{"product_id":"wilt-1962-isbn-9781400051618","title":"Wilt, 1962","description":"On the night of March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, right up the street from the chocolate factory, Wilt Chamberlain, a young and striking athlete celebrated as the Big Dipper, scored one hundred points in a game against the New York Knickerbockers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs historic and revolutionary as the achievement was, it remains shrouded in myth. The game was not televised; no New York sportswriters showed up; and a fourteen-year-old local boy ran onto the court when Chamberlain scored his hundredth point, shook his hand, and then ran off with the basketball. In telling the story of this remarkable night, author Gary M. Pomerantz brings to life a lost world of American sports.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1962, the National Basketball Association, stepchild to the college game, was searching for its identity. Its teams were mostly white, the number of black players limited by an unspoken quota. Games were played in drafty, half-filled arenas, and the players traveled on buses and trains, telling tall tales, playing cards, and sometimes reading Joyce. Into this scene stepped the unprecedented Wilt Chamberlain: strong and quick-witted, voluble and enigmatic, a seven-footer who played with a colossal will and a dancer’s grace. That strength, will, grace, and mystery were never more in focus than on March 2, 1962. Pomerantz tracked down Knicks and Philadelphia Warriors, fans, journalists, team officials, other NBA stars of the era, and basketball historians, conducting more than 250 interviews in all, to recreate in painstaking detail the game that announced the Dipper’s greatness. He brings us to Hershey, Pennsylvania, a sweet-seeming model of the gentle, homogeneous small-town America that was fast becoming anachronistic. We see the fans and players, alternately fascinated and confused by Wilt, drawn anxiously into the spectacle. Pomerantz portrays the other legendary figures in this story: the Warriors’ elegant coach Frank McGuire; the beloved, if rumpled, team owner Eddie Gottlieb; and the irreverent p.a. announcer Dave “the Zink” Zinkoff, who handed out free salamis courtside.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the heart of the book is the self-made Chamberlain, a romantic cosmopolitan who owned a nightclub in Harlem and shrugged off segregation with a bebop cool but harbored every slight deep in his psyche. March 2, 1962, presented the awesome sight of Wilt Chamberlain imposing himself on a world that would diminish him. \u003ci\u003eWilt, 1962\u003c\/i\u003e is not only the dramatic story of a singular basketball game but a meditation on small towns, midcentury America, and one of the most intriguing figures in the pantheon of sports heroes. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlso available as a Random House AudioBook“Gary Pomerantz’s \u003ci\u003eWilt, 1962\u003c\/i\u003e is beautifully written, well reported, and compelling. But what’s so special about this book, what causes it to linger, is the atmosphere that Pomerantz has captured through his words, so bittersweet and haunting. You love Wilt Chamberlain. You feel the aura of his isolation as he towered above the rest of us in life, and you wish more than ever he was still around because of his very individuality.” —H. G. “Buzz” Bissinger, author of\u003ci\u003e Friday Night Lights\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In his undeniable excellence and egotism, Wilt Chamberlain was America itself, inspiring worship, ambivalence, and downright awe.” —\u003ci\u003ePhiladelphia Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Genius is in the details, and Gary Pomerantz’s \u003ci\u003eWilt, 1962\u003c\/i\u003e proves that.” —John Feinstein, author of \u003ci\u003eA Season on the Brink\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eA Good Walk Spoiled\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Meticulously researched and superbly crafted, \u003ci\u003eWilt, 1962\u003c\/i\u003e revisits and vividly re-creates a seminal but overlooked moment in American sports history. On that transformative evening in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain scored one hundred points and staked a black man’s claim to the city game. In Gary Pomerantz’s deft possession-by-possession retelling, Chamberlain soars again. The gangly, uncompromising seven-footer who always seemed too big for the uniform he inhabited thunders back to life.” —Jane Leavy, author of \u003ci\u003eSandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eWilt, 1962\u003c\/i\u003e is not only a lively sports story about the record-setting performance of a larger-than-life athlete, it is also a wonderful chronicle of urban and social history, replete with colorful characters and situations from a bygone era of professional basketball, when the game changed from being dominated by white stars to being dominated by black ones.” —Gerald L. Early, author of \u003ci\u003eThis Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In this age of instant everything, few people have any idea who Wilt Chamberlain really was and what he meant to sports. Gary Pomerantz shows us. In\u003ci\u003e Wilt, 1962\u003c\/i\u003e he puts us courtside for one of the greatest unexamined moments in sports history, the night Wilt scored one hundred points. In a sweet return to his sportswriting roots, Pomerantz gives us Wilt in his realm, his rise to prominence and dominance, set against the backdrop of the NBA’s coming of age. It’s all irresistible.” —Michael Wilbon, cohost of ESPN’s\u003ci\u003e Pardon the Interruption\u003c\/i\u003eGary M. Pomerantz earned acclaim with his two previous books. \u003ci\u003eWhere Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn\u003c\/i\u003e, a multigenerational biography of Atlanta and its racial conscience, was named a 1996 Notable Book of the Year by the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003ci\u003eNine Minutes, Twenty Seconds\u003c\/i\u003e (2001), the true story of an airplane crash, has been published in Britain, Germany, and China. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Pomerantz worked for nearly two decades as a journalist, first as a sportswriter for the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post \u003c\/i\u003eand then writing columns, editorials, and special projects for the \u003ci\u003eAtlanta Journal-Constitution\u003c\/i\u003e. He later served for two years as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta. He lives today in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and their three children.\u003cb\u003eChapter 1: The Dipper in Harlem\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is a photograph of the Dipper with James Baldwin on a Harlem  street corner, the big man in a slim suit and snap-brim fedora, tilting  his frame toward the writer, seemingly half his size. If not  classically handsome, Chamberlain’s face was arresting: a long, narrow  brow over almond eyes lit by youth and restless ambition, high  cheekbones, and a cool jazzman’s trimmed mustache. Then, when he really  wanted something (or someone), there came a starry smile and his deep  baritone transformed to the smooth, soft patter of the FM radio deejay.  It was Baldwin who in 1961, back in America after years of self-imposed  exile in Europe, wrote words that defined his life’s direction, words  that Chamberlain may have heard. Baldwin wrote, “I had said that I was  going to be a writer, God, Satan, and Mississippi notwithstanding, and  that color did not matter, and that I was going to be free. And, here I  was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChamberlain, too, would create himself, would refuse to be defined by  size or color or his sport. In 1962, the Dipper drove a white Cadillac  convertible, but only until he could take delivery of a nobleman’s car,  a Bentley, custom-made in England at a cost of nearly $30,000  (including tax and shipping), roughly six times the average yearly  salary for an American worker. Wealthy after his one season with the  Globetrotters and three with the Warriors, he used his big money as a  tool of self-creation. After buying his parents a house in west  Philadelphia, he lavished upon himself twenty fine suits, thirteen  pairs of stylish shoes, the Cadillac, and a chic, pricey,  Oriental-motif apartment on Central Park West. It was a far cry from  401 Salford Street, where Chamberlain had been raised. With nine  children, William and Olivia Chamberlain, a handyman and a domestic, at  times had two, three, or four kids in each bedroom; at five-thirty each  morning they felt the trolleys rumble past their rented row house in  ethnic, working-class west Philly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe young Dipper came of age noticing little discrimination, though  once, when he was about four, on a bus in Virginia bound for  Philadelphia, his mother wouldn’t allow him to sit near the front. “No,  mama, this seat right here is open,” the young Dipper protested, even  as she tried to steer him toward the rear of the segregated bus. It  prompted the white bus driver to intervene, “No, sonny, you go back  there with your mother like a good little boy,” and he did, though  uncertain as to why.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo valuable was Chamberlain’s name now, so incandescent his persona,  that a historic Harlem nightclub, Smalls Paradise, let him buy in as  part-owner and put his name first on the marquee in exchange for his  presence. He loved Harlem, the neon, the ladies, James Brown, Etta  James, Redd Foxx, a lush life with jazz the soundtrack. And when Wilton  Norman Chamberlain moved through Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise, there  attached to him an aura suggesting he owned not only this place, but  all of Harlem, perhaps all of New York. His presence in the club was  signaled by the white Cadillac parked out front by one of the nightclub  boys on the corner of 135th Street, while Chamberlain strode around the  club’s dark interior greeting his guests, draping an arm around Tom  “Satch” Sanders of the Boston Celtics, squeezing a shoulder, “Good to  see you, Satch. Sit down, relax, and enjoy yourself.” Reminiscing years  later, the Dipper would recall this as the greatest time in his life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise, the bandleader King Curtis worked deep  into the night, and the denizens turned up wearing sharkskin suits and  memorable monikers: Big Pete, Little Pete, an intellectual straight  shooter known as Knowledge, and of course, Charlie Polk, Wilt’s  right-hand man, always at his side, Robin to his Batman. His name,  called out so often, rolled off the Dipper’s tongue: Chollypolk. Small  and thin as straw, Polk was, as one Harlem nightclub regular would say,  “one of those types of guys who if he latched on to you, he didn’t let  go.” Whatever the Dipper wanted—his shirts picked up at the cleaners,  his friend’s wife picked up at the bus stop and taken  shopping—Chollypolk got it done. When a beautiful woman at Smalls  caught the Dipper’s eye, Chollypolk became his emissary, quietly  letting the woman know of his boss’s interest and gauging her  availability. He loved being on stage at the club, and though he  couldn’t sing or dance and he stuttered slightly, he was a riotous  emcee. If you put a microphone in his hand, Chollypolk might never let  go of it, and Redd Foxx would sit beside the stage, waiting, waiting to  begin his gig.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFoxx, a bawdy redheaded comic, was a Harlem favorite. “Lincoln got his  head on all the pennies. Roosevelt got his head on all the dimes,” Foxx  would say. “I just want to get my hands on some.” In his first New York  nightclub date in a decade, Foxx, a rising national star (to all but  the censors), appeared at Smalls Paradise in December 1961. In smoky  clubs, perspiring beneath the spotlight, Foxx would deliver his raunchy  routines, unafraid of the social taboos of sex and race. In one, using  his trademark off-color double entendres, he told of how everyone in  his hometown had bought a jackass. “Even the little bitty kids, they  had a ass of their own,” Foxx would say. “Preacher’s wife had the  biggest ass in town. I know because I rode her big ass all the time.”  And, Foxx said, her husband, the preacher, “didn’t have such a bad ass  himself,” though when a fire broke out in the church’s back pew,  “Reverend took a long running jump out the window to land on his ass.  But somebody had stolen Ol’ Reverend’s ass and he wasn’t there.  Reverend fell down into a deep hole in the ground and that’s where they  found him.” Foxx gave a comic’s pause. “Just goes to show you, don’t  it? Some folks don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSmalls Paradise was a legend that dated back to the Harlem Renaissance  of the Twenties when its waiters danced or roller-skated across the  room with service trays held high; the club was known then as the  Hottest Spot in Harlem. Chamberlain had long wanted his own nightclub,  an environment that had always drawn him as a stage for his  fabulousness—why, even when he was just sixteen, his rival at West  Philadelphia High, Ray Scott, had spotted him at a dance at the O.V.  Catto Elks Lodge in Philadelphia and noticed how the Dipper flourished  in such a setting, managing what all of the other boys couldn’t, a  laid-back, Miles Davis, be-bop cool. Chamberlain well knew the  precedents of black athletes owning such places in New York. Back in  the Twenties, Club Deluxe in Harlem briefly was owned by the  prizefighter Jack Johnson, a controversial figure excoriated by the  white press in the early part of the century for having twice married  white women and later imprisoned for transporting a woman across state  lines in violation of the Mann Act. Now Joe Louis and Ray Robinson lent  their names and money to The Brown Bomber and Sugar Ray’s. It wasn’t so  much the fast life that attracted the Dipper to buy a piece of Smalls  in the spring of 1961. He rarely drank or smoked and he exercised every  day, pushing his own physical limits. (Before one weekend trip to  Atlantic City, his friend Cal Ramsey tried to pick up Chamberlain’s  suitcase but found it too heavy. Ramsey looked inside and discovered  why—the Dipper’s barbells.) What attracted Chamberlain to Smalls  Paradise was the chance to explore new avenues of his own celebrity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn calm moments, the Abyssinian Baptist Church crowd came for early  Sunday dinners. But on most other nights, the nightclub was, like its  part owner, full of the energy and exuberance of youth. “The Twist” by  Philadelphia’s Chubby Checker was yet the rage, and the Tuesday night  Twist contests packed the downstairs Wilmac Room. Limousines and taxis  carrying big-money whites triple-parked out front. “Meeting again at  Smalls Paradise as their fathers did before them, a brand new  generation of monied fun-seeking whites is flocking happily to Harlem,”  \u003ci\u003eEbony\u003c\/i\u003e magazine noted. “And Wilt Chamberlain’s cash registers are  running as hot as the gyrations on the floor.” It was a see-and-be-seen  crowd, sophisticated, elite, and integrated. Smiling for pictures for \u003ci\u003e Ebony\u003c\/i\u003e magazine on a Tuesday Twist night were comic Jack Carter, famed  saxophonist Cannonball Adderly with actress Olga James, a Rockefeller,  an Astor, Edward Smalls (the former owner who sold the club in 1955),  the Greek ambassador to the United Nations, singer Lloyd Price, and of  course, the Dipper himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis nightclub impressed other African-American players in the NBA, not  only for its high style and glitz but because it suggested  Chamberlain’s business acumen. They considered Big Wilt’s Smalls  Paradise a must-stop along the Strip in Harlem along with Jocks and the  Red Rooster. The Knicks’ Willie Naulls and Johnny Green were regulars  at Smalls. The Celtics’ K.C. Jones, in with Bill Russell once, met  James Brown, and was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Godfather of  Soul’s ego.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere, in Harlem, was the Wilt Chamberlain few white Americans knew:  easing comfortably through what W.E.B. Du Bois once had called “the  Black World Beyond the Veil.” Here was the Apollo Theater and Showman’s  Lounge, the Big Apple bar, The Harlem Moon, Lickity Split, and Roy  Campanella’s liquor store. The neighborhood was thirty years past its  heyday; no longer the hub of black intellectual and cultural life,  Harlem had become riddled with crime, dope, and storefront vacancies,  an urban despair and bleakness suffused with racial tension and  frustration. Still, the Strip retained some of its old-time flair. In  the neon flash and bustle, crowds moved from one nightclub to the next.  At the Red Rooster, where Willie Mays had held sway during the early  1950s, you could still find Congressman Adam Clayton Powell surrounded  by admirers. A club hopper could see comic Nipsy Russell at the Baby  Grand on 125th Street, stop by Sugar Ray’s on 126th, and then walk six  blocks over to Count Basie’s club. Next door to Count Basie’s on 132nd  was Shalimar by Randolph, a nightclub that featured a late-night beauty  salon. When Knicks first-year guard Sam Stith, a Harlem resident, came  out to the Strip in 1962, he dressed to the nines and no one crowded  him. A few years before, Stith had taken his girlfriend to Shalimar by  Randolph at 11:00 one night to get her hair done. She finished at 3:00  a.m. While he waited, Stith saw a hustler, all primped up, enter and  shout, “Suits!” The hustler looked at the Knicks guard. “What size?” he  asked. Stith replied, “Forty-two.” The hustler put the same question to  another man sitting nearby, then said, “I’ll be back in an hour.” Stith  looked at his watch: 1:00 a.m. An hour passed, back came the hustler,  suits in hand. Stith didn’t buy; the other guy did. Another hour later,  Stith and his girlfriend headed to Wells Restaurant for the famous  chicken and waffles, a perfect way to end the night, or start the  morning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this animated environment, Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise remained a  bright light. So hot was the revelry at Smalls on Twist nights, local  columnist Jesse H. Walker asked, “Will this thing never end?” In  Harlem, Jackie Robinson co-hosted a cocktail party for New York’s  Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller; Malcolm X, in his dark suit and  shined black shoes, made his rounds through the streets surrounding the  Nation of Islam’s Mosque Seven in Harlem (and periodically ridiculed  the nonviolent movement, including sit-ins, saying, “Anybody can sit. An old woman can sit. A  coward can sit. . . . It takes a man to stand.”); and Wilt Chamberlain  moved through his own celebrated orbit. If Philadelphia was his  workplace, Harlem was his living room. He gravitated to a black world  shared with whites, not an exclusive world or an excluding one. Each  night in the NBA, the Dipper played for white team owners and  predominantly white crowds, but here, at Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise,  surrounded by icons of black life in the lingering glow of Harlem  glamour, whites came to him—to his place.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe March 2 game in Hershey meant little to Chamberlain . . . except  another Friday night away from Harlem. He had spent Thursday night, and  the wee hours of Friday morning, doing what the Dipper often did,  enjoying the spoils of his celebrity. He dropped off his date at her  home in Queens at 6:00 a.m. and only then set his sights on Hershey. He  would travel the 170 miles to Chocolate Town on his own.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWilt Chamberlain had one incentive in Hershey. On another scoring  rampage, he was closing in on 4,000 points for the 1961–62 season; no  other NBA player had ever scored even 3,000 points. On the previous  Sunday, the Dipper had torn into the Knicks for sixty-seven points. Two  days later, in St. Louis, he scored sixty-five in a victory over Bob  Pettit’s Hawks. On Wednesday, he had annihilated the great rookie big  man, Walt Bellamy, and the expansion Chicago Packers, scoring sixty-one  on Bells and blocking twelve of his shots. In that game, the Dipper  also made thirteen of his seventeen free throws, typically the Achilles  heel of his game. Chamberlain, who loved statistics (especially his  own), needed 237 more points over the remaining five games to reach the  once-unthinkable 4,000.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn top of his statistical rampage, he was revolutionizing his sport  stylistically much as Babe Ruth had revolutionized his in the 1920s.  What the garrulous Ruth did with the home run, Chamberlain was doing  with the Dipper Dunk. Slam dunks still were relatively rare. It’s not  that NBA players were incapable of stuffing the ball through the  basket; they simply didn’t do it. Basketball traditionalists believed  dunks suggested poor sportsmanship or showboating. As the NBA’s second  tallest player (Syracuse’s Swede Halbrook stood seven-foot-three),  Chamberlain was beginning to break with tradition by dunking with some  regularity. Even so, he remained more of a finesse player around the  basket, with finger-rolls and put-backs. He dunked with real force only  when the spirit, or perhaps an opponent’s well-placed elbow, moved him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs Ruth, with his fifty-four home runs in 1920, had lifted baseball  from the dead-ball era, so Chamberlain was lifting pro basketball into  a new realm of scoring possibilities. At Madison Square Garden, the  Dipper once proved like the gluttonous Ruth in another way, sending a  ballboy to get him two hot dogs, and then eating them, while in  uniform, on the bench, just before the game started. And like the Babe,  the Dipper kept his eye on pretty women in the crowds. A married man,  Ruth could be loud and coarse, once telling his teammates, “You should  have seen this dame I was with last night. What a body. Not a blemish  on it.” The bachelor Chamberlain was more careful about his liaisons in  winter 1962. “The blonde sitting underneath the basket,” he whispered  to a Warriors official sitting at the scorer’s table during a game. The  Dipper raised a brow and whispered, “Get her number for me.”","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303406489829,"sku":"NP9781400051618","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400051618.jpg?v=1767744352","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/wilt-1962-isbn-9781400051618","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}