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SECOND LOOK: BEST ATHLETES
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Best athlete in the world? It's not a total leap. Seriously.
Where Mark Hendrickson isn't Michael Jordan. He's better!
In this latest issue, The Mag asked 200-plus athletes to name the best pure athletes in sports today.
The usual suspects came up, with LeBron James, Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant as the top three, the rightful usual suspects based on branding alone. But this is where it gets interesting. After that, we noted some of the peculiar nominations—guys who are epic at the naked eye level, but have never broken through to let enough eyes see them. Names like Quan Crosby, Schea Cotton and Antonio Cromartie came up. There was even Brandon Inge, a multiple position gem who, if he could hit, might have cracked the Big Board Top Ten.
One name never came up: Mark Hendrickson.
Who?
Well, he's only the best cross-over "star" since Deion Sanders, with the fact that he's never truly been a star as his only weakness.
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Hendrickson's other little hobby.
Here is a guy who, impossibly, has an NBA and MLB career to discuss. Hendrickson topped out at a mere 5.5 ppg in the NBA after he was drafted out of Washington State by the 76ers 31st overall in 1996, and his best baseball year may have been a positively unspectacular 10-win campaign for Toronto in 2004, where he still managed to lose 15 and rack up a 4.81 ERA.
The guy literally left the NBA and said, "I think I'll play baseball," seemingly as quietly as Forrest deciding to go for a jog. But how could he be so completely ignored by his contemporaries?
Well, you could start with a gumpy 6'8" frame, wrapped on a slender body. Combine that with the fact that he pitches like a hopped up Jamie Moyer and played hoops like Nenad Kristic, and you deliver an under-the-radar vision. So it is, that in the games he can play, he can do so in a completely un-athletic manner. But oh, that he could play two!
The former NBA power forward of four years, who banged against the likes of Karl Malone and Charles Oakley, is currently a starter for the Marlins (he's 7-4). His last win gave him 50 in baseball, and as a soft-tossing lefty, who's to say he can't hit 100 before he's done?
One more note: when he played in the NBA, Hendrickson wore #42. Fittingly, MLB has that number retired out of respect for perhaps the greatest cross-over athlete any of us would have ever known, had Jackie Robinson been given the chance. At UCLA, he was only an All-American in four sports. Hendrickson played two at WSU, and was an All-American in neither. Somehow, he was and is a pro in both.
Go figure.
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