Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game: Why are some saying it didn’t happen?…

The greatest single performance in NBA history — maybe in all of professional sports — took place in a drafty arena built for ice hockey in Hershey, Pa., on March 2, 1962. Using his repertoire of fadeaway jumpers, finger rolls and “Dipper dunks,” Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game between his Philadelphia Warriors and the New York Knicks

More than an eye-popping statistical milestone, Chamberlain’s 100-point game focused new attention on the NBA, then a secondary attraction struggling to recruit fans. Oscar Robertson said the game, and Chamberlain’s 50.4 point scoring average that season, generated so much interest that it saved the league from extinction.

The game also represented a kind of hinge moment in the league’s history. Still transitioning from the era of the set shot, still beset by unspoken quotas limiting African American players, Chamberlain’s 100 all but announced that the league’s future would be different.

Over the past decade or so, however, a curious anti-lore has grown up around that night in Chocolate Town. Namely, that it didn’t happen, that Chamberlain never hit 100.

The skeptics populate TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook and X/Twitter with videos and posts asking, “Is there any actual proof of Wilt’s 100-point game?” and “Did the NBA fake Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 Point Record?” The popular podcaster Pat McAfee catalyzed the skepticism last year, debating with his panel whether one man possibly could have reached three figures in a 48-minute basketball game.

How did we get here? Let’s consider the roots of suspicion.

The common thread among those who question Chamberlain’s 100-point game is that there’s no TV footage of it. (The most lasting visual evidence of the game is an iconic photograph of Wilt afterward, seated in a locker room chair and holding a handwritten sign reading “100.”)

But that’s neither surprising nor telling. Attesting to the league’s second-class status in 1962, many NBA games weren’t televised. The Warriors-Knicks game clearly didn’t seem like a candidate for special attention. Chamberlain’s Warriors were comfortably in second place behind Bill Russell’s Celtics; the Knicks were dead last, with just five regular-season games to play.

There’s another seemingly suspicious fact: Only a partial recording of the game’s radio broadcast exists. The existing audio of the game covers just the fourth quarter, though it includes the moment Chamberlain dropped in his 100th point. (“He made it! He made it!” play-by-play man Bill Campbell shouts. “…One hundred points for the Big Dipper!”) This, too, is unsurprising: Recordings of NBA games of that era weren’t routinely archived or even made.