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My name is Terry Disinger, I'm 82 years old, and you may not know me, but I'm a member of the Naismith Hall of Fame.
Today, the Nets were bloodied by the Bucks at home 109-121, playing the top four teams in the East and West with a record of 0 wins and 8 losses, and were pinched to death by strong teams. I think the first thing that comes to mind is the "part-time player" Irving in the Nets.
But to put it in a popular way, I was already a part-time player before Irving became a part-time player.
And I feel like I'm a lot more bullish than Owen is today. I was a rookie when I was a part-time player, but even though I was playing and stopping, I was still given the Best Rookie Award of the year, and I was also selected as an All-Star.
If put in the present, do you dare to believe it? Today I will talk to you about my glorious history.
I entered the NBA in 1962-63, exactly 59 years ago. I think the term "part-time player" was born for me.
That year, I was already a little famous. After all, 2 years ago, I helped the U.S. men's basketball team win the gold medal of the men's basketball team at the Rome Olympic Games. That team had later household names like Jerry West and Oscar Robertson, but I was the youngest member of the U.S. team at the time.
As we all know, professional players were not allowed to participate in the basketball games of the Olympic Games at that time. But I still wanted to play in the Olympics 2 years later, so in the beginning, I chose to play for the Oklahoma Amateur Sports League team Phillips 66ers.
As the son of a rugby coach, my physical fitness is naturally leveraged, and when I was a student at Garfield High School, I won the best honors in rugby, athletics and basketball at the same time. When I entered Purdue University to play, my basketball level was also a man to block the killing Buddha, and when I retired from college, I almost covered all the team history records.
However, I have to say that the decision to play for the Phillips 66ers is still a bit abrupt. When I saw the dirty and messy team environment, I realized that if I wanted to continue the basketball career I loved, there was only one way to do it.
It so happened that the Chicago West Winds, the predecessor of today's Wizards, selected me with the 1st pick (8th overall pick) in the second round of the NBA in 1962.
So I chose to join the Chicago West Winds as a part-time player. Why are you a part-time player? Because I was a junior in college that year, I wanted to get a degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University first. As a result, I made a deal with the Chicago West winds that I would play for the team when I was free and not play if I was going to class.
So I became the last "part-time player" in the NBA before Irving.
That season, I only played the weekend and holiday games for the first half of the season and even missed the team opener because that game was held in New York on Tuesday and I had classes to attend that day.
At that time, I lived in a student dormitory on the Lafayette campus in Indiana, 125 miles from the team, and even now it is a two-hour drive, so I can't stay with the team.
So after class every day, the most common thing I do is catch the car, sometimes by plane, sometimes by train, and sometimes by car.
I had to put my jersey on the plane so that when I met the team, I could play directly and it worked well.
It all made me feel happy because I started by taking time to play, but then I played better and better, I had a good performance as soon as I played, and then I would enjoy the game. Everyone around me is also very good to me, they never point fingers and say something like "you see that person is different from us", they really treat me as a teammate, we are united.
How well did I play? That season I played in 25 of the west winds' first 48 games and the last 32. In 57 games, I averaged 40 minutes per game and averaged 25.5 points, 8.0 rebounds and 3.1 assists from 51.2 percent shooting. You know, there was no three-point line back then.
The Don Nelson you should know is the player who later helped the Celtics win five championships, and he was selected by the West Winds in the same year as me, but he was selected with the 1st pick (17th overall) in the 3rd round.
He was sitting on the bench watching me perform, and who would have thought he would become a Celtic star.
I heard him say this about me in an interview with The Athletic some time ago: "He's a star, his playing style is very modern, he's good at all the techniques of basketball, outside, attacking with the ball, etc." ”
He's right, I'm 2.01 and I still weigh 86kg, but I can break through and jump shot like a defender. So that year, I became a twin star with the team's super center Bellamy.
Although I missed a lot of games because of my studies, Nelson still said of me: "When you have Disinger, we are really a better team. ”
Of course, he followed up later: "But we are a bad team anyway." ”
Make no mistake, this sentence is not mine, it is because of the environment that the team was in at the time.
That was 1962, we in the Chicago WestWinds joined the NBA the year before, we have no foundation at all, the team's record is naturally not too good. So we've only had a 25-55 record all season, just a little bit better than the New York Knicks, second to last in the league.
Our home stadium was the worst, when it was originally a prison built in 1899. Nelson remembers training at the time: "The conditions here are worse than in the universities, and the temperature in the gym can even reach minus zero, but the heating is only turned on during the game, and sometimes the training has to be canceled." ”
"I remember being able to see my white breath on the field and the breath of everyone present. Although there weren't many people, it was a crazy season. ”
Fortunately, the team's memory of belonging to Chicago is only two years, and the next season we moved to Baltimore and changed our name to the Bullets.
At that time, everyone was much more tolerant, and although I was a "part-time player", I was not treated differently. Not only do teammates not care, not even the fans.
Even after missing a third of the game, I managed to win the rookie of the season and was named an All-Star. However, it should be noted that the best rookie vote at that time was the players voting for each other, and it seems that everyone still recognizes my skills.
Can you imagine? I'm a part-time player, I got the best rookie, and it seems like I've got something.
However, I have to admit that my status as a part-time player is not unrelated to the environment in 1962, after all, there were only 9 teams in the entire league at that time. If you put it now, it is estimated that the fans will have already exploded.
The rookie season was the best year of my 9-year NBA career, and although I was selected as an All-Star three times, it was still the best first year in terms of statistics. In the second and third years, I finished with 20.8 points, 8.3 rebounds and 18.2 points and 6 rebounds, respectively.
But at that time, it was difficult to make a lot of money playing in the NBA, so after three seasons I went to military service, because during college, I signed up for the National Guard, so I had to serve in the National Guard, and when I served two years in Hawaii, I returned to the NBA.
Two years of military service made me miss my peak, but I didn't regret it, because during those two years of service, I planned to become a dentist after retiring.
The last season I spent in the Trail Blazers. When I announced my retirement, I received my Doctor of Dental degree from the University of Tennessee, and I was elected as a representative of outstanding students to give a graduation speech.
Since then, I have settled in Portland and started my career as a dentist. If you're passing by Lake Oswego on the outskirts of Portland and see a house number called The Dischinger Team Orthodontics, that's my home.
If you look closely at the photos in the room, you'll see a framed Men's Basketball Men's Basketball No. 6 jersey and a gold medal, and that's the beginning of my basketball saga.
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