Wilt Chamberlain and the Conspiracy Factory (PTFO Vault)

Summary

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Pablo Torre Finds Out

Episode: Wilt Chamberlain and the Conspiracy Factory (PTFO Vault) – November 25, 2025
Host: Pablo Torre (The Athletic)
Guests: Gary Pomerantz (author, "Wilt 1962"), Robert Mays, Tom Meschery (Wilt’s teammate), plus archival audio and callers

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Overview & Main Theme

This episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out deeply investigates the legend and conspiracy surrounding one of sports’ most iconic yet enigmatic feats: Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point NBA game in 1962. Through first-hand interviews, recovered archives, and a conversation with Wilt’s teammate Tom Meschery, Pablo Torre and team unpack how a lack of video footage, bizarre game circumstances, and Chamberlain’s own myth-making turned this event into a conspiracy factory. The episode explores not just whether it really happened, but how fact, folklore, and doubt merge in sports history.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Conspiratorial Times and the Question of Proof

• Setting the Scene: The modern skepticism about Chamberlain’s 100 points emerges from the internet age’s demand for video evidence. Lack of tape feeds conspiracy (“If there’s no video, then it didn’t happen.” – Gary Pomerantz, 04:11).
• This skepticism is contrasted against other world-shaping events with no visual proof, humorously likening Wilt’s game to the moon landing or Gettysburg.

2. Wilt Chamberlain: The Man, The Myth, The Number

• Larger than Life: Chamberlain’s persona (nightclub owner, celebrity, larger-than-life stats with 20,000 relationships) is dissected.
• Quote: “Wilt had a Goliath sitting syndrome ... his body was the most perfect instrument made by God to play basketball.” – Gary Pomerantz (09:41)
• The symbolism of “100” and sports mythology is discussed, with Pomerantz noting, “If Wilt had scored 102 or 97, we wouldn’t embrace it or question it as we do.” (05:16)

3. Why No Footage? and The Patchwork of Historical Evidence

• Amateur Era: The NBA was “a lounge act,” neglected by national media, and recorded mostly on tape that got reused to save money.
• The Hunt for Tape: Pablo’s team recounts two separate recovered audio recordings of the fourth quarter (from fans and a college student), constructing as complete a story as possible.
  • “Not even the Basketball Hall of Fame has the tape of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game.” – Pablo Torre (18:59)
• Interview tapes and rare primary sources compiled by Gary Pomerantz (19:33).

4. Game Night in Hershey: Atmosphere and Unusual Context

• Hershey, PA—“the chocolate capital”—was a strange setting for an iconic NBA moment, with a hockey arena, a small crowd, and absent national press.
• Wilt’s Dominance and Circumstances: Knicks’ starting center Darrall Imhoff was exhausted and hungover, leaving Wilt to feast on mismatched defenders.

5. Was It a Farce? On-Record Doubts and The Defense

• Player Perspective: Darrall Imhoff, the Knicks’ center, calls the game a “farce” because of fouling, stalling, and the Warriors’ singular focus on Chamberlain’s milestone.
  • Quote: “It was a farce of a game... I don’t see it as one of the great games ever.” – Darrall Imhoff (31:02)
• Teammate Tom Meschery counters: “I don’t think anybody could have guarded Wilt that night. I don’t think Shaq at his very best could’ve guarded Wilt that night. Will was indomitable that night. Everything he threw up, all in. It was a miracle game.” (52:38)

6. The Numbers, the Scoreboard, and Harvey Pollack’s Crayon

• Score discrepancies (“Did the Knicks score 147 or 150?”), the slapdash nature of the event, and the origin story of the iconic locker room photo of Wilt with “100” on a piece of paper.
• All scoring and stats are only as trustworthy as the era’s record keepers.

7. Legacy, Mystique, and Memory

• No Video = More Mystique: Wilt himself later appreciated the mystery (“I think it kind of adds to the mystique of the game.” – Wilt Chamberlain, 47:19).
• Pablo points out everyone directly involved has now passed, making the game more reliant on fragile memory, scraps of evidence, and oral history.
• Poetic Closure: Tom Meschery, the last living starter, reads a new poem he wrote about that night (55:16).

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• “It became, you know, like Alice in Wonderland. Curiouser and curiouser.” – Gary Pomerantz (05:16)
• On the Warriors playing to maximize Wilt’s numbers: “Absolutely, we poured it on, because we were going to help our teammate score 100 points. There’s nothing wrong with that.” – Tom Meschery (53:41)
• On the ‘farce’ critique: “If you want to be a farce, maybe I should’ve punched Imhoff a little more!” – Tom Meschery (52:38)
• “Harvey [Pollack]... makes sure to establish there is no ambiguity around how many points Wilt Chamberlain scored, because he does the thing that results in the one piece of evidence every fan has seen.” – Pablo Torre (42:19)
• Tom Meschery’s poem, closing the episode, reflects on being the last teammate alive, the ghost of Wilt, and sports immortality (55:16).

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Important Segments & Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | | -------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 03:19 | Pablo & Gary Pomerantz discuss the urge to revisit Wilt conspiracy | | 06:26 | Explaining the gap between Wilt’s record and the enduring skepticism | | 09:41 | Pomerantz describes Wilt’s persona and early NBA context | | 14:14 | Setting the stage: Hershey, PA, and the oddities of the night | | 17:02-18:59| Two surviving partial fourth-quarter recordings—how tape survived | | 19:33 | The archive of Gary’s interview tapes | | 26:12 | Wilt’s own memories and the weak Knicks defense | | 27:05 | Darrall Imhoff, Knicks’ center, relives his defense and cynicism | | 31:02 | Imhoff calls it a “farce”—full critique on legitimacy | | 36:00 | Radio broadcast’s “call your friends!” moment, sense of history | | 37:46-39:09| Wilt reaches 98, 100 points; detailed play-by-play | | 40:48 | The origin/creation of the iconic "100" paper photo | | 47:19 | Wilt: “I think it kind of adds to the mystique of the game.” | | 49:11-52:38| Tom Meschery’s teammate testimony and response to “farce” allegations| | 55:16 | Tom Meschery reads his poem "Wilt’s Ghost" |

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Takeaways

• Yes, It Happened—But It Was Weird. Everyone interviewed was at Hershey Arena and saw history, though the circumstances were unusual: small crowd, focus on Wilt, stalling and fouling, plagued by poor documentation.
• Legacy Shaped by Mystery. The absence of video has only increased the event’s place in legend and debate, inviting every generation to “find out” anew.
• Truth vs. Myth. As the last living witnesses fade, the Chamberlain 100-point game lives on as both a testament to individual athletic greatness and the irresistible mythmaking of sports fans and skeptics alike.

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Notable Quotes – Speaker Attributions & Timestamps

• Gary Pomerantz (on Wilt’s mythmaking):
  “Wilt had a Goliath sitting syndrome… his body was the most perfect instrument made by God to play basketball.” (09:41)
• Wilt Chamberlain (on the mystique):
  “I used to hate the fact there was no video of it, but as time goes on I think it kind of adds to the mystique of the game.” (47:19)
• Darrall Imhoff (on legitimacy):
  “It was a farce of a game… I don’t see it as one of the great games ever.” (31:02)
• Tom Meschery (defending the night):
  “I don’t think Shaq at his best could’ve guarded Wilt that night.” (52:38)
• Harvey Pollack (origin of the photo):
  “And he writes 1-0-0... that might be the best picture in basketball history because of what it represents and who it represents.” (42:45)
• Bill Campbell (radio broadcast, via recording):
  “If you know anybody not listening, call them up. A little history you’re sitting in on tonight.” (36:14)
• Tom Meschery (closing poem, excerpt):
  “Can you imagine on this day when Wilt scored 100 points in a game in Chocolate Town, his ghost striding on the court… Dipper, because he always belonged in the sky.” (55:16)

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Tone & Speaker Style

Pablo Torre keeps the episode lively and skeptical, mining humor and cultural commentary from internet-era conspiracies and boomer memory. Pomerantz is scholarly, dryly funny, and occasionally poetic; Meschery offers warmth, candor, and an artist’s touch; tape recordings evoke the urgency and awe of that long-lost night.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

• The episode traces both the factual evidence and the social psychology around Wilt’s 100-point game, debunking the idea that it’s a hoax while embracing and examining why it became such fertile ground for conspiracy.
• Pablo and guests provide historical context, first-hand memories, and the poetry of myth—all making the case that the greatest performances are sometimes, unavoidably, the least fully captured.

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Transcript

[Pablo Torre]

We have a bit of incredible news to share. Our show, Pablo Torre Finds out was not only named one of the best of 2025 by Apple Podcasts, but our episode the Silent Superstar and the Rotten Apple Tree, which was, you know, the whole investigation and aspiration and Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers was also chosen as one of Apple Podcasts best episodes of the year. You can check both of those things out, the best shows and the best episodes list right now in the Apple Podcast app. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you for making clear what Apple Time Apple Time actually means. And today you are going to find out what this sound is.

[Caller/Listener]

I used to hate the fact that there was no video of it, but as time goes on I think it kind of adds to the mystique of.

[Pablo Torre]

Of the game Right after this ad.

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[Robert Mays]

Hi, this is Robert Mays from the Athletic.

[Gary Pomerantz]

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[Robert Mays]

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[Gary Pomerantz]

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[Robert Mays]

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[Pablo Torre]

When you heard from us, Gary Pomerantz, that we wanted to do this topic because of what people had been saying on the Internet, were you excited?

[Gary Pomerantz]

My intuitive reaction was, here we go again. My second reaction was something approximating an eye roll. You know, it's a conspiratorial time.

[Caller/Listener]

Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas.

[Gary Pomerantz]

You go back to the 1960s, and there were still a lot of questions about the Kennedy assassination.

[Caller/Listener]

That's one small step for man.

[Robert Mays]

One.

[Caller/Listener]

Giant leap for mankind.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Did Neil Armstrong really touch the moon or was he in a studio somewhere in the United States? So it was that kind of a time. And now, you know, we're unfortunately a bit of a historically illiterate country. If there's no video, then it didn't happen. Well, we know the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, but there's no video of that. We know about Lincoln at Gettysburg. There's no video of that.

[Pablo Torre]

Do we, though? Are we sure?

[Gary Pomerantz]

We're pretty sure.

[Pablo Torre]

Are we sure about that?

[Gary Pomerantz]

We're pretty sure Lincoln was at Gettysburg.

[Caller/Listener]

Yeah.

[Gary Pomerantz]

And so, you know, for sports fans, you gotta lock in on how different the NBA was then and how different sports media was then. When Kobe scores 81, 15 minutes later online, you can buy a DVD of his performance. So that's what we're used to. That's the immediacy of today with technology. It wasn't so then.

[Pablo Torre]

Do you remember the first time you heard somebody casting aspersions on the subject that you have literally written the book about?

[Gary Pomerantz]

Yeah. I mean, there was always questions of how could he have done this? How could anybody score 100 points? Kobe's 81 is second best, and that's not even close. There's something too, about the number 100, the symbolism of 100. It's a century. It's a perfect score on a test. If Wilted scored 102 or 97, we wouldn't embrace it or question it even as we do. And so I decided all these decades later, I gotta find out what happened here. This is one of the most famous and famously unknown stories in sports history. The deeper I went, it became, you know, like Alice in Wonderland. Curiouser and curiouser.

[Pablo Torre]

So the anniversary of one of the most iconic performances in the history of sports is approaching on Sunday. But what most distinguishes Wilt Chamberlain's single game scoring record is that right now, for each of his points on March 2, 1962, there appears to be just as many questions 60 plus years later.

[Robert Mays]

If I'm understanding correctly, on the Pat McAfee show, we are now questioning the.

[Pablo Torre]

Veracity of Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game.

[Robert Mays]

We're questioning whether this is whether or not this actually happened.

[Caller/Listener]

No, we're not.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Pac man is not. But I did not know that there was no documented footage of this until just now. So as soon as that happens, boom. My brain goes, oh. The people always say they don't know if it's true or if it's false. Did Wilt actually score 100 points?

[Caller/Listener]

Like, even the scores table people like, did they all die?

[Pablo Torre]

Like, yeah, like, that's why I'm curious, who's on the Knicks? Is anyone still?

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

You just.

[Caller/Listener]

That's. That was the only thing that could.

[Pablo Torre]

Like, sell me on it.

[Caller/Listener]

Like, there was people like, yeah, I was actually at that game.

[Gary Pomerantz]

People know what happened 10 billion years ago. They know how the Earth was created.

[Pablo Torre]

They know what the Egyptians were talking.

[Gary Pomerantz]

About, what they were saying. Even though that is like aliens, Even though that is six languages removed from.

[Pablo Torre]

What we're talking about right now.

[Gary Pomerantz]

And nobody knows outside of a sheet.

[Pablo Torre]

Of paper with crayon on it that says 100 and on and on. It goes across Reddit and TikTok and YouTube to the point where we here at Pablo Torre finds out. Got a voicemail about this topic at our detective agency hotline, 51385. Pablo.

[Robert Mays]

Hey, Pablo.

[Caller/Listener]

Long time, first time. There's been a lot of stuff going around the Internet lately about whether or.

[Robert Mays]

Not Wilkes scored 100 points. Because there's a lot of old footage from the 50s and 60s of the.

[Caller/Listener]

NBA, but nothing really about that supposed 100 point game.

[Pablo Torre]

And then we got another one.

[Robert Mays]

Hi, Pablo, my name is Matthew. I have a question and it's actually kind of a conspiracy theory that perhaps only I believe in, but maybe others do. We shall find out. It revolves around Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game. We have no video evidence of this happening as far as I know. And the only photographic evidence of this is a locker room photo and a piece of paper that says 100 on it. I'm not sure that I truly believe and trust that Wilt Chamberlain actually scored.

[Caller/Listener]

100 points in a game.

[Robert Mays]

I know that sounds crazy, but I need your help.

[Pablo Torre]

Now, those callers sounded reasonable enough to us that we finally decided it was time to get to the bottom of what seems to be the a global mystery. And the first person we called was Stanford professor Gary Pomerantz, the aforementioned author of the book Wilt 1962. And Gary immediately established something. He established that one tricky thing about fact checking Wilt Chamberlain is that Wilt Chamberlain's whole brand was to be larger than life.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Wilt was a luminous star at that time. He's just 25 years old. He's got a nightclub in Harlem called Big Wilt Smalls Paradise. Smalls paradise dates the halcyon days of the Harlem Renaissance. And Wilt walked through that place like he owned all of Harlem, like he owned all of New York. Redd Fox, Etta James, Cannonball Adderley. Wilt's the greeter, the tallest greeter in NBA history. Wilt had a Goliath sitting syndrome. He was 7 1, 260 pounds. Dolph Shays of the Syracuse national said his body was the most perfect instrument made by God to play basketball. You know, Another writer likened Wilt's body to first sight of the New York skyline. I mean, think about this. 7 1, 260 pounds. His back triangulates down to a 31 inch dancer's waist. The guy was cut. The guy could run the floor like a train. Everything about him was magnificent.

[Pablo Torre]

I had to do a lot of just reacquainting myself with history as well for this. Wilt was singing his own tune, literally on American Bandstand.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Right by the river, down by the.

[Caller/Listener]

River, by the river.

[Gary Pomerantz]

You know, he wasn't Frankie Valli. He wasn't very good. But they did cut a record of it. You know, he had a racehorse named Spooky Cadet and never won. He had an Asian motif apartment off Central park west in New York. And then, of course, there was Will telling stories about his womanizing.

[Pablo Torre]

That's the number that people are most, you know, had been most obsessed with that statistic, 20,000. If I had to count my sexual encounters, I'd be closing in on 20,000 women. That equals to having sex with 1.2 women a day every day since I was 15 years old. What kind of reaction did you receive after that? And do you still receive? I.

[Robert Mays]

Well, you know, I still.

[Caller/Listener]

I still receive.

[Pablo Torre]

What's the fact checking on that like?

[Gary Pomerantz]

Well, the fact checking is difficult to do, as a matter of fact. But I interviewed one of the 20,000, a woman named Linda Huey, who became a great friend of Wilt's at the end of his life. She said, wilt, why did you say 20,000? And Wilt's response was to wink and say, what's an extra zero between friends?

[Caller/Listener]

But, you know, I thought maybe one of the reasons you invited me on the show was to give me an award from the, the Board of Education, because whenever people see me now, they go, 20,000. And let's see, he must have started when he was like 15, and he's now maybe 55. So let's see, 20,000, 365 and 20,000. And, you know, and then you're getting people thinking, not only that, I'm teaching them mathematics, which is really the whole story here, you understand?

[Gary Pomerantz]

I don't think that's going to be.

[Pablo Torre]

A word problem for kids if Will Chamberlain is with 10 women on a train headed east.

[Caller/Listener]

That's right.

[Gary Pomerantz]

I got this sense as I was working on this book, you know, excavating this hundred point game. There's a comic book superhero quality to Wilt, his life, his numbers. I interviewed ultimately 56 people who were there, 15 of them players. The broadcaster, the statistician, the shot clock operator, a number of fans. Look, Pablo, when you go back into this time, you're going back into a time when the NBA was a lounge act. It was a league in search of itself. The crowds weren't very big. The joke used to be that the PA announcer would introduce the players in the starting lineup and then would introduce each fan. It was nine teams in the league. Only one team west of St. Louis. That would be the Lakers, who'd moved out a year before to the West. And the league was trying to grow new fans, and that's why they played in outlying areas that had sizable arenas. The Lakers played a game in Portland, they played a game in Seattle. The Celtics played in Providence, and the Philadelphia warriors played three games that year in Hershey. This was the third of those games.

[Pablo Torre]

You should know that Hershey, Pennsylvania, population in 1962, about 7,000, sits in the shadow of Amish country. That's where the chocolate capital of America is located. Which doesn't entirely explain why there is no full recording of the Philadelphia warriors game against the visiting New York Knicks on March 2, 1962. But electricity in general was scarce. The game wasn't televised. The NBA, as Gary said, was basically a lounge act. But the sport was big enough for an AM radio station, wcau, Philadelphia. Except it soon became clear, particularly to legendary play by play man Bill Campbell, who was frantically calling technicians back at the station in Philly, that nobody involved with this broadcast had actually kept a tape of the game, which then created a puzzle of its own.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Well, you have to realize back then TV stations didn't save tapes, they were saving money. And they were re taping over these tapes. That's why they disappear with television. That's why they disappear some with radio. It was a game 75 in an 80 game season.

[Pablo Torre]

But very recently, about 60 plus years later, something kind of crazy happened because we here at Pablo Torre finds out, found a Philly basketball fan by the name of Sammy Marcus. And Sammy Marcus had never given an interview about this before, but in 1962, Sammy used to listen to every warriors radio broadcast on March 2nd. However, that Friday he decided to do something different. He went to go see the Elizabeth Taylor film Butterfield 8.

[Robert Mays]

And then I came home from that, turned on the radio just in time to hear Bill Campbell say world Chamberlain just scored 100 points. 100 points, fans.

[Caller/Listener]

Oh my God, what a game to miss.

[Robert Mays]

So I didn't give up.

[Pablo Torre]

I thought, where else can I get this recorded? Called up a friend the next day.

[Robert Mays]

And he said that he had recorded.

[Pablo Torre]

It, but only the fourth quarter and.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Only when the warriors had the ball.

[Robert Mays]

This is where I have the tape somewhere.

[Pablo Torre]

And so Sammy ran over to his friend's house with his own recorder and microphone and he bootlegged that puzzle piece right off the speakers. And it's a tape he still has today.

[Caller/Listener]

One of these is the tape.

[Robert Mays]

Just don't know which one. Oh, that's a Floyd Patterson Sonny Liston fight.

[Pablo Torre]

Ah, this is the one. All of which is how the NBA got a copy of a grainy secondhand recording of history, or at least a fraction of that history. But as for the rest of Wilt's pivotal fourth quarter, including the Knicks possessions, the way we wound up finding that involved A different box entirely.

[Commercial Announcer]

Hi, my name is Tessa Burns and I'm archivist here at Hershey Community Archives. We are inside of our collection storage facility here at the Hershey Story Museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania. We heard from the producers at. Pablo Torre finds out asking us about one particular event in Hershey sports history which was Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game at the Hershey Arena.

[Pablo Torre]

And this puzzle piece, it turns out, was the full fourth quarter. But it wasn't taped in Hershey at all. Actually it was taped at UMass Amherst by an aspiring student broadcaster named Jim, who listened by rigging his transistor radio to the five story heating pipe in his dormitory. And that night in that dorm, Jim broke out a reel to reel tape recorder. Apparently the one his girlfriend had been using for elocution lessons. And many years later, those reels would finally find their way back home.

[Commercial Announcer]

So I did some searching in our collections and I was very excited to find this box right here. So this is from our Hershey Entertainment and Resorts company collection. And when we look inside, you can see we have some audio visual material, some CDs, set tape, and then the most extensive exciting item here is this five and three quarter inch reel to reel tape. So this is an audio recording format. It's magnetic media. If we look inside, you can see that we do have in fact the original tape.

[Pablo Torre]

Not even the Basketball hall of Fame has the tape of Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game. By the way, as their historian explained to us, they've never even had an official exhibit devoted to Wilt. But this show now has two independently sourced recordings of the pivotal fourth quarter, plus a third entirely different box of tapes that I need to tell you about because this is a box of tapes that contains Gary's interviews which we're going to curate for you as part of this exhibit here today.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Well, that's the joy of it to me. You know, that's what the attorneys call discovery. You know, you go and, and immerse yourself, full immersion. And I would travel far and wide to find these people. And it becomes, it becomes an obsession. You know, what about this? I, I called Bill Campbell so many times I call, the last time I called him, I said, bill, it's Gary Pomerantz. And he said, not again. And that's just. Bill, one more thing, one more question.

[Pablo Torre]

We can relate, we can rel. You know, Gary, one of our joys was that we actually did unearth your 22 year old interview tapes because at Emory University at the rare Book library manuscript collection number 890. We found your archive. And just tell me how you feel as we go back to March 1962.

[Caller/Listener]

WCAU, WCAU FM in Philadelphia. The time is 3:30 stop and we're ready to go. And here's Bill Campbell. Here's the big fourth quarter and everybody's thinking, how many Wilt gotta get? He's got 69 going in. Here's the pass to him. He's got another one.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Well, Wilt's got 69 points going into the fourth quarter, right? And so he still needs 31 points. You know, that's a lot of points.

[Caller/Listener]

Rogers takes the jump shot. It's no good. Chamberlain with a rebound.

[Gary Pomerantz]

And he just scored 28 points in the third quarter. And the Knicks are just going through the motions. It's a 10, 15, 20 point lead.

[Caller/Listener]

The warriors have inside to adults, to Chamberlain. He's got it 133 to 114 as the fellows on the Warrior bench are jumping for Toy Farm. Every time he scores, they will jump up in a body.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Now, the NBA didn't find out about this tape until 1990. And it's like, wait, what? That's just the way things were then.

[Caller/Listener]

We're just conjecturing here. How many can he make? He's got 9 minutes and 24 seconds left and the guesses are running as high as 100.

[Pablo Torre]

This is Bill Campbell that you're hearing. This is the play by play announcer. And in Philly, wcau, the radio broadcast. But it's one of your interviewees, a primary source here who is in the game somewhere on the court, Joe Rucklich, that I wanted to ask you about because Joe Rucklich sounds like he might be a guest on the McAfee show at times revisiting some of these tapes. Hearing you in O3 Talk to Joe Rucklich is a time machine inside of a time machine.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Well, Joe was the Kennedy liberal from Northwestern when I got there as their.

[Caller/Listener]

First draft choice that season out of Northwestern, behind Wilt. Wilt was technically first.

[Gary Pomerantz]

He was Wilt's backup. Now think about it. When you're the backup to a player who never comes out of the game, you don't play very much. But he observed a lot and he was a very keen observer. Joe also was into conspiracy theories. And Joe said, wait a minute, why did this tape just appear 28 years later? And Joe said he questioned whether Bill Campbell had had recreated it.

[Caller/Listener]

Right. I don't think Campbell was there. But then, you know what? That's so what are you saying?

[Gary Pomerantz]

If I get a tape?

[Caller/Listener]

What are you saying about the tape? I think you get the last few minutes.

[Gary Pomerantz]

I think it's only the last quarter.

[Caller/Listener]

Yeah. Less than that. I've got it. You do? I think it's fake, but anyway. Yeah, real.

[Pablo Torre]

Why do you think it's fake? Well, his allegation seems to be even a little more pointed than that it was that Bill Campbell wasn't even there. Actually, he wasn't really the announcer.

[Caller/Listener]

If it's a fake, it illustrates the nonsense that the NBA perpetrates about. About those days. It was a bush league. I mean, it was really bush.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Bill Campbell was there. Bill Campbell and I spoke and he talked about dreading going to Hershey, you know, for game 75 of an 80 game season.

[Caller/Listener]

It was annoying because instead of doing a home game at home, we had to go to Hershey. Players weren't happy either.

[Gary Pomerantz]

It's a long drive and it was sure it'd be nice to be playing it, you know, at home in Philadelphia.

[Caller/Listener]

Wilt, in order to come to that game, took a train. I remember him being there early, but.

[Gary Pomerantz]

He remembered vividly the game in the details.

[Caller/Listener]

Everything was such constant ease. It was effortless. They broke the ball up and he'd go out and get it and dunk it. They knew something unnatural was going to happen here and they offered.

[Pablo Torre]

As for just how bush league game 75 really was, I should acknowledge that Joe Rucklich dead wrong about the tape of the fourth quarter being this false flag operation. Also relatedly, it's funny that none of the online conspiracists that we mentioned before did enough research to be able to cite Joe Rucklich's theory in the first place. But it is pretty easy to imagine why the whole event did feel a bit confused.

[Gary Pomerantz]

This is played in an arena that's built for hockey. The hockey team, the Hershey Bears. There's not during this game a big screen where it says number 13, big fella, how many shots attempted, made free throws, attempted, made, assists, et cetera. There's just a cold, metallic, boxy scoreboard up in the netherland of this place that says, you know, Philadelphia, New York. Even the people who are watching the game don't have context.

[Pablo Torre]

But Wilt Chamberlain, as he later explained in an interview with Bob Costas, was keeping score.

[Caller/Listener]

The game starts. I'm fairly warm. I'm really warm from the foul. I'm not missing anything from the foul. That should have gave me some kind of hint that, you know, you made 28 of 32 from the foul line.

[Pablo Torre]

That night, which is good for anybody.

[Gary Pomerantz]

And staggering for you.

[Caller/Listener]

I appreciate that.

[Robert Mays]

Right?

[Caller/Listener]

Staggering. Staggering for me, you understand? But I was even better than that the first half. I was missing nothing. I was a hundred percent. A hundred percent, remember? So I said, hey, you know, things are going pretty good. And I had, I think like 44, 41 points at halftime, and I was shooting well.

[Pablo Torre]

And one big reason Wilt was playing so well is that the Knicks starting center was out sick and apparently kind of hungover. And so, yes, Wilt would go on to average 50 points a game that season. But the man primarily tasked with stopping the single most unstoppable offensive performance in basketball history, arguably all of sports history, was not supposed to be starting that night. And instead, what he became was the answer to a trivia question forever.

[Caller/Listener]

This is an interview with Daryl Imhoff, I M H O F F in Eugene, Oregon on July 8, 2003.

[Gary Pomerantz]

By the way, I taped a double.

[Caller/Listener]

Tape in case one tape fails. Okay. Isn't this interesting? Yeah.

[Gary Pomerantz]

So, gosh, Darrell was a second year player, 6 10, left handed. And you know, he was primarily a defender at times a rough defender. He would become known as the axe for axing, you know, shooter's arms.

[Caller/Listener]

You know, Wilt was an attraction. And I was going to have to spend the next that night in his armpits, so I wasn't looking forward to that.

[Gary Pomerantz]

And one of the things that was so interesting, he was then working in Eugene, Oregon, at the U.S. basketball Academy, a training ground. And we walked by an open court and I said, darrell, could you come here for a second? I stood in the middle of the lane. I said, show me how you defended Wilt that night. Wilt, Imhoff said, would arch his back and it was like a tree and Darryl's behind him down low. He said it was like a tree was gonna fall down on me. I said, so what would you do? And he said, I did this. And he took the point of his elbow and put it in my rhomboids right between the shoulder blades and. And Darrell could still inflict some pain all these years later, but he said he, he would position himself behind Wilt with. When Wilt's down on the offensive left side down by where we would now see the block. The block didn't exist then. And he would put his knee into Wilt's, the back of his thigh to collapse his leg. He would put his foot inside of Wilt's left foot to keep him from turning in. Daryl played only 20 minutes and fouled out. He was in and out of the game. So he played some. In the second half, six fouls covering Wilt, the tallest. Next, next. Tallest player the Knicks had was six foot eight, rookie Cleveland Buckner. Six eight, they said 210 pounds. He's probably 185, 190. He was a stick. He scored 33 points that night too, I might add. It was a career night for him. What a night to have a career night. Seven and a half minutes are left. When will he scores? And Harvey Pollock, statistician, he passes over a sheet of paper to the PA Announcer, the great Dave Zinkoff. Zinkoff then announces Wilt Chamberlain has just set a new record for most points in a game. He has 79 points, breaking his 78 point scored in three overtime game earlier that season. And while he's announcing that Wilt makes shooting underhanded, two more free throws to go to 80 and 81.

[Caller/Listener]

On the PA they're announcing the new record of 79. And during the announcement, Chamberlain goes right ahead through the announcement and makes a foul. They're still making the announcement. He makes another foul. Shame. And didn't even listen to. He just made two straight fouls.

[Robert Mays]

He now has 81 points granny style.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Granny style. He looked ridiculous doing it because he's so big. He would squat down low, his knees would flare out. He looked like an adult trying to sit in a kindergartner's chair.

[Pablo Torre]

What did Daryl say to you, particularly Gary, if you recall in your interview with him about the refs.

[Gary Pomerantz]

He just thought they loved Wilt. And you know that at one point they called a foul against Imhoff that Imhoff did not think was a foul.

[Caller/Listener]

And he started backing in and I held my position and Willie Smith called me for a foul. And I said, really? You know, I got. I'm allowed to position. And I said, why don't you, you know, why don't you give the guy 100 points, we'll all go home. I mean, you did say that. You said, right, I said that. Why don't you give him 100 points, we'll go home. And he did. Going in for the layup, up with a shot. No good. Chamberlain rebounds good. Chamberlain rebounds with score. And he's fouled. 145 to 126. Darryl him off fouled him. He has 83.

[Gary Pomerantz]

And the game took on, you know, Daryl would call it a farce.

[Caller/Listener]

My word is a farce. It was a farce of a game. It was not. I don't think it was a legitimate type of thing where a guy goes out in the course of event. I mean we had guys score 60 points. Elgin Bader scored 60 points against in the guard. I mean that was a legitimate great performance. Jerry west had 60 against us in the sports arena against same year in that year. It was one of those things where guys had individual performances that were great but it wasn't done the way that one was done and that's what makes that a farce. I just don't, I don't see it as one of the great games ever. And I think the 100 point game is totally out of context with what you would consider the great games that were played in the NBA by great players.

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[Pablo Torre]

So this is where I need to observe that everybody who's been trying to undermine Wilt's record by asking if it really happened has been asking the wrong question. Because what Daryl Imhoff is arguing here, as one of the principals is, is not that the 100 point game never took place. What Daryl is arguing is that compared to other Great Performances, Wilt's 100 was abnormal and ultimately illegitimate to the point of being, quote, a farce.

[Gary Pomerantz]

With seven and a half minutes to play and everybody realizing now what the stakes were, the Knicks started not quite stalling, but sort of couple extra passes, then they start running a weave down court, taking the ball in 94ft from the basket. The warriors start committing fouls of the Knicks to get the ball back quicker to get the ball to Wilt, cross court.

[Caller/Listener]

The Butchers, they eat up as much time as they can. Butchered of a circle and fouled by Roger. Warriors figured the only way to combat the New York stall was to come out and foul the backcourts on themselves.

[Gary Pomerantz]

If somebody walked into the arena and they see the warriors fouling and the Knicks stalling, they're going to think the Knicks are ahead by 20, not the Warriors. That's where it breaks down.

[Caller/Listener]

Knowles is fouled by Joe Rucklich and they almost came to close. Of course you can understand the Knickerbockers feelings. They're a little upset. I would have rubbed in a little bit like this with a guy on a scoring rampage.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Whether or not it became a farce is a serious question. You know, when the structure of the game breaks down and the team that's 20 points behind is stalling, something's weird, something strange.

[Caller/Listener]

Yeah, you've got a situation where you're beating somebody intentionally to make something happen. But that's what was going on. I mean, it wasn't in the flow of the game. Now the first, you know, the first half over three quarters, it was certainly in the flow of the game. But when they started doing some things intentionally to foul and getting the ball and left him in the game when the game was already over, I mean, it was obvious they were out to prove something and so they did.

[Pablo Torre]

There's a moment, you know, just in terms of recreating, when people began to realize we're witnessing something that we'll be talking about forever. There's the moment where Bill Campbell, the play by play guy on the radio broadcast says on a night work this.

[Caller/Listener]

Night, down Chamberlain on the line, foul shot, up in the air. He has 84, 146 to 126. If you know anybody not listening, call him up. A little history you're sitting in on tonight.

[Pablo Torre]

This brings us as we get deeper into the fourth quarter Gary to the 98 point mark. So the psychology of the 98 point moment here, who gets the ball to Wilt? How does this play unfold here?

[Gary Pomerantz]

Well, there's a guard named York Larisi and he's leading the fast break. And so he doesn't see Wilt behind him, but he hears the big fella, the mighty huff and puff. He feels the vibration of the floor when Chamberlain's moving. And so he just as he's going straight at the basket, he doesn't distribute left or right. He just sort of throws the ball up and continues on underneath the basket, past the baseline and out of play. At which point he looks back and sees Wilt, the mighty dipper, grabbing the ball, fully extended, my arms leaving the screen, then slams it in one movement.

[Caller/Listener]

Lisi with the ball down the right side, passes to Chamber and he's open. He shoots. He's ball 167 to 145. He had the 98.

[Pablo Torre]

What was the call? What was the, the sequence of events to get to, to the number?

[Gary Pomerantz]

Well, Wilt would have three attempts at the hundred point basket. And in fact, one of them came after he scored on that slam dunk to hit 98. He started to run down court and quickly turned around and stole the ball. And missed it from around the free throw line. Then he'd get two more attempts and there's 50 seconds left. And now the warriors have the ball and. And Guy Rogers, who would have 20 assists on this night, a wonderful passer. He throws the ball down court, length of the court to Wilt, who jumps, catches it because the next tallest snake is five, five inches short.

[Caller/Listener]

Rogers throws long to Chamberlain. He's got it. He's trying to get up. He shoots. No good. The rebound, Luckinville.

[Gary Pomerantz]

And Ted Luckinville, a rookie, comes in, gets the rebound, gets it to Wilt again.

[Caller/Listener]

Back to Chamberlain. He shoots up. No good. In and out.

[Gary Pomerantz]

He misses Luckinville again.

[Caller/Listener]

People are sprouting, pounding him, banging him. The Warrior players are all over him. Fans are coming out of his stands. 46 seconds left. The most amazing scoring performance of all time. 100 points for the big difference.

[Gary Pomerantz]

An adrenalized moment for the fans and for Wilt until he gets to the locker room and sees the statute. He's sitting next to Al Adols and he's shaking his head. And Adoles says, what's the matter, big fella? He said, I can't believe I took 63 shots, 21 of them in the fourth quarter. And Adel said, that's okay. You made 36 of them. That's all right. The criticism against Wilt is not his athleticism. It's always that he cared more about himself and his own statistics rather than the greater good of the team. And this night, he thought for many years reflected that criticism in a big way.

[Pablo Torre]

And, yeah, I understand why. I mean, it's worth remembering here that the most enduring image of that night, the thing that everybody remembers still today, was the Big Dipper holding a piece of paper with the number of points he scored written on him. But the person responsible for that meme, it turns out, was not Wilt Chamberlain. It was the same warriors statistician that Gary mentioned earlier, a man named Harvey Pollock.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Harvey Pollock was a legend in Philadelphia basketball. He was an employee of the Philadelphia warriors, then the Philadelphia 76ers, for six decades. And at the time this game is being played, he's known as the Octopus, because he would send out a Christmas card every year with the Octopus, each arm representing another thing he did. On this night When Wilt scores 100, Harvey is the statistician. He is a publicist who's got to arrange any interviews. He's writing the game story for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who didn't care enough about it to send anybody. He's writing for AP and he's writing for United Press. That's a lot of work. And in fact, when he finished the scorekeeping and added stuff up, he thought, oh, my, what if Will ends out with 98 points? Well, you know, one of the things you hear on the radio is, I think, three times. The final score is 169 to 150.

[Caller/Listener]

Butcher breaks down for an easy layup, and he's got it 169 1.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, I was going to mention this. Yeah.

[Gary Pomerantz]

And the Knicks. Now we look back on it and see the Knicks at 147, and no one could reconcile that. For me, I think it was just sort of this slap dash nature of the whole night. And this was one more aspect of it. Oh, yeah, the Knicks. Well, it doesn't matter what the Knicks got. You know, all that matters is, is.

[Pablo Torre]

What Will, right there was the disc. Well, that's it, right. The discrepancy between what the radio announcer was saying versus the official score score. There's all this confusion. You hear it on the tape a couple of times. But what the. The Octopus, he makes sure to establish that there is no ambiguity around how many points Will Chamberlain scored because he does the thing that results in the one piece of evidence that I think every basketball fan has seen.

[Gary Pomerantz]

Pollock looks around and says, hef to Jim Heffernan, the sportswriter of the Philadelphia Bulletin, let me borrow a sheet of paper. And he takes out what was a magic Marker. I don't think they had Sharpies in 1962. I may be wrong on that. And he writes 1, 0, 0. And it's the backstory to this classic photo. And that might be the best picture in basketball history because of what it represents and who it represents. It's the Dipper on his night. Remember, this is a time when the NBA even its statistics in the way stats were kept, they didn't count block shots. You know, somebody said, how many shots did Will plug? I don't know. I don't know. We just have the numbers that they kept. Did The Knicks score 147 or 150? I don't know. I don't know. But. But to me, it was about getting to the essence of this story. There are some questions. Whether or not it happened is not a question.

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[Pablo Torre]

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[Pablo Torre]

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[Pablo Torre]

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[Pablo Torre]

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[Pablo Torre]

Perfect.

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[Pablo Torre]

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[Gary Pomerantz]

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[Pablo Torre]

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[Gary Pomerantz]

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[Pablo Torre]

So this is where I should point out what might now feel obvious, which is that every person that Gary Pomerantz has mentioned to this point, every voice you've heard on this episode, has passed away. This will forever be a story about hidden boxes and lost recordings and secondary sources and truly tricky ambiguities, which is something that Wilt Chamberlain himself, who died in 1999, eventually learned to accept.

[Caller/Listener]

I used to hate the fact there was no video of it, but as time goes on, I think it kind of adds to the mystique of the game.

[Pablo Torre]

Or in the words of Gary Pomerantz.

[Gary Pomerantz]

And you know, the baseball great Ted Williams used to say, his dream was that when he walked down the street, people would point at him and say, there goes the greatest hitter in baseball history. Wilt came to realize that people would point at him as he walked down the street and say, there goes the guy who scored 100 points in a game. And he came to like it.

[Pablo Torre]

But in our research near the end here, we were able to find one last primary source for the online exhibit we've been building. A person who, at 86 years young, still has a unique and even poetic perspective on what really happened in Hershey, Pennsylvania on March 2, 1962. Tom, give me the pronunciation of your name. I just want to make sure I'm getting it right. Sherry Macheri okay, good, good, good, good. Didn't know where the. The accent or the stress was going to be. But Misheri makes.

[Robert Mays]

My third grade teacher called Mashari.

[Pablo Torre]

Masharia Moore. Yes. A different nickname for a bruiser power forward.

[Robert Mays]

The one that pretty much stuck was the mad Manchuria. That had to do with my birthplace. I was born in Manchuria, which is in China now. White Russian parents, and I was an immigrant kid. I came to the United States after the Second World War. My parents, my mother and I and my sister were interned in a Japanese concentration camp in Japan during the war. And then we came to the United States via the Red Cross, to San Francisco, where my father was waiting for us. And that's kind of where I learned. San Francisco is where I learned how to play basketball.

[Pablo Torre]

And Tom Macheri really was good at basketball. The warriors, who eventually relocated from Philly to the Bay Area, retired his number, and Tom was in the starting lineup playing 40 minutes right alongside his teammate Wilt Chamberlain in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on the day in question. And while Tom would go on to spend 24 years as a high school English teacher and also write five books of poetry and six novels and two.

[Robert Mays]

Memoirs, on my mother's side, I'm related to Leo Tolstoy.

[Pablo Torre]

He still thinks about Hershey all the time, in part because it was his very first season in the NBA.

[Robert Mays]

Talk about working out, huh? I got off the plane, I was pretty naive, and I just walked into this fantastic moment.

[Pablo Torre]

I'm getting the sense that as much as you were a guy who was not there to shoot that night, you enjoyed spectating yourself.

[Robert Mays]

I was mesmerized. I mean, the one thing I was a rookie. Imagine being a rookie from the west coast, coming to the east coast, being part of the NBA. I mean, this was like a dream for me. A world deserves not to be questioned. My daughter called me up. She's 8th grade middle school teacher, and she provided me with the news that there. Some of her kids, you know, think that, well, 100 point game was fake news just because there was no video of it.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, look, the question of why people.

[Robert Mays]

Question it, for me, that's a very simple answer. I think we have a whole society that has anybody can say anything they want and there's no fact checks. And nobody believes in fact checks. Nobody believes in honesty. I mean, it's. We're in a really troubled times. They'll believe all sorts of conspiracy stuff.

[Pablo Torre]

Well, one of the things I wanted to fact check with you was a theory of a different kind because one of the people that was interviewed by Gary Pomerantz in his book is a gentleman by the name of Darrell Imhoff. You remember Darryl in some.

[Robert Mays]

Sure, sure, I remember Darryl. I chased him in the stands and almost beat him to death.

[Pablo Torre]

Why? Why did you do that, Tom?

[Robert Mays]

Because I hated there.

[Pablo Torre]

I'm getting the sense that the mad Manchurian may have also earned that nickname because you also tried to hit Daryl with a chair.

[Robert Mays]

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that chair. Yeah, it just sort of. Just sort of appeared in my head.

[Pablo Torre]

But I bring up Daryl Imhoff now not simply because you have this personal backstory with him, but because I need you to help fact check something that he told Gary Pomeranz that we discovered in the course of fact checking the story of that night. Because the allegation that Daryl makes, of course, is not that the hundred points did not happen. He was there. He, in fact, personally was responsible for quite a number of those points, trying to guard Wilt. The allegation that Daryl Imhoff made on tape was this quote, the 100 point game was a farce.

[Robert Mays]

Well, when I say sour grapes, kid, you know, you got smoked and, you know, fouled out and somebody else filled in for you and you couldn't stop Wilt. Nobody could stop Wilt that night. So it's just sour grapes. I could just say your defense was a farce. That's why Wilt scored. If you want to be a forest, maybe I should have punched him off a little more. I don't think anybody could have guarded Wilt that night. I don't think Shaq at his very best, guarded Wilt that night. Will was indomitable that night. Everything he threw up, all in. It was a miracle game. And if Darrell thinks it was manufactured, it was manufactured by the Lord God himself. I've never heard that. Darrell said that. That makes me angry. That makes me really angry.

[Pablo Torre]

He accused you guys of pouring it on.

[Robert Mays]

As in, of course we poured. Absolutely. We poured it on. Poured it on because we were going to help our teammates score 100 points. There's nothing wrong with that. What I saw was a destruction, you know, unless my eyes were failing me. I saw destruction.

[Pablo Torre]

So this is where I do need to jump in here and let cooler heads prevail for a second. For the sake of posterity, if nothing else. Because, yes, I have apparently goaded the bad manchurian at age 86 back into bloodlust, but also because the thing that courses inside of tomorrow, the thing in his blood, as mentioned before, is really poetry.

[Robert Mays]

I grew up listening to poetry, my mother and my father both.

[Pablo Torre]

And so you may not be surprised to find out at this point that the Big Dipper was not just a teammate and a friend to Tom, but also a muse.

[Robert Mays]

I wrote a poem last night. I don't know, I think because I was going to be on your zoom and I was thinking about it.

[Pablo Torre]

Would you. Would you mind reading some of the poem that you just wrote last night for me? Would you. Is that. Is that.

[Caller/Listener]

Ah.

[Robert Mays]

I thought you'd never asked.

[Pablo Torre]

I was wondering when the Mad Manchurian might read from his latest work.

[Robert Mays]

Okay, let me give it up. Let me give it a try. Okay?

[Pablo Torre]

Please.

[Robert Mays]

Welch Ghost March 2, 2025. Can you imagine on this day when Wilt scored 100 points in a single game in Chocolate Town, his ghost striding on the court of Chase arena six decades later, followed by his teammates in that game, all gone. Harrison, Gola, Rogers, Adles and the rest. Except for me, waiting my turn to be a ghost, cheering like grand crazy for the Dipper because he always belonged in the sky.

[Pablo Torre]

Tom, the Mad Manchurian, the Poet laureate of the NBA. You contain multitudes and you observed multitudes. And I very, very sincerely thank you for joining us.

[Robert Mays]

You're. You're very welcome.

[Pablo Torre]

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out a Meadowlark Media production and I'll talk to you next time. Going to.

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