It was only last January that high school junior Jeron Teng of Xavier School exploded for 104 points in a single game during the 2010-11 Metro Manila Tiong Lian basketball competitions.

That reminded me of the late Wilt Chamberlain, who also once scored 100 points in the early years of his professional career in the U.S. National Basketball
Association.

It was 49 years ago on March 2 that Chamberlain achieved the greatest singular scoring feat by a player in NBA history when he tallied 100 points with the Philadelphia (now Golden State) Warriors during a 169-147 thumping of the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Significantly, the Warriors played just three of their regular home games at Hershey, Pennsylvania (also their training camp site) during the 1961-62 season.

On that cold night Chamberlain hit the century mark, however, only 4,124 spectators were on hand for the contest. There was no television coverage at the time, and there were only limited radio and print mentions.

Moreover, for many years, there was no recording of the radio broadcast.

In was only in 1994 that the NBA office did care to know that a taped radio broadcast of the fourth quarter of the game existed.

It was recorded by a man in Amherst, Massachusetts - a University of Massachusetts college student named Jim Trelease - and later passed on to an official of the Hershey Park Arena - Paul Serff, who in turn gave the tape to the NBA less than 16 years ago.

Soon, even the game's final score was a source of conflicting reports. The official boxscore showed that the Warriors won, 169-147, but on the tape, there were two final scores given - 169-150 and 169-146.

And the players who suited in that game have different memories of whether the game stopped or continued after Chamberlain made his 100th point.

For sure, there were 46 seconds left on the game clock when the Big Dipper's 99th and 100th points on a two-handed dunk became numbers 168 and 169 for the Warriors.

However, writer Alon Marcovici, in the article "Setting the Score" for the official 1997 NBA All-Star Weekend souvenir program, expressed doubts with regard to the final score.

Said Marcovici: "We know the official boxscore reads 169-147. But we also have a tape of the radio broadcast that has announcer Bill Campbell calling the score after Wilt's bucket as 169-146. Following the celebration (when players and fans mobbed Wilt after he reached triple digits), Campbell picks up the call of the game with 39 seconds left and accounts for four more points - two by Willie Naulls' free throws and a Donnie Butcher layup - and calls the score as 169-150.

"But when Campbell returns to the air to give his final summation, he once again said the score was 169-146. What is the explanation? If the score was 169-146 when Wilt scored his 100th point, did the clock operator simply fail to enter the final four points of the game, which could have meant that Campbell was reading an incorrect scoreboard?"

"Or was the scoreboard simply wrong? Did the scoreboard operator fail to hear the official scorer say the score was 169-147?"

Then there were the mixed recollections of what happened in the frantic moments after Chamberlain's 100th point.