How Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-Point Game changed the NBA

Mesher had 10 productive seasons in the NBA before embarking on a long second career as a high school English teacher. A published poet, he is the only former NBA All Star to be inducted into the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame.

And yet, despite all their diverse accomplishments, Atles and Mesheri realize that their legacy is tied, to some extent, to that night in Hershey, where Chamberlain shot 36 of 63 from the field, made 28 of 32 free throws, and then caught going back. in New York – he lived in Harlem at the time – with several players from the wretched Knicks.

“He was trying to sleep in the back and he could hear them saying they would leave him by the highway,” Mesher said, laughing.

The game was inconspicuous in many ways. He was placed in the Hershey Sports Arena, an impersonal concrete shell where the Warriors played several games each season. For their match against the Knicks, the building was only half full. The wooden court was originally designed for roller skating. The match was not televised and only a few newspaper reporters made the two-hour trip from Philadelphia.

Even now, the radio broadcast is not available to the public without the prior approval of the league. (The Warriors gave Atles and Mesher a copy of the fourth quarter so they could listen.)

But the game produced unexpected magic and it continues to be mythologized – suitable for a figure like Chamberlain, who did little to dispel the stories, real or imagined, of his life. Even to teammates, Pomerantz writes, Chamberlain may seem detached and “out of their reach,” although Atles was closer to him than most.

“Just a great person once you get to know him,” Atles said.

For Mesher Chamberlain, it was more of an emerging presence, at least in the beginning. In 1957, as a San Francisco graduate, Mesher appeared on the NBC’s Steve Allen Show, along with the rest of all of America’s high schools and colleges. As they gathered on stage, Meshery glanced over his shoulder.

“And Wilt is right above me,” Mesher recalls.

Chamberlain, who dominated the Kansas College Defenders, eventually left school early to play for the Harlem Globetrotters, then joined the Warriors in 1959. Atlays, who thought he should work as a junior high school teacher in Newark , made the Warriors selected in the fifth round in 1960, creating a reputation as a security guard. (His nickname? The Destroyer.) A weak striker, Mesher joined the Warriors the following season.