Guess what! We went to the moon!

I don't know much about basketball, but I will always remember that the National Basketball Association record for scoring points in a game is held by Wilt "The Stilt" Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors, playing against the New York Knicks on March 2, 1962. 

The game was not played in Philadelphia or New York, and the reason for that plays into what I'm here to talk about today. 

In 1962, the NBA was not nearly as popular or ubiquitous as it is today. There was no cable, so there was far less television exposure. The game itself centered around set shots from the court, rather than dramatic dunks under the basket; it was more of a finesse game at the time.

So the Warriors sought to promote themselves in other ways, with no 24-hour TV coverage. They played some games in a drafty hockey arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania, hoping to attract new fans, and it was there that Chamberlain got off to a hot start that evening, and his teammates kept feeding him the ball, enabling him to sink enough "Dipper Dunks" and jump shots, totaling 100 points.

All good for the game, and it has been said that that one single game helped the pro league become an American fixture. People talked about it, and went to see more games.

You know what else has become an American fixture, though, is this dumb trend of people questioning the validity of things and saying maybe they didn't happen. This dates back to the days of early man, when humans had not yet learned much about the nature of the universe, so they made up fables to explain things. This is why your parents told you not to go back in the pool for thirty minutes after you had a sandwich, lest you face a certain, watery, death.

There is, against all odds, a movement afoot on the socials (TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook and X/Twitter) that has people wondering if this game, and Chamberlain's feat, actually took place. Because there is not complete video available of the game, and not even a complete audio recording of the play-by-play, people with podcasts and plenty of time to think of things to podcast about are saying maybe this was faked. 

Yes, it happened.

As a nation, as a world, we are awash in facts. For crying out loud, everyone walks around with a little device in their pocket that can tell them the latest news, name the principal exports of every nation, list all the ingredients for a really nice layer cake, and play songs to listen to while you bake that cake.

And instead of appreciating having the sum total of human knowledge and experience literally at our fingertips, some of us just see a fact and say, "Duh, that is fake news!"

Where would we get such an idea?