There is an iconic photo of Wilt Chamberlain that every basketball fan of a certain age has seen, and that solidifies the Stilt’s reputation as a man before his time.
Chamberlain — nicknamed the Stilt and the Big Dipper — was one of the first truly mobile, truly agile 7-footers in the game. His talents were unique for his time, and would’ve allowed him not just to compete, but star in today’s game, and along with the Celtics helped remake the early league into something competitive and viable — before the transformation that would take place during the Magic-Bird and Air Jordan eras.
The game was different, and that has led to the spread of some strange conspiracies, driven by bloggers and Tik-Tokers whose parents likely were not even born when Chamberlain rained a cool hundred on the Knicks,
I didn’t catch Chamberlain in his prime, saw him only at the end when my Knicks were battling — and losing — in the ‘71-‘72 finals and then exacted revenge as they won their second title.
Even then, Chamberlain was a dominant force on the glass — a 36-year-old Wilt average better than 18 rebounds for the five-game series, and while he only scored 11.6 a game, he was surrounded by several of the greatest offensive talents to have played.
The photo I refer to is this one:
It is a post-game locker room shot from March 2, 1962, after Chamberlain went off for a record 100 points against the woeful Knicks in a game in Hershey, Pa. Wilt shot 36 of 63, taking 55% of his team’s 115 shots, and make 28 or 32 shots at the free throw line. He also played all 48 minutes and grabbed an obscene 25 rebounds.
It is an astonishing stat line and all the more remarkable because it happened 17 years before the NBA adopted the three-point shot. But that was Chamberlain, a rare physical specimen who combined size, strength, speed, and intellect to dominate the games in which he played.
He was, as my dad has told me often over the years, a man among boys, with only Bill Russell — and later Willis Reed — able to get into his space and slow him down.
Chamberlain’s performance is NBA lore, though it happened at a very moment in NBA history, when the league was at best an afterthought, a league transitioning from a slow-down pace and the set shot to something more in line with what we know now. As The Athletic points out, most games were not televised and the league would schedule games in odd and faraway locations — like Hershey, which is about an hour and a half from Philadelphia, where the Warriors were located at the time. The Warriors eventually would follow the Lakers west to San Francisco, and four other teams —the Syracuse Nationals (who would move to Philadelphia, trade for Chamberlain and win a championship), the Chicago Packers (now the Washington Bullets), St. Louis Hawks (now in Atlanta), and Cincinnati Royals (who would move to Kansas City-Omaha and later to Sacramento) — would eventually find new names and new locations.
As The Athletic writes, these stark differences get elided in the conspiracy world. And while the article’s focus on the technology of social media makes sense, I think there is something more at play, something that is more than just a social media phenomena. Americans distrust large institutions — especially government and corporations.
They are decidedly more mixed about most other entities, with their being a partisan divide, as a recent Pew Research Center poll found:
This distrust, along with a broken media ecosphere, create an environment ripe for wild conspiracies to take root and grow — especially when the distrust has been earned by corrupt or inept practices. And that is what has happened.
We live in a world rife with conspiracy and mistrust of institutions — a mistrust that has been earned in many ways (Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq) and has poisoned our democratic culture. We saw it with the debunked CIA-crack conspiracy of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the explosion of investigations into the Clinton White House by Congress, and again after 9/11 when some on both sides of the ideological aisle bought into an inside job explanation, or one that blamed the Israeli government. We saw it again with Obama’s birth certificate nonsense, the election of Trump, the denial of Biden’s election win by Trump and a large segment of his base. Conspiracies — endorsed by Trump — damaged our response to COVID and turbocharged the anti-vaccine movement.