Sam Cooke – "Twistin' the Night Away" (1962)

Here’s a man in evening clothes

How he got here, I don’t know

Man, you oughta see him go!

My son told me recently that he had been doing some research on old-time NBA players as part of his job with NBC Sports, which will start broadcasting NBA games next season.  

By “old-time players,” I mean the guys who played in the 1960s . . . guys like Bill Russell, and Bob Pettit, and Oscar Robertson, and Wilt Chamberlain.

All four of those basketball legends had prominent roles in the 1962 NBA all-star game.  I don’t remember watching that game – I was only nine years old at the time – but I’m guessing that I did, because I tuned in to just about every baseball, football, and basketball game that was televised in my hometown when I was growing up.  (We had only two TV stations, so there weren’t a lot of games to choose from.)

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After saying good-bye to my son, I fell down the rabbit hole that is Basketball-Reference.com – the most comprehensive source of basketball statistics that exists.

I always knew that Wilt Chamberlain was an amazing man – both on and off the basketball court – but I didn’t appreciate just how amazing a player he was until I spent a few minutes studying his career stats.

Chamberlain was a powerfully built seven-footer, so it comes as no surprise that he was a great rebounder.  He is the NBA’s career leader in rebounds by a wide margin.  

Wilt Chamberlain

What’s even more remarkable is that Chamberlain’s seventh-best single-season total rebounds number is greater than any other player’s best single-season total.  (Think about that – he not only has the highest single-season rebound number in NBA history, he also has the second-highest, third-highest, fourth-highest, fifth-highest, sixth-highest, and seventh-highest number of rebounds in a single season.)

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Chamberlain was just as dominant a scorer as he was a rebounder.  If you rank players according to the number of points per game they scored over the course of their career, Michael Jordan and Chamberlain are in a virtual tie for first.

Michael Jordan scored 37.1 points per game in the 1986-87 season.  No other player – other than Chamberlain – has ever beaten that mark.

Chamberlain beat it not once, but four times.  In the 1959-60, 1960-61, 1961-62, and 1962-63 seasons, Wilt averaged 37.6, 38.4, 50.4, and 44.8 points per game respectively.

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Think about that 1961-1962 number – 50.4 points per game.

Chamberlain scored 50 or more points for the Philadelphia Warriors no fewer than 45 times that season.  (No one else has ever scored 50 in a game more than ten times in a single season.)

Wilt in 1962

He scored an astonishing 100 points against the Knicks on March 2, 1962.  The second-highest single-game total ever is Kobe Bryant’s 81 in 2006.  

Including Bryant, only three players other than Chamberlain have scored 72 or more points in an NBA game – and each of those three did it only once.  Chamberlain scored 72 or more five times in a twelve-month period. 

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While no one else has ever scored more points or pulled down more rebounds than Chamberlain did in 1961-62, there’s another Chamberlain statistic from that season that’s even more mind-boggling.

Chamberlain’s Warriors played 80 games in the 1961-62 regular season, plus 12 playoff games.  Do you know how many times in those 92 games Chamberlain’s coach sent in a sub to give him a breather?  Would you believe ZERO times!  

You heard that right – Chamberlain never came out of a game that year.  

Actually, he did come out of one game.  It appears that he talked back to a referee one night and was ejected with about eight minutes left in the fourth quarter.  Otherwise, he played every single second of every minute of every game his team played that season.

That included a stretch in January 1962 when his team played five games – two of which went into overtime – in five nights.  (Wilt scored 62, 54, 53, 44, and 62 points respectively in those games.)

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Chamberlain’s playing-time numbers that season were no anomaly.  In fact, Chamberlain ranks first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh all-time when it comes to minutes played per game in a single season.

Not surprisingly, he holds the all-time NBA career record for minutes played per game with a 45.8 mark – over the course of his career, Chamberlain was on the floor a full three and a half minutes more per game than anyone else who’s ever played in the NBA.  

In his final season, when Wilt was 36 years old, he still averaged 43.2 minutes played – second-highest in the league.   (Last season, no NBA player averaged more than 37.8 minutes per game.)

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Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” was sitting at #27 on the Billboard “Hot 100” singles chart the night that Wilt dropped 100 points on the Knicks.

Sam Cooke

“Twistin’ the Night Away” is also notable because it was one of the first two 45s I ever owned.  I bought it and Bobby Lewis’s “Tossin’ and Turnin’” with my winnings from the first round of my fourth-grade spelling bee that year.

Click here to listen to “Twistin’ the Night Away.”

Click here to buy it from Amazon.

The Voice – "Train to Disaster" (1965)

You know the end is near

And you’re laughing out of fear

Here’s a quote you might have read recently:

You know, I do the weave.  You know what the weave is?  I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together and it’s like, and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’  But the fake news, you know what they say?  ‘He rambled.’

The person who said those words?  None other than our 47th President, Donald John Trump.

What I found most interesting about that quote is that it applies one hundred percent – maybe even one hundred and ten percent – to 2 or 3 lines.

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I gave birth to 2 or 3 lines on November 1, 2009  – long before Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.  (I’m sure you remember how that campaign turned out.)

The weave is real!

I’m not saying that President Trump stole “ the weave” from me.  Maybe it’s just a coincidence that “the weave” so closely resembles my rhetorical style.  

Do you believe in coincidences?  Albert Einstein didn’t.  “Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous,” he once said.

If you don’t believe Einstein – who was about a thousand times smarter than you are – maybe you’ll be persuaded by something that best-selling author Jim Butcher wrote:

Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found.

That's out of three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in 325 vanishing every year.

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but its almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators.

(Case closed.)

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“Train to Disaster” was the only single The Voice ever released.  Most of the group’s members were also members of an odd religious cult called The Process, who worshipped both Christ and Satan.  When they upped and moved to the Bahamas with the rest of the cult’s members in 1966, that was the end of The Voice.

Fun fact: The Voice once called themselves Karl Stuart and the Profile – even though there was no one named Karl Stuart in the band.

Click here to listen to “Train to Disaster.”

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon. 

Ice-T – "99 Problems" (1993)

If you’re having girl problems

I feel bad for you, son

After inviting my loyal readers to send their questions to 2 or 3 lines instead of to one of those lame newspaper advice columnists, I’ve been deluged with inquiries.

I can’t respond to all your pleas for advice, of course.  But here’s one that struck a chord with me.

Dear 2 or 3 lines:

After separating from my wife of forty years, I dated a number of women before settling down with my current girlfriend.  I recently introduced her to a childhood friend of mine who I recently reconnected with, and the two of them have become very chummy.

The childhood friend published her first novel last year, and I bought a copy to show my support for her efforts.  I don’t have a lot of time to read, so I gave the book to my girlfriend – who isn’t all that busy.  (She fritters away most of her time watching TV, playing video games, and talking on the phone with the neighborhood yentas.)

The friend, girlfriend, and I were at a party last month, and I overheard the following conversation between the two of them:

Friend:  “Thank you for posting such a nice review of my book.  I guess Greg hasn’t gotten around to reading it yet?”

Girlfriend: “I’m afraid not.  He means well, but he’s a procrastinator and has his hands full with his large family.”

Friend:  “I know he does.  Anyway, I’m so glad he found you – I was worried about him navigating life as a serial dater.”

I know that you are an expert when it comes to relationships and how the female mind works,  so I’m curious what you think about that conversation – it left me feeling a little uneasy.

Signed, 

Curious Greg

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Here’s my response, which I think speaks for itself:

Dear Curious Greg:

You’re right to feel uneasy.  Both of these women are trouble. 

I suspect what makes you uneasy about this conversation is that these two women are working in tandem to fix you.  That’s not surprising, of course – women are constantly trying to fix men who are just fine the way they are.  

[NOTE: It’s no accident that I chose the word “fix,” which is a euphemism for a certain rather unpleasant surgical procedure.] 

Good advice!

It’s bad enough when you have to deal with one woman who is determined to fix you, but it’s even worse when two of them gang up on you.  

Let me now address two specific aspects of their conversation.

First, we have the “He’s a procrastinator” comment.  Let’s ignore the fact that your girlfriend threw you under the bus instead of taking your side, and focus on the substance of that statement.  

When a woman accuses a man of procrastinating, what she is really saying is that he didn’t do something according to her timetable.  I’m guessing you never committed to read your friend’s book by a certain date, but she had an expectation that you would drop everything and read it ASAP – and when your didn’t act in conformance with her expectations, that’s somehow a failing on your part.

The second issue is the “I was worried about him navigating life as a serial dater” comment.  (Note her use of the word “serial,” which has very negative connotations – e.g., “serial killer.”)  I suspect you were perfectly happy playing the field – especially after milking the same cow for so many years – so there was no need for your friend to worry about you.

Bad advice!

Jane Austen once wrote that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man must be in want of a wife.”  Today’s women aren’t as hung up on men putting a ring on it as the women of Austen’s time were.  But it does bother them when they see a man who is going from woman to woman like a bee pollinating many different flowers – in other words, a “serial dater.”

Signed, 

2 or 3 lines

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If you’re having girl problems like Curious Greg, 2 or 3 lines feels bad for you, son.  Just e-mail me at 2or3lines@gmail.com, and I’ll give you the straight dope.

Click here to listen to Ice-T’s “99 Problems,” which is possibly the most offensive and misogynistic rap song I’ve ever heard.  (I’m sure you’ve heard Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” which was a y-u-g-e hit for him.  Jay-Z not only stole the title of that record from Ice-T, but also stole the line quoted at the beginning of this post.)

Click here to buy Ice-T’s “99 Problems” from Amazon.