He scored 188 points so his coach could make one

Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game and was immortalized.

Kobe Bryant scored 81 and was lionized.

John Barber, a 6-foot-6 center who played at Cal State Los Angeles in the early 1950s, scored more than the two of them combined -- in a game that was eight minutes shorter, no less -- and was marginalized, his feat thought to be so unworthy and unbelievable that his alma mater did little to preserve it.

"You can see why I don't want to go around talking about it with my friends," Barber, 74, tells a visitor to his home in the Morningside Park area of Los Angeles. "Nobody wants to believe it, and I can understand that."

But understand this: It's true.

On Feb. 16, 1953, in a 208-82 victory for the Cal State L.A. varsity over the Chapman College junior varsity, Barber scored a staggering 188 points, the result of an "experiment" concocted by his coach, Sax Elliot, to debunk the myth of Clarence "Bevo" Francis as a "Superman" of the courts.

Francis at the time was attracting national attention for his prodigious scoring exploits at Rio Grande College in Rio Grande, Ohio. Against a schedule that included 27 of 39 games against noncollegiate teams (vocational schools, junior colleges and service teams), Francis averaged 50.1 points a game in the 1952-53 season, topped by a 116-point effort against Ashland Junior College.

Elliot, described as an inventive and inquisitive coach, wanted to see whether Barber could top Francis' single-game mark if asked to do nothing but score.

He set up a game against the Chapman JV to find out.

"Sax Elliot was the type that liked to experiment," Barber says of his former coach, whose other "innovations" included fitting players with shoes that featured springy, inches-thick soles. "He believed in challenging every little thing, and he was always in my corner. Boy, he thought I could do anything.

"So Sax came up with the idea that any great scorer could score that many points if he's fed the ball often enough, and he set out to prove it."

Barber was a self-described country boy who had come to Los Angeles from his tiny hometown of Atlanta, Texas, hoping to play football at UCLA for legendary coach Red Sanders. When it was discovered that he was not academically eligible, he enrolled instead at East Los Angeles College.