The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO - Wilt Chamberlain and the Conspiracy Factory: We Unearthed the True Story of the 100-Point Game
Fri, 28 Feb 2025
It is the greatest individual performance in basketball history: Sixty-three years ago this weekend, a larger-than-life superhero conjured the supernatural. Why do so many people — including a player on the court — now think it was fake news? Our quest for irrefutable proof (and poetry) unpacks boxes that you won't find in the Hall of Fame: The recordings from author Gary Pomerantz, who spoke to 56 people in attendance and on the court. The tapes, which we unearthed from a rare-book library, a basement closet and a vault in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Plus: the last Warrior left standing to check the facts — and shake a fist at the naysayers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why is Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game questioned?
all of which is how the NBA got a copy of a grainy secondhand recording of history, or at least a fraction of that history. But as for the rest of Wilt's pivotal fourth quarter, including the Knicks' possessions, the way we wound up finding that involved a different box entirely.
Hi, my name is Tessa Burns and I'm archivist here at Hershey Community Archives. We are inside of our collection storage facility here at the Hershey Story Museum in Hershey, PA. We heard from the producers that Pablo Torre finds out asking us about one particular event in Hershey sports history, which was Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game at the Hershey Arena.
And this puzzle piece, it turns out, was the full fourth quarter. But it wasn't taped in Hershey. At all, actually. It was taped at UMass Amherst by an aspiring student broadcaster named Jim, who listened by rigging his transistor radio to the five-story heating pipe in his dormitory.
And that night, in that dorm, Jim broke out a reel-to-reel tape recorder, apparently, the one his girlfriend had been using for elocution lessons, And many years later, those reels would finally find their way back home.
So I did some searching in our collections and I was very excited to find this box right here. So this is from our Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Company collection. And when we look inside, you can see we have some audio visual material, some CDs, set tape. And then the most exciting item here is this five and three quarter inch reel to reel tape. So this is an audio recording format.
It's magnetic media. If we look inside, you can see that we do have, in fact, the original tape.
Not even the Basketball Hall of Fame has the tape of Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game, by the way, as their historian explained to us. They've never even had an official exhibit devoted to Wilt. But this show now has two independently sourced recordings of the pivotal fourth quarter, plus a third, entirely different box of tapes that I need to tell you about.
Because this is a box of tapes that contains Gary's interviews, which we're going to curate for you as part of this exhibit here today.
Well, that's the joy of it to me. That's what the attorneys call discovery. You go and immerse yourself, full immersion. And I would travel far and wide to find these people. And it becomes an obsession. What about that? I called Bill Campbell so many times. The last time I called him, I said, Bill, it's Gary Pomerantz. And he said, not again. And that's just, Bill, one more thing.
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