Thoughts on Vin and Bill
It’s hard to remember another week where American sports lost two icons of the caliber lost this week, when both Bill Russell and Vin Scully passed away. I don’t have much to add to the words other people have spent on these two legends. Both became icons before I was even born, and I never rooted for either the Celtics or the Dodgers, so I have no special insight into either of their legacies, but I didn’t want to let their passing go unremarked upon.
Because one thing that stands out about the reaction to their deaths is what each of them meant to their teams. The Boston Celtics—the winningest team in NBA history—had never won a championship before Bill Russell suited up for them. Then he helped lead them to 11 titles. The Los Angeles Dodgers weren’t even in Los Angeles when Vin Scully started calling games for them—he was with them through Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax and Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda and Kirk Gibson and Clayton Kershaw, and his voice narrated almost all the iconic moments of that team’s history.
Something I find interesting about sports is the way they connect us to history. That is to say, Celtics fans who never watched Russell play will feel affection for him because he played for their team. Similarly, Dodgers fans in 2016 were hearing the same voice that was calling games in 1956. Not to get too philosophical about it, but in many ways, “the Celtics” and “the Dodgers” are defined, respectively, as “the team Bill Russell played for” and “the team Vin Scully called.”
Obviously it’s a little more complicated than that. No team can ever be boiled down to a single individual. Scully and Russell in particular were always quick to point out how their accomplishments were collaborative. But even if we collective it, we see that it’s the work done by players and announcers like them that define the games we root for.
In the cases of Bill Russell and Vin Scully, it may be hard to find others “like them.” But this only illustrates the elite level at which they operated. They stand out as the most visible faces of a larger point: A team is the sum of the work done by hundreds or thousands of people, stretching back decades. Players, coaches, announcers, and so many others. This is a corollary of the very first post I ever wrote for this newsletter, that sports are labor.
All the obituaries and tributes and elegies this week to Russell and Scully stressed a basic point: They were both really, really good at what they did. In each case, possibly the best ever. They were workers at the top of their craft; that’s what mad them so beloved. The sports world is full of elite workers, and the teams you love and root for are the products of that labor.
Normally I would contrast this with the ownership class, which contributes nothing and merely sucks value from the things you love, but out of respect to Bill and Vin, I’ll save that for a future post. For now, it is simply worth remembering that when you watch sports, you are watching people at the height of their craft, and we should appreciate them while they are with us.