Greenspan, who died 19 months ago at 84, pretty much invented the Olympic film genre, Leni Riefenstahl (“Olympia,” 1938) notwithstanding. His body of film work, which included 10 “official” assignments as Olympic documentarian and countless unofficial, independent stints, stretch from the 1952 Summer Games to the 2010 Winter Games. His accomplishments are nothing short of, well, Olympian.

Greenspan’s favorite stories, which he exuberantly talked about in interviews through the years, were about marathon runner John Steven Akhwari of Tanzania and British distance runner Dave Moorcroft.

At the 1968 Mexico City Games, Akhwari finished last, more than an hour after the medal winners. When Greenspan asked him why he had continued running, Akhwari’s answer was: “My country did not send me 5,000 miles to start the race. My country sent me 5,000 miles to finish the race.”

At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Moorcroft finished last in the 5,000 meters, nearly lapped by the medal winners. He told Greenspan why he kept running, despite illness and injury: “Once you quit, it’s easy to (quit) again. I did not want to set a precedent.”

Said Greenspan: “Sometimes the essence of the Olympic Games can be found in people who don’t stand on the victory podium.”

Greenspan, who died 19 months ago at 84, pretty much invented the Olympic film genre, Leni Riefenstahl (“Olympia,” 1938) notwithstanding. His body of film work, which included 10 “official” assignments as Olympic documentarian and countless unofficial, independent stints, stretch from the 1952 Summer Games to the 2010 Winter Games. His accomplishments are nothing short of, well, Olympian.

Greenspan seemed unfazed by such criticism. In an interview with ESPN in 2002, he said: “I spend my time on the 99 percent of what’s good about the Olympics” while others “spend 100 percent of their time on the one percent that’s negative. I’ve been criticized for seeing things through rose-colored glasses. I say if that’s true, what’s so bad? I’m not good at hurting people.”

Greenspan, who died 19 months ago at 84, pretty much invented the Olympic film genre, Leni Riefenstahl (“Olympia,” 1938) notwithstanding. His body of film work, which included 10 “official” assignments as Olympic documentarian and countless unofficial, independent stints, stretch from the 1952 Summer Games to the 2010 Winter Games. His accomplishments are nothing short of, well, Olympian.

“I’m the sole survivor of idealism,” Greenspan told the New York Times in 1998. “I might be from another century.”

This summer marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of the movie that gave us “There’s no crying in baseball,” a reliably funny and adaptable line (take out “baseball” and substitute any sport, or any endeavor or situation) that never gets old.

Purists might complain “A League of Their Own” is fiction posing as fact, and highly glossed, Hollywood-style fiction at that, loosely based on the World War II-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and often resembling a TV sitcom with one-liners galore, broadly drawn characters and farcical confrontations.

Film buffs might counter with “Chill, dude” or some similar response. A good baseball movie is a good movie, and “A League of Their Own” is at least as genuinely laugh out loud as “Bull Durham” or “Major League,” as sentimental as “Field of Dreams” and as melodramatic as “The Natural.” Plus, its story is socially progressive, about female athletes way ahead of their time, transcending gender stereotypes and making their mark in the world (or at least in second-tier Midwestern towns).
Applied to “A League of Their Own,” it would seem there’s room to appreciate both fact and fiction.

In 1988, Kelly Candaele and Kim Wilson wrote a nonfiction account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and Candaele produced a documentary, called “A League of Their Own,” which was shown on PBS. (Incidentally, Candaele is the son of Helen Callaghan and nephew of Marge Callaghan, sisters who played in the women’s baseball league. Candaele is also the brother of Casey Candaele, who played in the major leagues from 1986 to ’97.)

Penny Marshall picked up the story and produced and directed a 1992 theatrical movie out of it, also called “A League of Their Own,” with a script — a potboiler with charismatic characters — by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.
Fact: Philip Wrigley, chewing gum mogul and owner of the Chicago Cubs, founded the women’s baseball league in 1943, when the major leagues were largely drained of talent by the war’s military manpower requirements.
Fiction: In the movie, Wrigley becomes Walter Harvey, a candy bar mogul and big-league team owner, played by Garry Marshall as a hard-core businessman with a heart.
Fact:  With the war coming to an end in 1945, Wrigley cut his ties to the league, and public relations executive Arthur Meyerhoff took it over.
Fiction:  In the movie, David Strathairn plays Ira Lowenstein, a league PR man who cajoles Harvey not to shut it down.
Fact:  Former major-league stars and future Hall of Famers Max Carey and Jimmie Foxx managed teams in the women’s league.
Fiction:  In the movie, Tom Hanks plays Jimmy Dugan, modeled after Foxx. While Foxx may have been as profane as Hanks’ Dugan, it’s unlikely he was as adept at broad comedy (Hanks competing with the Geena Davis character in giving signs to a batter; as a hung-over Dugan spending more time at a clubhouse urinal than in strategic thought; Hanks chewing out a player for throwing to the wrong base, then delivering the “there’s no crying in baseball” line).
Fact:  Even though the women’s league was created as a wartime stopgap until the “real” ballplayers returned from war, the league lasted 12 seasons (and through another war, in Korea), with its peak year coming in peacetime 1948, when the combined paid attendance nearly reached one million.
Fiction: In the movie, only the inaugural season of 1943 is dramatized, with hardly a hint that the league would last another 11 years.
Fact:  Claire Schillace, Faye Dancer, Dorothy Ferguson, Joanne Winter and Dorothy Kamenshek were unglamorous and virtually unknown even in their prime as pioneers and superstars of women’s baseball.
Fiction:  In the movie, team leaders are either glamorous (Geena Davis), wise-cracking (Rosie O’Donnell) or glamorous and wise-cracking and fabulous dancers (Madonna).
Fact and Fiction:  Where the movie got it exactly right were the so-called charm classes the female ballplayers were required to attend and the mandatory short-skirt uniforms that exposed players’ legs to scrapes, bruises and bloody abrasions.
The movie also got it right in that the Racine Belles defeated the Rockford Peaches for the league’s first championship, although it’s unlikely that the series ended when a player completed an inside-the-park homer by crashing into her rival older sister, who’s trying to tag her out at home plate.
So here’s a question from one of the film’s biggest fans who has often wondered: Did Kit Keller (played by Lori Petty) force the ball out of the catcher’s glove with her aggressive slide? Or did Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) let her kid sister have her longed-for and hard-earned moment in the sun?

If Guillen, who spent some time on the Baltimore Orioles just a year earlier, had been with the Orioles instead of the Braves in March of 1999, he would have traveled approximately 90 miles with the team to Cuba for an exhibition game against a squad of all-stars that included pitcher Jose Contreras.

Guillen would have seen Contreras pitch eight shutout innings against the Orioles, striking out 10. It’s possible Guillen did see the game, won by the Orioles 3-2 in 11 innings, because it was televised live by ESPN.

Among the 50,000 fans at Estadio Latinoamericano in Havana that March day in 1999 were Orioles owner Peter Angelos and MLB commissioner Bud Selig. They were seated in the front row behind home plate, on either side of 73-year-old Fidel Castro.

Final score: Ravens 38, Colts 31.

Harbaugh led a 17-point fourth-quarter rally.

On Sept. 26, 1999, Manning, 23, and Harbaugh, 36, were once again opposing starting quarterbacks, as the Colts visited the San Diego Chargers.

Final score: Colts 27, Chargers 19.

Manning led a 14-point fourth-quarter rally.

Chamberlain shot 36 of 63 from the field and 28 of 32 from the free-throw line.

Chamberlain teammate Al Attles, though, who would go on to coach the Golden State Warriors to their only NBA championship in 1975, was perfect on March 2, 1962.

Attles was 8 for 8 from the field and 1 for 1 from the line, giving him an unsullied 17 points.

It stands out freakishly, like the fictional Pushmi-pullyu, the two-headed creature from the old Dr. Doolittle children’s stories, with each head facing an opposite direction. It’s that odd, that unreal. As laughable as it is exotic. As sports accomplishments go, the legacy of Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points in an NBA game exists more as carnival exhibit or myth from ancient times (or at least pre-ESPN, black-and-white TV times) than bearing any relevance to real basketball, let alone reality.

The 50th anniversary of this seemingly Herculean feat arrives today, March 2, and so it’s appropriate, if you care about basketball history, to discuss it.

Some of the cold, isolated facts are worth mentioning:

The NBA, in only its 13th season of existence, still hadn’t completely shaken off its small-town, barnstorming roots, hence the game of March 2, 1962, between the Philadelphia Warriors and New York Knicks was held in Hershey, Pa., before 4,124.

Chamberlain, a pathetically poor free-throw shooter despite being the most physically dominant athlete of any sport, ever (with the possible exception of Babe Ruth in the Roaring ’20s), scored 28 of his 100 points on 87.5 percent shooting from the line.

The final score: Warriors 169, Knicks 147.

In that 80-game season, Chamberlain averaged 50 points and 25 rebounds. Thanks to overtimes, he averaged more than 48 minutes a game. But Bill Russell won the league’s MVP award in 1962, and Russell’s Boston Celtics won the NBA championship, just as they had done the previous three seasons and just as they would the following four seasons.

For those of us old enough to remember, the Chamberlain-Russell rivalry played out year after year like a favorite dramatic series on TV, except it was live and unscripted although the ending was always the same: Russell, the ultimate team player, would lead the Celtics to championship glory while Chamberlain, the ultimate individual player, would lead himself to the statistical stratosphere, while his team’s ultimate defeats were too often of the postseason’s seventh-game variety. In the 10 years the NBA’s two epic figures staged their Shakespearean rivalry, only once did Chamberlain prevail, when his Philadelphia 76ers won the league title in 1967.

Fascination with the Russell-Chamberlain rivalry never gets old. The classic team player vs. sport’s Goliath. Russell’s reputation as the greatest winner in sports history is likely to shine forever: Two NCAA titles, an Olympic gold medal, 11 NBA championships in 13 seasons. For Chamberlain, who died in 1999 at 63, well, besides virtually rewriting the record book, he did win two NBA titles (the second, in 1972 with the Lakers, came three years after Russell retired) on teams regarded among the best in NBA history, better than any of Russell’s.

And he did score 100 points in a game 50 years ago.

But now if a young NBA fan associates any number at all to Chamberlain it’s 20,000 — the number of women he notoriously claimed to have slept with. It was an unfortunate boast, if “boast” is the right word, which it isn’t.

In a disarming interview with Pat Jordan in 1997, Chamberlain, then 61 years old and portrayed as egocentric and eccentric as ever but also terribly lonely, said this about his famous sex stat:

“If I had to do it all over again, I’d emphasize more that it would have been better for me to have one woman a thousand times. It’s my sorrow. It embarrasses me, I wasn’t bragging that I was a great lover, a Don Juan. Actually, if you look at it, you can say that I had so many women once because I was such a bad lover they never came back a second time.”

Finally, in observing the 50th anniversary of Chamberlain’s 100-point game, it might be challenging to meditate on one of the most provocative, outlandish, simultaneously puzzling and honest statements by a world-class athlete. It comes from his autobiography “Wilt,” co-written by David Shaw.

“To Bill (Russell), every game … was a challenge, a test to his manhood. He took the game so seriously that he threw up in the locker room before almost every game. But I tend to look at basketball as a game, not a life or death struggle. I don’t need scoring titles or NBA championships to prove that I’m a man. There are too many other beautiful things in life … to get that emotionally wrapped up in basketball. I think Bill knew I felt that way, and I think he both envied and resented my attitude. … I wish I had won all those championships, but I really think I grew more as a man in defeat than Russell did in victory.”