A Year Too Late, But Dumars A Hall Of Famer

THAT'S what I'm talking about!


It came a year too late, if you ask me, but Joe Dumars is going into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

Dumars has been elected, the Detroit News is reporting, and the official announcement will come sometime today.

Dumars was eligible for the first time last year, but failed to garner enough votes for enshrinement. If anything has changed in his career since a year ago March, I'd like to know what it is.

Last I looked, Dumars hasn't made one more assist, stolen one more pass, drained one more clutch three-pointer, or played one more game of shutdown defense since March 2005. And he hasn't, that I'm aware of, done anything earth-shattering as an executive, other than trade Darko Milicic and cashier Larry Brown and bring in Flip Saunders. Did THAT put him over the top?

No, none of that mattered. For some reason, the chosen folks who fill out Hall of Fame ballots seem to think that sometimes an individual doesn't merit induction in his first year of eligibility. It doesn't matter, to them, if the cold, hard stats remain static and unchanged from year to year. I just can't get a handle on the notion that if a guy was worthy in Year Two, he wasn't worthy in Year One. You'd think the decisions should be made based on the career set before the voters, regardless of what year of eligibility it is. I can almost see players waiting for several years before induction, because sometimes new blood comes in and rights an old wrong.

But Joe Dumars is no more qualified in 2006 than he was in 2005, and that rankles me. Last year I wrote a column decrying the Hall, declaring it unworthy of existence because of Dumars' exclusion. It was a fraud Hall, I maintained, as long as Dumars was not a part of it.

It's a little less of a fraud today, but it's still tainted. They all are -- our sports Halls of Fame.

The Baseball Hall of Fame will have suffered more harm in excluding Pete Rose than it would have caused by admitting him. The Football Hall of Fame, I look at with cross eyes because for years it told us that the reason Alex Karras and Paul Hornung weren't in was because of their gambling suspensions in 1963. Fine. Yet Hornung eventually got in, and Karras -- possibly the best defensive lineman not enshrined -- still is on the outside looking in. What's the reason now?

I could give you more examples in each of the Halls, but that's okay, because nothing that is based on such subjective criteria will have a perfect list of haves and have nots -- or in this case, "ins" and "not ins." So it's not the fact that a guy's not in that bothers me so much, because that's what happens when players who haven't met certain standards -- like 500 homeruns or 20,000 basketball points -- are up for consideration.

What puts a burr in my britches is the incongruities, like in the case of Karras, and the unnecessary waits, like with Dumars. In a crazy way, I almost would have been less angry if Dumars failed to be voted in this year, too. But with the voters saying "yes" in 2006 but "no" in 2005 -- that's beyond my comprehension.

Of course I'm happy for Dumars this morning. He's where he belongs -- in the Hall -- and that's the good news. And I'm sure it makes me more upset than him that it came 365 days tardy. But that doesn't change the fact that these Hall votes are goofy and sometimes smelly.

Maybe the scribes and wise men who vote on such things realized the errors of their ways and moved to correct it forthwith. That'll be my glass is half-full approach to it, anyhow.

But a part of me suspects that maybe their 24-second clocks don't have all the ticks in them.