What to make of the feverish conjecture that his 100-point single-game record is a fabrication. After more than sixty years, the late basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain still retains the NBA record for most points in a game: 100, set on March 2, 1962, between Chamberlain’s Philadelphia Warriors and New York Knicks. That’s 19 more points than Kobe Bryant, in second place, has ever recorded in a single night.
Bryant, Jordan, James, and O’Neal all had three-point lines. Chamberlain counted his points one and two at a time.Despite being a simple statistic to verify—just look at the box score!—a segment of the sports social media world believes it did not occur. They claim that the NBA staged the 100-point game as a PR stunt. This conspiracy idea has been around for a long time, but it appears to be gaining popularity recently. “The skeptics populate TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, and X/Twitter with videos and posts,” writes Paul Farhi for The Athletic. Searching for “Wilt Chamberlain hoax” or “Was the 100-point game faked?” will lead you into a rabbit hole of doubt.
“The skeptics populate TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, and X/Twitter with videos and posts,” writes Paul Farhi for The Athletic. Searching for “Wilt Chamberlain hoax” or “Was the 100-point game faked?” will lead you into a rabbit hole of doubt. Although the existence of 100-point-game trutherism seems absurd to consider, it is worth exploring because it stems from a type of presentism—applying today’s attitudes, assumptions, and expectations to the past—that is all too widespread in other aspects of our public discourse.
Watch those conspiracy theory videos, and you’ll see that doubters point to a number of issues that don’t add up for a modern audience. The most popular criticism is that no visual recording of the game has survived. No game tape indicates that there may not have been a game at all. Pat McAfee, an ESPN podcaster, was horrified last year when he discovered there was no video of the game. “That sure sounds like something from back in the day” when sports journalists “used to just make s*** up,” McAfee said. “That was the first time I heard there’s no footage of this, and in 2023 [when] there’s no footage of anything it’s hard not to just be like ‘Oh, the tooth fairy came.'”
In fact, an audio recording of the game exists (which McAfee accepted as evidence), but it is not a complete broadcast from a radio station (leading one of his cohosts to suspect a forgery). A college student made the clip using an old-fashioned tape recorder while listening to a rerun of the fourth quarter early the next morning. Surprisingly, the audio only surfaced in 1988. And one of the announcers miscalculated the score, claiming it was 169-150 and then 169-146. The official result was 169-147. Truthers bring out several other apparent anomalies. The game took place in Hershey, Pennsylvania, rather than Philadelphia or New York, and was attended by approximately 4,000 people.
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