WILT, 1962(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　On the night of March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, right
up the street from the chocolate factory, Wilt Chamberlain, a young
and striking athlete celebrated as the Big Dipper, scored one
hundred points in a game against the New York Knickerbockers.
　　As historic and revolutionary as the achievement was, it remains
shrouded in myth. The game was not televised; no New York
sportswriters showed up; and a fourteen-year-old local boy ran onto
the court when Chamberlain scored his hundredth point, shook his
hand, and then ran off with the basketball. In telling the story of
this remarkable night, author Gary M. Pomerantz brings to life a
lost world of American sports.
　　In 1962, the National Basketball Association, stepchild to the
college game, was searching for its identity. Its teams were mostly
white, the number of black players limited by an unspoken quota.
Games were played in drafty, half-filled arenas, and the players
traveled on buses and trains, telling tall tales, playing cards,
and sometimes reading Joyce. Into this scene stepped the
unprecedented Wilt Chamberlain: strong and quick-witted, voluble
and enigmatic, a seven-footer who played with a colossal will and a
dancer’s grace. That strength, will, grace, and mystery were never
more in focus than on March 2, 1962. Pomerantz tracked down Knicks
and Philadelphia Warriors, fans, journalists, team officials, other
NBA stars of the era, and basketball historians, conducting more
than 250 interviews in all, to recreate in painstaking detail the
game that announced the Dipper’s greatness. He brings us to
Hershey, Pennsylvania, a sweet-seeming model of the gentle,
homogeneous small-town America that was fast becoming
anachronistic. We see the fans and players, alternately fascinated
and confused by Wilt, drawn anxiously into the spectacle. Pomerantz
portrays the other legendary figures in this story: the Warriors’
elegant coach Frank McGuire; the beloved, if rumpled, team owner
Eddie Gottlieb; and the irreverent p.a. announcer Dave “the Zink”
Zinkoff, who handed out free salamis courtside.
　　At the heart of the book is the self-made Chamberlain, a romantic
cosmopolitan who owned a nightclub in Harlem and shrugged off
segregation with a bebop cool but harbored every slight deep in his
psyche. March 2, 1962, presented the awesome sight of Wilt
Chamberlain imposing himself on a world that would diminish him.
Wilt, 1962 is not only the dramatic story of a singular basketball
game but a meditation on small towns, midcentury America, and one
of the most intriguing figures in the pantheon of sports
heroes.
　　Also available as a Random House AudioBook
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　Gary M. Pomerantz earned acclaim with his two previous books.
Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, a multigenerational biography
of Atlanta and its racial conscience, was named a 1996 Notable Book
of the Year by the New York Times. Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds
(2001), the true story of an airplane crash, has been published in
Britain, Germany, and China. A graduate of the University of
California, Berkeley, Pomerantz worked for nearly two decades as a
journalist, first as a sportswriter for the Washington Post and
then writing columns, editorials, and special projects for the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He later served for two years as
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at Emory University
in Atlanta. He lives today in the San Francisco Bay Area with his
wife and their three children.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　“Gary Pomerantz’s Wilt, 1962 is beautifully written, well
reported, and compelling. But what’s so special about this book,
what causes it to linger, is the atmosphere that Pomerantz has
captured through his words, so bittersweet and haunting. You love
Wilt Chamberlain. You feel the aura of his isolation as he towered
above the rest of us in life, and you wish more than ever he was
still around because of his very individuality.” —H. G. “Buzz”
Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights
　　“In his undeniable excellence and egotism, Wilt Chamberlain was
America itself, inspiring worship, ambivalence, and downright awe.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
　　“Genius is in the details, and Gary Pomerantz’s Wilt, 1962 proves
that.” —John Feinstein, author of A Season on the Brink and A Good
Walk Spoiled
　　“Meticulously researched and superbly crafted, Wilt, 1962
revisits and vividly re-creates a seminal but overlooked moment in
American sports history. On that transformative evening in Hershey,
Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain scored one hundred points and staked
a black man’s claim to the city game. In Gary Pomerantz’s deft
possession-by-possession retelling, Chamberlain soars again. The
gangly, uncompromising seven-footer who always seemed too big for
the uniform he inhabited thunders back to life.” —Jane Leavy,
author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy
　　“Wilt, 1962 is not only a lively sports story about the
record-setting performance of a larger-than-life athlete, it is
also a wonderful chronicle of urban and social history, replete
with colorful characters and situations from a bygone era of
professional basketball, when the game changed from being dominated
by white stars to being dominated by black ones.” —Gerald L. Early,
author of This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s
　　“In this age of instant everything, few people have any idea who
Wilt Chamberlain really was and what he meant to sports. Gary
Pomerantz shows us. In Wilt, 1962 he puts us courtside for one of
the greatest unexamined moments in sports history, the night Wilt
scored one hundred points. In a sweet return to his sportswriting
roots, Pomerantz gives us Wilt in his realm, his rise to prominence
and dominance, set against the backdrop of the NBA’s coming of age.
It’s all irresistible.” —Michael Wilbon, cohost of ESPN’s Pardon
the Interruption
　　From the Hardcover edition.