Hail to The Chief

Happy 54th birthday to NBA great Robert Parish. Inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003 and named one of the NBA’s 50 Greatest Players of all-time, “The Chief” played fourteen years with the Boston Celtics, and twenty-one years overall (four with the Golden State Warriors out of college, two with the Charlotte Hornets, and one with the Chicago Bulls). He owns the record for most games played (1,611) and is the third-oldest player to play in an NBA game at age 43 (Nat Hickey of the Providence Steamrollers and Kevin Willis of the Dallas Mavericks are the two ahead of him). Incidentally, his Celtics teammate Cedric Maxwell gave him the nickname after the character in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because of Parish’s stoic nature.

Also, it would have been baseball great Ted Williams’ 89th birthday today. Others celebrating birthdays: tennis player Andy Roddick (25), actress Cameron Diaz (35), bazillionaire Warren Buffet (77), and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly (would’ve been just 210).