HERSHEY, Pa.Walk into HersheyPark Arena today and its not quite like stepping into a time warp because the ever-growing amusement park now dwarfs the landscape. Modern roller coasters, designed seemingly in the future, are what attract folks to Chocolate Town these days.
But as far as time warps go, HersheyPark Arena is about as close as it gets.
The building is virtually unchanged since it was first opened in 1936 as the Hershey Sports Arena for the American Hockey League Bears. Its sloped, concrete roof was modeled after the old hockey arenas in Europe and it blended in perfectly with the barns that dot the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside.
Certainly Wilt Chamberlain saw a lot of barns as he drove from New York City to the Hershey Sports Arena in his Cadillac for a Friday night game against the New York Knicks. In fact, Chamberlain and the Philadelphia Warriors had already played twice in Hershey during the 1961-62 seasononce against the Los Angeles Lakers and another game against the St. Louis Hawkswhere the Big Dipper scored a combined 107 points.
On March 2, 1962, Chamberlain nearly doubled that output when he scored 100 points in the most celebrated individual record in professional sports.
Nevertheless, in 1962 the NBA was not the international juggernaut that we know it as now. In fact, the Lakers had just moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles two years prior, in a league where St. Louis was the westernmost franchise. So with very little television and certainly no cable TV, NBA teams had to get out and about in order to drum up support for the league.
By the time the Philadelphia Warriors hit Hershey on March 2, 1962, they had already played 12 neutral site games with some coming as part of NBA doubleheaders in cities like Boston or New York. In fact, the Warriors had faced the Knicks in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Hershey. They also went to places like Utica, N.Y. and East Chicago, Ind. during the season. The season before, Philadelphia played neutral site games in all the usual places, plus Rochester, N.Y., Fort Wayne, Ind., and College Park, Md.
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Other teams played regular-season games in Camden, N.J., Bethlehem, Pa. and Providence, R.I.
But for the Philadelphia Warriors, Hershey was always on the schedule beginning in 1950 and going until the team left for San Francisco after the 1961-62 season. When the Syracuse Nationals moved to Philadelphia to become the 76ers, the team played games in Hershey as late as 1974.
It wasnt just the NBA that turned up at HersheyPark Arena, either. Big 5 basketball teams routinely scheduled a neutral site game in Hershey. Along with the standard tenants like the minor league Hershey Bears, the Ice Capades, professional wrestling, high school championship games and pop music concerts, basketball was a staple in Hershey.
That was especially the case for the Warriors, who held their preseason training camp in Hershey year after year. As part of the bargain the Warriors turned the Hershey Sports Arena into a home away from home.
Yet for basketball, Hershey Sports Arena was notorious for its damp, dungeon-like locker rooms where there were no lockers at all. NBA players, hockey pros, high school athletes and rock stars made do with a room that featured a few shower heads, a couple of bathrooms stalls and a long wooden bench in front of metal hooks. High school and college players in the 1980s and 1990s likely used the same facilities as Chamberlain and other Hall of Fame NBA stars.
The floor of the arena was always cold, which made sense considering the place was built mostly for hockey. For basketball, a cheap, easy-to-piece-together floor was snapped into place and elevated approximately six inches off the ground.
Actually, according to Gary Pomerantz, the author of Wilt, 1962, the basketball floor that Wilt got his 100 points on was built for roller skating. It was a mess in 1962 and later stashed in the attic of a barn on a campground in Hershey. Thats where anyone who wanted could ask to run around on the court where Wilt scored 100 points on an old, eroding roller skating surface gathering mold and dust in an attic of a barn on a campground in rural Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, the backboards and hoops were shoved to the side in the basement corridors of the arena when concerts, wrestling matches or hockey games had center stage. Thats where the kids from the neighborhood would sneak in to climb all over the baskets. As a result, the rims were marshmallow soft and when shots by NBA players hit them, the ball had no choice but to roll through the net.
I spoke with people in Hershey and was told by them that when the circus came to town and played there, they pushed these baskets to the side of the arena. And kids would sneak in during the off hours. They would bring a basketball, and they would borrow the clown's springboard. And they would do these running jumps, bounce off the springboard and fly through the air like little Wilt Chamberlain, Pomerantz told the Philadelphia Daily News. And they would dunk the ball. But as they were coming down, they would grab the rim and hold onto them, then fall catlike to the ground. So they were working those rims.
Darrall Imhoff, the undersized backup center in charge of guarding Wilt had a name for the soft rims.
The baskets were very loose hoops, very soft, Imhoff said in an interview for the Basketball Hall of Fame. They were what we called garbage hoops.
Even NFL players laced them up to play basketball in Hershey. As the opening act of the Warriors-Knicks game that began at 8:45 p.m. on the Friday night at the arena, the Philadelphia Eagles played a game against members of the Baltimore Colts. According to newspaper accounts, many NFL teams barnstormed around to play other clubs in basketball during the off-season. According to an interview with Eagles quarterback Sonny Jurgensen in Wilt, 1962 by Gary M. Pomerantz, the Eagles sometimes played 40 games a year often for 50 a pop.
So before the Eagles and Colts hit Martinis bar near the Hershey chocolate factory, they hung around to watch Chamberlain make history. First, though, the football players got a glimpse of Chamberlain as they were arriving at the arena. In an arcade adjacent to the famous Hershey Park and across the parking lot from the utilitarian Hershey Park Stadium, Chamberlain held court in a shooting gallery game
They had a shooting arcade right there at the stadium, Wilt said in an interview with the New York Post years later. Right before we played the game, I broke every shooting record at the arcade.
I killed it.
These days there isnt much at the arena to memorialize Wilts big night. The Pennsylvania Historical Society placed a marker outside of the front door and inside the art deco ticket lobby, there is a photo and box score commemorating what happened on March 2, 1962. But Hershey was Milton S. Hersheys townliterally. The chocolate magnate built it all. The stadium, the amusement park, the arena, the hospital, the schools, the orphanage, the parks and the houses are all his gifts to the people of his town. Hershey even had the street lamps shaped like Hersheys Kisses and when the wind is blowing just right, the scent of chocolate from his factories is evident in places like Harrisburg, Lancaster and even nearby Three Mile Island.
The arena, too, was built for the people of Hershey. These days the hockey clubs at Shippensburg University and Lebanon Valley College play games at the arena. the arena is open to all visitors who just want to poke around the place on a quiet evening or maybe take a few spins around the ice on skates.
Its a time warp. The doors are rarely locked in Hershey, Pa.
Wilt, however, was just passing through and the arena, virtually untouched since it was built during the Depression, bears that out. The first four rows of seats are made of hard, unforgiving wood. The concourses are as narrow as tight ropes and the steps that lead to the seats encircling the joint are as steep as the foothills of the Himalayas.
The scoreboards, designed for hockey, were hanging above the arena since the late 1950s. Additionally, many future stars for the Flyers, Capitals, Bruins and Avalanche passed through the doors of the arena, but there is barely anything to remember them by either.
Then again, there is no need for it. Anyone who walks through the doors of the old barn knows exactly what happened there. Its where Wilt had the greatest night in basketball history and the strength of Wilts spirit in the arena is much stronger than the scent of chocolate pulsing through the factory next door.
Notes on sources
Information from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, Harrisburg Patriot News, Lancaster New Era, New York Post, New York Times, ESPN the Magazine and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame archives were used.Pomerantz, Gary M. (2005). Wilt, 1962: The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era. Pluto, Terry (2000). Tall Tales: The Glory Years of the NBA.Taylor, John (2006). The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball
E-mail John Finger at jfinger@comcastsportsnet.com