Wilt Chamberlain

On 2 March 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he scored 100 points in a basketball game.

He made 36 of 63 from the field and 28 of 32 from the free-throw line, which is the strangest part, because he was a poor free-throw shooter for his entire career and that night he was not.

There is no film of it. About four thousand people were in the building.

That season he averaged 50.4 points a game. He also averaged 48.53 minutes a game, in a game that lasts 48 minutes, because there was overtime and he never came off.

Wilton Norman Chamberlain was born on 21 August 1936 in Philadelphia.

He went to Kansas and lost the 1957 national championship game in triple overtime. Then he spent a year with the Harlem Globetrotters, because the NBA would not let him turn professional until his college class had graduated.

He joined the Philadelphia Warriors in 1959 and was Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player in the same season, which nobody else has done.

He led the league in scoring seven years in a row, from 1960 to 1966.

He led the league in rebounding eleven times. His career total of 23,924 rebounds has not been approached by anyone since and will not be.

On 24 November 1960 he took 55 rebounds in a single game — against Bill Russell.

In 1968 he led the league in assists, which no centre has ever done before or since. He said afterwards that it was like a home-run hitter winning a sacrifice-bunt title, and that the point was to end the argument about whether he could pass.

And in fourteen seasons and more than a thousand games he never fouled out. Not once.

The other half of his career is Bill Russell, who was not as good a player and won eleven championships to Chamberlain's two.

They met in the playoffs repeatedly through the sixties and Boston almost always won. The standard reading is that Russell had the better team; the other reading is that Russell knew how to win and Chamberlain accumulated statistics. Both are unfair and both are still argued.

Chamberlain got his. Philadelphia won the title in 1967 with a team that broke Boston's run, and he was MVP that season and the two either side of it.

He joined the Lakers in 1968. In 1971–72 they won thirty-three consecutive games, which is still the longest winning streak in the history of American professional sport, and took the championship. He was Finals MVP at thirty-five.

By then he had changed what he did entirely — he had stopped shooting and become a defender and a rebounder, and the team won more.

He retired in 1973 at thirty-six. He died on 12 October 1999 in Los Angeles, aged sixty-three.

His 30.07 career average sits just behind Michael Jordan's 30.12. As of 2026 they are the only two players above 30.

Billy Cunningham, who played with him: "The NBA Guide reads like Wilt's personal diary."

That is the accurate summary. Open the record book at almost any page about scoring or rebounding in a single game or a single season and the name at the top is his, usually by a margin that makes the second entry look like a different sport.

The objection people raise is the era — that he was seven foot one in a league where that was rare, and that the rules and the pace were different. Some of that is true. The pace was faster and there were more possessions and more shots for everyone.

It does not explain 50.4. It does not explain 55 rebounds in one game against the best defensive centre who ever lived. And it does not explain a player that size, taking that much contact, playing every minute of every game for a decade and never once being sent off for fouls.

The other thing the numbers do not say is that he changed his game when it stopped serving him. The man who averaged 50 points a season decided, at thirty-five, to stop shooting, and won a title playing defence.