Matthew Stafford won his first Super Bowl championship Sunday night with the Los Angeles Rams. He will have to win another to match Ben Roethlisberger and three more to tie Terry Bradshaw. Of course, he needs six more to catch Tom Brady, whose seven Lombardi Trophies are more than any NFL franchise has. The Steelers have only six.
Good luck to Stafford matching Brady.
What's amazing is Brady isn't the greatest team athlete in sports history. Neither is Michael Jordan, who won six NBA titles with the Chicago Bulls, nor Wayne Gretzky, who won four Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers and owns all of hockey's significant records and will for a long time as long as he can hold off Alex Ovechkin.
The debate about the greatest became fascinating to me this month for a couple of reasons. Brady retired — or so we think — after 22 NFL seasons. Bill Russell turned 88 on Saturday.
Russell is the greatest team athlete of all time.
I had a feeling about that all along, but a little research confirmed it.
Very minimal research.
Sure, Brady, Jordan and Gretzky are strong candidates. They had marvelous careers. Brady might even end his retirement to come back and try to win an eighth championship. The man is addicted to competition and to winning.
Henri Richard— the "Pocket-Rocket" — also was a phenomenal winner. He won 11 Cups in 20 seasons with the dynastic Montreal Canadiens.
In baseball, there was Yogi Berra. He won 10 World Series with the New York Yankees, more than any MLB player. Yankees teammate Joe DiMaggio won nine. Their Yankees teams were an incredible dynasty.
A little closer to home, Bryan Trottier makes the list of all-time great winners. He won two of his six Stanley Cups with the Penguins. He still lives in Pittsburgh.
We've been so lucky to have been able to watch so many of the great athletes here. The Super 70s Steelers. The Clemente and Stargell Pirates. The Lemieux and Crosby Penguins. The list of Pittsburgh Hall of Famers and soon-to-be Hall of Famers is too long to mention here. Joe Greene, Willie Stargell, Jerome Bettis and Sidney Crosby might be the best team leaders in Pittsburgh sports history.
But none of those amazing players matched what Russell did.
They didn't even come close.
Russell played 13 seasons in the NBA from 1956-69 and won 11 championships. Making his success even more remarkable is that he owned his sport at a time when Wilt Chamberlain was the other dominant center in the league. Chamberlain won just two NBA titles, the second in 1972 after Russell had retired as a player.
But Russell's winning started long before he joined the Celtics. He won two NCAA championships at the University of San Francisco. He won an Olympics gold with the U.S. team in Melbourne in 1956. He even won two state championships in high school.
We haven't seen another team athlete like Russell.
We won't see one again.
