Sports Then and Now

After joining the rest of the country in taking a pause back in March, the NBA is looking to get back to work with a return to game action this week. If all goes well, the NBA hopes to crown a 2019-2020 champion by mid-October.

Unlike Major League Baseball, which is attempting to play games in home cities, the NBA made the decision to create a bubble at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando with all games being played at one location. Like MLB and other leagues, they will be playing in an empty arena.

Given the challenges that MLB has already seen after just one weekend of teams staying in hotels and traveling on airplanes, it looks like pretty good strategy by the NBA to take the travel element out of the equation and instead have everyone in one location without regular outside contact.

Of course, given the nuances that the COVID-19 virus has shown, there is no guarantee that even creating a bubble can keep 200+ athletes safe for an extended period of time. However, if odds were being given, I would have to say I feel the NBA is more likely to be playing to the conclusion of their season than MLB or even the NFL, which also plans to play in home stadiums beginning in September.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s famous sky hook was nearly impossible to stop.

If you had to pick out one basketball star that deserves the title of the greatest player of all time – then the name of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is definitely on the shortlist.

Once in a while, there are players in all kinds of different sports who just seem to re-write the way the game is played – along with the record books – and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was most certainly such a player.

One might say the same about the great Pele or perhaps Diego Maradona in the world of soccer, for example – or perhaps Jack Nicklaus or maybe even Tiger Woods in golf. And in tennis both Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer have been re-writing the record books over the last decade between them. These are all players and sportsmen who learn their trade in the same way as everyone else trying to make it in their chosen sport – then somehow do something different again. It’s not just about being better – it’s about doing things differently than anyone else ever has done before, and taking things to a whole new level.

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s game that no-one else had really done was that trademark skyhook shot that punished so many opponents so badly during the player’s 20 year basketball career.

But it was more than that; he played with sublimity – with an elegance and style that few other players have ever been able to match, if any.

Another of his trademarks was to play down low. He looked like he was hunting as he crouched with the ball, looking up from underneath his spectacles that he usually played in – and he was completely single-minded in achieving what he was setting out to do; score points and win games. But he did it all with grace and style and a wonderful fluidity of movement that is the hallmark of so many great players in different sports. It’s rather like watching someone doing exactly what they were born to do – moving with grace and speed like a predatory big cat in a way that is far more about instinct than it is about conscious thought.

By the time Abdul-Jabbar decided to quit basketball in 1989 at the grand old age of 42, no NBA basketball player had ever scored as many points or been awarded as many ‘Most Valuable Player’ awards, or blocked more shots. He had even played in more All-Star Games and notched up more seasons than any other player in NBA history. So when we say that he re-wrote the record books, this is no throwaway sycophancy from an appreciative audience of basketball fans – it is, quite simply, a literal truth. Read the rest of this entry →