More than three years ago when I wrote a PressBox cover story about Wes Unseld, I had to reconcile the glowering, baleful warrior stare I remembered from long-ago winter nights watching the old Baltimore Bullets, and the thing that Jim Henneman always said about Unseld.
“When it comes to character,” said Henneman, who covered sports for the old News-American and The Sun, “Wes Unseld’s the closest I’ve ever known to Brooks Robinson.”
If you need an explanation behind those words, then you’ve been utterly oblivious to Baltimore sports for the last half-century.
Wes and Brooks are two of the great American barometers, not only for athletic ability but for decency as human beings.
That’s why so many are lamenting the news of Unseld’s death, at 74, from pneumonia on June 2. He was that rare man whose overall life was greater than his headlines.
As a ballplayer, Unseld was a powerhouse. In his first season, he led the Bullets from last to first place and was named Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player. Across 13 seasons, he led them to 12 playoff rounds, four NBA finals and, eventually, an NBA championship after the team moved to the D.C. area.
He was a Hall of Fame center named one of the top 50 players in NBA history.
And yet, those are the least of his accomplishments, which gets us back to Henneman’s remark about character.
When his playing days were over, Unseld never left town. He took his basketball earnings, and he and his family started a school on South Hilton Street, in battered Southwest Baltimore, called Unselds’ School.
It’s still there, nearly 40 years later, not only teaching more than 100 kids at a time from day care through middle school, but nurturing them. Wes’s wife, Connie, and daughter, Kim, taught there, and Wes was a constant fatherly presence. They’ve helped raise thousands of kids there.
That’s where I met Unseld, in late 2016, and had to reconcile that warrior scowl he wore in his playing days with the gentle figure he was off the court.
“That angry face,” I said, looking at the smiling fellow across from me.
“That was conscious,” Unseld said. He chuckled softly at the memory. “Well, after a while, it wasn’t conscious, it was just there.”
He played center at 6-foot-7 and 245 pounds, big as a municipal statue. But he was up against seven-footers like Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
“Going back to high school ball,” he said, “the game was serious business, and I never wanted anybody to know what I was thinking. So I wouldn’t smile, and I’d always throw out the image to other players that, ‘I’m mad, and I’ll kick your butt.'”
“So it was all image?”
“Of course,” he said, laughing again, “if somebody’d puff up at me, I’d have probably passed out.”
Not bloody likely.
I’m part of a generation around here that goes back to winter nights inside the madhouse we used to call the Civic Center.
There was Unseld, the heart of the most exciting NBA team of his era. He had that warrior glare on his face. He bullied rebounds away from centers several inches taller. He set picks that could stop a Greyhound bus.
And he threw pinpoint outlet passes the length of the floor. There was Earl “The Pearl” Monroe on the other end. Or Gus “Honeycomb” Johnson, Kevin Loughery or Jack Marin.
They were marvelously exciting, part of an era when Baltimore exulted in its championship Orioles, Colts and Bullets.
To sit there with Unseld at the school he and his family had built and sustained was pure delight. Part of it was the row of children who came in to say hello to the big guy. They never knew him as basketball star but as father figure.
And part of the delight was reminiscing about the old nights of basketball in downtown Baltimore, and those wonderfully exciting teams.
But the thing about Unseld was this: sports were only a part of his story. This was the most decent of men. He gave back to the community that had cheered him.
And when his basketball days were over, he started the most important part of his life, helping children, and stayed with them for the next 40 years.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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