LOOK BACK IN WONDER...

NEW CENTURIES DON'T come along that often and when they coincide with a millennium, oh, boy, it's time to take a long look back for some perspective on what happened to sport while Joe DiMaggio and Pete Rose were out peddling autographs to the masses.

We confess, it was staggering to check from Alonzo Stagg to Joe Paterno, Christy Mathewson to Greg Maddux, and from the Buffalo Germans to the Chicago Bulls.

The first thought that struck us was that sport, from the historical standpoint, is still in its infancy. America may have been born in 1776 (a good year), but little of genuine sport consequence happened until 144 years later.

Sure, baseball had a professional league at the turn of the century (can anyone name five players and a single manager?), but basketball was just nine years old and football was mostly a plaything of the idyll rich -- the ivy league.

It was not until our boys came marching home from France in 1918 that the explosion occurred. It was called "The Roaring Twenties," and all of a sudden there were Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, a basketball team called the Original Celtics, and a horse named Man O' War.

They cast a stupendous spell over the world of sport, and the public even began learning the names of the coaches, like Knute Rockne, Bob Zuppke, Phog Allen, George Halas, and a high school coach named Ernest Blood, whose Passaic (NJ) High School basketball team was in the process of winning 159 games in a row!

And so sport began spreading its wings and moving into the industrial ambiance occupied by steel, transportation, communication, entertainment, and hot dogs.

As man grew taller, heavier, faster, stronger, and smarter, our games started evolving into wondrous spectacles.

Far-seeing coaches and rulesmen put all their intelligence and imagination to work on the structure of their games, and produced small miracles.

With the elimination of the center jump, the introduction of the one-hand shot, and the promotion of Madison Square Garden, basketball bloomed into a national and then international sport, replete with spectacular tournaments, a smashing pro league, and enthusiastic acceptance all over the world.

Three football coaches dreamed up a new way of playing the game with the quarterback crouched over center. A free-substitution rule quickly followed, then soccer-style place-kicking, and a Super Bowl. Football began vying with baseball as the national pastime.

When a mildly delinquent lad named Babe Ruth joined the Red Sox in 1914 a lot of people suspected that he was going to become one of baseball's top left-handed pitchers -- and they were right.

What they didn't suspect was that he was going to start hitting the dead baseball over fences, and that everyone would fall in love with the idea.

And so baseball put a little extra rabbit under the horsehide and changed the game forever. Babe Ruth and home runs became the rage, changing baseball from a defensive game to an offensive game, where it remains today-- and threatens to become even more so.

And, lest we forget, a man named Branch Rickey broke the color line in baseball and opened all our sports to the black athlete, producing an unprecedented rise in the artistry and excitement of our games.

The second electrifying emancipation of a significant segment of our society occurred two decades later with the introduction of a law called Title IX.

Its liberation of the woman athlete had a spectacular impact on sport. It literally opened the doors to millions of new participants and produced staggering results in basketball and soccer. And the end is not yet in sight.

Our women are already into lacrosse, hockey, and other once exclusive preserves of mankind, and it is quite likely that by the next decade or two they will be playing football in a league of their own.

All we have done here is scratch the surface. We don't care to look too far ahead. Believing as we do in evolution and the historic imperative, what we see overwhelms us.

If ball clubs are sold for $750 million today, what will they sell for in 2,050?

If salaries in professional sports start at one million dollars, and the stars draw anywhere from $7 million to $36 million, what will they be paying athletes in another 50 years?

What will ticket prices be, what will TV contracts go for? How much will the fan pay for a hot dog, beer, parking space?

And -- a staggering thought -- if our colleges allow their teams to wear corporation logos on their uniforms and allow their coaches to be sponsored and allow their facilities to bear corporation labels, what are they going to allow the corporations to buy next?

And how do they reconcile the non-payment of athletes with all of the above?

All very deeply disturbing questions that will require an enormous amount of soul-searching.

THAT 100-POINT GAME...

LIKE EVERY OTHER basketball fan on planet earth, we were stunned by the sudden demise of our favorite alp, Wilt Chamberlain. He was so much bigger than life that we couldn't conceive of his permanent departure from it.

Wilt would have loved his obituaries. Everyone had great things to say about him. Even Red Auerbach admitted (begrudgingly) that Wilt might have been good enough to play in the same world with Bill Russell.

Chamberlain's stats made awesome reading, starting of course with his 100-point game. Nobody else in the NBA ever scored 100 points before (or since).

It happened on March 2, 1962 in Hershey, PA, Philadelphia vs New York. We checked the box score the next morning and were stupefied by the score, 169 to 147. The only way two basketball teams could have scored 316 points was by resolutely refusing to play defense. What they had played was not basketball. It had been vaudeville.

Actually, the most fascinating stat in the game had been Chamberlain's foul shooting. Can you imagine the worst foul-shooter in the NBA going 28 for 32 from the foul line?

Our basic feeling about Chamberlain never changed. He awed us. He was so overwhelmingly physical. Though we never saw him commit a deliberate foul, threaten anyone, or foul out of a game, he was incredibly intimidating.

To this day, whenever we think of him we conjure up a picture of Wilt in Madison Square Garden in the winter of 1960.

A Knick guard had picked up a loose ball and driven hard down the sideline and then veered into the basket for a lay-up. As he left his feet, a Warrior guard roared up from behind and knocked the dribbler into the third row of seats behind the baseline.

The entire Knick bench jumped up and came tearing up the floor, blood in their eyes.

By the time they reached mid-court, Chamberlain had moved into their path and set up a roadblock -- feet spread, body bent over, arms extended practically from sideline to sideline.

It was the classic challenge position: If you want my guy, you will have to go through me.

The smell of burning rubber filled the air as every Knick ground to a complete halt. The Knicks may have been mad but they weren't crazy.

The only human being who might have had a chance to get by that fearsome condor with the outstretched wings would have been General Patton in a tank.

JOCK MENTALITY...

ONE OF THE SMART-ALEC words we have learned to detest is the pronoun/adjective "jock." Athletes, coaches, or sensible media people rarely use it. The dilettantes love it to prattle about "jock mentalities" and "dumb jocks" --- always delivered with the kind of hail sneer reserved for the brain-dead.

Which is why we enjoyed seeing a man named Bill Bradley undress a talk-show host who attempted to identify him as a jock.

Bradley -- basketball All-American on the high school, college, and pro levels, a Rhodes scholar, a Senator, and a presidential candidate -- was asked whether he would describe himself as a jock.

A dumb question deserved a dumb answer, but Bradley never stopped smiling.

"No, Steve," he said, "I would never describe myself that way. First, because the word is demeaning and, second, because the people who use it don't really know what it means. They believe it makes them sound hip and superior to people who play games well.

"I have loved sports all my life. I couldn't play enough of them in high school, college, and as a professional--where I was very lucky to have played on a team that was perfectly suited to my talent.

"All that time and in my political life right up to this moment, I have simply thought of myself as an athlete-- which is a whole lot different than jock."

It was nice shot, worth at least three points, and what made it even more enjoyable was that the announcer apparently never understood that he had just been annihilated.