No Heavy Lifting Required

A week in the city hosting the Super Bowl can make it difficult to come up with interesting themes to write about. We have already witnessed Shank overusing the Tomato Can insult a few times this week (like that's a shocker) and now he trots out the overused 'Mount Rushmore of Boston sports' theme one more time, just to make sure that horse is dead, dead, dead!

MINNEAPOLIS — The statues have spoken. The best of our best Boston athletes have voted. And a couple of them are willing to cede the gold medal platform of Boston sports to Tom Brady.

“Tommy will go down as the greatest athlete in Boston history,’’ Bobby Orr said this week. “There is no argument.’’

There is always an argument when it comes to rating sports stars, of course. In addition to Orr, we reached out to Larry Bird, Carl Yastrzemski, and Bob Cousy. Larry and Cooz allowed that Brady might be the top dog while Yaz joined Orr in conceding that Brady is The One.

There's one very curious omission here, isn't there?

Here in the Hub of the Universe, we think we’ve witnessed the best player ever in each of America’s four major sports. Boston’s Jock Rushmore — usually identified as Orr in hockey, Brady in football, Bill Russell in basketball, and Ted Williams in baseball — easily beats that of any other city in America.

Provincial Shank - where have you been?

Williams died in 2002, and the ever-reclusive Russell, now 83, was unavailable for comment (proof of John Updike’s reminder that gods do not answer letters). But Orr, Bird, Yastrzemski, and Cousy, all cast in bronze, were open to the suggestion that Brady might be the best of Boston’s best.

“Boston’s had a lot of great ones,’’ said Yaz, MVP of the American League in 1967. “Larry, Ted, Russell, Bobby Orr, don’t forget Big Papi.

I'm sure Shank wants no part of Big Papi.

In case you're wondering, heeeere's Larry!

Bird, who was MVP of the NBA three times from 1984-86, submitted, “I have played with and against some of the greatest clutch players in sports, and Tom is right up there with them.”

Go read the rest of it if you're interested in this sort of thing, but Shank does this column enough times during a year that just removes the interest in it for me, and probably a good number of other readers as well.