I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [35]
If that had happened to Tiger . . . man . . . I can’t even think about it now. It would have been . . . just terrible . . . too terrible to even think about. But it didn’t. We couldn’t take our eyes off the TV, just sat there and watched every shot, and soaked up every moment of it as if it were happening to one of us. What a great day. That set a whole lot of stuff in motion, didn’t it?
If You Don’t Win a
Championship . . .
When Ted Williams passed away in the summer of 2002, it brought about a lot of fascinating reflection and it made me think about how people perceive athletes’ careers.
Obviously, in retirement Ted Williams was simply a very good guy. Even though he retired three years before I was born, I appreciated him because of his support for Negro League players who had been banned from playing with him in the major leagues. I’ve read excerpts of interviews and seen clips of speeches that showed he was about inclusion and integration and recognizing everybody’s talents back when baseball didn’t want any part of black and Latin players. And even beyond that, in recent times, you knew Ted Williams had to be a really good guy because of the way modern-day players embraced him, and the way he embraced them. The way they surrounded him at that All-Star Game in Boston a few years ago told you how much the people in his profession thought of him.
What’s interesting is that in his retirement, when he became the elder statesman of the game, people hardly ever mentioned that he never won a championship with the Red Sox. I had forgotten he hadn’t won one until I started reading and watching the obituaries after he died. I mean, I know the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since 1918, and Ted’s career went from 1939 to 1960, so obviously he didn’t win a World Series. But I’d forgotten about it because nobody tried to diminish him because he hadn’t won a World Series. I’ve read that people brought it up during his career, when he was perceived by a lot of people as being a bad guy, but since he was clearly a good guy for many, many years, people just let it go. It’s a serious double standard, and it’s silly because it’s not like he was two different players. So if he’s a good guy it doesn’t matter, but if he’s a bad guy it does?
Thing is, if Ted Williams had been traded to the Yankees in his rookie year for Joe DiMaggio, Ted would have all those World Series rings and DiMaggio probably wouldn’t have had any. But would DiMaggio not have been a great ballplayer? Would Ted have been any better? Ted only played in one World Series, 1946, and the Red Sox lost. But nobody has hit .400 since he did it. The guy won two Triple Crowns, which is almost unthinkable these days. But the bigger point to be made is the perception of what kind of player he was as it relates to playing for a championship team.
It’s something that all athletes have to live with, even the guys who win a championship, and it can be frustrating. It obviously hits home with me because I never played on a championship team in my sixteen years in the NBA. Some guy in Los Angeles once wrote that my career wasn’t fulfilled because of that. And that’s absurd.
Dean Smith once relayed to me a conversation he had with Roy Williams after Dean Smith won his first NCAA Championship, the one where North Carolina beat Georgetown in 1982. People had gotten on Dean Smith about coaching at Carolina for twenty years and not winning the NCAA Championship, even though he’d been to the Final Four a bunch of times. Roy, who was his assistant at the time, said to him as the game ended, “Now you can get ’em off your back about not winning a championship.” And Dean Smith said