Athletes on bench earn salute

Happy New Year one and all. May it be a good year of sports competition.

This has been a week of review, highlighting key games, plays and players at all levels of sports. In that vein, a recognition of the following who deserve attention for their efforts in sports in 2003.

To every athlete who diligently practiced and fought for playing time, only to spend most of the season watching from the sidelines and cheering on teammates, you are saluted.

Little is more difficult for an athlete than to make the effort and not establish the playing minutes, but there is so much to learn in doing so. If one can sustain an effort in such cases, you will find battling through problems later in life will have a reference point of hope.

There is no failure in effort.

One more salute to former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. Celebrating his 93rd birthday recently, at least two players from every team he coached, dating back to 1948, came back for his night at Pauley Pavilion. He is the only man who can call Kareen Abdul-Jabbar Lewis Alcindor, the basketball star’s name when he played at UCLA.

That is what coach knows him as, and Jabbar is honored.

Wooden’s commitment to excellence, dedication and decency on and off the court not only continues to be recognized, but are values that have found their way back into the mainstream of sports during an era where everything but those values seemed to be taking over.

Coach Wooden is a national treasure.

For all coaches and parents of young sports players who let the kids enjoy the games, good for you.

As to resolutions for 2004, I will not use the term “hero” in association with any athlete unless that person has done something off the field of performance that warrants such recognition.

If we should have learned one thing about sports over the past decade, there are few events on the field that justify a person having the moniker “hero” hung around his or her neck.

Sports feats may be stunning, amazing, remarkable, surprising or uplifting, but rarely are such events or the people who perform them heroic. Athletes, like anyone else, may perform such deeds off the field, and occasionally on field, and for that recognition is warranted.

Most accolades for athletes come from a sports media that desperately seeks viewers and readers and attempts to build hero worship out of athletic events that are seldom worthy of being long remembered.

I resolve not to mention or think about Game 7 of the ALCS and Pedro Martinez coming back out to the mound. I will not worry that Nomar starts the spring with the Red Sox as an angry man.

There. That takes care of 2003 and a couple of resolutions for 2004 that I already haven’t kept.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and NBC sportscaster.