Gary Pomerantz
speaker
58 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Gary Pomerantz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
My intuitive reaction was, here we go again. My second reaction was something approximating an eye roll. You know, it's a conspiratorial time.
You go back to the 1960s and there were still a lot of questions about the Kennedy assassination.
Did Neil Armstrong really touch the moon or was he in a studio somewhere in the United States? So it was that kind of a time. And now, you know, we're unfortunately a bit of a historically illiterate country. If there's no video, then it didn't happen. Well, we know the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, but there's no video of that. We know about Lincoln at Gettysburg. There's no video of that.
Do we, though?
Are we sure about that? We're pretty sure Lincoln was at Gettysburg, yeah. And so, you know, for sports fans, you've got to lock in on how different the NBA was then and how different sports media was then. When Kobe scores 81, 15 minutes later online, you can buy a DVD of his performance. So that's what we're used to. That's the immediacy of today with technology. It wasn't so then.
Yeah. I mean, there was always questions of how could he have done this? How could anybody score 100 points? Kobe's 81 is second best, and that's not even close. There's something, too, about the number 100, the symbolism of 100. It's a century. It's a perfect score on a test. If Wilton scored 102 or 97, we wouldn't embrace it. or question it even, as we do.
And so I decided, all these decades later, I gotta find out what happened here. This is one of the most famous and famously unknown stories in sports history. The deeper I went, it became like Ellis in Wonderland, Curiouser and Curiouser.
Wilt was a luminous star at that time. He's just 25 years old. He's got a nightclub in Harlem called Big Wilt Smalls Paradise. Smalls Paradise dates the Halcyon days of the Harlem Renaissance. And Wilt walked through that place like he owned all of Harlem, like he owned all of New York. Redd Foxx, Etta James, Cannonball Adderley. Wilt's the greeter, the tallest greeter in NBA history.
Wilt had a Goliath syndrome. He was 7'1", 260 pounds. Dolph Shays of the Syracuse Nationals said his body was the most perfect instrument made by God to play basketball. You know, another writer likened Wilt's body to the first sight of the New York skyline. I mean, think about this. 7'1", 260 pounds. His back triangulates down to a 31-inch dancer's waist. The guy was cut.
The guy could run the floor like a train. Everything about him was magnificent.
You know, he wasn't Frankie Valli. He wasn't very good, but they did cut a record of it.
You know, he had a racehorse named Spooky Cadet and never won. He had an Asian motif apartment off Central Park West in New York. And then, of course, there was Will telling stories about his womanizing.
What's the fact checking on that like? Well, the fact checking is difficult to do as a matter of fact. But I interviewed one of the 20,000, a woman named Linda Huey, who became a great friend of Wilt's at the end of his life. She said, Wilt, why did you say 20,000? And Wilt's response was to wink and say, what's an extra zero between friends?
I got this sense as I was working on this book, excavating this 100-point game, there's a comic book superhero quality to Wilt, his life, his numbers. I interviewed, ultimately, 56 people who were there. Fifteen of them players, the broadcaster, the statistician, the shot clock operator, a number of fans.
Look, Pablo, when you go back into this time, you're going back into a time when the NBA was a lounge act. It was a league in search of itself. The crowds weren't very big. The joke used to be that the PA announcer would introduce the players in the starting lineup and then would introduce each fan. It was nine teams in the league, only one team west of St. Louis.
That would be the Lakers, who'd moved out a year before to the west. And the league was trying to grow new fans. And that's why they played in outlying areas that had sizable arenas. The Lakers played a game in Portland. They played a game in Seattle. The Celtics played in Providence. And the Philadelphia Warriors played three games that year in Hershey. This was the third of those games.
Well, you have to realize, back then, TV stations didn't save tapes. They were saving money, and they were re-taping over these tapes. That's why they disappear with television. That's why they disappear some with radio. It was a game 75 in an 80-game season.
Well, that's the joy of it to me. That's what the attorneys call discovery. You go and immerse yourself, full immersion. And I would travel far and wide to find these people. And it becomes an obsession. What about that? I called Bill Campbell so many times. The last time I called him, I said, Bill, it's Gary Pomerantz. And he said, not again. And that's just, Bill, one more thing.
One more question. Two more questions.
Well, Wilt's got 69 points going into the fourth quarter, right? And so he still needs 31 points. You know, that's a lot of points. Right.
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