Thursday Trivia: Taking aim on a new career
Before he begins his major league career, this player is part of the inaugural Boston Celtics’ team in 1946.
His claim to fame – dubious as it is – in the newly formed National Basketball Association is to become the first player to ever break a backboard in a league game.
This occurs before the Celtics’ first home game on Nov. 5, 1946 at hallowed Boston Garden. The bit of unexpected destruction in pregame warmups causes an hour-long delay before the Celtics’ eventual 57-55 loss to the Chicago Stags.
Prior to that moment, this 6-foot-5, 190-pound center plays collegiately at Seton Hall with future Pro Basketball Hall of Famer Bob Davies.
He later becomes a baseball player, initially sharing a clubhouse there with a slew of future Hall of Famers.
In fact, when this player makes his major league debut in 1949 with Brooklyn, his teammates on the field that day include Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese.
And yet despite establishing his legacy in NBA history as the first backboard breaker and then playing with some of baseball’s best, this gentleman becomes better known in another occupation – an occupation where his athletic beginnings become merely a footnote to his new career.
And the name of this player is …
We can wait.
And wait.
And then wait just a little longer until you come up with the name of Chuck Connors, who leaves behind both basketball and baseball in the early 1950s to begin a 40-year career as a Hollywood regular in television and movies.
His first role comes in the 1952 movie Pat and Mike starring the legendary duo of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
His most famous role later comes as rancher Lucas McCain in the popular TV series The Rifleman, which runs for 168 episodes from September 1958 to April 1963.
His greatest challenges along the way, though, are learning to ride a horse and, more important, learning to speak without slipping into his native Brooklyn accent.
Understandable, given so few – OK, like zero – western roles in Hollywood are spoken in heavy Brooklynese.
Lots of other roles follow for Connors until his death in 1992, but he forever is typecast as a good guy from the cinematic Old West.
“I can never get rid of it,” Connors later says of being typecast, “and I don’t want to.
“It’s a good image,” Connors says. “Basically, (The Rifleman) was the simplicity of the love between the father and the son. That was the foundation.
“The rifle was for show, but the relationship was for real. There was some violence, but at the end, I would explain to the boy that the violence was not something we wanted to do, but had to do.”