Okay, I was able to snag a couple of other shots without the letters. In the second photo, his head is even higher than in the first but he has already blocked the shot and his arm is beginning to come down. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the rim is at about the same height as Wilt’s adam’s apple. I apologize for the lack of clarity, but that’s what I had to work with.
I am sorry for bumping this old thread but I found it while doing a Google search and wanted to add something here. I clipped this photo from a YouTube video that asks this very question. People talk about players who were able to take a quarter from the top of a backboard, but the number of players who could actually do it can be counted on one hand. In this photo, Wilt’s hand is clearly about a foot above the top of the backboard and almost his entire head is above the rim. Wilt’s thumb is above the letter K in “backboard” and his fingers extend to the edge of the frame at the top. This is completely and utterly ridiculous. My guess is that when you combine his height, his reach, and his vertical jump, nobody in history could reach an object higher off the ground than he could.
There’s a great account of Wilt in Kareem’s autobiography, “Giant Steps.” It was the sometime in the mid 1960s and Kareem was an up-and-coming wunderkind basketball player. One night he went out to play in a Rucker League game in New York City. Wilt was there as were a bunch of other NBA players as well as quite a few nice-looking lady spectators. Somebody ----- Earl Monroe, maybe ----- made the mistake of dunking on Wilt and then doing some sort of minor celebration. Bad move. According to Kareem, Wilt got mad. Kareem says something like “so then Wilt had to block every shot and score every point, which he did.”
Thanks. In my opinion, it pretty definitively answers the question re: whether he could ever reach the top of the backboard. My guess is that when he was at Kansas he probably could have jumped high enough to take a quarter off the backboard but that after he went to the Globies and then into the NBA and added 20-30 pounds he could no longer do it, which is why we don’t have photos of him doing it. But he remembered that at one point he COULD do it so he would say that he could do it because, you know, Wilt being Wilt and all.
BTW here’s the video. Judge for yourself.
There’s a great account of Wilt in Kareem’s autobiography, “Giant Steps.” It was the sometime in the mid 1960s and Kareem was an up-and-coming wunderkind basketball player. One night he went out to play in a Rucker League game in New York City. Wilt was there as were a bunch of other NBA players as well as quite a few nice-looking lady spectators. Somebody ----- Earl Monroe, maybe ----- made the mistake of dunking on Wilt and then doing some sort of minor celebration. Bad move. According to Kareem, Wilt got mad. Kareem says something like “so then Wilt had to block every shot and score every point, which he did.”
Thanks. In my opinion, it pretty definitively answers the question re: whether he could ever reach the top of the backboard. My guess is that when he was at Kansas he probably could have jumped high enough to take a quarter off the backboard but that after he went to the Globies and then into the NBA and added 20-30 pounds he could no longer do it, which is why we don’t have photos of him doing it. But he remembered that at one point he COULD do it so he would say that he could do it because, you know, Wilt being Wilt and all.
BTW here’s the video. Judge for yourself.
Okay, I was able to snag a couple of other shots without the letters. In the second photo, his head is even higher than in the first but he has already blocked the shot and his arm is beginning to come down. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the rim is at about the same height as Wilt’s adam’s apple. I apologize for the lack of clarity, but that’s what I had to work with.
I am sorry for bumping this old thread but I found it while doing a Google search and wanted to add something here. I clipped this photo from a YouTube video that asks this very question. People talk about players who were able to take a quarter from the top of a backboard, but the number of players who could actually do it can be counted on one hand. In this photo, Wilt’s hand is clearly about a foot above the top of the backboard and almost his entire head is above the rim. Wilt’s thumb is above the letter K in “backboard” and his fingers extend to the edge of the frame at the top. This is completely and utterly ridiculous. My guess is that when you combine his height, his reach, and his vertical jump, nobody in history could reach an object higher off the ground than he could.