Alas, the conspiracy theorists have even come for Wilt Chamberlain

On March 2, 1962, a National Basketball Association game between the Philadelphia Warriors and the New York Knicks was played in the town of Hershey, Pa., population 7,000. Few people cared.

A coherent professional basketball league, what we now know as the NBA, had only been around for about a dozen years, following the coalescing of independent, barnstorming and regional teams that included such memorable squads as the Sheboygan (Wisc.), Red Skins and the Anderson (Ind.) Packers.

The quality of the play was uneven, and teams developed a tedious strategy of building a lead and then draining the clock by playing a glorified game of keepaway, dribbling and passing for minutes at a time without attempting to score. (The final score of a game between Minneapolis and Fort Wayne was 19-18.) Frustrated, the league invented the 24-second shot clock in 1954. This would have major implications on that night in Hershey eight years later.

The venue was the Hershey Sports Arena, home of the Hershey Bears hockey team. No one bothered to count the spectators in attendance, but those who were there said the 7,000-seat arena was about half full. There was no television, and the taped radio broadcast did not survive in its entirety. None of the great New York newspaper sports sections even bothered to send a reporter.

Jumping at center for the Warriors was 7’1” Wilt Chamberlain, a Kansas Jayhawk who began his professional career with the Harlem Globetrotters and had signed with Philadelphia in 1959. The Warriors won comfortably, 169-147. What was memorable about the contest was that 14 Philadelphia players not named Chamberlain combined for 69 points.

In 1960, the great Elgin Baylor had set the single-game scoring record with 71 points. Chamberlain broke that record a year later, but needed a triple-overtime game to score 78. Asked if it bothered him that Chamberlain had extra periods to break his record, Baylor waved it off, saying “Some day that guy’s going to break 100.”

That day happened on a Friday night 62 years ago.

Except some say that it didn’t.

If you smell social media here, you would be correct, and that being the case you never know whether this is a heartfelt belief, or just a  chance to be provocative in the name of clicks.

The naysayers contend, basically, that since there was no video and since it didn’t happen in a major metropolitan area, the whole story was cooked up as a publicity stunt to draw interest to the fledgling sports league.

Never mind that there is audio tape of the radio announcer shouting his head off when the 100th point was  scored, or that fans to this day remember storming the court, or that a little kid slipped into the melee and filched the basketball, running from the arena with the cops unsuccessfully giving chase.

Perhaps this same band of conspiracy theorists have doubts about George Washington crossing the Delaware, since there’s no video of that, either. But the paradox is that a generation that became accustomed to everything — from police arrests to Little League games — being verifiable by video evidence, is about to be supplanted by a generation for which video is proof of nothing.

The amped-up marketing age of the 1970s resurrected Edgar Allan Poe’s bromide, “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” Fittingly, perhaps, the character who spoke these words was a psychiatrist in a mental hospital.

What used to be figurative is today literal. Video generated by artificial intelligence is distinguishable from reality only by close, expert inspection. For video, “AI-ed” may become a verb, much the way “Photoshopped” came to represent a still photograph that had been manipulated.

Video will no longer be tantamount to proof. To bring it full circle, this will be a gold mine for the conspiracy theorists of tomorrow, who will be able to claim that, say, imagery of the Kansas City Chiefs winning the Super Bowl has been faked.

It might be for the best that there’s no video of Wilt’s hundred-point game — it was not artistic. “There was nothing exciting about the Knicks playing the Warriors in Hershey,” said Chamberlain’s teammate York Larese.

At halftime, Chamberlain had 41 points, and with nothing on the line, the Warriors coach said, “Let's get the ball to (Wilt). Let's see how many he can get.” From there, the game devolved into a contest to assist, or prevent, Wilt’s assault on triple digits.

When Chamberlain set the single-game scoring record with 80 points, instead  of applauding, the fans screamed for 100. “I thought, man, these people are tough,” Chamberlain said.

No, tough would be those who deny the achievement ever happened.

Tough or stupid, one of the two.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Did Chamberlain really score 100 points in Hershey? Some say no.