Remembering Kobe Bryant and other lost legends.
SPORTS LOST MANY LEGENDS IN 2020, BUT BRYANT’S PASS ING STOOD ABOVE THE REST
On the first road trip of the year, which happened to be the last road trip of a very different year, I got into my hotel room in Miami on a Sunday afternoon, turned on my television set and froze.
There had been a helicopter crash in Los Angeles. The details were still sketchy. And the news was blaring on every channel, the same news, the same sadness. A few minutes later it became official: Kobe Bryant and daughter, Gianna, and others were dead.
This was the beginning of Super Bowl Week. The great show for Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid, only it was challenging to talk football, to care about football, to change the subject really when all anybody wanted to talk about was Kobe’s death.
There aren’t many, in any pursuit, sports, music, entertainment, to have the carry that Kobe Bryant had, to transcend being a basketball player to being a world celebrity.
To being someone everyone seemed to have a story to tell about, a personal moment to remember, something that connected them to Kobe, and now connects to this unspeakable year of tragedy and protest and political upheaval and pandemic and illness, and far too much death.
We end almost every year looking back at who died in the previous 12 months.
They do it at the Academy Awards. They do it at the Emmys and the Grammys. The newspapers and magazines always do it. We have a need to remember and celebrate, but this year feels different as it comes to an end.
This year was so much about death, about the three words that mattered most — “I cant breathe” — about loss of friends and athletes and celebrities and people like George Floyd, who we only came to know after he was gone.
We saw part of an NHL season and part of an NBA season and a shortened baseball season and games cancelled because of player protests and Black Lives Matter and speaking out on matters of social discourse in North America.
Maybe we won’t care to remember the Stanley Cup won in Edmonton or the NBA title bought and paid for by the Los Angeles Lakers in Orlando.
We will likely remember the World Series because of how it ended and the decision that will be debated forever. But so much of the year was our own personal Groundhog Day. Living at home. Working at home. Worrying at home. Hoping and wondering if we still had a job or a business or a cheque coming in. Hoping and wondering if our mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends would make it through the coronavirus and not say they couldn’t breathe.
Sports is such a personal piece of our entertainment landscape.
We all take it in and consume it differently, based on our thoughts, our passions, our teams, our players, no matter what the game, no matter when they are played.
But the losses seemed more significant this year, more personal, more damaging, more heartbreaking.
Kobe Bryant died on Wayne Gretzky’s 59th birthday. He died 25 days after the great NBA commissioner, David Stern, died at the age of 78. January was a tough month for the NBA. One month later, the current commissioner, Adam Silver, put his sport, and in tune, other professional sports on hold when he called a halt to the NBA season. The NHL followed suit the next day. Baseball didn’t start until late July. The CFL season never began. The NFL season somehow struggles along.
It wasn’t just Kobe and Stern who died in 2020: Basketball lost coaches and players and broadcasters such as Wes Unseld, Jerry Sloan, Tommy Heinsohn, John Thompson and Curly Neal in the past 12 months.
This year hit home. In every possible way. Maybe, if we were lucky, we got more time with family than ever before. We talked more. Read more. Watched way too much television and then talked about that without friends.
We became slaves to Netflix and Amazon Prime, and shopping without leaving the house and far too much CNN, and also too much time on the phone or on Zoom or Facetime with friends talking about what it was we were binging.
This year, I discovered Harry Bosch and the violence and craziness of Kingdom and the many sides of The Queen’s Gambit and too many seasons of Suits and The Money Heist, where the mouths and the words were never quite in sync. And all of it — with a world screaming like never before — became part of my 2020. But so much of the year was about anger and uproar and blame, and not just on social media outlets.
Christmas is on its way now and I can’t help but think of Eddie Shack, the loud growling voice, the silly smile: This was his time of year. Long after his NHL career ended, he sold Christmas trees. My friend Michael Farber, the former Sports Illustrated star, did a piece for the then- great magazine years ago on Toronto as an NBA city. This was long before championships or Masai Ujiri. Farber made the point, half-kidding, half-not, that you’ll know Toronto is a basketball city when you say Shaq and it doesn’t mean Eddie.
Toronto is a basketball city and even in passing, as he did in July at the age of 83, if you say Shack to so many people across Canada, they will still say Eddie. Probably always will.
Shack wasn’t the best hockey player to pass away in 2020, just the only one who had a hit song written about him and do commercials for Pop Shoppe. This year we said goodbye to the combined excellence of Dale Hawerchuk and Henri Richard, goodbye to Colby Cave and Travis Roy, both way too young, to that great body checker, Brian Glennie, to the tough guys, Ted Green and Jack Mcilhargey, to the future hall of famer, general manager Pierre Lacroix, to names from my youth and maybe yours — Bob Nevin, Dean Prentice, Pat Stapleton, the junior legends named Larry Mavety and Tommy Webster and the voice and conscience of hockey, Howie Meeker.
Almost everybody I’ve known at different times in their lives have tried to throw a baseball the way Tony Fernandez did. It was part throw, part flip, part underhand, part sidearm and absolutely original. In Toronto, and maybe across Canada, he was the most imitated Blue Jays player in history.
And also one of the most beloved. Fernandez died at just 57 years of age, too young, too soon, but in a local kind of way, with a Kobe kind of impact. He has the most hits in Blue Jays history and will hold that record for years. He has the most games played, the most triples hit.
Not far behind him, at one time, in the record books, was Damaso Garcia, who played second base to Fernandez’s shortstop on the 1985 team that should have gone to the World Series. Fernandez came back to Toronto to win in 1993. Garcia was 65 when he died in April.
Can you imagine a baseball starting rotation with Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver and Whitey Ford? They all died in 2020. And an outfield with Al Kaline, Lou Brock and Jimmy ( the Toy Cannon) Wynn. All of them gone. With Bob Watson sharing first base with Dick Allen and Joe Morgan playing second. Baseball’s losses were enormous from 2020.
Not long ago, I sat down with Scotty Bowman to talk about coaching. I asked him which coach in other sports he admired most. He began the conversation and ended it talking about Don Shula.
Shula won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Colts before they moved to Indianapolis and he moved to Miami. He won another Bowl with Bob Griese and the still- famous undefeated Dolphins. And he probably should have won another one with Dan Marino in Miami. Shula won with defensive teams, with running teams, with passing teams, all the while, as Bowman pointed out, adjusting to his players, changing how he coached.
Shula died in May. He lived a great, long life. He was 90 when he passed.
Gale Sayers died in September. He was 77, and a running highlight film like no one who has ever played football. Sayers became more famous, really, for the movie Brian’s Song, but at a time in history when the word greatness is too easily attached to athletes, few could ever do what Sayers did on a football field.
Too many Argos and CFL names we remember were lost in 2020.
Was there ever a football player in Toronto better than Marv Luster? Was there ever a more consistent receiver in Hamilton than Tommy Joe Coffey? A more dependable linebacker and community figure in Ottawa and Montreal than Mark Kosmos?
Unfortunately and circumstantially the world spent too much of the past 12 months mourning and wondering what comes next.
Maybe that’s a Jeopardy! topic for 2021 and for whomever replaces the irreplaceable treasure Alex Trebek.
“What comes next for $100?”
“And the answer is ... “