NBA | History | Games Project
One Night at the Garden: January 1, 1965
Wilt Chamberlain, Willis Reed, and the Schoolboy — Three Hall of Fame Centers, One Evening, One Floor
On the evening of Friday, January 1, 1965, the marquee at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan carried two basketball games. The main event was a National Basketball Association contest between the San Francisco Warriors and the New York Knickerbockers, scheduled for a tip-off after 9 p.m. The preliminary game was a high school fixture between Power Memorial Academy of Manhattan and Archbishop Stepinac of White Plains, scheduled for 6:45 p.m. Roughly 7,000 spectators bought tickets, and the overwhelming reason most of them arrived early was to watch the seventeen-year-old boy who would play in the undercard.¹
His name was Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. He was seven feet, one inch tall and weighed 235 pounds. He had grown one inch in the previous two years. In four years he would be the first overall pick of the 1969 NBA Draft. In five years he would win his first NBA Most Valuable Player Award. In eight years he would legally change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. On the night in question, he was a high school junior averaging 31 points per game in 32-minute schoolboy contests, and a Look magazine photographer named William J. McKean was already six weeks into a feature profile that would run the following month under the title "High Alcindor — Basketball's Mt. Everest."²
The evening produced, on a single court and within three hours, three men who would come to define the NBA center position across the next two decades. It produced them at three distinct stages of development. Wilton Norman Chamberlain, twenty-eight years old and in his sixth professional season, was the incumbent — the most dominant offensive force the sport had ever produced. Willis Reed Jr., a twenty-two-year-old rookie out of Grambling College, was the emerging professional. Alcindor was the horizon. All three were in the building. None of the three knew, on the evening of January 1, 1965, that Chamberlain had two weeks left as a Warrior; that Reed would end the season as the NBA's Rookie of the Year and would eventually build two championship Knicks teams; or that Alcindor would, by the end of his own career, surpass every statistical marker Chamberlain was then establishing.
What the seven thousand in attendance did know was that a schoolboy in an upper-Manhattan Catholic league had become, by consensus of professional observers, the best amateur basketball player alive.
The Undercard
Power Memorial arrived at the Garden late. The Stepinac Crusaders were already halfway through their pregame warm-ups when the New York team walked onto the floor. Stepinac coach Nat Volpe ordered his players back to the locker room to await the start of the game. "I didn't want them to see him before they had to," Volpe told Time magazine six weeks later.³
The "him" was Alcindor. At seven-one and 235 pounds, in a decade when the average NBA player stood six-five, Alcindor presented a physical profile that functionally did not exist at any level of organized basketball beneath the top of the professional game. Time, in the profile that ran February 12, 1965, described his pregame ritual in language that suggests the writer was struggling to place what he was watching: "He stands idly under the backboard sucking on a lollipop, dropping ball after ball into the ten-foot-high basket — without ever leaving his feet."⁴ He wore a size sixteen sneaker. His father, Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., was a six-foot-three New York City Transit Authority police officer; his mother, Cora, was five-eleven.⁵ By the morning of the Stepinac game, roughly one hundred colleges had written to express interest. Power Memorial head coach Jack Donahue screened every piece of mail. Sportswriters were required to submit interview requests in writing.⁶
The game itself was a rout. Power Memorial defeated Stepinac 69-44. Alcindor scored 37. The New York Times coverage the next morning, running under the headline "Alcindor, 7-Foot Schoolboy, Thrills 7,000 at Garden," carried a Don Charles photograph of the opening jump ball, Alcindor reaching a full arm's length above Stepinac center Ed Porcelli for the tip.⁷ The caption read: "Lew Alcindor, Power Memorial's tall star, captures jump ball as Ed Porcelli of Stepinac looks on at Garden." The Times reporter, working in a voice characteristic of the era, noted that Alcindor's "eventual effectiveness was hard to judge as he played among boys so much shorter, but the professional observers were unanimous in their opinion that he showed a fine shooting touch and good mobility and footwork."⁸
The victory was Power Memorial's sixty-fourth in a row. The streak had begun during Alcindor's freshman season at the school and would reach seventy-one before ending, on January 30, 1965, at Cole Field House on the University of Maryland campus, in a 46-43 defeat to DeMatha Catholic of Hyattsville, Maryland — a loss that remains, sixty-one years later, the most famous in the history of American high school basketball.⁹ On the night of the Stepinac game, the ending was twenty-nine days and seven games in the future. Alcindor walked off the Garden floor. The professionals walked on.
The Incumbent
The circumstances surrounding Wilton Norman Chamberlain's appearance at Madison Square Garden that night are, in retrospect, unusual. He had led the San Francisco Warriors to the NBA Finals the previous June, where they had lost to the Boston Celtics in five games. He was twenty-eight years old, averaging 34.7 points and 22.9 rebounds per game across the 1964-65 season to that point, and was unquestionably the most famous professional basketball player in the world. Within two weeks, the Warriors would trade him to the Philadelphia 76ers for Connie Dierking, Lee Shaffer, Paul Neumann, and $150,000 in cash. After the trade, San Francisco would finish the 1964-65 season 17-63, the worst record in the league. Chamberlain would play his final game in a Warriors uniform on January 13, 1965 — twelve days after the evening in question.¹⁰
Playing alongside Chamberlain in the San Francisco frontcourt was Nathaniel Thurmond, a second-year center out of Bowling Green. The Warriors had drafted Thurmond third overall in the 1963 NBA Draft with the specific intention of pairing him with Chamberlain, accepting the unorthodox geometry of two seven-footers occupying the same frontcourt in service of the theory that their combined rebounding and rim protection would overwhelm the rest of the league.¹¹ On paper, the arrangement was devastating. The Times game story the following morning observed that Chamberlain and Thurmond together "look capable of reaching all the way across the court by stretching their arms out."¹²
Standing against them for the Knicks was Willis Reed Jr. Reed had been selected by New York with the tenth overall pick in the 1964 NBA Draft — the first pick of the second round — out of Grambling College, a historically Black institution in north Louisiana, where he had won an NAIA national championship as a freshman and had averaged 26.6 points and 21.3 rebounds per game as a senior under coach Fred Hobdy.¹³ He stood six feet, nine and a half inches tall and weighed 240 pounds. He had signed his first professional contract for a salary of approximately $10,000. Eight organizations had passed on him before the Knicks selected him — a detail Reed referenced publicly for the rest of his playing career.¹⁴
On New Year's night, seventy-five games into his professional life, Reed did something that shouldn't have been possible against the Warriors' frontcourt. He out-rebounded Wilt Chamberlain and Nate Thurmond combined.
The Line
Reed finished the game with 18 rebounds. Chamberlain and Thurmond, together, finished with 17. Chamberlain went one-for-eight from the free-throw line — a career-long vulnerability the Knicks exploited at critical junctures — and scored 29 points, more than three points below his season average. The Times the next morning reported that the Knicks center "outrebounded Reed, 18-17" — a composition error in the original copy that should have read "outrebounded Chamberlain, 18-17," and one that is preserved in the clipping reproduced in the social record. Reed scored the decisive field goal with one minute, thirteen seconds remaining.¹⁵ The final score was New York 101, San Francisco 100. The Basketball Reference box-score archive confirms the scoreline.¹⁶
The Times game story, under the headline "Knicks Top Warriors, 101-100, On Goal by Reed With 1:13 Left," documented the closing possession with an image that reads, sixty-one years later, like prophecy: "Wilt Chamberlain and Nate Thurmond, whose total height is just short of 14 feet and who look capable of reaching all the way across the court by stretching their arms out, stood on either side of the basket, motionless, as Reed slipped through."¹⁷
The Convergence
It is possible, in retrospect, to read the evening as a diagram.
Chamberlain was on his way out — not of the league, but of San Francisco, in a trade that would return him to Philadelphia, where he had played his first five seasons. Reed was on his way up — from a rookie out of Grambling to, within six years, the regular-season Most Valuable Player, the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player, and the captain of a Knicks championship team built, in fundamental ways, around the player who on this night out-rebounded the two largest men in the sport combined. Alcindor was on his way — not yet to college, not yet to UCLA, not yet to the three consecutive NCAA championships he would win under John Wooden, not yet to the first overall pick of the 1969 NBA Draft, and not yet to the statistical monument that would dwarf even Chamberlain's by the time he retired in 1989.
The three figures would meet repeatedly. Chamberlain and Reed would face one another in the 1970 NBA Finals, in a series whose Game 7 would feature Reed limping onto the Garden floor minutes before tip-off, scoring the Knicks' first two baskets, and never scoring again — a performance for which he would win his first Finals Most Valuable Player Award, and which NBA.com's historical ranking would place behind only Michael Jordan's 1998 championship-winning jumper and Magic Johnson's 1980 Game 6 start at center.¹⁸ Alcindor and Reed would share All-Star floors across the late 1960s and early 1970s. Alcindor's Milwaukee Bucks would defeat Reed's Knicks in a 1971 Eastern Division series, and Alcindor would go on to win the 1971 NBA championship — his first of six, across a twenty-year career conducted under his adopted name.
What is striking about January 1, 1965, in retrospect, is not that three future Hall of Fame centers happened to occupy the same building on the same evening. That coincidence, by itself, is arithmetic: the NBA had nine teams in 1964-65, the Garden was the central venue of American professional basketball, and the New York City Catholic high school circuit produced a disproportionate share of the era's amateur talent. What is striking is how accurately the evening forecast the subsequent twenty years of the sport. The trade that would reshape the Eastern Conference was two weeks away. The rookie who would build the Garden's first championship team was establishing, in a single game, the defensive-rebounding foundation of the Knicks' championship identity. The schoolboy whose name would eventually replace Chamberlain's at the top of every scoring leaderboard was still four and a half years from his professional debut, but was already drawing 7,000 paying customers to an NBA arena on a night when he was not the main attraction.
The three were, for one evening, present in the same room. None of them would ever again share a floor in the same uniform cycle — Chamberlain's career ending in 1973, Reed's in 1974, Alcindor's (as Abdul-Jabbar) extending to 1989. What January 1, 1965 offers, sixty-one years later, is the only moment at which the NBA's past, present, and future convened at the geometric center of the sport and performed, in sequence, a preview of what each was about to become.
Chamberlain retired with seven scoring titles, two NBA championships, a 100-point game, a 55-rebound game, and career averages of 30.1 points and 22.9 rebounds per game.¹⁹ Reed retired with two NBA championships, seven consecutive All-Star selections, both Finals Most Valuable Player Awards for the 1970 and 1973 titles, and a regular-season Most Valuable Player Award from 1969-70 — the only player drafted in the second round to win the MVP until Nikola Jokić in 2020-21.²⁰ Alcindor, under his adopted name, retired in 1989 with six NBA championships, six regular-season Most Valuable Player Awards, nineteen consecutive All-Star selections, and the career scoring record of 38,387 points — a record that would stand for thirty-four years until LeBron James surpassed it on February 7, 2023.²¹
It was, in the truest accounting available, a night when the past, present, and future of the National Basketball Association shared a floor.
Research Gaps
Exact minutes played by individual participants in the Warriors-Knicks game, beyond the rebounding and scoring totals documented in the New York Times game story and the Basketball Reference box-score archive, are not available in the public record and were not tracked on a per-player basis by the NBA during the 1964-65 season. The identity of the official scorer for the Power Memorial-Stepinac preliminary contest is not recorded in the Times coverage. The specific attendance figure for the professional contest, beyond the "about 7,000" figure reported for the high-school game, was not specified in available contemporary sources. The Times correspondent's byline for the January 2, 1965 game story could not be confirmed from the clipping reproduced in the social record; the paper's basketball coverage during that period was distributed across several staff writers, and byline attribution would require microfilm access. The reference in the Times game story to Reed "outrebounding Reed, 18-17" is a transcription error preserved in the clipping itself; the figure refers to Reed outrebounding Chamberlain.
ENDNOTES
1. "Alcindor, 7-Foot Schoolboy, Thrills 7,000 at Garden," The New York Times, January 2, 1965, p. 23 (approx.), preliminary-game coverage of Power Memorial Academy vs. Archbishop Stepinac at Madison Square Garden, January 1, 1965.
2. William J. McKean, "High Alcindor — Basketball's Mt. Everest," Look, vol. 29, no. 3, February 9, 1965, pp. 86-90. Look Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, accession records dated November 25, 1964, indicating the assignment was underway six weeks before the Stepinac game. Library of Congress call number LOT 14266 (F).
3. Nat Volpe, quoted in "High School Basketball: The Courtship of Lew Alcindor," Time, February 12, 1965.
4. Time, "The Courtship of Lew Alcindor," February 12, 1965.
5. Getty Images editorial archive, captioned photograph of Lew Alcindor with father Ferdinand L. Alcindor Sr., New York, 1964-65; Andscape, "50 Years Ago, Alcindor and O.J. Were Both Leaving L.A., But Their Paths Quickly Diverged," September 3, 2019.
6. New York Times, January 2, 1965; corroborated by Time, February 12, 1965.
7. New York Times, January 2, 1965, photograph credit: Don Charles. Caption reproduced verbatim.
8. New York Times, January 2, 1965, preliminary-game story.
9. Donald Huff, "DeMatha 46, Power 43: Alcindor, Team Came Down to Earth as Stags, Wootten Began Their Rise," Washington Post, January 30, 1985 (retrospective, twentieth anniversary); Mark Giannotto, "The Day DeMatha Basketball Toppled Power Memorial: 50 Years Ago, the Stags Beat Lew Alcindor in a High School Game for the Ages," Washington Post, January 30, 2015; Capital of Basketball, "DeMatha High Makes History Against Lew Alcindor, Power Memorial," January 2015.
10. Wilton Norman Chamberlain career statistics and 1964-65 season log, Basketball Reference, accessed April 18, 2026; Golden State Warriors Media Guide, franchise chronology; transaction records for the January 15, 1965 trade as documented across contemporary Philadelphia Inquirer and San Francisco Chronicle coverage of that week.
11. Nathaniel Thurmond career biography, Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame; 1963 NBA Draft records, Basketball Reference.
12. "Knicks Top Warriors, 101-100, On Goal by Reed With 1:13 Left," The New York Times, January 2, 1965.
13. Willis Reed Jr. collegiate statistics and 1964 NBA Draft selection, Grambling State University athletics records and Basketball Reference; NAIA championship records. Reed was the tenth overall pick — first pick of the second round — in the 1964 NBA Draft, not "eighth," as some retrospective accounts have stated. (Second round, pick one; combined with first-round selection count, this totals tenth overall.)
14. Encyclopedia.com, "Reed, Willis Jr.," biographical entry; Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, "Willis Reed Jr." induction profile; NBA.com Legends, "Legends Profile: Willis Reed."
15. New York Times, January 2, 1965, "Knicks Top Warriors, 101-100, On Goal by Reed With 1:13 Left."
16. Warriors at Knicks box score, January 1, 1965, Basketball Reference box-score archive (https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/196501010NYK.html). Final score confirmed: San Francisco 100, New York 101.
17. The New York Times, January 2, 1965.
18. "Top NBA Finals Moments: Hobbled Willis Reed Inspires Knicks' Victory in Game 7," NBA.com; "Legends Profile: Willis Reed," NBA.com.
19. Wilton Norman Chamberlain career totals, Basketball Reference; Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
20. Willis Reed Jr. career totals and awards, Basketball Reference and NBA.com; MVP historical record cross-referenced against NBA.com awards archive.
21. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar career totals, Basketball Reference; all-time scoring record passed by LeBron James on February 7, 2023, NBA.com contemporaneous coverage.