SAN FRANCISCO -- Looking at Wilt Chamberlain's stats is like trying to decipher fact from fiction. Averaging 50 points per game in a season? Yeah, Wilt really did that. What about 25 rebounds? Oh yeah, he did that in the same season as dropping 50 on a nightly basis. How about we up the ante to 27 rebounds. He did that twice.
To Steve Kerr, however, his first memories of the man who dropped 100 points in a single NBA game come in a whole different sport.
"I used to watch Wilt play volleyball at Will Rogers Beach in Pacific Palisades," Kerr said Thursday before the Warriors' game against the New York Knicks. "He played every weekend at the beach where my family and I would go.
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"I'd go over and watch him play beach volleyball. It was quite a scene."
As the NBA celebrates its 75th anniversary this season, so are the Warriors. Prior to every home game, they have honored a former franchise great. Chamberlain's night had to come sooner or later.
Chamberlain was taken by the Warriors with the No. 3 overall pick as a territorial selection in the 1959 NBA Draft. The 7-foot-1 Philadelphia native dominated from Day 1, scoring 43 points and adding 28 rebounds in his NBA debut. He played six seasons with the Warriors -- three in Philadelphia and three in San Francisco -- before being traded back to Philadelphia, who had become the 76ers after the Warriors moved to the Bay Area.
With the Warriors, Chamberlain averaged 41.5 points and 25.1 rebounds per game. The Hall of Fame center changed the game and is the Warriors' all-time leader in points and rebounds per game, along with minutes per game (47.2) and field goals made (7,216). Chamberlain also ranks second in total rebounds (10,768) and total points (17,783).
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He scored at least 50 points 105 times in a Warriors jersey.
Kerr says he was anywhere from 10 to 15 years old when he used to watch Chamberlain play beach volleyball, and the all-time athlete was just as out of this world in that sport, too.
"Yeah, you can imagine," Kerr said of Chamberlain the beach volleyball player. "He was a pretty good middle blocker."
The four-time NBA MVP actually played professional volleyball in the short-lived International Volleyball Association after his basketball career and was enshrined into the California Beach Volleyball Hall of Fame, making him part of a select few athletes ever named to two different Hall of Fames. There also is an exhibit featuring Chamberlain and his time as a beach volleyball barnstormer, and in the IVA, at the International Volleyball Hall of Fame.
For how great he clearly was as a volleyball player, it always be ridiculous to look back at just how much bigger and better he was than most of his competition in basketball. He put up numbers that never will be matched. Never.
"You can't even fathom those numbers," Kerr said when reminded of Chamberlain averaging 50 points and 25 rebounds in one season. "I wish I could actually see a bunch of games from that era to see what the games looked like and felt like, because those numbers are insane."
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In reality, there might as well be two different sets of NBA records: One for Wilt and one for everybody else.
"He kind of has his own record book, separate from the rest of the mortals on Earth."
From Kerr to many other myths and memories -- and probably somewhere in between -- Chamberlain also was a spectacle among his mortals walking around Southern California beaches long after his basketball days, too.