AMERICA AT LARGE:What could be more undignified than the spectre of Scottie Pippen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rolling around in the dirt against the backdrop of the NBA finals?
COMPARING THE accomplishments of players in one era with those of their counterparts from another is an exercise in futility, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen all the time. Ignoring the inequalities posed by advances in equipment, rules changes and scheduling, bloggers and tweeters with way too much time on their hands inundate the World Wide Web with these arguments every day, and they don’t seem to have much difficulty finding someone prepared to take them up on the apples versus oranges debate:
* If Nicklaus had been using Titanium shafts and hitting a Pro V1, he’d have won 30 majors.
* Babe Ruth never had to play night games.
* Of course, you ninny, but when Jim Brown did it the NFL played a 12-game season.
When my book Four Kingscame out a few years ago, I tried hard to steer clear of the passionate fans who wanted to argue that, say, Arthur Abraham belonged in the same company as Leonard, Hagler, Hearns and Duran. And I couldn't help remembering that when I was covering the nine-fight round-robin between those four a quarter-century ago I'd run into old-timers who told me things like "Jake LaMotta would have kicked the shit out of all of them on the same night".
But there’s something downright unseemly about the principals themselves jumping into the fray to turn a harmless little dialogue into a mean-spirited argument calculated to re-open festering wounds. I mean, what could be more undignified than the spectre of Hall of Famers Scottie Pippen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rolling around in the dirt against the backdrop of the NBA finals?
You can blame ESPN for initiating this spat. The blood had yet to congeal after the conference championships last weekend when ESPN Radio interviewed Pippen, with somewhat predictable results.
A seven-time All Star, Pippen was a few years ago named among the NBA’s 50 greatest players of all time. He won six championship rings in eight years with the Chicago Bulls, but only at your peril would you point out in his presence that the two years his team didn’t win the title in that span coincided with Michael Jordan’s flirtation with a baseball career.
That he has been consigned by basketball history to be remembered as Jordan’s wingman has always grated on Pippen, and it didn’t take Scottie long to turn a question about the Miami Heat and the Dallas Mavericks into an answer about LeBron James and Michael Jordan – at the denigration of Jordan’s reputation.
LeBron, said Pippen, “may be the greatest player ever to play the game”, while Jordan is merely “probably the greatest scorer ever to play the game”. The former was a contention so absurd that James himself seemed embarrassed: “Michael is an unbelievable player,” said LeBron. “I’ve got a long way – a long way – to go to be mentioned as one of the all-time greats. There are a lot of great players who have played in this league. I’m flattered, but I’m not going to sit here and say I’m better than Jordan. I’m not better than Jordan.”
Pippen was roundly excoriated for his remarks, though not, significantly, by Jordan, who wisely remained above the fray. Then, two days ago, Abdul-Jabbar composed his own response, in the form of an open letter (subtitled “How Soon They Forget”) that wound up on the Los Angeles Times’ Lakers blog yesterday morning.
Abdul-Jabbar noted that since “LeBron has yet to win a championship”, any characterisation of him as “the best ever” was at the very least premature. But he also took issue with Pippen’s back-handed salute to Jordan as the “greatest scorer” when the empirical evidence would lead one to conclude that he himself owned that designation. (Kareem, in fact, signed his letter “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, NBA’s All-time Leading Scorer”.)
In chiding Pippen for his “limited perspective”, Abdul-Jabbar also cited the historical examples of the late Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell (that he would invoke the name of the former struck some as amusing, since Kareem didn’t especially like Wilt). Not only did Chamberlain once score 100 points in a game, he pointed out, but he averaged 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds in 1962, when there were only eight teams in the league and “only the cream of the basketball world got to play” in the NBA.
And the 11 championships (including eight in a row) by Russell’s teams, noted Abdul-Jabbar, do rather dwarf the six amassed by Jordan’s and Pippen’s teams, to say nothing of the zero (so far) by LeBron’s.
“And as you very well know, Scottie, the ring’s the thing,” Abdul-Jabbar concluded his open letter, advising Pippen to “do a little homework” next time he felt like running his mouth and crowning anybody the greatest this or the greatest that.
Kareem’s sentiments did seem to strike a responsive chord among NBA fans – or NBA fans not residing in South Florida, at any rate. Since the day last summer when James commandeered an hour’s worth of ESPN time to make his breathless announcement that he would “take my talents to South Beach” and then, upon arriving there, predict that, in partnership with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, the Heat would win “six, seven, and more” NBA titles, many fans had fretted that he might do just that.
In that respect, perhaps we’ve all taken our eye off the ball a bit as we’ve watched the Old Guard – the Celtics, the Lakers, even the Bulls – swept out of the way as these play-offs ran their course. Certainly there should have been room for reappraisals of both James and Dallas’ Dirk Nowitzki that didn’t come at, say, Michael Jordan’s expense.
The curious, or perhaps not so curious, result has been that the Heat went off a solid betting favourite to defeat the Mavericks in this year’s finals, even as Dallas remained an overwhelming sentimental favourite, and now that Miami has Tuesday night’s opening game win in their pockets, the possibility looms even larger that what seemed an idle boast by LeBron James back in July could turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy 11 months later.
