Al Attles sat on a wooden bench in a tiny locker room in Hershey, Pa., exactly 50 years ago Friday in stunned amazement. The historical significance of what he had just witnessed would come later. He just tried to soak it all in.
He remembers the mood in the room was surprisingly low-key. Joyous, sure, but not the jubilant celebration one might expect given the circumstances. Teammate Wilt Chamberlain had scored 100 points to lead the Philadelphia Warriors to a 169-147 victory against the New York Knickerbockers.
One hundred points! A monumental accomplishment even for a larger-than-life figure.
Attles, a second-year player, looked over at Chamberlain afterward and noticed sweat still pouring off his body like a river. Chamberlain had a conflicted look on his face as he studied the stat sheet.
"He said, 'I never thought I'd take 60 shots in a game [actually 63],'" Attles said. "Me in my infinite wisdom said, 'Yeah, but you made 36 of them.' We tried to make it light at that point because he was really down."
Imagine the mood in the Knicks locker room. Some of them were livid about the way the whole thing happened on the court.
"I know some guys were ticked off," forward Dave Budd said. "But I wasn't really ticked off. Listen, the fact that we did everything we could just added to the legitimacy of the feat."
That feat still stands as an NBA record 50 years later, a performance that's become almost mythical because there were no TV cameras to capture it. It was played at the end of a season in an arena built for ice hockey with official attendance counted at 4,124.