Warriors legend Meschery debunks students’ conspiracy theories about Chamberlain’s 100-point game – Paradise Post

By Austin Murphy | The Press Democrat

Janai Meschery knows a teaching moment when she sees one.

Meschery is in her 28th year as a teacher at Miller Creek Middle School in Marin County. It runs in her family. Her father taught high school English and creative writing for decades, and is also an accomplished poet.

But Tom Meschery is better known for his 10-year NBA career — the first six of those seasons with the Warriors. In 1967, the club retired his number, 14, which hangs in the rafters of the Chase Center in San Francisco.

Now 86 and living in Sacramento, he embodies a sublime paradox. The notoriously intense player who led the league in personal fouls in 1962 and once chased Lakers center Darrall Imhoff into the stands while brandishing a folding chair, has since published four volumes of poetry and two novels. His memoir, “The Mad Manchurian,” was released in March.

The hothead who once fought at the drop of a hat jumped at the chance, earlier in this school year, to record a video for his daughter’s students, when a classroom debate hit close to home. In it, Tom Meschery encouraged them to hone their critical thinking skills, and to examine their willingness to embrace conspiracy theories.

In an eighth grade U.S. history class last fall, Janai Meschery read a poem by her father titled “The Legend,” which mentioned an NBA milestone from March 2, 1962, when Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in one night against the New York Knicks — still a league record, 63 years later.

To her surprise, several of her students already knew about the game. And they pushed back, questioning whether Chamberlain, then with the Philadelphia Warriors, had really scored all those points.

They’d seen videos and posts, on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, casting doubt on Chamberlain’s feat — all part of “a curious anti-lore,” as The Athletic put it, that’s grown up around the game over the past decade.

The skepticism of her students jolted Meschery on a personal level. Her father, at that time a burly power forward in his rookie season, had started alongside “Wilt the Stilt” in that game, chipping in 16 points in the Warriors’ 169-147 win.

When Janai Meschery was growing up, The Big Dipper would hold her up close to the rim so she could dunk a basketball.

Now, with some of the young teens in her classroom casting doubt on his most iconic game, she wanted to spark a discussion on how best to research long-ago events, and to underscore the importance of considering the source, whether researching a paper or forming an opinion.

She also felt called to safeguard the legacy of an old family friend no longer around to defend himself: Chamberlain died of a heart attack in 1999, at age 63.

Tom Meschery was happy to help. Looking at the camera through spectacles that gave him the appearance of a wise old owl, he recorded a 5-minute video addressing doubts around Chamberlain’s triple-digit game.

“My understanding is that (on) the internet right now, there are people talking about this being a fake. And I want to tell you that is absolutely bogus. And one of the reasons it’s bogus is because I was there,” he said. “I played with Wilt Chamberlain in that 100-point game that took place on March 2, 1962.”

No filmed highlights of the game existed, he explained, because it was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania, 95 miles west of Philadelphia. To build the team’s fan base, the club had scheduled several out-of-town home games that season — to little avail. The Warriors moved to the Bay Area the following season.

Paid attendance at the drafty, hangar-like Hershey Sports Arena was 4,124. “That was a long time ago, so my guess is probably 1,000 (of those spectators) are probably still alive,” Meschery noted.

“So, I ask you guys” — the skeptics in the class were, in fact, all boys — “would 1,000 eyewitnesses, plus me, be sufficient for you to believe that the 100-point game did exist?”

On a recent Wednesday, two dozen boys returned to Janai Meschery’s classroom, on their lunch break, to continue that discussion.

The skeptic-in-chief, a fiercely intelligent eighth-grader nicknamed Fonzi, explained his doubts around Chamberlain’s accomplishment.

The game had not been televised, he noted. The radio broadcast by Philadelphia station WCAU wasn’t archived.

But many NBA games weren’t televised in the early 1960s. The NBA hadn’t yet entered the mainstream of American culture, where it is today — thanks, in part, to Chamberlain’s herculean outing in Hershey.

And a partial recording of announcer Bill Campbell’s play-by-play was discovered in 1988. That tape, which captured only the fourth quarter, now resides in the Library of Congress.

Those absences — of TV footage, and a complete radiocast — stoked Fonzi’s suspicions. “There’s like, some weirdness there,” he said.

A red-haired boy named Julian noted that Chamberlain was a lifetime 51% free throw shooter — “and now he makes every single one, in a small town?”

In fact, Chamberlain was 28 for 32 from the foul line that night, using the underhand “granny shot” later popularized by the Warriors’ forward Rick Barry.

A rangy eighth-grader piped up, asking why Chamberlain only broke the 100-point barrier once. “Why didn’t he get close again? I mean, I know it’s really hard, but …”

A student named Eli recalled the night in 2023 when Cleveland’s Donovan Mitchell torched the Chicago Bulls for 71 points. “That was unbelievable. So, for someone to score 100?”

Janai Meschery, nodding, seemed to take his side, noting, “We haven’t seen Steph Curry even come close to that number. The Splash Brothers had to do it together” — a reference to the 2012 game when Curry and then-Golden State Warrior Klay Thompson combined for 100 points in a win over the Charlotte Bobcats.

“But you’re wearing a 2025 hat,” she reminded Eli. Looking through the lens of the modern game, Janai said, “It’s really hard to believe that somebody could score 100 points. But does that mean it didn’t happen?”

Having heard from the skeptics, she pivoted to a broader issue: “If we doubt this, what else are we going to question? And why? What do we need to prove that something’s true? What is fake news? And isn’t this a really important time to think about all that?”

When the discussion ended, the boys noisily filed out. Afterward, Meschery expressed concerns that some of her students were willing to be persuaded by social media influencers “with a million-plus followers, but no credentials” over their teacher, or her father, a primary source “who was an actual eyewitness.”

Fonzi, for one, found Tom Meschery’s testimony persuasive. To a degree.

“After the video,” he said, “my whole perspective changed, because he was telling us things that most people never heard.”

No less remarkable than Chamberlain’s scoring spree that night is the life story of Tom Meschery, the pugnacious power forward who was the only rookie in the Warriors’ starting lineup that night.

Tomislav Nikolayevich Mescheryakov was born in 1938 in Manchuria, now part of China, his parents having fled the Vladimir Lenin-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

His great-grandmother was a Tolstoy who once instructed her distant cousin — the novelist Leo Tolstoy — to leave her house.

“She didn’t like atheists, and she kicked his ass out,” a smiling Tom Meschery told The Press Democrat.

(While Tolstoy was religious, according to some of his own writings, he may have been going through a spiritual crisis the day Meschery’s great-grandmother gave him the boot.)

After spending World War II in a Japanese internment camp, he moved to San Francisco. Bullied in school for being a “pinko” and “commie” — even though his family had opposed the Bolsheviks, or Reds, who executed some of his relatives — he found a vital outlet in sports.

“To me, basketball was citizenship,” he said. “The better I played, the greater an American citizen I would be. So I tended to be more fierce about it.”

That’s putting it mildly. While averaging 12.7 points and 8.6 rebounds per game over his decade-long career, Meschery also earned renown as one of the league’s most pugilistic players.

Take, for instance, the night he traded punches with then-Celtic Tom Heinsohn — whom Meschery encountered soon after in a tavern near Boston Garden. Among the topics they discussed was Heinsohn’s passion for fine-arts painting — as referenced in Meschery’s poem, “Tom Heinsohn:”

Today I write poems and admire the back-light

In Wyeth’s painting of the yellow dog sunning himself

In the window and think that the violence

we made together was the work of artists.

Those verses capture the contradictions within Meschery, whose hard-nosed style earned him the nickname The Mad Russian — he prefers The Mad Manchurian — but who enrolled, shortly after his playing career, in the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts.

During his four seasons with the Seattle SuperSonics, Meschery was part of a weekly poker game that included Mark Strand, a visiting professor at the University of Washington who later become the U.S. poet laureate.

Strand had good things to say about Meschery’s first collection of poems, “Above the Rim,” published during his final NBA season, and invited the warrior-poet to sit in on his classes.

Later, during his sole season as head coach of the ABA’s Carolina Cougars — the team finished 35-49 — Meschery confessed to Strand that he was miserable in the job.

Strand urged him to apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop, and wrote him a recommendation. Meschery was accepted, and moved with his young family to the Corn Belt.

During poker parties at their house on Linn Street in Iowa City, Janai recalls, guests would leave their coats in the master bedroom.

Sneaking out of their rooms past bedtime, she and her two siblings would hide under the coats “and listen to the poker game.”

Among those dropping by for those parties were John Cheever, John Irving, Allan Gurganus and other literary luminaries.

Tom Meschery, meanwhile, was shuttling to and from Portland, Oregon, where he was an assistant coach for the Trail Blazers — while working on his MFA.

Degree in hand, he moved the family to Truckee. Soon after, he started teaching high school in Reno. Tom Meschery opened a bookstore downtown. But it closed after four or five years, said Janai, who recalled that her father was not a good businessman.

That tracks with a self-assessment he shared in a 2011 commencement speech delivered at his alma mater, St. Mary’s College in Moraga.

Tom Meschery, according to Meschery, was “an excellent basketball player, a lousy coach, a terrible bookstore owner, an uninspired house painter, a disorganized administrator, a damn good teacher and an adequate poet.”

Begging to differ, when it came to that last description, was his fellow poet and St. Mary’s Gael, the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award winner Robert Hass, who has likened Meschery’s verses to “a clean jab, straight through, all force and grace.”