TWO things come to mind when the month of March rolls around – the “March Madness” of the U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball tournament and the 100-point game of the late Wilt Chamberlain in the U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA).
It was 53 years ago on March 2 that Chamberlain registered the greatest singular scoring heat by a player in NBA history when he netted 100 points for the Philadelphia (now Golden State) Warriors during a 169-147 shellacking of the New York Knickerbockers in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Significantly, the Warriors played just three of their regular home games at Hershey, Pennsylvania (also their training camp site) during the 1961-62 season.
On that cold night Chamberlain hit the century mark, however, only 4,124 spectators were on hand for the contest.
There was no television coverage at the time, and there were only limited radio and print mentions.
Moreover, for many years, there was no recording of the radio broadcast.
It was only in 1994 that the NBA office did care to know that a taped radio broadcast of the fourth quarter of the game existed.
Perhaps sensing that a historic moment was about to unfold, a man in Amherst, Massachusetts – a University of Massachusetts college student named Jim Trelease – recorded the game’s fourth quarter and he later passed on the tape to an official of the Hershey Park Arena – Paul Serff, who in turn gave the tape to the NBA nearly two decades ago.
Soon, even the game’s final score was a source of conflicting reports. The official boxscore showed that the Warriors won, 169-147, but on the tape, there were two final scores given – 169-150 and 169-146.
Even the players who took part in that game have different memories of whether the game stopped or continued after Chamberlain made his 100th point.
For sure, there were 46 seconds remaining on the game clock when the Big Dipper’s 99th and 100th points on a two-handed dunk became numbers 168 and 169 for the Warriors.
However, writer Alon Marcovici, in his “Setting the Score” article for the official 1997 NBA All-Star Weekend souvenir program, expressed doubts with regard to the final score.
Said Marcovici: “We know the official boxscore reads 169-147. But we also have a tape of the radio broadcast that has announcer Bill Campbell calling the score after Wilt’s bucket as 169-146. Following the celebration (when players and fans mobbed Wilt after he reached triple digits), Campbell picks up the call of the game with 39 seconds left and accounts for four more points – two by Willie Naulls’ free throws and a Donnie Butcher layup – and calls the score as 169-150.
“But when Campbell returns to the air to give his final summation, he once again said the score was 169-146. What is the explanation? If the score was 169-146 when Wilt scored his 100th point, did the clock operator simply fail to enter the final four points of the game, which could have meant that Campbell was reading an incorrect scoreboard?”
“Or was the scoreboard simply wrong? Did the scoreboard operator fail to hear the official scorer say the score was 169-147?”
Then there were the mixed recollections of what happened in the frantic moments after Chamberlain’s 100th point.
(to be continued)
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