Larger Than Life

AP Photo via the Chronicle

With his unsurpassed combination of strength, athleticism, and grace 7-foot-tall Wilt Chamberlain was the dominant basketball player of the 1950's and 1960's. Today is the 50th anniversary of the day he scored 100 points, a single-game NBA scoring record that no one has come close to breaking.

Before Twitter, Facebook, and Google, before the personal computer, e-mail, and cable TV, there were only three TV channels and one phone company. (On the other hand, there were at least two newspapers in every town, and AM radio was pretty much the same as it is now.)

We got most of our news in print the next day. If we were lucky there were a few photos. For higher quality pictures we had to wait a week to read the issue of Life or Look magazine.

We still had our imaginations. In an era when being 6-2 meant that you could be a center on our high school basketball team, we barely imagined a giant like Wilt Chamberlain. We could read about him in the paper, and we saw his grainy black-and-white footage on our tiny TV's or on the Movietone newsreels. We used our minds to fill in the blanks.

Wilt Chamberlain, like Bill Russell, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and John Unitas, will always be larger than life to this child of the '50's. In the battlespace of memory imagination triumphs over the eyes and ears. © 2012 Stephen Yuen