Cover Stories to Be Simply the Best

By Tom Callahan

At the top of their games, the finest athletes' best instinct is never to look back, though the impulse is strong and requests are frequent. Once a performer has transcended the competition, or seemed to at least, he or she begins to play in the past as well as the present, and yesterday is a slippery field with a sliding context. The future can be affected. If they never get any better, they are the only ones who will be disappointed. If they stop to acknowledge the position, they stop. Maybe they become satisfied. The position is acknowledged.

After all, contemporary acclaim is wonderful. Peggy Lee, the jazz singer, once fielded the question "Who is the best jazz singer?" as cleanly as Brooks Robinson reaching over third base: "Do you mean besides Ella?" Such is the esteem in which Wayne Gretzky and Larry Bird are held now. By common agreement, each is the best in his sport, and something more than that. They are changing the elements if not the definition of a star. In Gretzky's and Bird's gloved and bare hands, hockey and basketball appear to improve even as games, seem to become not only more appealing but less incomprehensible. And when what they are doing loses its mystery, how they are doing it becomes the wonder. As Bobby Jones said of Jack Nicklaus, they play a game with which we are not familiar, but would like to be.

Nicklaus has wended his way around the world not only digging divots but scraping new golf tracts out of mountainsides. Presumably he is motivated by something other than a passion for landscaping. Considering his accomplishments, no athlete has avoided arrogance better than Nicklaus, who has slipped as a golfer, even then maybe only as a putter, but is still not quite back to mortal at 45. "I had the confidence to try to be the best ever --you have to," he says. "But I never thought in terms of being it. I don't think even 20 years from now, looking back at the record, I'll ever say it." So he is carving the record in mountains. He is moved by history.

The racquet gouges that the world's No. 1 tennis player, John McEnroe, slashes furiously into Wimbledon's crabgrass scarcely qualify yet as this ! kind of mark. But he has just turned 26 and has not exactly been silenced, or even quieted. Maybe he will grow into a greater mantle. Of all the athletes in their prime, Martina Navratilova should have the nearest understanding of where Gretzky and Bird are situated. For the past three years, her grip on women's tennis has made Margaret Court, Billie Jean King and Chris Evert Lloyd protective of their memories. It would be appropriate to say that Martina has played the competition off its feet, except that she is the only powerful woman tennis player who really leaves her feet, a smasher with an underrated delicateness. The Czech defector does not insist that she is the greatest, as Muhammad Ali would say, of all time, though she believes so. "America gave me the opportunity to play the best tennis any woman ever played, which I think I have done the past few years. Excuse me if that sounds like bragging."

In the right voice, it never sounds like bragging. (Reggie Jackson's is not the right voice.) "I'm very good at my profession," says Jockey Willie Shoemaker, 53, a restrained appraisal of his almost 8,500 victories in 36 years. "I don't know if I'm as strong as I've ever been, but I'm smarter." Still 95 lbs. after so many campaigns, Shoemaker rides "three or four" races every California afternoon, and last week his odometer turned past $100 million in purses won. While the West and East coasts cannot agree on whether Laffit Pincay or Angel Cordero is the ablest jockey today, no one threatens Shoemaker's place. Although he thought of retiring ten years ago, he says, "Something wouldn't let me." You can almost hear a horse cantering when he adds, "I just kind of go along."

Endurance is one of the tests. The ultimate grade comes when it is impossible to call the sport and the man to mind separately. There is one international word for European football or American soccer: Pele. But then a day or two can be a lot, and 45 minutes enough. During the most astonishing three-quarter hour in 1935, Ohio State Sophomore Jesse Owens broke three world track records and tied a fourth. He was ready for the Munich Olympics, his legacy. How long Gretzky and Bird play at the top and stay at the fair will help determine their ultimate reputations.

An all but obsolete baseball player in an all but obsolete position, Cincinnati Reds Manager-Player Pete Rose, 43, is hanging around for the rare chance to meet Ty Cobb this summer--sometime in August, he expects. To the young players under his authority, Rose extends a greeting without apology. "I'm no different from anybody here," he says, "who has two arms, two legs and 4,000 hits." Probably because Rose skipped his true generation, he is good at updating latecomers on events even older than he is. A young fan materialized at the batting cage once just as the topic turned to Joe DiMaggio, whose 56-game hitting streak coincided roughly with Pete's birth. Rose was well into an explanation of what made Joe DiMaggio so great when it became obvious that the boy had no idea who Joe DiMaggio was. "C'mon, you know," he tried to jog a memory, "Mr. Coffee." Whether that helped or not, the light went on in the child's eyes.

DiMaggio's resilient aura 34 years into retirement speaks for the power of grace, though football's Jim Brown has kept his legend for 20 years without leading a notably polite life. Thanks to the persistence of his advocates and the pure power of memory, Sugar Ray Robinson weathered another boxing Sugar Ray without giving up his personalized subtitle "pound for pound." Contemplating why anyone is best in any game is a riddle. If the best pitcher was Sandy Koufax, the best catcher was Johnny Bench and the best hitter was Ted Williams, who was the best player? Willie Mays, of course. In the late '60s, Williams signed the young Bench's baseball "to a Hall of Famer, for sure"; the greatest players seem to know their descendants. Neither Bobby Orr nor Gordie Howe had any difficulty recognizing Gretzky. "He passes better than anybody I've ever seen," says Orr, "and he thinks so far ahead." Howe allows, "In the old six-team league (21 teams now), the opposition would have been able to learn more about him, but it might not have helped."

Bob Cousy, the smoothest passer basketball had ever seen, a man who both guarded and coached Oscar Robertson, says without the merest reservation, "Bird is simply the best who ever played this silly game." He includes Center Bill Russell, Cousy's Boston teammate, whose presence had the most to do with the Celtics' eleven National Basketball Association championships in 13 years. By basketball's nature, it is fundamentally a pivotman's game, the expected province of the Los Angeles Laker Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the Philadelphia 76er Moses Malone, but Forward Bird forwardly deposed Malone as the league's MVP last season after placing second three straight years. Another incongruity, a slightly troubling one, has to do with the fact that nine black men and Bird started the last All-Star game. Granting it is unseemly, is it even conceivable that the best basketball player in the world is white? "It's weird," agrees Marques Haynes, the old Fabulous Magicians barnstormer, a neutral expert, "but it's true."

Not merely white, Bird is a paler shade of paste. As a moment of silence descends over him at the foul line, a youthful voice calling out from a courtside row can be heard in the mezzanine: "Larry Bird, why are you so white?" Bird laughs later. "It's amazing. I guess I'm a white superstar in a black man's game, but it's open to all colors." Sometimes from exertion he turns a flamingo shade of pink. Perching on one leg at nearly every pause in the game, he compulsively rubs and preens the tops and bottoms of his feet with both hands, an interesting reaction to a confessed sense that he is slipping, when he is not. All over Boston, kids are doing it.

When the old Detroit Pistons star George Yardley, 56, acknowledged recently that he never would have been able to play professional basketball as it is practiced today, the two-hand set shooter Bob Davies, 65, wisely consoled him: "You can only be a little bit better than your competition." Gretzky and Bird could use each other for competition. Some day they will be explained by the numbers, but the statistics will be as unreliable as Babe Ruth's. "It wasn't just that Ruth hit more home runs than anybody else," observed Red Smith, who rode trains with Ruth and felt no need to exaggerate his ample stature. "He hit them better, higher, farther, with more theatrical timing and more flamboyant flourish. Nobody could strike out like Babe Ruth. Nobody circled the bases with the same pigeon-toed mincing majesty."

When a grandfather some day starts to describe Gretzky and Bird, will he begin with all of the things they could not do, and then wonder? Is it that Gretzky knew precisely where his teammates were heading, or did he put the puck in a place that made them proceed there? Somewhere far below Wilt Chamberlain in points and Robertson in assists, Bird should be just a respectable presence on all of the lists. But two men in one class are too few for a list. Anyone who really wants to know why they were the best will have to have seen them.