Wilt Chamberlain
Wilt Chamberlain is the only player in NBA history to score 100 points in a game, the only one to average over 50 points a season, the only one to grab 55 rebounds in a game, and, for the first 13 years of his career, the only player in the sport who was physically capable of doing any of those things. The record book still tips toward him. More than half a century after his last NBA minute, most of the single-game and single-season entries that matter still have his name on them, and most of the rest were erased by men who came specifically for his record. That is the fact about Chamberlain that the record book, on its own, does not explain.
Philadelphia, Overbrook, and a seven-foot sprinter
He was born Wilton Norman Chamberlain on August 21, 1936, in Philadelphia, the ninth of eleven children. His father William worked as a custodian at a publishing house; his mother Olivia did domestic work. The family lived in a rowhouse on Salford Street in West Philadelphia. By age ten, Wilt was six feet tall; by the time he entered Overbrook High School in 1951, he was 6’11”.
Overbrook was a public high school with a basketball program run by Cecil Mosenson, who coached Chamberlain to two Philadelphia public-league championships (1953, 1955). Chamberlain was also, independently, one of the best schoolboy track athletes in the city: the Pennsylvania state high-school high-jump champion, a shot-put record holder, and a sub-49-second quarter-miler. His high-school coaches have said in later interviews that the track record was the better athletic index, because what he could do on a basketball floor at seven feet was, in the early 1950s, a category with no prior example. He scored 90 points in a 1955 game against Roxborough High School, a number that appears in the Philadelphia public-school record book and in no other verifiable contemporaneous source.
Kansas, 1957, and the triple-overtime loss
He enrolled at the University of Kansas in the fall of 1955, a deliberately-courted signing by head coach Phog Allen, who had himself played for James Naismith and who, in Allen’s own account in Better Basketball (1937), had been personally trying to recruit Chamberlain for two years. Freshmen were ineligible for varsity under the NCAA rules of the period.
In his sophomore season, 1956–57, Kansas went 24–3 and reached the NCAA championship game against an undefeated North Carolina. The final ran to three overtimes and Kansas lost 54–53. Chamberlain scored 23 points with 14 rebounds, on a night in which UNC coach Frank McGuire had prepared a box-and-one defense specifically to keep the ball out of his hands in the last minutes. The game is widely remembered as the turning point in NCAA thinking about how to defend seven-footers. The year after, 1957–58, Kansas went 18–5 and did not return to the tournament. Chamberlain left school at the end of his junior year and signed with the Harlem Globetrotters, at $50,000 a season, in May 1958. The NBA at the time did not admit players under the age of their graduating college class, and the Globetrotters were the most visible and best-paying alternative.
The Globetrotters year
He toured with the Globetrotters through the 1958–59 season. Teammate and mentor Meadowlark Lemon later described Chamberlain’s year on the team as the year he “learned how to play for people, not against them.” The more operationally useful thing about the Globetrotters year was that Abe Saperstein’s rotation gave him thousands of minutes against professional-level defense without the strategic constraints of the NBA. He returned to the NBA in 1959 when the Philadelphia Warriors, who had held his rights via the league’s territorial-pick rule since 1955, signed him to a contract that, at roughly $65,000, was more than any existing NBA player was earning.
The 1959–60 rookie season and the 37.6 average
His first NBA season was the single most statistically disruptive rookie year in North American team-sport history. He averaged 37.6 points and 27.0 rebounds per game. He was named Most Valuable Player and Rookie of the Year, still the only player to sweep both in the same season. The Warriors finished 49–26 and lost in the Eastern Division Finals to Boston.
At that point in the NBA the rule book had been written to equalize player height. The lane had already been widened from six feet to twelve in 1951 to limit George Mikan. Chamberlain’s rookie year was, in effect, the season that made clear no rules-based counter was going to be sufficient. In October 1960 the league considered, and tabled, a proposal to widen the lane to 16 feet. That change would eventually pass in 1964, one year into Chamberlain’s third MVP run.
Hershey, March 2, 1962: 100 points
On March 2, 1962, at the Hershey Sports Arena, the Philadelphia Warriors beat the New York Knicks 169–147 in front of 4,124 fans. Chamberlain scored 100 points on 36-of-63 from the field and 28-of-32 from the free-throw line. It was the highest single-game total in NBA history. It has not been approached since; the nearest challenger, Kobe Bryant’s 81 against Toronto on January 22, 2006, was 19 points short.
The game was not televised. No film of the performance exists; one Philadelphia radio broadcaster, Bill Campbell, called the fourth quarter on the air, and the audio of his call of the hundredth point survives. The NBA at the time treated the Hershey game as a contractual obligation to a neutral site and did not staff it. The most complete contemporaneous account is Gary M. Pomerantz’s Wilt, 1962 (2005), assembled from interviews with the remaining participants four decades later. Chamberlain’s own account, given in multiple interviews over the rest of his life, was that he had not been tracking the scoring after the third quarter, that the Warriors’ bench had started feeding him deliberate feeds to run up the number once 100 was in reach, and that the Knicks’ strategy in the final minutes had been to double-team him and foul other Warriors to keep him off the floor. He made the feeds anyway.
The full season of 1961–62 produced an average of 50.4 points per game, still the only 50-plus-point season in NBA history, on 48.5 minutes per game, meaning he played every minute of every game he appeared in, including overtime. He did not miss a game that year.
The San Francisco years, and the trade back to Philadelphia
The Warriors moved to San Francisco in the summer of 1962. Chamberlain played two and a half seasons on the West Coast. The travel was difficult for him; he commuted between apartments in Philadelphia and San Francisco and did not settle into the Bay Area. In January 1965 San Francisco traded him back to Philadelphia, to the expansion 76ers (who had moved from Syracuse for the 1963–64 season), for Connie Dierking, Paul Neumann, Lee Shaffer, and cash.
The 1967 championship, and a new coach-imposed role
The 1966–67 76ers went 68–13, which was then the best regular-season record in NBA history, and beat the San Francisco Warriors in six games in the Finals. Chamberlain, under head coach Alex Hannum, had agreed to change his role. His scoring average fell from 33.5 the previous year to 24.1; his assists rose from 5.2 to 7.8. He was still the league MVP, his third, and he was still the leading rebounder (24.2 per game). The 1967 title ended a nine-year stretch in which Bill Russell’s Celtics had won every year Chamberlain had been in the league.
Los Angeles, 1968, and the 1972 ring
Philadelphia traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers on July 9, 1968, for Archie Clark, Darrall Imhoff, Jerry Chambers, and cash. The Lakers then paired him with Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. The first three Lakers seasons produced two Finals losses and one conference-finals loss, the decisive issue in each being the aging and injured roster around him.
The 1971–72 Lakers finished 69–13, including a 33-game winning streak between November 5, 1971 and January 7, 1972, which is still the longest winning streak in the history of American major team sports. They beat the Knicks in five games in the Finals. Chamberlain was Finals MVP at thirty-five, playing through a fractured wrist he had sustained in the conference finals. That series remains the signature of the Lakers’ move from the Forum’s dynasty era to the pre-Magic Johnson holding phase, and it remains the ring that Chamberlain has, in every subsequent interview, treated as the most personally meaningful of his two.
The career numbers, and what they are
He retired after the 1972–73 season at age thirty-six. The final career line: 31,419 points, 23,924 rebounds, 30.1 points per game, 22.9 rebounds per game, 45 minutes per game. He was a four-time MVP (1960, 1966, 1967, 1968), a seven-time scoring champion, an eleven-time rebounding champion, and, in his last season with Philadelphia in 1967–68, an assists champion, the only center in league history to lead the NBA in assists.
The single-game and single-season records that are still his: most points in a game (100), most rebounds in a game (55 vs Boston, November 24, 1960), most points in a season (4,029 in 1961–62), most rebounds in a season (2,149 in 1960–61), highest scoring average in a season (50.4), highest rebounding average in a season (27.2), and most minutes in a season (3,882 in 1961–62, an average of 48.5 a game in an eighty-game schedule). None has been broken since his retirement. Several have not been approached.
Post-retirement, Hollywood, and volleyball
He coached the San Diego Conquistadors of the ABA for the 1973–74 season as a player-coach, though a lawsuit by the Lakers prevented him from suiting up. The Conquistadors went 37–47. He did not return to basketball as a coach or front-office figure afterward.
He was a pitchman for Le-Nature’s bottled water and Volkswagen. He acted in the 1984 fantasy-adventure film Conan the Destroyer, playing the character Bombaata opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger. He co-founded the International Volleyball Association in 1975, played one professional season with the Orange County Stars, and won the IVA’s All-Star Game MVP. In 1991 he published A View from Above, a memoir best known outside the basketball world for a single sentence in which he claimed to have slept with 20,000 women; Chamberlain said in later interviews that the number was a rhetorical estimate and that he regretted its inclusion in the book because it came to overshadow the rest of it.
Death
He died of congestive heart failure at his home in Bel Air, California, on October 12, 1999, at age sixty-three. The Lakers retired his number 13 jersey in November 1983; the 76ers retired it in March 1991.
Legacy, and the rules he made everyone rewrite
Eight NBA rule changes between 1956 and 1968 were drafted with Chamberlain in mind. The twelve-to-sixteen-foot lane widening, the defensive three-second rule, the offensive goaltending rule, revised inbounding, and a rewritten free-throw-lane entry protocol were all, in whole or in part, responses to his game. The most colorful of them, the offensive goaltending rule, was written specifically after reports that he had once offered to throw the ball in from the top of the backboard. The NBA did not want to find out whether he could.
He was not the best center of his era by the championship measure; Russell was. That is the argument that closed, late, against Chamberlain in his own career. But the shape of the modern big man’s role, the pick-and-roll center, the high-assist pivot, the running-transition rebounder who triggers the break with the outlet pass, descends more directly from his last four seasons than from anyone who played his position before or during. The Finals record (two rings) is the part of the résumé that has hurt his historical standing in recent rankings. The record book, which is about what happened on the floor rather than the trophy count, has not meaningfully changed since 1973.
Gear
Shop official Wilt Chamberlain jerseys and fan gear on Fanatics, or read Gary Pomerantz’s Wilt: 1962, built around the 100-point game.
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Sources
- Basketball-Reference, Wilt Chamberlain career page; box score of Philadelphia Warriors at New York Knicks, March 2, 1962, at Hershey Sports Arena
- Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Wilt Chamberlain induction file (1979)
- Gary M. Pomerantz, Wilt, 1962: The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era (Crown Publishers, 2005)
- Wilt Chamberlain, Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door (Macmillan, 1973), autobiography ghostwritten by David Shaw
- Wilt Chamberlain, A View from Above (Villard Books, 1991)
- Bill Campbell, Philadelphia Warriors radio broadcast, March 2, 1962 (fourth-quarter audio, archived at NBA.com)
- Philadelphia 76ers team records, 1966–67 regular season (68–13 record)
- Los Angeles Lakers team records, 1971–72 regular season (69–13, 33-game winning streak)
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Sources
- Basketball-Reference, Wilt Chamberlain
- Naismith Hall of Fame, Wilt Chamberlain
- Philadelphia Warriors vs New York Knicks box score, March 2 1962 (Hershey, PA)
- Wilt Chamberlain, "A View from Above" (Villard, 1991)
- Gary M. Pomerantz, "Wilt, 1962: The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era" (Crown, 2005)