Oct
4
Remembering Iron Man A.C. Green, Who Turns 44 Today 
Lou Gehrig, the luckiest man alive, played in 2,130 consecutive games as a New York Yankee from 1925 to 1939.Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. would break that 56-year-old streak in 1995 and play in an amazing 2,632 straight games from May 30, 1982 to September 20, 1998, a record that will surely never be broken.
Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre has started an NFL-record 241 regular season games for the quarterback position.
While Gehrig, Ripken and Favre are synonymous with the terms “longevity” and “toughness” in sports, people should not forget former power forward A.C. Green, who played for the Los Angeles Lakers, Phoenix Suns, Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat during his 16-year NBA career and turned 44 years old today.From November 19, 1986 to April 18, 2001, Green played in an ABA and NBA record of 1192 straight games. The streak would not be snapped by an injury or a “DNP”; rather, Green would not get signed by a team entering the 2001-2002 season and would thus retire.Amazingly, Green would only miss three games during his second season in the league prior to beginning his amazing streak, which was in serious jeopardy in 1996 while a member of the Suns. Nursing a serious mouth injury after a hard foul by J.R. Reid, Green would play less than 10 minutes in 10 out of 11 games, including four straight games in which he played three minutes or less. Essentially, Phoenix played Green during that period to keep the streak intact. Notwithstanding those couple of weeks with the Suns in 1996, Green was a reliable player throughout the streak. From his early days on championship teams with the Lakers in 1987 and 1988 to his glorious return in 1999-2000 to Los Angeles at the twilight of his career, Green was a vital and often underappreciated cog on teams that boasted some of the greatest players of all time, including Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. While Green’s consecutive-games streak on the court is something to marvel at, a lot of people remember Green more for his Iron Man status off the court. Green, who played on 80’s Lakers teams known for their fast lifestyles on and off the hardwood, remained a virgin throughout his career; something that he freely and proudly spoke of.Green once used his initials A.C. to spread a message that Abstinence Counts and still speaks about the importance of being abstinent until marriage. The same season that he retired from the game, Green was married in April 2002 at the age of 38.
by Chris Maynard, chris@hoops4thesoul.com
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