THE OPINION COLUMN
By: Ryan Welte
What Should It Take
To Get Your Number Retired?
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In my mind the biggest honor in pro sports is to have your jersey retired by the franchise that you represented. More than making your sport's Hall of Fame, more than having a statue of yourself outside of the arena they played in, more than anything, having your jersey in the rafters would be the greatest honor to me. I feel like the privilege of having your number retired has been held to loosely.
Recently, I was watching an Orlando Magic basketball game and Jeff Van Gundy started discussing whether or not Dwight Howard's #12 should be retired. I
thought: "of course not. The city doesn't like him, and he didn't get a championship." But then the statistics were put on the screen and they were impressive! He is first in multiple categories in Magic's franchise history. So I started thinking about a checklist that a player should have to meet for the honor.
In the NBA, a player should have to most certainly win a championship, play at least 8 seasons with the team and at least half of his career, be elected into the Hall of Fame of his sport, and he should need to earn at least one MVP award. That means no #12 in the ceiling for Orlando.
Why so strict? We need to keep the numbers! What happens when a team uses every single number? Will we go into decimals? Hundreds? Thousands? Keep the integrity in the honor. As for the players that have already been retired that don't fit the criteria, we should leave them for now. Eventually we should let their numbers be worn again but not for a long time.