’s impossible to know in sports when or where the unforgettable moment will happen. That’s the beauty of it. It can be a place or a time. It can be a personality or a startling achievement.

  We remember Babe Ruth’s “called shot” in the 1932 World Series in Chicago because of the sheer force of the Babe’s personality—not to mention the bluster and arrogance of the act—and because, in the darkness of the Depression, America needed heroes. Never mind that we still can’t be certain if the Babe really pointed to the center field bleachers in Wrigley Field to show the hecklers in the Cubs dugout where he intended to hit his home run.

  We remember Jesse Owens’s performance in the 1936 Berlin Olympics because of its social and political significance. Owens, an African-American sprinter and jumper, won four gold medals to challenge the racial notions of the Aryan supremacist watching that day from a box seat—Adolf Hitler.

  Beyond its Chocolate Town charm, Chamberlain’s hundred-point game carried deeper import. Shot like a flare into the sky, it signaled that the pro game had changed in both the way it would be played and the men who would play it. It would be a game with a higher metabolism performed now at a greater speed, from in close and above the rim, by players who were no longer bound by gravity. The Dipper proved irrefutably that you could be a remarkable athlete even if you were seven feet tall or taller. Athletes had long been taught to be quiet and humble. Not the Dipper. He was fast becoming the most striking symbol of basketball’s new age of self-expression and egotism—a development slightly ahead of the overall popular culture—and his hundred-point game gave him an imprimatur to continue being, boldly and unashamedly, the Dipper.

  His hundred-point game was also a hyperbolic announcement of the ascendancy of the black superstar in professional basketball. A wave of black athletes had been achieving superstardom in other professional sports for more than a decade: Jackie Robinson had cleared the baseball path for Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, and others. Jim Brown was annihilating pro football’s top defenses, while the young heavyweight Cassius Clay, with his father proclaiming, “He’s the next Joe Louis!” set his sights, eight months hence, on Archie Moore and then later the big ugly bear, Sonny Liston. In 1958–59, the year before the Dipper had broken into the league, Elgin Baylor rated as the only black player among the NBA’s top ten scorers; now, in 1961–62, there were five scoring leaders who were black, and by the later Sixties there would be seven. The hundred-point game was a revolutionary act—if not by intention then by effect—that announced the NBA as a white man’s enclave no more. Against the Knickerbockers in Hershey, the Dipper symbolically blew to smithereens the NBA owners’ arbitrary quota that limited the number of black players, a tacit understanding that was systemic in America (the joke among NBA writers was, “You can start only one black player at home, two on the road, and three if you need to win”).

  At the time of his hundred-point game, Chamberlain was twenty-five years old, still in the process of becoming, though already at the height of his considerable athletic powers. His standing reach was nine feet, seven inches, his arm span eighty-nine inches. He’d run the 440 in forty-nine seconds, leaped nearly twenty-three feet in the broad jump, and put the shot more than fifty-three feet. He could clean and jerk 375 pounds and dead-lift 625 pounds. If athleticism may be defined exclusively as a combination of size, strength, speed, and agility, then the young Wilt Chamberlain, at seven-foot-one, 260 pounds, might have been the twentieth century’s greatest pure athlete. He would transform his sport, and its geometry, more than anyone ever did: He led the movement that took a horizontal game and made it vertical.

  Already, he was a celebrated individualist, a bachelor with enormous cravings, an intergalactic nickname, and all the trappings of new money. He had a fancy car, a racehorse (Spooky Cadet), apartments on both coasts, and a famous Harlem nightclub—where Malcolm X had served as a teenaged waiter—that now bore the name Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise. The Warriors’ owner, Eddie Gottlieb, worked hard to keep Chamberlain happy. As part of their agreement, Gotty rented the Dipper a gorgeous three-bedroom apartment at the Hopkinson House, a prestigious new high-rise. It overlooked Independence Hall, where the Founding Fathers ratified America’s defining documents, and was near the nation’s first Executive Mansion where George and Martha Washington lived during the 1790s (with eight Negro slaves). There, the Dipper roomed with Vince Miller, whom he had known since third grade, his deepest and most enduring boyhood friendship. Miller was his teammate at Overbrook High and even before a
t Shoemaker Junior High where they wore red-white-and-blue socks pulled up nearly to the knees. That’s when he began using rubber bands to keep them in place. The Dipper wore spare rubber bands on his wrists throughout his NBA career to remind him of those early friendships, the ones that preceded the arrival of the groupies and sycophants.

  In 1962, only its sixteenth season, the NBA struggled to compete with the more established college game, which had troubles of its own. Basketball had been damaged by the betting and point-shaving scandals in the colleges during the early Fifties; now, a decade later, a new college gambling scandal struck, twice the size of the first, involving at least fifty players from twenty-seven schools in nearly two dozen states. The NBA’s failure to capture the American imagination showed in sparse crowds and small television ratings. The Warriors even played one game that season against the expansion Chicago Packers in a high school gymnasium in Indiana. NBA games could be physical, even violent. Fights broke out on the court. Penny-ante gamblers still worked the crowd in some NBA arenas. With only one team west of St. Louis, the NBA hardly seemed national. When the Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960 they found themselves virtual foreigners in a Pacific Coast League baseball town. The team dispatched players in sound trucks to Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and south central Los Angeles to give clinics and read from scripts: “Hello, I’m Tommy Hawkins of the Los Angeles Lakers. We’re going to be at the Sports Arena for the next ten days. First up: the New York Knicks on Friday. Please come out to see us.” The Lakers’ attendance wasn’t helped when the U.S. Army called for Private Elgin Baylor. Stationed in Fort Lewis in Washington, Baylor missed nearly half the 1961–62 season, doing his best to obtain passes to play games on weekends. The NBA, in its rudimentary development and reach, was in 1962 roughly the equal of baseball at the dawn of the live-ball era in the early 1920s, an old era fading and a new one rising with exciting possibilities.

  Occasionally NBA games were played in outlying towns like Hershey in an attempt to attract new fans. The Knicks and Warriors rosters on March 2 were a snapshot of American manhood at midcentury, filled with first-generation Americans carrying their fathers’ Old World names (Meschery, Larese, Radovich) and former U.S. Marines (Arizin, Guerin, Green). Their childhoods had been shaped by the Depression and World War II when their fathers worked as cops, for the railroads, in coal mines, and as common laborers. The father of one of the Dipper’s teammates in Hershey fought with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks after the October 1917 revolution.

  Chamberlain’s hundred-point game was played in a drafty old gym in Pennsylvania Dutch country, up the street from Milton Hershey’s famous chocolate factory, spreading its sweet fumes.

  No television cameras were there.

  Neither was the New York press.

  Only two photographers showed up; one left in the first quarter, the other took just a few pictures.

  Only 4,124 people attended, leaving nearly 4,000 seats empty. Chamberlain’s hundred-point game played out under the media radar and lives largely in the memory of those who played in it or watched it.

  On the bus ride home through the Amish lands late that night, Chamberlain’s teammates spotted a farmer driving his horse-drawn buggy by a lantern’s light. Chamberlain never saw that. He was in a new Cadillac, no bus for him, cruising back to his nightclub in Harlem. Showered and tired but exhilarated from his night’s work, he still had time to celebrate. Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise didn’t turn off its lantern lights until four in the morning.

  Wilt Chamberlain would be cremated, per his family’s wishes. For the memorial service in Los Angeles, Sy Goldberg sought a way to bring the Dipper and his memory into the church, to feel his presence. He would choose from among dozens of pictures of Chamberlain. He wanted the images to be symbolic of a full and memorable life—Wilt Chamberlain as he was. Goldberg canvassed his file of eight-by-ten glossies and finally selected two. He would blow them up to poster size, three feet by four feet, and place them on easels on the church dais, large enough for mourners in the back row to see. The first was of Chamberlain in his purple-and-gold Los Angeles Lakers uniform, circa 1972. Staring at the second, Goldberg smiled. The image satisfied him. The pinnacle of Wilt’s career, he thought. The way he ought to be remembered. It showed a younger Chamberlain, sitting in a locker room, smiling and sweat-soaked, holding a piece of paper that read “100.” It was taken in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on March 2, 1962.

  PART ONE

  Building Toward 100

  MARCH 1962

  CHAPTER 1

  The Dipper in Harlem

  THERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE DIPPER with James Baldwin on a Harlem street corner, the big man in a slim suit and snap-brim fedora, tilting his frame toward the writer, seemingly half his size. If not classically handsome, Chamberlain’s face was arresting: a long, narrow brow over almond eyes lit by youth and restless ambition, high cheekbones, and a cool jazzman’s trimmed mustache. Then, when he really wanted something (or someone), there came a starry smile and his deep baritone transformed to the smooth, soft patter of the FM radio deejay. It was Baldwin who in 1961, back in America after years of self-imposed exile in Europe, wrote words that defined his life’s direction, words that Chamberlain may have heard. Baldwin wrote, “I had said that I was going to be a writer, God, Satan, and Mississippi notwithstanding, and that color did not matter, and that I was going to be free. And, here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.”

  Chamberlain, too, would create himself, would refuse to be defined by size or color or his sport. In 1962, the Dipper drove a white Cadillac convertible, but only until he could take delivery of a nobleman’s car, a Bentley, custom-made in England at a cost of nearly $30,000 (including tax and shipping), roughly six times the average yearly salary for an American worker. Wealthy after his one season with the Globetrotters and three with the Warriors, he used his big money as a tool of self-creation. After buying his parents a house in west Philadelphia, he lavished upon himself twenty fine suits, thirteen pairs of stylish shoes, the Cadillac, and a chic, pricey, Oriental-motif apartment on Central Park West. It was a far cry from 401 Salford Street, where Chamberlain had been raised. With nine children, William and Olivia Chamberlain, a handyman and a domestic, at times had two, three, or four kids in each bedroom; at five-thirty each morning they felt the trolleys rumble past their rented row house in ethnic, working-class west Philly.

  The young Dipper came of age noticing little discrimination, though once, when he was about four, on a bus in Virginia bound for Philadelphia, his mother wouldn’t allow him to sit near the front. “No, mama, this seat right here is open,” the young Dipper protested, even as she tried to steer him toward the rear of the segregated bus. It prompted the white bus driver to intervene, “No, sonny, you go back there with your mother like a good little boy,” and he did, though uncertain as to why.

  So valuable was Chamberlain’s name now, so incandescent his persona, that a historic Harlem nightclub, Smalls Paradise, let him buy in as part-owner and put his name first on the marquee in exchange for his presence. He loved Harlem, the neon, the ladies, James Brown, Etta James, Redd Foxx, a lush life with jazz the soundtrack. And when Wilton Norman Chamberlain moved through Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise, there attached to him an aura suggesting he owned not only this place, but all of Harlem, perhaps all of New York. His presence in the club was signaled by the white Cadillac parked out front by one of the nightclub boys on the corner of 135th Street, while Chamberlain strode around the club’s dark interior greeting his guests, draping an arm around Tom “Satch” Sanders of the Boston Celtics, squeezing a shoulder, “Good to see you, Satch. Sit down, relax, and enjoy yourself.” Reminiscing years later, the Dipper would recall this as the greatest time in his life.

  At Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise, the bandleader King Curtis worked deep into the night, and the denizens turned up wearing sharkskin suits and memorable monikers: Big Pete, Little Pete, an intellectual straight shooter
known as Knowledge, and of course, Charlie Polk, Wilt’s right-hand man, always at his side, Robin to his Batman. His name, called out so often, rolled off the Dipper’s tongue: Chollypolk. Small and thin as straw, Polk was, as one Harlem nightclub regular would say, “one of those types of guys who if he latched on to you, he didn’t let go.” Whatever the Dipper wanted—his shirts picked up at the cleaners, his friend’s wife picked up at the bus stop and taken shopping—Chollypolk got it done. When a beautiful woman at Smalls caught the Dipper’s eye, Chollypolk became his emissary, quietly letting the woman know of his boss’s interest and gauging her availability. He loved being on stage at the club, and though he couldn’t sing or dance and he stuttered slightly, he was a riotous emcee. If you put a microphone in his hand, Chollypolk might never let go of it, and Redd Foxx would sit beside the stage, waiting, waiting to begin his gig.

  Foxx, a bawdy redheaded comic, was a Harlem favorite. “Lincoln got his head on all the pennies. Roosevelt got his head on all the dimes,” Foxx would say. “I just want to get my hands on some.” In his first New York nightclub date in a decade, Foxx, a rising national star (to all but the censors), appeared at Smalls Paradise in December 1961. In smoky clubs, perspiring beneath the spotlight, Foxx would deliver his raunchy routines, unafraid of the social taboos of sex and race. In one, using his trademark off-color double entendres, he told of how everyone in his hometown had bought a jackass. “Even the little bitty kids, they had a ass of their own,” Foxx would say. “Preacher’s wife had the biggest ass in town. I know because I rode her big ass all the time.” And, Foxx said, her husband, the preacher, “didn’t have such a bad ass himself,” though when a fire broke out in the church’s back pew, “Reverend took a long running jump out the window to land on his ass. But somebody had stolen Ol’ Reverend’s ass and he wasn’t there. Reverend fell down into a deep hole in the ground and that’s where they found him.” Foxx gave a comic’s pause. “Just goes to show you, don’t it? Some folks don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.”