In 1954, a tiny town handed Wilt Chamberlain one of his three high school losses. This signed syllabus shows he never forgot it.

Ed Uberti was walking through a Philadelphia hotel lobby in November 1991 when he saw a familiar face. Wilt Chamberlain was hard to miss. At 7-foot-1, the former 76er towered over everyone else, with enormous hands, a 7-8 wingspan, and the same distinctive mustache he’d had since high school.

Chamberlain was promoting his autobiography, A View From Above, on a local radio station. During commercial breaks, fans waited in line for autographs, carrying photos, magazine covers, and basketballs.

Uberti was not that prepared. He was a third-year medical resident at the time, on his way to a conference, with only a syllabus in hand. But this seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He decided to stick around.

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As the physician inched closer and closer to the Hall of Famer, he began to think about what he wanted to say. Everyone seemed to have a story to offer. There was the time Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game. Some mentioned the night he collected 55 rebounds against the Celtics.

Uberti chose something completely different; something the big man probably wanted to forget. As Chamberlain mechanically signed memorabilia in front of him with his head down, the medical resident introduced himself.

“Wilt,” he said. “It’s really nice to meet you. I just wanted to say that I’m from a little town in western Pennsylvania, called Farrell.”

Chamberlain looked up at Uberti.

“You’re lucky you told me that after I signed this,” he said, as he handed the syllabus back.

They shared a laugh and went their separate ways. Uberti wasn’t sure if Chamberlain would remember his hometown, but was happy that he did. Thirty-seven years earlier, Farrell High School had handed Chamberlain one of the only losses of his high school career.

It came on Dec. 28, 1954. Farrell was playing Overbrook High School, where Chamberlain was a senior center, in a holiday tournament. The game was widely promoted and hotly anticipated, because neither program was used to losing.

Overbrook had the best player in the country in Chamberlain, who led the Panthers to a record of 56-3 over three seasons and average 47 points in his senior year. Farrell was the state champion and the winner of 75 straight home games.

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The teams had never played because Farrell competed in the PIAA, and Overbrook in the Philadelphia Public League. (The Public League didn’t begin participating in the PIAA playoffs until 2003.) But Farrell’s coach, Ed McCluskey, was not one to shy away from a challenge. So he invited Chamberlain and his team to his home court.

The result was one of the greatest high school basketball games in state history. Chamberlain was “held” to 33 points and named tournament MVP, but Farrell won, 59-58.

To this day, the game is a point of pride in the tiny steel mill town. And Uberti, who works as an orthopedic surgeon in the Farrell area, still has his signed syllabus. It’s on a bookshelf in his office, right behind his desk, sandwiched between medical textbooks and World Series programs.

“I was like, ‘I got no story. What am I going to say?’” Uberti said. “But as I got up there, the only thing I could think of was this game that everyone from my part of the state talks about. And I was like, ‘He may not like it, but I’ll bring that up.’”

In 1960, Farrell had a population of 13,793, squarely on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border about 15 miles northeast of Youngstown. When Chamberlain was visiting 70 years ago, its high school had only a few hundred students. Nevertheless, McCluskey turned the program into a powerhouse.

One of his star players, guard Jim McCoy, compared that era to Hoosiers, a 1986 film about a small-town Indiana team that wins a state championship. McCluskey spent 28 years at Farrell, leading his players to a 698-185 record. They won seven PIAA championships.

The coach did not allow them much time to celebrate. After Farrell won its second PIAA championship — at nowhere other than the Palestra in March 1954 — McCluskey pulled aside his point guard, Paul Gustas.

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“I hope you enjoy yourself,” he said. “Because tomorrow we’re going to start preparing.”

“Why?” Gustas asked.

“I just scheduled a game for next year, at the Christmas tournament,” McCluskey responded. “We’re going to play the greatest player in the country.”

The challenge was borne out of pride. McCluskey had heard rumblings that his team’s state championship wasn’t authentic because it didn’t face Chamberlain and Overbrook. In his mind, the way to change that perception was by facing the future Hall of Famer and his teammates head-on.

Their prep work was extensive — especially for a game that had no bearing on Farrell’s regular season. Gustas’ son, Paul Jr., said his father recalled team managers standing in the paint during scrimmages with broomsticks to simulate Chamberlain’s height.

“They would swat balls away when the players shot,” the younger Gustas said.

McCoy’s daughter, Monique, said Farrell scouted Chamberlain and his Overbrook teammates in great detail. In the days before the tournament, they ramped up their defensive drills.

“[McCluskey] figured we’ll stop the other players,” Gustas said in a video interview with writer Bob Golub in 2020. “We knew we were just going to contain [Chamberlain]. We weren’t going to stop him. But we tried to do our best to contain him, because he was so great and so big at the time.”

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On a cold December night, about 3,000 people crammed into Farrell’s gym. Some sat on the 8-inch-wide windowsills, eager to catch a glimpse of a budding star. Chamberlain was brilliant — he scored 33 points on 12 field goals and nine free throws — but not as brilliant as he could’ve been.

Chamberlain, who never fouled out in his 1,045-game NBA career, had three fouls in the first half. Some fans claimed that the referees were giving the local team a better whistle. The younger Gustas, who has a tape of the game, said that wasn’t the case.

“A lot of Sharon people, which is Farrell’s rival, said, ‘Oh, they cheated them. They were hanging on him,’” Gustas said. “Well, the tape doesn’t show that at all. They probably did some little things and probably tugged on him, but they didn’t hack him.

“My dad said he remembers McCluskey going to the officials at halftime. He said, ‘Hey, these 3,000 people didn’t come to see you guys officiate.’ And he said, ‘If he fouls out, you guys will never work another game for me.’ Needless to say, he didn’t foul out. He finished the game.”

Farrell was up, 31-30, at the half, but the teams traded the lead throughout the game. It came down to the final minute. Gustas shot two free throws to give his team a 59-58 lead with 11 seconds left.

The ball was hit out of bounds, and Overbrook tried to deliver an entry pass to Chamberlain. It looked like it was going to reach him, until Farrell’s big man, Don Jones, jumped up and knocked the ball away.

Time ran out, and thousands of fans stormed the court. To this day, the high school still has a blown-up photo of that game hanging in its foyer.

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“Farrell has a lot of pride in that,” McCoy said, “because it’s a small town. Not big [compared] to a Philadelphia or even a Pittsburgh. I mean, who knows about Farrell? Not too many people.

“So I feel like as a community, to know the hard work that those young men put forth in order to be able to win a huge game, to be able to beat a team that had an icon … that was huge.”

Uberti was born in Philadelphia in 1962. He moved to Hermitage, Pa., a town next to Farrell, in 1970 but was well aware of Chamberlain’s high school prowess before then. His father, Fred, grew up in South Philadelphia, where he ran track and played basketball at Bishop Neumann High School (now Neumann Goretti) in the 1950s.

Neumann played Overbrook a few times, and Fred had an opportunity to face Chamberlain while he was still there. Like Farrell, Catholic League players came up with some unusual strategies to contain the big man.

“My dad would say that the only way you could beat Wilt was to try to get him upset,” Uberti said. “He used to wear rubber bands around his wrist. When the refs weren’t looking, [the Bishop Neumann players] would sneak up behind him and snap the rubber bands. Just to get him mad, you know?”

It was an exercise in futility. Chamberlain’s teams still “killed” Neumann whenever he played them, according to Uberti. Nevertheless, it gave Fred some interesting stories to share with his son, stories that only were bolstered by everything Uberti heard growing up in Farrell.

He and his father followed along as Chamberlain, who died in 1999, became one of the best players in NBA history. He scored more than 30,000 points over his 14 seasons. He set a slew of NBA records, including career rebounds (23,924). He won four MVP awards, was named to 13 All-Star Games, and won two championships, one with the Sixers (1966-67) and one with the Lakers (1971-72).

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But at their core, the greatest athletes are the fiercest competitors. And Chamberlain never forgot that loss in December 1954.

“When I told my dad, he just laughed,” Uberti said. “He said, ‘I can’t believe you said that, of all the things you could have told him. You probably [ticked] him off.’ I said, ‘He got a kick out of it. He laughed about it.’”

The Inquirer is running a series on the stories behind unique pieces of sports memorabilia. If you’d like to submit an idea, please email [email protected].