Smith Dropped Chance to Be Super Bowl Hero

Your name is Jackie Smith, you’re a 13-year NFL veteran and you don’t deserve what fate has in store for you this day.

With millions watching, you’re all alone in the end zone, and your Dallas Cowboy quarterback, Roger Staubach, throws you an easy, soft pass. It hits you in the hands . . . and you drop it.

And so Pittsburgh wins the best-played of all Super Bowl games, 35-31, and you go on to be the series’ best-remembered goat.

A lot of the media types who have been fawning over Michael Jordan lately are either too young to have seen Wilton Norman Chamberlain play basketball, or they’ve forgotten.

Thirty-eight years ago tonight, Jan. 21, 1961, in just another early 1960s NBA game for Chamberlain, his Philadelphia Warriors beat the Lakers, 136-111, and Chamberlain had 56 points and 45 rebounds.

It was the third time that season Chamberlain had scored at least 56 in a game.

Chamberlain averaged 38.4 points and 27.2 rebounds in 1961. The following season, he boosted his scoring average to 50.4, a number never since approached.

Chamberlain scored 40 or more points in a game 271 times, and 50 or more 118 times. In December, 1961, he scored 50 or more in seven consecutive games.

Also on this date: In 1975, the NHL became the first major pro sport to admit women reporters to its locker rooms. . . . In 1958, Robin Roberts, a future Hall of Fame pitcher who would win 286 games, signed with the Phillies for $37,500. He had been 10-22 in 1957 and took a $7,500 pay cut. . . . In 1990, John McEnroe erupted in one of his greatest tantrums at the Australian Tennis Open and was kicked out of the tournament.