These are the athletes who would grace a male Mount Rushmore of high school sports in the state of New York.
We need a bigger mountain.
Maybe’s there’s one in the Adirondacks grand enough to accommodate the busts of seven or eight sports greats.
That’s because, try as we might, there is no way to construct a Mount Rushmore of New York male high school athletes without asking for more than just four slots or developing the urge to ask for repeated do-overs.
Earlier this month, we unveiled the girls version of a High School Mount Rushmore, a spinoff of an ESPN project from earlier in the year.
There were a couple of tricky decisions to be made there, but in the end it was relatively easy to walk away satisfied that Abby Wambach, Kim Batten, Chamique Holdsclaw and Nancy Lieberman ranked at the top of the class.
We were not so fortunate with the guys, where the talent runs a bit deeper than, shall we say, the lyrics on a Backstreet Boys CD.
Need an example? Try basketball, where we had to leave Lew Alcindor, Connie Hawkins, Mark Jackson, and Kenny Anderson on the bench – and that’s just a portion of the New York City list, which doesn’t even include Julius Erving, Christian Laettner or Pat Riley. Personally, I’m still sick there was no way to drag charismatic crowd-pleaser Pearl Washington into the discussion, although I think I just did.
Not that the process was all that much easier in football, where Ernie Davis’ Heisman Trophy wasn’t even good enough to make our varsity. And baseball star Manny Ramirez couldn’t pull down a place, so Yaz never had a chance.
All I can say is thank goodness Walter Hagen played more baseball than golf in high school or we’d be casting aside still another Hall of Famer.
That being said, here’s a reminder of our bare-bones criteria for selecting the honorees:
(1) The candidate must have achieved a very high level of success as a high school athlete, winning championships and/or accomplishing enough to have merited all-state recognition or comparable honors.
(2) He or she must have gone on to success in collegiate, professional or international competition worthy of high honors or acclaim at that level.
And the winners are ...
Jim Brown, football and lacrosse
There’s an old joke that says the alphabet used to have 39 letters but Jim Brown hoarded 13 of them while he was at Manhasset. That’s how many times he lettered in football, basketball (averaging 38 points a game as a senior), lacrosse, baseball and track while in high school.
Brown’s football prowess in college and the pros is well documented and even those who deny he was in a class of his own as a running back concede that the class he was in had a very short roll call.
He was a unanimous first-team All-American and fifth in the Heisman Trophy voting as a senior at Syracuse University while averaging 6.2 yards a carry and scoring 14 TDs in just eight games.
And, oh yeah, did we mention that he is regarded as possibly the best college lacrosse player ever?
In the pros, Brown was drafted by Cleveland in the first round in 1956 went on to set the single-season (1,863 in 1963) and career rushing (12,312) yardage records plus the marks for TDs (126) and all-purpose yards (15,549).
Brown was selected All-Pro every season he played and then retired as the age of 29 to pursue a career in Hollywood.
Bob Cousy, basketball
Younger fans likely have little or no knowledge of basketball pre-John Stockton, and those in their early 40s might barely remember Pete Maravich. Cousy was a special breed whose talent made him one of the pro game’s first elite guards.
Cousy did not join the Andrew Jackson varsity until midway through his junior year, scoring 28 points in his debut. He was New York City’s leading scorer as a senior, paving the way for a scholarship at Holy Cross.
Though such flair is commonplace now, Cousy made an immediate impression with flashy passes and behind-the-back dribbling en route to being selected to the All-American team three times.
That, though, was just scratching the surface of his potential.
In a 13-year NBA career, Cousy amassed 16,960 points (18.4 per game) , 6,955 assists (7.5) and 4,786 rebounds (5.2) while guiding the Boston Celtics to six league championships and finishing first in assists eight times. He was the league MVP once and All-Star Game MVP twice.
It added up to Cousy being inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1971.
Lou Gehrig, baseball
The Iron Horse was a New Yorker through and through during his legendary career, progressing from Commerce High to Columbia University to the New York Yankees en route to enshrinement in Cooperstown.
Gehrig attracted attention in high school by homering at what’s now known as Wrigley Field in Chicago – knocking the ball completely out of the park in front of more than 10,000 fans.
He was both a dominating pitcher and heavy-hitting first baseman in college, finally earning a contract offer from the Yankees.
In the majors, he played in 2,130 consecutive games until amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) forced him out of the lineup. He finished with 1,995 runs batted in, a .340 batting average and a 632 slugging percentage powered by 493 home runs. Gehrig was selected to the first seven All-Star Games, won two MVP awards and put together a triple crown season in 1934.
Gehrig was the No. 1 vote-getter on the Major League Baseball All-Century Team selected by fans in 1999.
Bob Beamon, track and field
Geeks invent new words all the time, which explains how “Googling” and “Twittering” have entered the lexicon in the last few years.
Beamon was no geek, but rather the purest of athletes in mastering one of the staples of his sport — the long jump. Though highly accomplished in the event throughout his career, Beamon added a new word to the language one magical day in Mexico City.
So it is that “Beamonesque” has come to mean an accomplishment so dramatically superior to previous achievements that it overwhelms the imagination.
It’s a little-known fact that Beamon still holds the state high school record in the long jump, having cleared 25-3½ as a Jamaica senior to earn a scholarship to UTEP.
On Oct. 18, 1968, Beamon annihilated the world record at altitude in the Mexico City Olympics with one of the most famous marks in sports, 29 feet, 2½ inches. The record stood until Mike Powell broke it in 1991.
What made the record particularly special is that no one to that point had jumped 28 feet. His amazing leap tacked nearly 22 inches onto the world record.
New York has produced many other track and field Olympians and even multiple-medal winners. But none left such a mark, literally or figuratively.
John Schiano, who has written about high school sports in western and central New York for more than 25 years, covers New York for MaxPreps. He may be reached at johnschianosports@gmail.com.
