At Martini’s bar in Hershey, the NFL players congregated after the game for beer earned from their work in the prelim. Everyone in the place knew Sonny Jurgensen. The all-pro quarterback talked with the Colts’ Gino Marchetti, Bill Pellington, and others about the Dipper, marveling over the accomplishment of scoring one hundred points. Marchetti couldn’t get one thought out of his head: A hundred points yes, but, God, Chamberlain would make a terrific football player! The fan Jim Hayney, wearing his fine suit, showed up at Martini’s, too, with his two “clients”—the milkman and the bartender from Harrisburg. They also toasted Wilt Chamberlain.
At Castiglia’s, an Italian restaurant in Harrisburg, a few blocks from the Hotel Penn Harris, a sixteen-year-old fan, Eliot Goldstein, dined after the game with a William Penn High School classmate and his classmate’s father. They, too, talked about the Dipper’s hundred and their great luck in having seen it happen. Goldstein remarked about the boy he saw run onto the court and steal the basketball—so bold! Now, at Castiglia’s, Goldstein noticed a familiar man enter the room and sit at a nearby table. Goldstein asked his classmate quietly, “Isn’t that the guy on the Knicks, Richie Guerin?” It was. The two teens summoned the courage to approach Guerin’s table. As Guerin signed autographs for them, Goldstein blurted, “Wasn’t that amazing and unbelievable what happened tonight?” Goldstein got the impression that Guerin didn’t want to talk about it. He only heard Guerin make a passing remark that he’d scored thirty-nine points but no one would ever know it.
It was as if Wilt Chamberlain and Willie Naulls were on the same side now, alone, in the midnight darkness, driving through the open spaces of Pennsylvania, heading for the New Jersey Turnpike. Their car was a beauty, a new Cadillac that belonged to attorney Ike Richman, Gotty’s friend, who had fast become the Dipper’s friend after negotiating his first NBA contract covertly on the streets of Philadelphia three years earlier. Now Richman was the Dipper’s business manager of sorts, suggesting deals and investments, looking out for his finances. Naulls knew that Wilt loved cars and that what most mattered was not how plush or streamlined a car was, but how fast it could be driven. As the Dipper talked now, casually moving his hand in wide arcs for emphasis, Naulls glanced at the speedometer. It raced past eighty-five toward ninety. Naulls felt the engine’s exhilarating thrum beneath them.
They were headed to Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise in Harlem where there would no doubt be revelry and celebration about the hundred-point game. Naulls was glad to get out of Pennsylvania, away from the embarrassment of the game. Naulls told the Dipper that the Knicks would have beaten the Warriors’ butts if not for a few teammates becoming more preoccupied with slowing Chamberlain than with winning the game. The Dipper smiled and took it in. In truth, Naulls was happy for him. He liked and admired Chamberlain, especially the way he seemed so totally in command, not only on the court but also in life. Naulls had heard that the Dipper demanded half the gross from any summer league game in which he played; the word on the streets was that the Dipper counted receipts at halftime with the promoter, then put his percentage in the trunk of his car, which was, naturally, guarded. Naulls seized the moment now and asked Chamberlain about investments and how he handled contract negotiations. Chamberlain talked freely about tax shelters and real estate holdings that Ike Richman had helped him put together; his racehorse, Spooky Cadet (which rarely won); the Bentley being custom-made in England; and the nightclub to which they were headed.
Their conversation returned, invariably, to the hundred-point game, the back and forth nature of it, the way fouls had been committed intentionally at the end. They talked about the NBA. So many talented African-American players—including more than a few of their friends—had been left behind, losing their primes to games in the ghettos. Naulls believed a truly open competition would seek its highest level of expression: Only the best would play. The NBA, Naulls believed, was strangling itself with a racial quota, constricting the talent flow. There was humiliation in it for so many black players. Of course, Wilt Chamberlain had just dished out his own humiliation to the Knicks, the NBA, and to a system that would diminish him.
The Dipper and Naulls also talked about the nicknames they loathed—Wilt the Stilt and Willie the Whale—and the way sportswriters applied to black athletes nicknames or descriptions that condescended and lacked sensitivity. The hour grew late, past 1:00 A.M. Naulls grew tired. He really didn’t need to hear the hundred-point huzzahs in Harlem. The Dipper drove him home to Montclair, New Jersey, and turned off the engine in front of Naulls’s place. There they talked a bit longer. Chamberlain spoke about how sports-writers harped on him for taking too many shots and for failing to win a championship in his first two seasons. This criticism always found its way back, he said, to Bill Russell. Sportswriters had overdrawn and oversimplified the comparison—the great player (Chamberlain) versus the player who makes his team great (Russell). He was tired of hearing it. In the darkness, Chamberlain vowed to Naulls that he would win his NBA championships but said that when he retired he would be known only for his individualism, for his scoring and rebounding. He would be remembered for nights such as this. At last Chamberlain said his goodbye. In Harlem, a nightclub crowd awaited him.
In the darkness of Friday night, Kerry Ryman threw open the front door at 50 West Chocolate Avenue. His mother reclined on the living room couch, waiting for him. She noticed that he was short of breath, excited. “I just got a basketball, mom,” he said. His chest heaved. “Wilt Chamberlain just scored a hundred points over at the arena.” He didn’t say how he got the ball. He did not mention his dash through the amusement park or the constables giving chase. Lucille Ryman eyed him. “You can’t keep it,” she said. “You’ve got to give it back.” Her son nodded and said, “All right.” He went upstairs, put the basketball in his closet, and listened for the constables, but their knock at the front door never came. Reuel Ryman returned from the 210 Club in Harrisburg several hours later. His wife told him about the basketball. They agreed it had to be returned. Besides, if Kerry had stolen it, they might have to pay a fine. In a company town, the neighbors would talk. Reuel Ryman would tell his boy, “The ball goes back where it belongs,” and his boy wouldn’t argue. He told his wife that he would call the people at the arena in the morning.
Long before Reuel Ryman awoke, though, his boy already was in Kenny Snyder’s macadam driveway in the alley behind Caracas Avenue, where a basket was nailed to the garage. Kerry Ryman took his NBA leather basketball with him. In his hands it felt sweet.
In Harlem, as the 4:00 A.M. closing time approached, the Dipper luxuriated in the neon light, caught up in the moment, caressed by jazz and by a crowd that, much like the kids in Hershey, simply wanted to touch him because of who he was and what he had just done. The Dipper would finally fall asleep at 8:00 A.M., and then wake at 10:30, still energized by the sensation of Hershey.
When Chamberlain awoke, no New York City newsboy was heard hawking “Extra! Extra! The Big Dipper scores a hundred!! Read all about it!” The New York City newspapers, absent in Hershey, had only the barest coverage of the hundred-point game on the morning after, same as most other major American newspapers. The New York Times and The New York Herald-Tribune ran Pollack’s AP account on The Times merged the story with staff coverage of the forty-third annual Knights of Columbus track meet at Madison Square Garden. The New York Daily News buried its five-paragraph UPI story (also Pollack’s) from Hershey on the bottom of The New York Post, the paper in town that most valued professional basketball, on Sunday gave prominent back-The Post playfully interspersed italicized gee-whiz laugh lines in unrelated columns about the Yankees and high school sports such as “Did you hear about Wilt?” and “Wilt got 100 points!” and “100 points? That’s crazy!” and “Wilt really went crazy.”
Not one New York sports columnist thought enough of the Dipper’s performance in Hershey to write about it, though Jimmy Powers of The New York Daily News would write that, generally, he was not impres
sed by “praying-mantis types ‘goal tending’ or merely dunking the ball for astronomical totals.” Two days after Hershey, Powers wrote: “Basketball is not prospering because most normal sized American youngsters or adults cannot identify themselves with the freakish stars. A boy can imagine he is a Babe Ruth, a Jack Dempsey or a Bob Cousy, for example, but he finds his imagination stretched to the breaking point trying to visualize himself as one of the giraffe types on display today. You just can’t sell a seven-foot basket stuffing monster to even the most gullible adolescent.” If Powers wasn’t impressed by the Dipper, at least one Associated Press feature writer was. A brief profile of the Dipper written by the AP in Philadelphia found its way onto the front The New York Times two days after Hershey, in which it was stated that Chamberlain “speaks four languages (French, Spanish, Italian and German), plays the guitar and bass fiddle, sings folk and popular music.” This was not true. It was true, however, that the source of the information was Wilt Chamberlain himself.
The newsboys weren’t shrieking in Philadelphia, either. The Dipper’s big night barely rippled the front The Inquirer and The Bulletin about how Chamberlain had fulfilled prophecy by scoring one hundred points. Jack Kiser, in his own inimitable, tabloidian fashion, gushed: “Impossible? Sure it was impossible. But Wilt Chamberlain did it. One hundred points in one game. One oh! oh! Writing the most fantastic chapter to an already unbelievable career, the 7–2 center made a complete shambles of the NBA record books here last night as the Warriors defeated New York, 169–147.” When Jack Kiser wasn’t covertly stirring small controversies for his own benefit, he served publicly and at times defiantly as the Dipper’s shield, defending him against charges that he took too many shots and cared only about his own statistics. Now, Kiser wrote: “Not one of them was tainted. No basket hanging, no ‘gimme’ layups, no cooperation from the Knicks in any shape or form. Just the most devastating offensive show ever staged by a basketball player…. The Knicks did their best to stop him, or at least slow him down. They played five men on him at times, not even attempting to cover anyone else in the last four minutes.” Kiser added, “True, over-anxiousness caused Wilt to miss some shots he’d ordinarily make. But he made some he wouldn’t have dared taken under ordinary circumstances. Long jumpers from 25–30 feet out with two and three men clinging onto his wiry, 260-pound frame. Power-packed dunk shots when he had to bull through, around and over a tight knot of defenders. Blazing speed that carried him downcourt for layups after he had launched the fast break with a rebound himself. He earned every point.”
Around the NBA the reaction to Chamberlain’s hundred-point night was mixed. The Lakers’ Tom Hawkins heard teammate Frank Selvy recall his own hundred-point game for Furman against little Newberry College and say, “Well, I had one hundred points with no dunks.” To which Hawkins replied, “Yeah, Pops, but look at the competition you were facing.” Syracuse’s Dolph Schayes and Red Kerr stared at the Warriors-Knicks box score with disbelief. Kerr said, “How about this: He’s the world’s worst free-throw shooter and he’s twenty-eight out of thirty-two!” Boston’s Bob Cousy heard about it and dismissed it as a game that must have raged out of control, just like when Cousy had recorded a record twenty-eight assists in a 1959 shoot ’em up game in which his team scored the record 173 points against Minneapolis. Boston Coach Red Auerbach, whose praise for the Dipper came reluctantly if it came at all, heard about the hundred-point game and laughed. “He’s playing against nobody,” Auerbach would say much later. “Imhoff, yeah. That’s like me playing against a guy that’s five-foot-three. All you have to do is give me the ball, I’ll turn around and put it in.” Auerbach’s own center had a different reaction. In St. Louis on the morning after the Dipper’s hundred, Satch Sanders saw Bill Russell smile and heard him say, “The Big Fella finally did it.”
PART THREE
Aftermath
CHAPTER 21
The Legend Grows
WHEN BRITISH MEDICAL STUDENT Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile in 1954, he attained instant celebrity. The previous record of 4:01.4, set nine years earlier, had seemed the outer limit of human possibility. Bannister stretched that limit and was knighted for it years later by the Queen of England.
No one awaited pro basketball’s first hundred-point scorer. The game in Hershey disappeared from conversation quickly. It became like a sunken galleon, resting on the ocean floor, riches in its hold waiting to be recovered. There were references to the hundred-point game over the years, usually with a mixture of awe and curiosity, no one certain how it had happened. Despite newspapers’ fondness for stories that commemorate anniversaries of memorable events, no retrospective on the hundred-point game appeared on its first anniversary in March 1963 nor on its fifth or tenth anniversaries nor the twentieth in 1982. Not even the cantankerous Jack Kiser wrote one during these years, having long since turned to his first love, harness racing. (Kiser had been living in Nevada and writing about stamp collecting when in 1993 he died of cancer.) Not until 1987, the silver anniversary of the Dipper’s big night in Hershey, did the media attempt to reclaim an important piece of the NBA past. By that time, the NBA had grown truly into a major league sport with a network television contract, star players such as Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan, and an average of more than 13,000 fans per game. That no television videotape of the hundred-point game existed only added to its mystique. The Dipper told the Associated Press in 1987 that his teammates had gone “way beyond the call of duty” in Hershey. “They were so clever finding ways to get me the ball. They had to do more than just give up open shots. They had to avoid fouls and pass me the ball in traffic,” he said. Of Hershey, he added, “That’s my tag, whether I like it or not.”
Once the anniversary stories began, there was no end to them. The game’s legend grew. Whenever his phone rang at home in Oregon in early March, Darrall Imhoff thought, Must be Wilt Chamberlain time. On the fortieth anniversary, Richie Guerin still was angry about it. In March 2002, the Leatherneck told ESPN Radio, “In all honesty I was annoyed at the way the second half proceeded. I could care less if somebody scored one hundred points against us or eighty-five or ninety points against us. If they earn it and they get it, more power to them. But I just didn’t think that the second half was played the way it should be played.” Marge Donovan felt that same pent-up emotion over the decades. She sat in distress in the Hershey Sports Arena that night. Forty years later, Coach Eddie Donovan’s widow would say only, “They passed Wilt Chamberlain the ball every time. It wasn’t like he did some great thing.” Willie Naulls slid his wire-rim glasses down the bridge of his nose as he examined the statistics from that long-ago night. Still handsome, his white hair electric in the afternoon light of north Florida, he said, “Wilt Chamberlain was thirty-six for sixty-three!!!! I didn’t realize he took that many shots. Thir-tee-six for six-tee-threeee!” Naulls said, “The game was not a fluke … I thought it was absolutely authentic.”
Darrall Imhoff has been unfairly labeled “the man who gave up Wilt’s hundred,” given that Imhoff played only twenty of forty-eight minutes. Still, he endures with good humor. “Every March first,” he said, “I break out into a rash.” And: “When I fouled out in Hershey, I told Wilt, ‘You know, Big Fella, just remember my name and carry me into the Hall of Fame with you.’” And: “It was an honor to spend twelve years in Wilt’s armpits.” Imhoff once cohosted a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe with former Lakers guard Rod Hundley, who introduced Imhoff to an audience as “the man who held Wilt Chamberlain to one hundred points.” Imhoff took the microphone and said, “That’s a bad rap. Look, I didn’t play the whole game.” He raised a brow, then deadpanned: “Wilt only got eighty-five off me.” Imhoff labored to elevate his game and once made the NBA all-star team. Decades later, as a vice president for the U.S. Basketball Academy near Eugene, Oregon, he would say, “I wasn’t a great player, and feel privileged to have played then. I was a part of the transition of the game that was to the ga
me that is.” He would recall that Chamberlain had scored sixty-seven, sixty-five, and sixty-one points in games leading up to Hershey. “So I mean, in four games that week he averaged about seventy-three points. He was unbelievable.” Only deep in conversation, the memory of the hundred-point night rekindling, would Imhoff say, “The game was a farce. They poured it on…. It was because of the way they were feeding him the ball…. When you go beyond seventy [points] and now they are fouling in the backcourt to get the ball back to you, that’s when it became a farce. And the announcer said, ‘And he just broke the record!’ And ‘He just broke the record again!’ Their announcer, Zinkoff, didn’t help us much.”
A telegram for Darrall Imhoff arrived two days after Hershey. Signed by two of Imhoff’s college teammates on Coach Pete Newell’s team, it read: “D—Congratulations on a fine defensive effort. Pete would be proud of you.” Imhoff smiled and that afternoon in Madison Square Garden, he limited the Dipper to fifty-eight points. When he fouled out near the end of a tight game (won by the Warriors on Arizin’s late basket), Imhoff couldn’t believe what happened: He got a standing ovation.
Wilt, 1962 Page 23
