The NBA's Greatest Sportsmen

[tihsad]

Just wanted to pop in and say this a great idea for a thread, and a nice break from the standard on this board

[Tim Lehrbach]

1. It's a challenging topic because "sportsman" has been used to mean distinctly different things. It can just mean "athlete", it can just refer to virtuous behavior (aka "sportsmanship"), but I think that from a "who is the greatest?" perspective, the Sports Illustrated award on the subject (Sportsman/Sportsperson of the Year) has been prominent enough to essentially co-opt the term.

I'm inclined to follow your approach and focus on what we find to be admirable, but if we're making it a competition, then I do think competitive dominance has to loom large.

Re: dedication, loyalty, flair, influence. Yup, all those things seem relevant to me.

As compared with my last batch of posts, I'm inclined to be more forthcoming with my opinions this round! I think sportsmanship is about virtue, and I think that ranking and measuring competitors is also about virtue, just... differently, or more subtly. I see a tendency to believe these are two separate sets of virtues: one we might call moral, the other we might call technical. I want to shed light on great (virtuous) sportsmanship here, but I am also curious whether and to what extent the moral and technical virtues can co-mingle in our ideas about "greatness." So, what SI does with the term is interesting to me, too.

2. When it comes to basketball, I'd say we're pretty fortunate here because we have someone who to me is the clear cut choice:

Bill Russell

Most dominant player ever, possibly most influential player ever, civil rights icon, insightful author.

A key thing here that I don't think we can shy away from: The sport becomes Black-dominated with Russell's arrival. While Russell wasn't the first Black player who could be argued to have been the best basketball player in the world (Tarzan Cooper in the '30s), the basketball world wasn't dominated by a single league until after World War II, and those leagues remained dominated by white players until Russell. (It is worth noting that resistance to handing the reins over to Black players existed, and Russell's path to domination notably allowed a small white guy to chuck the ball to his heart's content. This is probably not a coincidence.)

I concur. There is no single exemplar of sportsmanship, but if I just had to pick only one, it would be Bill Russell.

And, let me admit my bias: part of my motivation in posting lately has been scholarly curiosity, but part of it is inspiration following the death of one of my heroes. I'd been meaning to post about sportsmanship generally, and Russell in particular, for years, but never found the right occasion to break in. When he passed, there were articles upon articles, pages upon pages of appreciation and tributes using all the right keywords for sportsmanship, and I thought, even in my sadness, "this is a great moment of reflection for sport." We often say that it's just a game, or we'll speak of meaningful moments as being bigger than basketball, but the career and life of Bill Russell is a reminder of just how big the game and its contestants can really be. My bias, besides that of elevating Russell, is that I don't want this to be a one-off. I want people to have that moment of reflection but then to carry it forward, rather than resume thinking of basketball as strictly wins and losses or players as their statistical inputs and outputs. Russell, and other great sportsmen, help to remind us why sports matter to us, what distinguishes sports from exercise as participants and from entertainment as observers. There's more going on here than a mere child's game.

I could list a bunch of other players that are worth celebrating on this front, just not up there with Russell, but I want to specifically single out someone outside of the NBA:

Maya Moore

If you're like I was until recently, you see Moore the player as one of the many MVPs in WNBA history. I'd like to emphasize that it really does seem likely to me that Moore was considerably better at basketball than any other player in WNBA history. Her +/- data is really quite insane, and despite the MVP, I think she got drastically underrated.

When she arrived into the league, she took a team that had been perpetually bad and immediately led them to the championship leading the entire league in +/-, which she would do as a matter of course over her career. But early on, there was reluctance to see her as the clear-cut star of her team, and more annoyingly, in her last years, there was a mass delusion that another player on her team (Sylvia Fowles) was the best on the team and was actually given MVP of the league despite being nowhere near as valuable as Moore.

And then there's the whole thing where she retired early to focus on getting an innocent man out of prison, and she succeeded. Now, she did end up marrying that man, so make of that what you will, but in a very real sense, Moore can be seen as the Muhammed Ali of the 21st century more so than any other athlete I'm aware of.

Thank you for this. I used the words "sportsmanship" and "sportsman" a lot in my OP, but in no way do I mean them to be the exclusive domain of men. My gendered usage was simply a reflection of the scope, which I figured would be limited to NBA players. I will learn more about Moore!

[OhayoKD]

Great thread