The Night Wilt Scored 100: Basketball's Untouchable Record

The setting could not have been more ordinary. On the night of March 2, 1962, the Philadelphia Warriors played the New York Knicks at the Hershey Sports Arena — a concrete minor-league hockey barn in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The crowd was 4,124, about half the building's capacity. No members of the New York press bothered to come. There was no television. Nobody in the building had any idea they were about to witness the most famous scoring night in basketball history.

The man at the center of it was Wilt Chamberlain: 7-foot-1, 25 years old, in his third NBA season, and in the middle of a year for the ages — he would average 50.4 points per game, a single-season record that still stands. Earlier that season he had broken the league's single-game scoring record of 71 with 78 points against the Lakers in triple overtime. His coach, Frank McGuire, had predicted, "Someday he will hit 100."

Someday turned out to be that Friday night. Chamberlain had 23 points after the first quarter, 41 by halftime, and 69 after three. His teammates, realizing history was in reach, fed him the ball on nearly every possession while the crowd shrieked, "Give it to Wilt, give it to Wilt!" The last-place Knicks tried everything — surrounding him with three and four defenders, milking the shot clock, even intentionally fouling his teammates to keep the ball away. The Warriors countered by fouling right back to get the ball into Wilt's hands again.

In the fourth quarter, Chamberlain poured in 31 points. When he finally reached 100, the game stopped as fans stormed the floor. The final: Warriors 169, Knicks 147. Chamberlain's line read like a misprint: 36 of 63 from the field, and — for a man considered a poor free-throw shooter — 28 of 32 from the line, both league records. The teams' combined 316 points set another record.

The Warriors' statistician, Harvey Pollack, had been pressed into service covering the game for the wire services. Afterward, he penciled "100" onto a scrap of paper and handed it to Chamberlain for the photographers — creating the iconic image of Wilt holding the number aloft. Because the game was never televised, no video of it exists; only an audio recording of the fourth quarter survives, treasured enough that the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2016.

In the decades since, the game's greatest scorers have taken their runs at the mark, and none has come close. Chamberlain himself later admitted he had been up all night before the game and felt a little embarrassed at needing 63 shots to get there. But embarrassment fades, and 100 does not: more than sixty years later, it remains the single most untouchable record in American team sports — set on a rainy night in a half-empty arena, in front of the luckiest 4,124 fans who ever bought a ticket.

Photo: Wilt Chamberlain in his Philadelphia Warriors uniform, 1960, by Bill Allen, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.