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Even the most casual sports fan can rattle off a list of athletes who, by virtue of hard work, psychological toughness, or plain old good luck have succeeded, when most signs pointed to them wasting their best years working a 9-5 job and only pursuing their sporting passion on weekends.
Part two of this series was a tip-of-the-cap for Tom Dempsey, the toeless kicker who slotted a 63-yard field goal to gift the New Orleans Saints a win against the Detroit Lions in 1970, the plucky, ungainly New South Wales all-rounder Steve Smith, and Monica Seles, the heroine who returned to glory after being stabbed by a crazed spectator during a quarter-final tennis match.
It doesn’t take being stabbed between the shoulder blades to be named in this list, however.
Part three will touch on two successful athletes who overcame various indicators that they would fall short of the success they eventually achieved. One was born without one of the crucial requisites for success in his sport, and the other, battled his way through South Coast mediocrity to success.
Tyrone ‘Muggsy’ Bogues
If you’ve never heard of him, you’d be forgiven. He’s not one of the big-name NBA All-stars that most basketball-apathetic Australians have heard of. His career, though, is nothing short of remarkable.
Bogues played point guard for four different franchises over 14 years in the NBA.
He was 12th overall pick in the first round of the 1987 NBA draft, at 22 years of age.
Over the course of his 14-season career, He scored 6,858 points at 7.7 points per game, clocked up 6,726 assists at 7.6 assists per game, and made 1,369 steals at 1.5 steals per game. Remarkably consistent, you’d have to agree, even if they’re not quite remarkably high statistics.
The US-born Point Guard was part of the gold medal winning Team USA at the 1986 FIBA World Championship in Madrid, but this was the highest honour to be bestowed upon Bogues – he was never selected as an All Star or All-NBA player.
He was however, one of five NBA players to appear in the highest-grossing basketball movie of all time: the timeless classic, Space Jam.
So how about that? Pretty impressive, right? Oh. You’re not quite knocked off your feet by the tale of a better-than-most basketballer who never made the heady heights of All Star fame?
What if I told you that Bogues was (and still is) just 160cm tall, and 64kg; that his hands were not large enough to hold onto a ball one-handed?
His 39 blocks and 44-inch vertical leap seem quite impressive, in that light.
In his rookie year, Bogues played in the same team as Manute Bol, who stood at 7 ft 7 in tall. They were the tallest and shortest NBA players ever, at the time. This incongruity was made quite a big deal of in the media, and the two graced the covers of three different magazines together.
Bogues makes this list by virtue of overcoming a considerable physical impediment to success in the NBA. Arguably, the only hurdles more difficult to overcome would be an amputation or being vision impaired.
Finally, Muggsy Bogues compounds his champion-status by running a not-for-profit organisation, ‘Always Believe’ assisting at-risk youth in “reaching their full potential”. Bogues deserves to be on this list twice.
Scott Chipperfield
A tribute to one of my favourite Aussie battlers; Chipperfield embodies perseverance and the much-used Australian ‘have a go’ cliché.
The 38-year-old winger-cum-fullback learned his craft in the now-defunct National Soccer League with the Illawarra-based Wollongong Wolves, winning the league in 2000 and 2001.
He also scored the winning goal in the Grand Final of the 2001 Oceania Club Championship against Vanuatu-based Tafea FC, a competition that has since been reformatted and renamed by the OFC to become the Oceania Champions League.
While playing for the Wolves, Chipperfield forced his way into the Socceroos squad, and there he stayed. In 2002, Chipperfield appeared at the OFC Nations Cup in New Zealand, having paid his own way to the tournament because of the financial shortcomings of Soccer Australia at the time.
He was a vital part of the Socceroos’ “golden generation” which enjoyed such massive hype in the lead-up to the relative success of the 2006 World Cup campaign.
My favourite thing about Scott Chipperfield though, is that during his days with the Wollongong Wolves, he worked part-time as a school bus driver to support himself.
That for me ranks up there with the best of the battling occupations. It almost embodies the Socceroos around the time of the 2006 World Cup campaign. Here was a squad of hard-working, yet to-this-point internationally unknown footballers, dotted with likes of Kewell, Viduka and Neill of Premier League fame.
Scott Chipperfield, now 38 years old and playing for FC Aesch in Switzerland, scored 12 goals in 68 appearances for the Socceroos, and demands to be recognised as a veteran battler who answered the call when his country needed him most.
Perhaps we haven’t seen the last of Chipperfield though; he has previously mentioned his interest in playing for a Wollongong-based A-League franchise should one be founded in the near future.
There is always hope.
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