King Kong Ain’t Got
Shit on Wilt
The most dominant player in the history of the NBA may be
the one interesting thing about basketball’s early years, if for no other
reason but the sheer absurdity of his stats.
This is not to say that Wilt Chamberlain is the greatest basketball
player of all time: while he is certainly in the conversation for such a meaningless
honor, he may not quite be at the level of some of those yet to come. He was, however, dominant in a way that will
never been seen again thanks to his unique nature. Wilt[1]
was one of the first highly skilled seven-footers, able to make plays his
fellow monstrosities were too cumbersome to attempt. His high school career was so storied as to
create college basketball. Before Wilt’s
high school graduation, no one had ever considered having sports teams at a
college competing with other colleges.
Wilt was such a talent that many schools realized that having him attend
their university and play basketball would probably be good for their
reputation. This is why, upon his
graduation in 1955, roughly 100 college basketball programs sprung up around
the country.
As a Philadelphian, Wilt naturally chose to attend the
University of Kansas, where he put up comical numbers. Little did the world realize that his 30 PPG
and 18 RPG at Kansas were the least insane stats he would put up for the rest
of his career. Rumor has it that Wilt
only slept with one or two different women a night at that point too. Truly, his dominance was still in its
infancy.
He joined the NBA as a member of the Philadelphia Warriors
thanks to the league’s old practices of territorial player rights. Since was from Philadelphia, Philadelphia’s
team would get to have him. This is the
same reason that every single player to ever play for the Milwaukee Bucks is
from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and nowhere else.
In unrelated news, the Milwaukee Bucks were not very successful at this
point in their history.
Entering the NBA as a 23-year-old can be a huge
adjustment. Thankfully for Wilt, his
Kryptonian powers made this adjustment extremely easy. Had I not mentioned that Wilt Chamberlain was
the inspiration for the modern Superman?
While Superman was a comic book character as far back as 1938, he did
not have the powers and background of today until Jerry Siegel attended a
Warriors game in 1959 and learned of Wilt’s past. The only major changes Siegel made were to
make Superman an alien and have him sleep with just one woman all the time
instead of all the women on Earth. Wilt
was less than thrilled about this adaptation and slept with both Siegel’s wife
and Siegel multiple times either as part of his revenge or because he couldn’t
keep track of who he had or hadn’t slept with yet anymore.
Wilt started his career by averaging 37.6 PPG and 27 RPG,
starting a stretch of seven years of averaging over 30 points per game and 10
years of averaging over 20 rebounds. He
averaged under 20 PPG just twice in his career.
In those years, he set the NBA record for field goal percentage by
shooting 73% from the field and also had the eighth-highest field goal
percentage (an embarrassing 65%).
During a casual flight around Philadelphia[2],
Wilt realized that he would have to start challenging himself if he wanted
basketball to be interesting. He started
setting insane goals for himself just to see if they were possible: in 1961-62,
he averaged 50 PPG, far and away the highest total in NBA history. After hearing critics say that he was a ball
hog, Wilt led the leagues in assists in 1967-68 (though he was second in
assists per game, Wilt counted this as a victory lest he have to try passing
ever again in his career). Four of the
five highest-scoring games in NBA history belong to Wilt, who scored over 60
points 32 times in his career, or 31 more times than Tom Chambers, All-Star Game MVP.
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| This man was...talented? |
Wilt is best remembered, however, as the man who scored 100
points in a single basketball game. He
was a sensitive soul, and also a giant asshole.
Wilt wanted to be the best at everything he did. This was why he decided he needed to score
exactly 100 points in a game even though no one had ever come close to that
number before. He chose that number to
represent his preference for the metric system and its base 10
measurements. Scoring 10 points in a
game wasn’t very impressive, however, so Wilt decided to go to the next unit up
for his statement. He also chose 100
because it was a very large number and would make him appear to be a very good
basketball player.
The first several attempts at breaking the century mark fell
short. The league celebrated Wilt’s
then-record 73-point regulation game on January 13, 1962, but it was a hollow
victory for him. He knew that he could
score more than anyone ever had: this was nothing new to Wilt. His whole life was about scoring. By which I mean both in basketball and with
women. For you see, Wilt Chamberlain
liked to sleep with a lot of women. It’s
a double entendre.
No, it had to be 100 points or else there was no point. His 78-point triple-overtime game in 1961 was
meaningless. It wasn’t even divisible by
10. Wilt looooooooved things being
divisible by 10.
On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain achieved his goal. He scored triple digits, the only player to
have ever done this[3]. He was on fire from the very beginning, even
knocking down his first nine free throws.
Wilt was a notoriously bad free throw shooter, so much so that Rick
Barry tried to teach him to shoot it in the most unconventional way possible:
by dunking the ball from a standstill at the free throw line. Wilt decided against this, wanting to challenge
himself at least a little bit. He had
also never taken a jump shot in a game before and was always excited for a
chance to see what all the fuss was about.
By halftime, Wilt had scored 41 points, leading his
teammates to the decision to feed him the ball as much as possible when
gameplay resumed. This was a major
departure from their usual strategy of feeding him the ball as much as
possible. The Knicks, his opposition that
night, fouled any other player they could lest Wilt embarrass them, only to
find that Wilt had taken control of the referees using his renowned mind
control techniques. Everything was
turning up Chamberlain[4],
a catchphrase that did not catch on.
Regardless, he scored 25 points in the last eight minutes of the game,
putting up his 99th and 100th point after breaking free
of a pentuple team by the Knicks. It was
a truly momentous achievement, one that will almost certainly never be
matched. Wilt said this himself before
he passed away, vowing that his mummified remains would reanimate and
personally guard anyone who broke the 80-point barrier just to protect his
record. This has been seen on only one
occasion since, when Kobe Bryant was denied in his pursuit of 100. Eyewitness accounts differ as to whether it
was truly Wilt’s mummy guarding Kobe or just regular Morris Peterson.
 |
| Not an accident. |
This was not the end of Wilt’s[5]
storied accomplishments. He scored over 60 points 32 times in his career,
setting the NBA record for points in a game on three separate occasions. Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant are the only
other players to reach the 60-point mark at least five times, with each doing
it exactly five times. Chamberlain once
dunked 22 times in a game, which is the dream of every adult male playing on a
7-foot hoop.
In summation, Wilt Chamberlain was the broken
create-a-player from video games. He
could do anything he wanted to a ridiculous degree, stretching the bounds of
basketball statistics just because he got a jolly out of it. Chamberlain would eventually die the way he
lived: alive, then not alive anymore. He
even showed up every other dying person at the end, losing 50 pounds in less
than a year and going through deathbed confessionals with each of the major
religions. Chamberlain holds the record
for most deathbed confessionals ever recorded, a record unlikely to be broken
after the Hari Krishnas retired from the deathbed game, citing Chamberlain’s
excellence as the pinnacle of what was possible in the field.
Somehow, Wilt Chamberlain is not the leading scorer in NBA
history, the only record that is now forever out of his reach. At the time of his retirement, he of course
was, only to see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar steal away four years of Chamberlain’s
career and claim them as his own. This
was accomplished by Abdul-Jabbar insisting to the league office that he had in
fact scored 4321 points for the Lakers between 1969 and 1973. When NBA Commissioner Larry O’Brien suggested
otherwise, Abdul-Jabbar noted that all black people must look alike to O’Brien
then. This was how Abdul-Jabbar came
into possession of the NBA scoring record, as well as an Oscar for his
performance in An Officer and a Gentleman
and credit for the invention of peanut butter.
Anyway, Wilt Chamberlain was really good at the
basketsports. His passing was a great
loss to the NBA community, as it forced everyone who had played during his
career to try and say something good about him.
He is survived by several siblings and a country’s-worth of unknowing
illegitimate children.
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