Wilt Chamberlain

Wilton Norman Chamberlain was born on the twenty-first of August 1936 at Philadelphia, the seventh of eleven children of William Chamberlain — a custodian and welder — and Olivia Ruth Johnson Chamberlain, a domestic worker. The Chamberlain household was profoundly working-class and the eleven children were raised in a small three-bedroom row house in the West Philadelphia district. He grew rapidly through his early teens — six feet eleven inches by sixteen, seven feet one inch by his eighteenth year — and was a successful track-and-field high jumper before he took up basketball seriously in his ninth-grade year at Overbrook High School.

He led Overbrook High School to three consecutive Philadelphia Public League championships from 1953 to 1955 and was a Parade All-American in 1955. He took the University of Kansas basketball scholarship offered him by the coach Phog Allen — Kansas being the only Big Seven Conference school to actively recruit Black players in the 1950s — and led Kansas to the 1957 NCAA national-championship-game seven-overtime loss to North Carolina that remains widely identified as the principal game of mid-century NCAA basketball.

He left Kansas after his junior year to play one season for the Harlem Globetrotters — the team that allowed him to circumvent the NBA-territorial-rights rule that would have given him only to the Philadelphia Warriors. He signed with the Warriors for the 1959-60 season at twenty-three. He was named Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player in the same season — the only player ever to win both awards in the same season.

His decisive game-statistical achievement was the one-hundred-point game of the second of March 1962 against the New York Knicks at the Hershey Sports Arena. He scored thirty-six field goals and twenty-eight free throws across forty-eight minutes of play. The record remains the single-game NBA scoring record more than sixty years after.

He averaged for the 1961-62 season fifty point four points per game across the eighty games he played — the only player ever to average more than forty points per game across an NBA season. He also averaged twenty-five point seven rebounds per game across that season.

He played fourteen NBA seasons across the Philadelphia Warriors, the Philadelphia 76ers, and the Los Angeles Lakers, winning two NBA championships (1967 with Philadelphia and 1972 with Los Angeles). He retired with the career records for scoring at thirty-one thousand four hundred and nineteen points and for rebounding at twenty-three thousand nine hundred and twenty-four rebounds. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1979.

He died of a heart attack at his Bel Air home on the twelfth of October 1999, at sixty-three.

He is honored here as the scorer of the one-hundred-point game.