“YOU don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on,” says crooner Tom Jones. I say, “Sometimes you don’t need to be a great player to win a championship in team sports.” You don’t have to be very talented as long as you have a star athlete or two for a teammate.
You only need to be lucky and be in the right place at the right time. Journeyman frontliner Cris Bolado is one example, winning numerous championships in the local professional league with nine teams from 1994-2003.
In the history of the American league National Basketball Association, several marginal players (or so-called “role” players) from the Boston Celtics captured championships by simply hopping onto the broad shoulders of all-time great Bill Russell during his distinguished 13-year professional career from 1956-57 through 1968-69.
Chief of the lot was rugged James Loscutoff, a menacing 6-5 enforcer who endeared himself to the Celtic faithful with his hard-driving physical moves. “Jungle Jim” earned six titles in 1957, 1959, 1961, 1962, 1963 and 1964 with the Hub City outfit. (He missed the 1960 playoffs – which also resulted in an NBA championship for Boston – due to an injury.)
How lucky Loscutoff was in comparison to fellow Celtics products Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, both Hall of Fame players who each won only three titles (1981, 1984 and 1986) as teammates. Even Bill Sharman, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1976 as a player (Boston) and in 2004 as a head coach (having piloted the Los Angeles Lakers to a 69-13 regular-season finish in 1971-72 and rewarding the team with its first NBA title since moving out of Minneapolis in 1960), snared only four rings in 1957, 1959, 1960 and 1961.
Russell, as if you did not know, is the winningest player in NBA annals with 11 championships in 12 trips to the NBA Finals. The defensive-minded 6-10 Russell initially powered Boston to the mountain top in 1957 as a rookie pro out of the University of San Francisco.
He subsequently romped away with eight consecutive titles from 1959 to 1966 – the longest championship streak in league history – before winning twice more in 1968 and 1969 as a player-coach with the Celtics. Russell tasted defeat only once during the NBA Finals.
That came in 1958 when the Celtics were beaten by co-Hall of Famer Bob Pettit and the St. Louis (now Atlanta) Hawks in six games during the best-of-seven titular showdown. Starting in 2009, the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player trophy has been known as the Bill Russell trophy in honor of the legendary Celtics center.
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