Jerry West

 

One of the things that remind a man he is getting old is seeing the great players of his boyhood die off. There was another one today – Jerry West. Bill Russell and Jim Brown went in the last couple of years. Mantle, Musial, Williams, Unitas, Aaron, Berra, and most of the rest have been gone a while. Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Oscar Robertson are the only ones I can think of who are still alive, and they are very old men. And we boys who followed them and collected their cards in the 1950s and early 60s are old enough.

Jerry West was special – a great offensive player whom Russell rated as also a great defensive player. He was one of my favorites. I still remember vividly how good he was.

Bill Russell

 Bill Russell has died. He was certainly the most successful basketball player of all time, winning two NCAA championships, an olympic gold medal, and eleven NBA titles (and probably would have had twelve if he had not been injured one year during the finals). By the criterion used by those who call Tom Brady the greatest football player ever, that of being the key player on the most championship teams, he was also the best basketball player of all time. People using other criteria besides winning might select someone else, and that might not have bothered him. Winning was his criterion. I have read that when some outfit selected him as the athlete of the 1960s and the 1969 Mets as the team of the decade, he was displeased – pointing out correctly that the only two real candidates for the team of the decade were the Packers and his Celtics and saying he could not take his individual award seriously coming from people who did not realize that. He was also the head coach of the Celtics in the last years of his playing career and an amusing, insightful, and interesting television commentator after he retired.

I think people will miss him. I know I will, and not just because he was one of the great stars of my boyhood, though that’s part of it.

Best Basketball Player

A while back LeBron James made news by announcing he was the best basketball player ever. This led to arguments on TV, many over whether Michael Jordan had the better claim. (Some cynics wondered if the more interesting question was which of the two was the bigger jerk.)  To consider who is best at something, one must first decide what he means by being the best. When people call Tom Brady the best quarterback ever, they usually do not mean he is the most athletically talented or is  the best passer or has the best statistics. They generally mean he is the most successful quarterback ever, with success defined as being the starting quarterback on a league’s championship team.  By that standard the argument for him is a strong though not conclusive one with only Bart Starr and Otto Graham as his peers. 

Applying a similar standard to basketball gives an easy answer. Whatever one may think about who was the best in other ways, Bill Russell was indisputably the most successful basketball player of all time, if success is defined as being the  key player on a championship team. He led the Celtics to eleven championships in thirteen  years and probably would have made it twelve if he hadn’t  been injured in the finals one year. 

 James and Jordan have good cases if one judges by athletic ability and statistics. But so do Kareem Jabbar,   Oscar Robertson, Julius Erving,  Jerry West, and others.  However, for my money,  the best case probably belongs to Wilt Chamberlain. He was a remarkable athlete and physical specimen who put up impressive  statistics in scoring, rebounding, and minutes played per game. He holds the records for both most points per game (a little over 50) and most rebounds per game (over 27)  in a season.  He even once led the league in assists. Of course one thing he could not do often enough was beat Bill Russell, but neither could anyone else.

Sports Fantasy

Many sports fans probably have at one time or another contemplated what they would do to fix things if they were suddenly made an all powerful commissioner of a professional league. It is an interesting fantasy to think about. Here are my ideas.

League: the NBA

When it was best: 1960-1990.  This period covers the best years of Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Kareem Jabbar, Rick Barry,  John Havlicek, Sam Jones, Elgin Baylor, Julius Erving, Moses Malone,  Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and others. It was a time after the coming of the modern game but  before the league degenerated into its present  combination of roller derby, professional wrestling, and a remake of The Longest Yard shifted to basketball and filmed by MTV.  

Changes:

1.      Treat all players, even the stars, the same. When the next Michael Jordan comes along, it will be legal to guard him, even in the fourth quarter.

2.      Enforce travelling and palming rules. There will be no more NBA three (or six) step.

3.      Enforce three second rule and restrict wrestling in the paint.

4.      Eliminate the three point shot.

5.    Punish showboating and taunting with technical fouls.

League:  Major League Baseball

When it was best: 1911-1961 (excepting the war years 1942-1945).  This period covers the time when baseball became and remained the national pastime. It covers the great teams and great players from the time of Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner,  and Ty Cobb to the time of Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays.

Changes: 

1.      Eliminate the abomination that is the designated hitter rule.

2.      Eliminate inter-league regular season play.

3.      Completely ban steroids or other such drugs, and really do it.

4.      Enforce the strike zone as defined, i.e. allow the high strike.

5.      Return all fields to natural grass.

6.      Eliminate playoffs and divisional championships. The team in the National League with the best regular season record would meet the team in the American League with the best regular season record in the World Series in the first week of October.

7.      Play Sunday double headers again.

League: The NFL

When it was best: Now. The NFL is probably at this time more exciting, interesting, and dominant  than ever.

Changes:

1.      Vigorously and draconically enforce the rule against head shots. The penalty for  flagrant violations would be thirty yards,  ejection, and  a suspension for the greater of one game or one game more than the victim of the shot misses.  For less vicious hits, a thirty yard penalty plus ejection would be enforced.

2.      Be almost as tough on cheap shots not to the head.

3.      Get more serious on preventing use of steroids and similar drugs.

4.      Restrict taunting and showboating with more liberal use of penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct.

5.      Switch to the college overtime rules, with a three possession limit before a tie in the regular season. 

That’s my list. It's fun to make one up.