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After the crash of a small plane killed the Yankees’ captain Thurman Munson on Aug. 2, 1979, his team played a home game the next day.
The Yankees played on three consecutive days following Munson’s death, flew to his funeral in Canton, Ohio, on a Monday morning, then flew back to New York that same day to play the Baltimore Orioles in a nationally televised night game.
More than 40 years later, Reggie Jackson still isn’t sure how they did it.
“I don’t know how we got through it,” Jackson, the 73-year-old Hall of Fame slugger, said in a phone interview. “You were empty for a while. You were lost. You couldn’t grasp it. The loss of Thurman was devastating.”
The Los Angeles Lakers and the N.B.A. at large have spent the past month trying to come to grips with the death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna in a Jan. 26 helicopter crash that also killed seven others aboard. Leagues are certainly smarter, in 2020, about considering the players’ mental health and trying to help them cope in such dire circumstances, but everyone grieves differently — and there is no manual.
The Lakers received permission to postpone their first game after Bryant’s crash and resumed the season five nights later against Portland. Yet the time cushion wasn’t enough for some of them. The Lakers’ Anthony Davis, on a recent podcast with Yahoo’s Chris Haynes, said the ceremony in Bryant’s honor before that loss to the Trail Blazers made it “one of the toughest games I’ve ever played in my career.”
“I couldn’t even, like, watch it,” Davis told Haynes. “A lot of guys couldn’t watch it.”
Referring to video clips from Bryant’s career that played on the giant screens hanging from the Staples Center ceiling, Davis added, “Just hearing his voice kind of tore me apart.”
That pregame program on Jan. 31 was the first in a series of moving remembrances. The latest was on Monday at Staples, where an emotional memorial service featuring giants of basketball and entertainment — Michael Jordan, Diana Taurasi and Shaquille O’Neal as speakers; Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and Christina Aguilera as performers; Jimmy Kimmel as the M.C. — played out like nothing we had ever witnessed.
The Lakers returned to work on Tuesday night against the New Orleans Pelicans in what would typically be a game generating boundless hype, with the dynamic rookie Zion Williamson scheduled to play opposite LeBron James for the first time. Yet this remains a thoroughly atypical time. As Clippers Coach Doc Rivers put it Monday night, after attending the Bryant memorial, Los Angeles has been “a brokenhearted city.”
“It’s just been a very heavy month,” Rivers said before coaching in the Clippers’ victory over Memphis. “It’s everywhere.”
Maybe Zion vs. LeBron is precisely what will give the Lakers and Angelenos a meaningful nudge back to normalcy. If not, that’s understandable, too. There’s no right answer for how long it should to take — and few understand that better than Jackson and his Yankees teammates from 1979.
Fair as it is to say that no sports figure’s death has elicited a reaction like that of Bryant at a mere 41, given his stature as a global sporting icon even in retirement, parallels can certainly be drawn to what Munson’s Yankees endured. Munson, 32, wasn’t quite Bryant, but he was the American League’s most valuable player in 1976 and played a key role in helping the Yankees win the World Series in 1977 and 1978.
Like Kobe, Jackson and Munson were one-name stars of their day: Reggie and Thurman. Munson, as the Yankees’ first captain since Lou Gehrig, was also the leader of a franchise that — even decades before the withering spotlight of the social media era — could have credibly claimed to know what it’s like to play under the sort of scrutiny that LeBron’s Lakers now face.
For Jackson, an N.B.A. fan and a huge Bryant admirer, watching the events of the past month “brings it back completely.”
I was moved to call Jackson for some perspective because, as I have written previously, those Yankees were my first favorite team. Munson’s death hit me in ways that, as a 10-year-old, I was just too young to process.
Jackson, though, assured me that Munson’s adult teammates hadn’t found it any easier to comprehend. The Yankees, coming off their consecutive championships, missed the postseason, playing their final 54 games in what Jackson called “a haze.”
“We weren’t the same,” he said. “It just stunned everybody. Thurman was just too important a figure at the time. He was such a big part of the franchise and the team that it really knocked the hell out of us.”
Jackson’s relationship with Munson did have a Shaq-and-Kobe phase, when it seemed as if the Yankee Stadium clubhouse was not big enough for both of them. But tensions had thawed considerably by 1979. The co-stars were in a place that season, after two World Series triumphs, where Munson routinely invited Jackson to join him on the Cessna Citation twin-engine turbojet he had just purchased to make frequent in-season trips from New York to see his wife and children in Canton.
Munson even had permission from George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees, to occasionally fly separately from the team between cities on a road trip. Jackson rode as Munson’s passenger on one such flight — to Anaheim, Calif., from Seattle — in July 1979. But he joined his teammates Bobby Murcer and Lou Piniella in declining Munson’s invitation to spend that fateful Thursday — an off day — in the air.
“He had asked me to go do touch and gos with him, takeoffs and landings,” Jackson said. “I had a corporate commitment in Connecticut that day, but I don’t think I would have gone anyway.”
It emerged later that key Yankees figures at the time, like Murcer and Piniella, were hoping Munson would stop taking the risk of flying so frequently on his own, with such limited experience as a pilot. The off day ended in tragedy when Munson’s plane crashed short of the runway at Akron-Canton Airport.
The aircraft was engulfed in flames before the two other passengers could help Munson, who was immobilized by a broken neck and couldn’t escape on his own. Jackson, then 33, learned of Munson’s fate through his car radio.
Bryant was obviously not an active player like Munson when he died, so the parallels have limits, but he remained as synonymous with the Lakers as anyone who had ever worn the purple and gold. I asked Jackson, still a special adviser to the Yankees, for any counsel he would offer if a current Laker were to ask him.
“You can’t,” Jackson said. “There’s no giving advice on this. It’s too emotional, too personal. It’s with you every day in L.A.”
Jackson would say only that it’s “very important” for a team soaked in sorrow “to have a leader there.” For his Yankees, it was Murcer. For the Lakers, the pillars have been Coach Frank Vogel, General Manager Rob Pelinka (Bryant’s former agent and Gianna Bryant’s godfather) and LeBron.
Images of Jackson sobbing in right field in that first game after Munson’s death will stay with me as long as the sight of Michael Jordan with tears streaming down his face at Monday’s memorial service, baring his emotions as never before while he eulogized Bryant.
Leave it to the Clippers’ Rivers to try to sound a hopeful note. He came away from Monday’s ceremony optimistic that the one-of-a-kind service, as much as anything happening on the floor these days, had a healing effect for Bryant’s many admirers around the league who are expected to just lace up their sneakers and play on.
“That’s where I feel like we’re at now,” Rivers said. “We can start celebrating his life.”
The Scoop @TheSteinLine
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Corner Three
You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.)
Q: Amid the Kobe Bryant sadness, I noticed recently that Kawhi Leonard and Damian Lillard had both recorded their first career triple-doubles. Then Lillard came startlingly close to another triple-double against the Lakers on Jan. 31 (48 points, 10 assists, 9 rebounds) and it made me wonder: Who has the lead in near triple-doubles? In other words, who has recorded the most games in which they have fallen one point, one rebound or one assist shy of a triple-double? — Galen Muskat (Cambridge, Mass.)
STEIN: There were only two ways I could even try to answer this question:
1. Ask the peerless @micahadams13, my trusty former ESPN colleague, for help.
2. Wait for Micah to send me one of his traditional scrumptious emails filled with all the pearls he unearthed through his masterful research and use of Basketball Reference.
As I had hoped, Micah came back to me with some amazing lists and factoids, while acknowledging that there may be a handful of games missing from the 1950s and 1960s that can never be accounted for. If the fine folks from Basketball Reference don’t have the data, it is safe to assume that no one does.
The enclosed numbers and notes are as of last Thursday, when play resumed after the N.B.A. All-Star break.
Most regular-season “one shy” games in which the player missed a triple-double by one point, rebound, assist, steal or block:
1. Oscar Robertson — 71
2. Magic Johnson — 64
3. Jason Kidd — 57
4. Larry Bird — 56
5. LeBron James — 51
6. Russell Westbrook — 39
7T. Kevin Garnett — 29
7T. Wilt Chamberlain — 29
9. Scottie Pippen — 26
10. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — 25
Most regular-season games falling one assist short:
1. Larry Bird — 36
2. Wilt Chamberlain — 29
3. Oscar Robertson — 28
4. Kevin Garnett — 28
5. LeBron James — 25
6. Charles Barkley — 20
Most regular-season games falling one rebound short:
1. Magic Johnson — 46
2. Oscar Robertson — 43
3. Jason Kidd — 37
4. LeBron James — 26
5. Russell Westbrook — 23
6. Larry Bird — 19
Most regular-season games falling one blocked shot short:
1. Hakeem Olajuwon — 13
2. Dikembe Mutombo — 12
3. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — 7
4. Alonzo Mourning — 5
It’s important to keep in mind, when looking at Oscar Robertson’s 71 near-misses, that the term “triple-double” wasn’t a thing when he played. Had he been cognizant of how big the stat would become, it’s reasonable to assume Robertson would have made securing a triple-double more of a priority in some of those games.
Q: From my roommates and I: When is Miami going to host an All-Star weekend? It seems like a no-brainer in every category — food, beach, night life, big arena in a nice area. Is this the league refusing to bring it down here or Heat leadership ignoring the N.B.A.’s calls? — Joey Seara (Miami)
STEIN: It’s really neither, Joey.
I don’t think anyone who has anything to do with the league would dispute that Miami is an ideal All-Star venue, but there has been a major boat show there for years at essentially the same time that already snarls traffic and — as a greater concern from the N.B.A.’s perspective — severely limits the number of hotel rooms available.
As long as that conflict persists, I don’t think you’ll see the N.B.A.’s biggest party return to South Beach. The All-Star Game was in Miami in 1990, but the next three are already booked: 2021 in Indianapolis, 2022 in Cleveland and 2023 in Salt Lake City.
Q: We’re tracking every Kobe and Gigi mural for the fans at KobeMural.com. — @kobemurals on Twitter
STEIN: In Sunday’s New York Times, we ran a wonderful piece on the various murals that have sprouted all around Southern California in tribute to Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna.
I tweeted a link to that story on Monday and received this response from the curator of KobeMural.com, whose site and Instagram page display many more murals (and details) for your perusal.
Mike Asner is the digital social media marketer behind KobeMural.com, and he recently told my longtime ESPN colleague Ramona Shelburne: “I started messaging the artists, tagging the artists. Just being really efficient with: ‘Here’s a great photo. Here’s exactly where it is. Here’s who the artist is.’ I’m not trying to be a freaking influencer or make money or anything. I’m honoring the guy who was my idol, and it’s bringing people together.”
Numbers Game
50
Maybe it was an omen when Kyrie Irving scored 50 points on opening night and the Nets still lost at home to Minnesota in overtime. Irving has played in only 20 games in his first season in Brooklyn thanks to a nagging shoulder injury that will require season-ending surgery.
69.9
The Nets must ultimately pay a combined $69.9 million this season to Irving and Kevin Durant for just 20 games between the two of them. Irving will wind up missing a career-high 62 games, and Durant will almost certainly miss all 82 as part of his recovery from the torn left Achilles’ tendon he sustained in Game 5 of last season’s N.B.A. finals.
70
In nine pro seasons, Irving has played at least 70 games just three times.
20
If you thought John Beilein’s 54-game stint as coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers was brief — coming to an end last week when a beaten-down Beilein resigned to return to the college game with the Cavaliers at 14-40 — don’t forget what happened in San Antonio at the start of the 1992-93 season. After a wildly successful 19 seasons at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Jerry Tarkanian lasted only 20 games with the Spurs before he was ousted with a record of 9-11.
70
Julius Erving celebrated his 70th birthday on Saturday. Shaquille O’Neal mentioned the former Nets and Philadelphia 76ers great in our piece on Sunday, explaining his grief over Kobe Bryant’s sudden death by pointing out that he had always enjoyed watching “greats I grew up watching” like Dr. J “grow old.”
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Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
