Obituaries are a wonderful source of amazing stories about people you wish you had known more about when they were alive. That’s true in sports as in so many aspects of life. This week, I read three amazing pieces about recently departed sports figures.
The Hit
by Stefan Fatsis for Slate
In today’s climate of concern about brain injuries in football, it’s hard to remember that football’s culture was exactly the opposite for many years. Football glorified its violence for decades and in doing so, it made heroes out of players who injured another player in a particularly epic way. Chuck Bednarik became one of those heroes after he hit Frank Gifford in 1960. Gifford was injured so badly on the play that he missed the rest of that season and all of the next. Bednarik was glorified. This one incident became Bednarik’s main claim to fame and was (quite literally as we found out last week) in the first paragraph of his obituary. The hit unquestionably caused a terrible injury, but for the most part, the idea that it was a brutal hit remained unquestioned until Steven Fatsis researched it and wrote about it this week. What he found may surprise you.
So was it a blindside tackle to the chest? A right shoulder under the chin? Or a forearm to the chest? Was Bednarik moving at full speed? Did the blow itself knock Gifford out? Was it one of the hardest hits ever?
Let me respond to those questions: no, no, no, no, no, and no.
Patrick McDarby, Sport Logo Designer, Is Dead at 57
by Margalit Fox for The New York Times
Sports logos are so ingrained into the fabric of the teams that they represent that they’re almost invisible. You can’t think about the Toronto Maple Leafs without the leaf or the Oakland Raiders without their eye-patch festooned pirate. If we rarely think about the logos themselves, we almost never think about the people who design them. Patrick McDarby was one of those people.
Over the years, Mr. McDarby designed more than 200 logos. For each, he received a flat fee, no royalties and, by the nature of his craft, little public recognition…
The design of sports logos entails singular challenges. In a small space, and only two dimensions, the artist must convey a sense of movement, excitement and power. The design must be simple enough to be immediately interpretable but evocative enough to be enduringly memorable. Ideally, it should distill the very essence of the thing it represents.
Dean Smith requested $200 be sent to each of his former players in will
in Sports Illustrated’s Extra Mustard column
When legendary North Carolina basketball coach, Dean Smith, died last month, the sports world poured out an unbelievable slew of tributes to him. He was, by all accounts, a good person as well as a great coach. He was an early leader in integrating college basketball in his area. One of the things that made him special was the tight connection he developed with his players, which continued throughout his and their lives. This week we found out that it actually continued a little bit past Dean Smith’s life.
In the letter Smith’s former players received from Miller McNeish & Breedlove, PA, it was revealed that Smith requested each of his former players be sent a $200 check with the message, “enjoy a dinner out compliments of Coach Dean Smith.” The enclosed checks also included the notation, “Dinner out.”