Sixty Years On, Wilt’s 100 Remains Undisputed

Sixty Years On, Wilt’s 100 Remains Undisputed.

Sixty years ago, Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors set a record for the most points ever scored in a single game in the history of not only the NBA but all of the major professional sports leagues in North America when he scored 100 points against the New York Knicks during the regular season.

In the words of late NFL coach Bill Parcells, “And it’s not close for second.” This is the account of that incredible accomplishment.

Squeezed into the eastern portion of the state, Hershey, Pennsylvania, is home to around 15,000 people. It is located about 100 miles west of Philadelphia and 15 miles east of Harrisburg, the state capital. Though Brussels and Switzerland would like to take a word, to some it remains the Chocolate Capital of the World. It is the location of Hersheypark, a sizable amusement park with more water rides and roller coasters than you can count on your fingers. And for those who enjoy sports, there’s the Hershey Bears, who have been a regular member of the American Hockey League since 1938.

Hershey is near enough to Philadelphia that during the NBA’s languid formative years, the Warriors, one of the league’s founding teams,

Indeed, there were multiple Warriors games played at the Hershey “neutral site” in each of the team’s final four seasons as The City of Brotherly Love before they relocated to San Francisco. Those trips even had a sort of established routine, with one taking place the week after Christmas and the other on the first Friday in March. (This consistency was made possible by the fact that in those years, Warriors owner Eddie Gottlieb, who was born in Kyiv in 1898, designed the NBA schedule.)

And so it came to pass that the Warriors paid what ended up being their last visit to Hershey on Friday, March 2, 1962. It ended up being the final regular-season match that the Philadelphia.

(In the early 1970s, Hershey experienced a brief comeback as a venue for NBA games when the 76ers visited for three seasons. In order to cover the hole left by the Warriors’ migration to the west, the Syracuse Nationals franchise relocated to Philadelphia in 1963 and changed their club name.)

In his third NBA season, Chamberlain led the Warriors during the 1961–1962 campaign. Gottlieb obtained his rights through the league’s “territorial draft” provision, which allowed teams to select players who had excelled locally in high school or college. The native Philadelphian had excelled at Overbrook High School.

Standing at seven feet one inch, Wilt had electrified the league like no player since he had arrived, having played for the Harlem Globetrotters for a year and at the University of Kansas. No player in a team sport has ever entered a league with the combination of size, power, and speed that young Chamberlain did for the NBA in 1959.