Basketball has changed, so they don’t make players like Wes Unseld anymore – but maybe they should

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In one of the lifeguard jobs of my youth in Cincinnati, we had a manager named George. This particular city swimming pool could be a pretty wild place compared with some I worked at. Every pool has its troublemakers and you’re taught to try to defuse them with understated reason. Sometimes easier said than done.

But always easier with Big George around. I was about 21 with blonde hair down my shoulders like some sort of ersatz surfer boy dropped into the blocks of worn brick tenements. Nobody was going to give me any respect if a fight broke out or some teenagers got too rowdy or somebody tried to break into the office and take some of the fruit drink and chips we handed out to the kids at lunchtime.

But if George was around, nobody messed with anything. And it’s not like he ever raised his voice. He didn’t have to. George was about 25, maybe 6-1 and 210 and slapped together like the ex-football player I’m sure he was. He didn’t need to talk tough.

And he gave the guards on his staff a similar line of advice: No matter how crazy it gets, stay calm. Talk sense to people. Don’t raise your voice. And one other thing.

“Whatever you do, don’t tell them, ‘Bring the family.’”

Huh?

“If somebody makes a threat and says they’ll bring so-and-so down to settle the score, don’t escalate it. Don’t say, ‘Bring him on!’ or ‘Bring the family!’ Because they will.”

Ha! Bring the family? I’d never heard that one. And I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying it.

Anyway, I found out just how important Big George was the next summer when he got another job or was transferred or something and we were on our own. I had to pretty much run the place and it was daily chaos.

Sometimes you need the enforcer. Especially when he looks so imposing that he never actually has to enforce. That’s how I always thought of Wes Unseld.

I’m sure he was in a few scuffles, but having seen him star during an era (1970s) when the NBA had its share of wild brawls, I can’t remember offhand ever seeing him in a fight. Nobody wanted that. Nobody at all. Maybe it was the permanent glower that he painted on his face. Which was a choice, he told Michael Olesker of Baltimore’s Pressbox four years ago:

“That was conscious. Well, after a while, it wasn’t conscious, it was just there. Going back to high school ball, the game was serious business. And I never wanted anybody to know what I was thinking. So, I wouldn’t smile. And I’d always throw out the image to other players that: ‘I’m mad and I’ll kick your butt.’”

Was it true? Unseld laughed, not really:

“Of course, if somebody’d puff up at me, I’d have probably passed out.”

Nobody in the NBA ever seemed to figure that out.

Unseld, who died on Tuesday at 74, will always live in my mind as a presence, the embodiment of the guy with whom you did not want to mess – and so nobody did. He could back off guys with that glare.

But there was a lot more to him than that, both on but especially off the court. He was essentially a gentle giant who left a legacy well beyond his early fame.

Unseld was a 6-7 center in an era largely before the NBA had a 3-point shot and 7-foot big men meant everything. Because of his muscular 245 pounds, he never had much of a vertical, even less so after knee troubles struck in 1974 and limited his mobility the last half of his 13-year career.

But his passing, his positional rebounding and his combination of strength and dexterity in traffic made him a constant force on courts without trey arcs. He battled taller and more gifted players such as Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his prime his entire career.

Unseld transformed the franchise. He turned a habitual loser into a winner and then won year in and out with the Baltimore and Washington Bullets through a golden age for the franchise (1968-81). Early, he teamed with the incomparable guard Earl Monroe and power forward Gus Johnson, later with big scoring forward Elvin Hayes and guards Bobby Dandridge and Phil Chenier. The Bullets (now the Wizards) made the NBA Finals four times in the ‘70s (1971, 1975, 1978, 1979) and beat the Seattle SuperSonics in ’78 to win the title as Unseld made five All-Star teams.

All of which speaks to the shadow he cast. He was a man.

“He was only 6-7,” Abdul-Jabbar told NBC Sports’ Rich Eisen on Tuesday. “But you still couldn’t get rebounds around him because he denied you access on the court. He was like a big roadblock.”

Now, I know power players like Unseld are archaic in today’s NBA in which everybody including the bigs must shoot the 3-ball. But I think there were aspects to his game that we could stand to examine and resurrect today.

Namely, some of today’s best rebounders would do well to study what a great outlet pass looks like. Unseld paid attention to how his body was orientated as he pulled boards. You could see him twisting his body into outlet position even as he descended with the ball. By the time he landed, Unseld was already firing the ball to a releasing guard.

And when I say fire, I mean like a cannon shot. He would routinely snap off 70-foot outlets with two hands, either a chest pass or an overhead motion. The strength, borne from hot days in Louisville carrying pallets of bricks and mortar up a ladder in construction work, was apparent.

The only ones in his league as an outlet passer in the history of the game – Bill Walton, Arvydas Sabonis and possibly Kevin Love.

Another lost art of his was a pick that hurt defenders, not because it was dirty but simply because he could get so solid so quickly. Unseld’s picks were like the corner of a stone foundation.

Said the similarly built slightly taller Willis Reed, who led the New York Knicks to 1970 and 1973 NBA titles: “People always asked me how tough it was to play against Wilt or Kareem. They didn’t really understand that when you played against Wes Unseld, he abused your body.”

And earlier in his pro career and during his All-America years in college at Louisville, he exited the pick for a roll to the hoop as nimbly as any big man in the game.

For all these reasons and that very nice, soft shooting touch from 15 feet in, Unseld was chosen #2 overall out of Louisville in the 1968 NBA Draft. He immediately rewarded the Bullets with an almost unfathomable achievement – the league’s MVP in his rookie year of 1968-69. Only Chamberlain ever did that, before or since.

Perhaps Unseld’s greatest gift was his combination of humility and self-awareness. He simply did his job every night without demonstrative showmanship. But you got the distinct sense a fire burned down inside.

He confirmed as much later in his career when speaking about being recruited by Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp, never exactly a progressive in matters of civil rights. Rupp was under some pressure from UK’s president in the mid-‘60s to recruit a black player, something he had never done. The heat intensified in 1966 after Don Haskins’ all-black Texas Western Miners defeated Rupp’s Wildcats in the national championship.

But, Unseld later said he didn’t think he was cut out for being such a pioneer, in the Jackie Robinson mold. That when people were ugly toward him, he tended to respond in kind, and that might not be received well around the all-white SEC.

That’s why he chose more progressive hometown school Louisville instead. It worked out pretty well for him.

Later in life, after his career ended, Unseld used some of his basketball savings to start a small charter school in southwest Baltimore with his wife Connie, a former teacher in the city system. Together with their daughter Kim, the Unselds have been running that school and teaching grades K-8 – for four decades. They’ve made an impact on hundreds of young lives.

Wes Unseld’s position doesn’t exist anymore. And now, neither does he. But he built a life, brick by brick that will stand as an example in Baltimore and DC, solid as one of those picks he set so many years ago.

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