STAR TOSSED
Team-first attitude ruling the day
THESE are good days for oldschool ways and oldschool sporting values. We have just completed a splendid run with a hockey team, the Rangers, whose soul really did seem to be forged in the ’40s and ’50s, a oneforall, allforone standard that really did seem to capture the imagination even of peripheral fans.
But hockey is like that, of course. Even if a team happens to be stuffed full of mefirst egomaniacs, there’s only so much impact one player can gave when he’s constantly shifting on and off the ice. By its very nature, hockey demands espritdecorps. So that’s really nothing new.
But we started to see this new age of teamover star in our own backyard a few months ago, at the Super Bowl, when roughly 93.4 percent of all the pregame attention was affixed on a certain quarterback for the Broncos. Now, in fairness, Peyton Manning isn’t a selfish player. And he isn’t the first quarterback to be given the lion’s share of credit for a team’s success.
But it sure seemed like if there were a marquee out in front of MetLIfe Stadium last February, it might have borrowed that famous one from the old Madison Square Garden — Geo Mikan vs. Knicks — and gone with: Pey Manning vs. Seahawks.
And, well, we know how that went.
Same deal with the NBA Finals. And, again, LeBron James is anything but a selfish player. In truth, it can be safely argued he may well be the most unselfish basketball superstar we’ve seen in some time — a point he hammered home in Game 2 when, rather than take the most important shot of the game himself, he passed off to Chris Bosh, and Bosh drained the 3.
But there is little doubt it is hard to traverse the NBA, or anything having to do with the league, without being inundated by James — by his face, by his likeness, by the products he endorses or the ubiquity of the Heat, of whom he is the team’s face, voice and enduring image. And then there are the Spurs. And if many of us have regularly given them their due for all they have accomplished over the past 15 years, they are also a team that is easy to overlook because they have reached the remarkable place where their relentless suc cess almost has become … for lack of a better term, boring.
But watching them in action this past week, watching them move the ball the way we always have heard that the hittheopenman Knicks moved the ball, watching every member of the team have a role, and a prominent one … well, it’s hard not to be impressed. Hard not to think of other basketball paragons of virtue — those ’70 Knicks, the ’77 Blazers, the Magic Lakers and the Bird Celtics, teams whose successes were as defined by the program as the players, by selflessness as much as sass.
This is how we want to believe sports are supposed to be of course: the whole over the parts, the better team beating the better player. Sometimes it works out that way, sometimes it doesn’t. Lately, we are seeing the oldschool values and the oldtime ways carry the day. Good days indeed.