WASHINGTON — The fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Dickerson, summoned Westley Unseld from the playground.
"I thought I'd done something wrong," he said the other day. All she wanted, it developed, was to innocently introduce the classiest athlete many of us will ever meet to a sport not of his choosing.
"Somebody had decided to play a basketball game between the fifth and sixth grades," he recalled, "and she told me I was going to play."
So it was Mrs. Dickerson who started, actually pushed, Unseld toward a career that includes induction last Tuesday into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Smiling, Unseld said: "And after that game, I didn't touch a basketball again for three years."
He was not just another pretty jump shooter. He graces basketball's showpiece museum for being as solid, tough, hard-working, relentless and intelligent off the court as on. He agrees.
"This award has got to reflect the people around me," he said. "Rookie of the year, MVP of the league (which he earned the same season, 1968-69) are something you almost think you did. This says something about who you've been involved with, because there are so many great basketball players, as such, who don't make it."
For the longest time, he wanted to emulate his first coach, Carl Wright, who ran the freshman team at Seneca High in Louisville. In college at Louisville, he grew to admire a coach he had been warned had little respect for blacks: Peck Hickman.
"I was told he wouldn't be the coach by the time I got to the varsity," Unseld said. "He was as different a person as I've ever met in my life. But I left, after playing for him, thinking he was the greatest person ever.
"To this day, he's one of the finest men I've ever been associated with."
Unseld said he was the first black recruited in the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast conferences, that Kentucky made only a token effort at signing him and that he didn't know where the Louisville campus was until his senior year.
In high school, Unseld began living a sporting lie that never ended until he quit playing in 1981. He is not 6 feet 8, as the Seneca coach said in an effort to scare opponents; neither is he 6-7 1/2, as the NBA press guide listed, nor 6-7, as the Bullets advertised.
His public shrinkage ended, not long after his final game, with his admission that he had been 6-5 3/4 all along. That's what his draft board said.
