I’ve seen his stats on only playing 48 games but I thought it was due to an injury.
One of the reason’s this blog was started was the thought of happiness, The thought that there exists a place , a state wherein you are happy. One of the things that make people happy is if they are doing something they love, and it is extremely hard to find something you love, and when you’ve found that something you do it there is no ifs and buts you do it because you nothing can stop you.
I write about this often but this is important to me. If you can find your place in this earth. If you can find the thing that would make you happy and do it. If you can’t help yourself from waking up early because you want to return to your work, we can live in a far better world than what we have now.
as mahatma gandhi say: there is enough for everyone’s needs but never enough for everyone’s greed.
If everyone could only find their place in this world, maybe we wouldn’t have to try having everything.
It’s impossible to fully capture Elgin’s greatness five decades after the fact, but let’s try. He averaged 25 points and 15 rebounds and carried the Lakers to the Finals as a rookie. He scored 71 points against Wilt’s Warriors in his second season. He averaged 34.8 points and 19.8 rebounds in his third season — as a 6-foot-5 forward, no less — and topped himself the following year with the most amazing accomplishment in NBA history. During the 1961-62 season, Elgin played only 48 games — all on weekends, all without practicing — and somehow averaged 38 points, 19 rebounds and five assists a game.
Why was this better than Wilt’s 50 per game or Oscar’s season-long triple-double? Because the guy didn’t practice! He was moonlighting as an NBA player on weekends! Wilt’s 50 makes sense considering the feeble competition and his gratuitous ball-hogging. Oscar’s triple-double makes sense considering the style of play at the time — tons of points, tons of missed shots, tons of available rebounds. But Elgin’s 38-19-5 makes no sense whatsoever. I don’t see how this happened. It’s inconceivable. A U.S. Army Reservist at the time, Elgin lived in a barracks in the state of Washington, leaving only whenever they gave him a weekend pass … and even with that pass, he could only fly coach on flights with multiple connections to meet the Lakers wherever they happened to be playing. Once he arrived, he would throw on a uniform and battle the best NBA players alive on back-to-back nights — fortunately for the Lakers, most games were scheduled on the weekends back then — and make the same complicated trip back to Washington on Sunday night or Monday morning. That was his life for five months.
ESPN Page 2 – Simmons: The forgotten pioneer.