1) Bill Laimbeer
The funniest thing about the basketball’s biggest tough guys is that away from the game they could be very nice. It’s just when they got on the court something took over. They were rugged, fierce and willing to throw anyone out of the way. And few men in professional basketball played that role better than the center of the late 1980s and early 90s Detroit Pistons.
Perhaps you have to consider the setting with Laimbeer. He was the muscle on a team called the Bad Boys. He had no choice but to be rough. Fortunately, he had no trouble fitting the role. At 6ft 11in, with thick shoulders and dark eyes, he looked mean. When he wore clear plastic mask as he often did, the scowl was even worse. Whether real or not he appeared to enjoy driving an elbow in an opponent’s side.
Perhaps Dennis Rodman (we’ll get to him in a bit) summed it up best in his book As Bad As I Want To Be when he wrote: “He was more than a thug but that’s what he’ll be remembered for.” He was a four-time All-Star, once led the NBA in rebounding and averaged nearly 10 boards a game for his career – but that’s not what people will recall. Instead, when they think of Laimbeer they will think of him for moments like this.
That escalated quickly.
Ironically, Laimbeer has become an outstanding women’s basketball coach with three WNBA titles in 11 years – all with the Detroit Shock. To see him now as coach of the New York Liberty, laughing on the sidelines, imploring his players to hurry up the court you have to wonder: Is this the same guy?
2) Xavier McDaniel
With a nickname like the X-Man how can you not be a tough guy? The essence of McDaniel can be summed up in a single photograph. In the picture, McDaniel, then with the Seattle SuperSonics, has Lakers guard Wes Matthews pinned against the scorer’s table and is choking him. Matthews’ eyes are wide with shock and his mouth is open as if gasping for air.
McDaniel also had a handful of memorable confrontations with the Chicago Bulls, and Michael Jordan in particular, when he played for the Knicks in the 1990s. Though he started off as a big scorer with the Sonics in the 80s, he came to fit best in a role as a reserve willing to set heavy screens, make a defensive stop, get a rebound and generally annoy opposing players and coaches.
The X-Man was always one of the game’s more interesting players. In keeping with the theme, he named his son Xavier and his daughter Xylina. He also dabbled in television with an appearance on Married With Children and a handful of reality shows. But his finest screen performance was in the movie Singles, which might be the best athlete cameo ever.
3) Maurice Lucas
So much of professional basketball history is centered around the modern era we don’t pay enough attention to the past. Since Lucas played in the 1970s there’s isn’t as much video evidence of his career as there is for contemporary players, but there was a tine when the last person you wanted to tussle with on the court was the man they called: “The Enforcer.”
He played for seven teams in 14 years, which doesn’t say enough about how dominant a player he was on the floor. While he averaged 14.4 points and 8.8 rebounds in his NBA career he was best known for using his 6ft, 9in, 250lb body to clear players away from the basket. To understand how powerful Lucas was as a player, Bill Walton named his son Luke after Lucas – in part, a testament to the role Lucas played in helping Walton and the Portland Trail Blazers to the NBA title in 1977.
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“He really liked being the enforcer-type player,” Portland’s coach in those days, Jack Ramsey, said after Lucas died in 2010. “A great rebounder. A great outlet passer. Then he could score on the post, make jump shots on the perimeter. But mostly it was his physical persona that he carried with him that made us a different team.”
Perhaps Lucas is best remembered for his role in this fight with Darryl Dawkins in the 1977 NBA Finals. “More than anything else in my career, I’ve been reminded of that incident and reminded of the fact that I was a real physical player,” he later said. “I’m not reminded of the fact that I was the leading scorer on those teams that I played on. But the old saying goes, ‘As long as they remember you, you can’t be mad.’”
4) Dennis Rodman
In later years Rodman became such a sideshow it is easy to forget the ferocious rebounder and defender who played alongside Laimbeer in Detroit and helped the Pistons establish their relentless reputation as much as anyone. He won five NBA titles, was twice the league’s defensive player of the year and was named to the all-defensive team seven times.
Of course, he is rarely glorified for these things. Instead, he is best known for wearing a wedding dress, his celebrity pals and multi-colored hairstyles. In many ways, he became bigger after basketball than he ever was as a player. This is unfortunate.
Nobody was better at stopping another team’s top scorer than Rodman. A lot of this came from an intense desire to be great at basketball. Not even considered for his high school team in Dallas, he gave the game a try after school when he suddenly grew several inches. While other players had been heavily recruited by big college programs, he went from working at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport to junior college, to little-known Southeastern Oklahoma State. So when he finally made the NBA at 25 he was determined to stay.
If that meant fighting his way through the league then that was what he would do. But to win five championships in what was essentially a 13-year NBA career says something about how good a defender and rebounder he really was.
5) Charles Barkley
To see him now on television, laughing through the halftime show, is to not remember how rough, aggressive and downright irrepressible he was as a player. One doesn’t average nearly 12 rebounds a game as a 6ft 5in forward and not be tough.
After establishing himself as a star over eight seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers, he won the MVP in 1993 in his first season with the Phoenix Suns and came within two wins of the NBA title that would forever elude him. Getting him away from the basket was impossible, he took his 252lbs that gave him the nickname ‘The Round Mound of Rebound’ and knocked people away. He was as good at grabbing a rebound and laying it back in as he was as shooting a fadeaway jumper. In some ways he was probably best with three players around him.
But he was also a polarizing player. He tussled with several opponents, shouted at fans and seemed to operate without a filter. When Nike introduced a commercial campaign in which he declared “I am not a role model”, people were furious. Why couldn’t he learn to behave?
That was Barkley. His most notorious incident might have been the time in 1991 when he spit at a fan in New Jersey, missing the man with his saliva and hitting a little girl instead. He was fined $10,000 and suspended. He apologized to the girl and later said the incident was his greatest regret.
6) Charles Oakley
Though his career roughly shadowed Barkley’s, this Charles was not as famous. He was three inches taller than Barkley and not nearly the accomplished scorer and yet he might have been the most aggressive player of his era. If Isiah Thomas had Laimbeer and Rodman, Michael Jordan had Oakley in his early years.
Oakley served as the young Jordan’s protector, clearing away big defenders and showing little regard for those who did not appreciate his ferocity. But it was after Oakley was traded to the Knicks in 1988 that he became widely known for his aggressiveness, especially against Chicago and Miami. This 1996 fight with Barkley embodies Oakley’s 10-year career in New York.
He could also score, averaging in double figures several times, but since he played most of his career in the NBA’s Eastern Conference he was usually needed to protect teammates, get rebounds and clear opponents away from the basket. He played this role perfectly. He never got the Knicks to an elusive title but he came close and became an essential stopper on a team built for defense first.
