by Milan Simonich , Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Known as "The Lip," Durocher was bright and cocksure, a natural leader. He also had as many vices as Pete Rose. At his worst, Durocher was immoral, cheating ballplayers in big-money card games. Yet Durocher, as manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, took a stand for desegregation that helped shape the course of history.

In spring training of 1947, at least six Dodgers, led by Fred "Dixie" Walker of Georgia, started a petition saying they would not play with rookie first baseman Jackie Robinson. These men scarcely knew Robinson. They opposed him for a superficial reason -- the color of his skin. Durocher, a member of the all-white major leagues since 1928, could have coddled his dissident veterans as they complained about Robinson breaking baseball's color barrier. Instead, Durocher woke his players at 1 a.m. to lay down his law on race relations.

In the finest moment of his life, he said he would play the best men, regardless of color. "This fellow Robinson is a great player. He's going to put money in my pocket and yours," Durocher said. Robinson went on to become the first rookie of the year in the major leagues, and the Dodgers won the '47 pennant.

Durocher missed this great run, as baseball's commissioner suspended him for "associating with known gamblers." Durocher in 1954 won a World Series as manager of the New York Giants . Willie Mays, the finest player in the integrated major leagues, was his center fielder. The record books say Durocher became a champion with Mays, but his unequivocal support for Robinson was more important.

Bob Shannon, high school Football coach, most notably of the East St. Louis Flyers in Illinois

East St. Louis is one of America's most impoverished cities. Drugs, violence and lawlessness were everywhere during the 20 seasons that Shannon coached at East St. Louis Senior High School. During that stretch, from 1976 to 1995, his teams won six Illinois state championships under conditions that few educators could imagine, much less overcome.

Rats crawled through Shannon's small office. His players could not clean up after practice because the showers were dry. Grass grew so tall around the Football field that killers used it to hide the body of a man whose chest was perforated with bullets. Amid this chaos, Shannon built one of the most successful programs in America, once winning 44 games in succession.

"Some people protest by wearing Malcolm X T-shirts. I protest by taking undisciplined guys from the streets and turning them into focused, proud men," he told Sports Illustrated in 1995.

Across his glorious career, Shannon never avoided a confrontation, regardless of the personal risk. So when he discovered that the East St. Louis athletic director was stealing money intended to outfit and feed students in sports programs, he exposed the culprit. Shannon wanted the athletic director's job, but the thief who held it wasn't leaving willingly. He threatened to fire Shannon. In turn, the coach offered to quit. School board members met in a rush to accept Shannon's resignation. One blamed the coach for going public about malfeasance at the high school.

The corrupt athletic director eventually went to prison. Shannon moved on to other coaching jobs in the St. Louis area. As for the Flyers, they were never the same without him.

Jake LaMotta, former world middleweight boxing champion

He had six wives. He lived hard and drank harder. He was brutal, vainglorious and often despicable. What's unusual is that most of the negatives about LaMotta were revealed by LaMotta himself.

When he wrote a book about his life, he told the whole truth, no matter how rotten it made him look. LaMotta admitted that as a teenager he nearly killed a man in a street mugging. He also detailed how he threw a fight to Billy Fox at Madison Square Garden in 1947. Many boxing matches have been rigged, but LaMotta was the only fighter to admit participating in a fix, a clumsy one at that.

"Dan Parker [star columnist of the New York Daily Mirror] said that my performance was so bad he was surprised that actors equity didn't picket the joint," LaMotta wrote in "Raging Bull," his autobiography. He said he intentionally lost to Fox in a selfish and desperate attempt to better his career. LaMotta hoped that mobsters who profited from his disgrace with Fox would help him receive a legitimate championship bout.

LaMotta eventually got his chance at the world title, defeating Marcel Cerdan for the middleweight championship in 1949. With this achievement, his fraud with Fox might have faded from memory. But in 1970 he wrote his book, revealing himself to be more antihero than champion.

Jim Murray, Los Angeles Times sports columnist

Muhammad Ali ran into the columnist at an NBA game in 1979 and paid him the ultimate compliment. "Jim Murray, you are the greatest sports writer of all times," Ali said. Across four decades, Murray wrote with style, bite and authority. He joined the LA Times in 1961 and wrote a column until his death in 1998.

Murray came aboard as the Times was beginning its transformation from one of the nation's worst newspapers to one of its best. Before Murray, the Times often was an embarrassment, covering up for its political pets instead of covering the news. The Republican-leaning Times had favored Richard Nixon during his mud-slinging 1950 U.S. Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas. During the 1960s, Murray, publisher Otis Chandler and editor Nick Williams played important roles in turning the Times into a fair, tough-minded newspaper.

Murray could shred an arrogant athlete in a couple of sentences, as he did when writing about sprinter Carl Lewis in the 1992 Olympics: "Why is Magic Johnson the darling of these Barcelona Games whereas Carl Lewis is almost like the man who came to dinner -- and everybody wondered who invited him. In the first place, Lewis comes off as a cold, calculating, commercial cad who cares little for his sport as sport and sees it only in its money-making aspects."

Murray won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, just the fourth sports writer so honored. His words still resonate.

Vince Lombardi, Football coach, most notably of the Green Bay Packers

More than 40 years ago, when the Deep South had no NFL teams, franchises would play exhibition games in Georgia and Louisiana. Black players were not entirely welcome. These men may have been admired for their talents on the field, but many restaurants and hotels would not let them in the front door.

When Lombardi's Packers traveled to the South, he fought the wretched local customs. The coach made sure every man on his team, black and white, went through the back door of businesses that practiced racial separation. It was good for team unity, and it was Lombardi's way of jabbing politicians who believed in segregation.

For a man obsessed with Football, Lombardi had a good grasp of society's big picture. His brother, Harold, was gay. So the hard-nosed coach was tolerant of gays and exasperated by those who tried to wound them with insults. Born in 1913, Lombardi was perhaps the least prejudiced man of his time. He gave everybody who wanted to work for him a fair opportunity.

Not all his players bought into his approach, the relentless demands and abusive tirades. Even his critics, though, recognized that a more eloquent coach never lived. Many of Lombardi's best lines have endured. "Winning," he said, "is not a sometime thing; it's an all-time thing. You don't win once in a while. You don't do things right once in a while. You do them right all the time."

Muhammad Ali, former world heavyweight boxing champion

George Raymond Wagner, the wrestler better known as Gorgeous George, taught Ali the power of bravado. While still known as Cassius Marcellus Clay, Ali saw George build up the gate for Las Vegas wrestling matches by insulting opponents and bragging about himself. "I don't really think I'm gorgeous," George would say. "But what's my opinion against millions?"

Ali duplicated George's style. He proclaimed himself "pretty" and "the greatest." Ali's egotism prompted audiences to ROOT against him. Writers were put off by his penchant for rhymes that belittled his opponents. Before he fought world champion Sonny Liston in 1964, Ali, an 8-to-1 underdog, serenaded the press corps: "If you wanna lose your money, then bet on Sonny." Liston, who seemed invincible to many of the writers, quit after taking a fearsome beating from Ali for six rounds.

Unlike Gorgeous George, Ali extended his oratory to meaningful issues. He refused induction into the Army in 1967 because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong," he said famously, a quote that his enemies ran with. Ali also became a crusader for civil rights. His refusal to serve in the military went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he won his case in 1971.

By then, Ali's once-brash statements about the immorality of the war in Vietnam no longer seemed out of the mainstream.

Vanderlei de Lima, marathon runner Irena Szewinska, sprinter

Athletes who speak loudly after each performance, such as Terrell Owens, usually monopolize media coverage. But de Lima, a marathon runner from Brazil, and Szewinska, the phenomenal sprinter from Poland, had enormous iNFLuence on the sports world because they resisted the natural impulse to complain about defeats.

De Lima was leading the 2004 Olympic marathon in Athens after 21 of the 26 miles. Then came a bizarre assault, both on the little Brazilian and on the Olympic ideal of fair play. A defrocked priest from Ireland ran onto the course and attacked de Lima. This oddball had nothing against de Lima. Rather, he wanted to disrupt the Olympics to call attention to himself. Streetside spectators, initially confused by the violence, freed de Lima after about 20 seconds. He got back on course, still in the lead but shaken.

What might have been his day turned out to be somebody else's. Two runners passed him down the stretch. De Lima took the bronze medal, an ending so ridiculously unfair that he could have cried foul. Instead, he reveled in the cheers of the crowd and proudly accepted third place. He said winning an Olympic medal -- any Olympic medal -- was a triumph. No finer sportsman has graced the Games.

Szewinska won an Olympic gold medal at age 18 in 1964, then stayed atop the track-and-field world for most of the next 16 years. Some regard her as the greatest female athlete ever. Others call Szewinska the greatest athlete, period. She ran in five consecutive Olympic Games --1964, 1968, 1972, 1976 and 1980 -- and won seven medals. If not for the advent of performance-enhancing drugs, she would have been even more dominant.

Steroid use by female sprinters was not prevalent in the 1964 Tokyo Games, where Szewinska won a gold medal in the 4x100 relay, or the 1968 Mexico City Games, where she set a world record in winning the 200-meter dash. But by the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the ethical code in women's athletics had broken down. East Germany's best sprinter, Renate Stecher, arrived at the Games looking like a linebacker. Stecher took the gold in the 200 meters. Szewinska finished third, an astounding five meters behind the winner.

Stecher eventually would be implicated in widespread doping scandals in East Germany. Szewinska knew all along that something was not right, but she never complained publicly. Instead, Szewinska made a different sort of statement. She switched to the 400 meters and went unbeaten in 34 consecutive finals between 1974 and 1978. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, Szewinska set a world record in the 400 final. She was 30 then, old for a sprinter

Kenny Moore, writing in Sports Illustrated, called her the "most elegant winner" of the Games. The description is still accurate.

Copyright 2008 P.G. Publishing Co.
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