Best Ever? Hold on to your shoe

Boy, I don’t know, I just can’t figure us out. Maybe we just have too much money, too many toys, too much idle time.

Now sweeping into our TV consciousness is ultimate fighting, which should be disgraceful but is becoming very popular. So popular that it is shoving aside traditional boxing.

And it appers ultimate fighting is trickling down like Reagan Economics, because now we have Michael Vick ensnared in dogfighting.

Why do we do these things?

I have some relatives who participated in chicken fighting. They did it for a lot of years. I’m not proud to say that, because that too is disgraceful. I know how much time and effort went into this endeavor and I used to shake my head in disgust, but I was not in any position to stop it. Unless, of course, I dialed the authorities, which I was not about to do.

Who knows what other kind of fighting goes on out there? Maybe we are headed back to the lions and gladiators.

I must confess I was rooting against Tiger Woods in the U.S. Open. I was on the phone to one of my sons who was wishing me a happy Father’s Day and I started giving him a putt-by-putt description of the last two holes.

Why are you rooting against him? he asked.

My answer is that it’s in my DNA to root for the underdog. Tiger has hundreds of millions of dollars, is the best golfer in the world without question, so why would I want to root for him? I’ll take Joe Schmoe from Idaho in a showdown with Tiger any day.

That kind of attitude goes back to my younger days, before my body stopped answering my brain in competitive sports. I was pretty good for my age when I was very young and whenever I ran up against somebody who was better, I reacted by increasing my game. I always felt it was better to play well and lose then to not play well and lose. If I wasn’t as phsyically gifted as the other person, I could at least out-think him – maybe. But it was always worth the try.

And I always felt sorry for those less gifted athletically. So I would give them a break, and secretly root for them, just as long as they didn’t suddenly get a big head and think they could always beat me. If that happened, I increased my game and said, “Let’s get it on.”

Which reminds me that whenever I played football, I was always scared. Somebody said once that it’s best to be scared because you are more alert and ready. If so, I was always alert and ready for football.

My recollection is that my knees knocked until I took the first hit and got a little hurt. That would shake me up and then, and only then, would I increase my game and get it on. After that I was a raving maniac. The more I hurt the harder I played.

When I was coaching basketball, I told some players to, “Play with emotion, don’t let your emotions play you.” A few of them would quit playing when they got hit and a foul wasn’t called. They would start chirping away at the referees and lose their focus. Not good.

I never faulted refs or hostile fans in the stands. Let fans boo me all they want. The more they booed, the harder I played. I used it as inspiration. I didn’t let my emotions play me.

I still remember, by the way, playing eighth-grade basketball and having a seventh-grader on our team suddenly emerge to challenge me as our team’s best player. The kid was pretty good, and went on to have an impressive high school career after I left that school for the West Coast.

It was a real challenge for me because until then I was clearly the best in school. But this kid shows up as a transfer and right away he does things that I can’t do, and I’m feeling a little poorly.

But one day in practice I did something that made me feel good. I can still see what happen, even though it is 55 years later. The kid was driving along the baseline and I was guarding him. He went up for a shot and I cleanly swatted the ball away and grabbed the loose ball.

That’s when I heard our coach’s whistle. Called me for a foul. I was stunned. Shocked. Still am. It was one of the best blocks I ever had.

I remember turning to the coach and doing something I never did. I protested. “You got him. Yes you did,” he said.

I didn’t. But it was no use. But the kid knew. That was my consolation. Still is.

Speaking of history, another thing that bothers me is our lack as a society of long-term mermory. A talking head on the pregame before Game 4 of the San Antonio-Cleveland NBA Finals was talking about current NBA centers. The talk started with Tim Duncan and the discussion centered on whether he was a post man or a power foward, or maybe both.

Then this talking head started talking about Shaq as a comparison. Only he did something that is reflective of us as a whole, a lack of long-term memory. He said as part of this discussion that, “Shaq is the best center this league has ever seen.”

I normally don’t get too upset over the stupid things I hear on TV or radio. I have been there, done that. You get to talking and before you know it your foot is engaged fully in your mouth. I want to believe that when this guy got off the air, he said to himself, “What did I just say?”

Nevertheless, I just about threw a shoe through the TV screen. And it wasn’t just him that I was mad at. He was just the last straw. We are 24-hour newsing ourselves to death. Because of the stiff competition that the Internet – including the proliferation of bloggers – almost everything is game to be presented as news. And some of it is faulty news, or done so quickly that talking heads are saying things they know nothing about, but are talking just because they can or must.

On top of that, almost all the news is bad. Bad news sells, and news people are selling a lot these days.

Anyway, saying Shaq is the best ever blows me up. Look up Wilt Chamberlain and see what the 7-foot-1 Big Dipper did in a 14-year NBA career. He averaged 50.4 points a game in the 191-62 season.Then got tired of that, and became the NBA assist leader. He averaged 22.9 rebounds a game for his career!

Chamberlain didn’t do himself any favors by claiming in a book he wrote that he slept with 20,000 women. But that unbelievable claim should not discredit the man for what he did in basketball. The guy truly was unbelievable on the basketball court.

It’s nearly impossible to measure athletes from different eras – Jack Dempsey, Muhammad Ali or Jim Brown against anybody – so the only thing you really can do is look at their careers in their eras against their peer group and then make a calculated guess.

My guess is that Chamberlain is the best NBA center of all time.

Just don’t throw a shoe at my house.

Have a great month.

You are loved.