There’s good news and bad news for Philadelphians this month.
The bad news you already know. Our fearless leader has trapped us in a pointless war in Iran. Russia’s fearless leader is bombing apartment buildings in Kyiv. Israel’s fearless leader is bombing defenseless Palestinians (for which Jews like me are inexplicably being blamed). ICE agents are doing to immigrants what Gestapo agents once did to Jews. Extreme heat is changing (and sometimes ending) people’s lives all over the world, while the U.S. government fires rafts of climate scientists. The cost of food, gas, and energy is going through the roof. Our vaccine-vilifying secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is hosting a cooking show on YouTube, while the dedicated 85-year-old public health doctor Anthony Fauci is maligned in Congress.
Now for the good news: LeBron James, perhaps the greatest basketball player in history, has committed himself to spending two seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers, raising hopes that the Sixers can win their first National Basketball Association championship since 1983, much the same way he erased a 52-year title drought for the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016.
If you walked through Center City on July 24, the day the news broke, folks were talking of little else. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro declared July 24 “LeBron James Day” throughout the entire state. Last Thursday the Philadelphia Inquirer celebrated James’s decision with a 32-page special section, which is 31 pages more than any Philadelphia newspaper ever devoted to Benjamin Franklin. (Frank Sinatra’s another story.)
Remember Yogi Berra?
By most accounts, James is a decent, intelligent fellow and a good family man who married his high school sweetheart and has raised three children with her. So why, at age 41, did James choose Philadelphia?
He has said several times over the years that his goal is to go down as the greatest basketball player of all time. He already holds records for the most seasons played (23), most games played, most minutes played, and most field goals made in league history. Signing with the Sixers, James said, had nothing to do with money or family. He just wanted to win again. He’s already won four championships with three teams. Winning five championships with four different teams would settle the “greatest” argument once and for all.
Except…
My own boyhood sports idol, Moose Skowron, won four World Series championships with the New York Yankees and one with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and he wasn’t even admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Yogi Berra won the World Series ten times with the Yankees. As for basketball, Bill Russell won 11 NBA championships with the Boston Celtics.
40-year-old athletes
Also, James will be 43 by the time his contract expires. His body could expire before then, when he least expects it. I was 46 when I foolishly got into a serious basketball game. I went up for a rebound, came down wrong on my left foot, and spent the rest of that month with a swollen knee wrapped in ace bandages, never to play basketball again. I’m no LeBron James, but there’s a good reason why 40-year-olds don’t play basketball.
Yes, I know: Aaron Rodgers is still quarterbacking the Pittsburgh Steelers at age 42. Tom Brady won a Super Bowl at 43 and retired at 45. The kicker Adam Vinatieri recently retired from the Indianapolis Colts at 47. George Blanda of the Oakland Raiders was still playing at 48. Nick Altrock actually played in a Major League baseball game at 57. But these superannuated professional athletes shared one thing in common: They didn’t play basketball.
There is much to admire about an athlete like James who kicks over the traces of a secure existence every few years to make a fresh start with a new team. There is also much to admire about an athlete who refuses to meekly surrender to the aging process. To compete at the highest level of any sport— or any endeavor, really— takes an awesome combination of talent and determination (and luck, as we shall see if you read on). To win consistently at that level takes even more.
What’s greater than winning?
In his quest to prove himself the greatest basketball player of all time, Wilt Chamberlain cut back on his shooting and rebounding in the 1967-68 season and led the league in assists, just to prove that he could do anything he wanted on a court. But the ultimate point of a team sport isn’t individual statistics; it’s winning games. Which is why Bill Russell was a more valuable player than Chamberlain.
Come to think of it, winning isn’t the ultimate point of a team sport, either. It’s remembering that a team sport is a sport, not a war. If LeBron James spends serious time in Philadelphia, he could do worse than check out the plaque in Penn’s Franklin Field that reads: “To win the game is great. To play the game is greater. To love the game is greatest.”
The late Princeton basketball coach Pete Carril, who won 514 games over 29 seasons, understood this. When asked to comment on the occasion of his 250th victory in 1981, Carril replied: “I don’t give a hoot about the first one, nor the 100th, nor will I care about the last one. They are so meaningless anyway. A victory is to be enjoyed for a while and then forgotten, and a defeat should be reflected upon for a while and then forgotten as well.”
The question I would ask James at this point is the same question I would ask Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin: Not “Are you the greatest?” but “What’s your next career?” And how will you respond when, inevitably, somebody breaks your records?
Remember Tony Jackson?
The late Penn sociologist E. Digby Baltzell once observed that successful people aren’t very interesting. How we deal with failure and disappointment may be more inspiring. I’m thinking here of one of the basketball heroes of my own New York City youth.
Tony Jackson was a brilliant six-foot, four-inch jump shooter and a two-time All-American who led St. John’s University to the championships of New York’s Holiday Festival in 1958 and the National Invitation Tournament in 1959, in an era when those tournaments showcased basketball’s finest talent.
I first saw Jackson play in March of 1957, when I was 14 and Jackson was a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. That day, playing against New Utrecht in the first round of New York’s Public School Athletic League tournament, he dazzled me by scoring 15 points in the first half alone— until the second half, when he scored 39 more points. His 54-point total that day broke the Madison Square Garden record for basketball at any level— high school, college, professional. At that time, he was the all-time top scorer in the history of the Public School Athletic League.
Caught in a scandal
At St. John’s, which then was consistently ranked among the nation’s top ten college teams, he was the only player in that school’s history to average 20 or more points per game over three varsity seasons. Had there been a three-point shot in those days, he might have averaged more than 30 points a game. He was also unsurpassed as a rebounder. In short, Tony Jackson was as good as they come. But none of this ever went to his head.
“He didn’t walk around with a swagger,” one of his teammates recalled years later. “You have no idea how modest and unselfish he was.”
Jackson might have become a professional star of LeBron Jamesian magnitude. But fate had other plans. Two months after he was selected by the New York Knicks in the March 1961 NBA draft, Jackson’s name turned up in an indictment listing college basketball players implicated in the game’s recent point-fixing scandals. Jackson had rejected a bribe offer, but his offense was his failure to report that he had been approached. He was never accused of a crime, but he and every other player named in the indictment were barred for life from playing in the NBA.
‘There’s a plan for you’
So instead, Jackson spent much of the ’60s playing in the short-lived American Basketball League. When the American Basketball Association was created in 1967, Jackson joined the New Jersey Americans, the franchise that eventually became the NBA’s Nets. He made the ABA All-Star team that season, averaging a respectable 15.9 points per game. But unlike LeBron James, he never got the opportunity to test himself against the best of the best in the NBA. He retired from pro basketball altogether before he turned 30.
Jackson spent the rest of his life working in recreational programs in Brooklyn. He got married and had a son and two daughters. His St. John’s starting teammates stayed in touch over the years and held regular reunions. He died of cancer in 2005 at age 65.
About his lost opportunity to become an NBA star, Jackson said this: “I have this belief. When you’re created and brought to this Earth, there’s a plan for you. This was the plan for me. You’re bitter for a while, but, hey, there’s life afterwards. I didn’t want to become a bitter person.”
I admired that guy when I was 14. Still do, albeit for a different reason. His message to LeBron James might be: What really matters is the “life afterwards.”
Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com
From reader Terry McDaniel:
Great messages in this piece, after I got through that sobering bad news paragraph. Three of the items that resonated with me: 1. The mention of Bill Skowron; 2.The back story of Tony Jackson; 3. The message on the plaque at Franklin Field.
Growing up in '50s-'60s as a Yankees fan, I too admired the "Moose. A hard-nosed Chicago kid with a pug face, he could hit to right & right-center with power from that level bat right-side stance. Interesting that HE was your hero rather than any of the "glamour boys" (e.g., Joe D, Mick, Whitey, etc.) of which the Yankees had many.
As a Hoosier kid, of course I dreamed of basketball stardom. Unfortunately, late growth and lack of talent got in the way of my plan. While trying to learn a jump shot in the late '50s, I clearly recall seeing Tony a few times on televised Redmens' games. What a smooth player with the sweetest early jump shot he was!
And that plaque that you saw frequently while playing at Franklin Field— how inspirational, and thoughtful!
I agree with you that LeBron seems like one of the good guys. I hope he has big success in his final chapter in Philly.
From reader Robert Zaller:
An interesting column that took me way back.
I wasn’t among the celebrants at LeBron James’ signing. He couldn’t help Washington when he played for it (74-90 over his two seasons there), and he is apt to be a distraction more than anything.
Your boyhood hero was Moose Skowron; mine was Gil Hodges, the only man except for the Pope that every Catholic church in Brooklyn prayed for when he couldn’t buy a hit in the 1952 World Series.
Nick Altrock did play in a major league game at age 57, but so did Minnie Minoso, who definitely deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. And Satchel Paige started a game for the Kansas City Athletics in 1965 at 58 (his pitching line: three shutout innings; one hit; one strikeout).