The most beautiful play in sports --  any sport -- is the assist. Think about Brooks Robinson and Magic Johnson.  They played with more than skill. It was beauty. Think about Adam Oates. If a hockey forward is in position to score, Oates can still get him the puck with a perfect pass. These greats came to mind in the past few days because of two other athletes with almost nothing in common except that precious gift of being able to put others in position to succeed.

LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers came to town and demonstrated
that, at age 18, he already is a master -- not of shooting yet, but of the
assist. Saturday night in Baltimore, a past master of the form, Tom Sheckells, was inducted into the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. He was a two-time, first-team all-American  at West Point, and his former coach, Jim Adams, hailed him specifically for being "the best pure feeder in the game." 

As it happens, Sheckells was a neighborhood friend of mine and, before that, a player I reported on for "The Post" in the mid-1960s.  He still holds the Army career assist record. 

Think of assists and maybe you think of Roberto Clemente or Al Kaline, pegging the ball in from right field to nail a base runner. Maybe it's John Stockton, dishing the basketball. From behind the blueline, Paul Coffey had few peers in beginning a scoring play. Hockey elevates and celebrates the assist, equating it with a goal in its points totals; often, two assists are awarded on one goal. 

Then there are the most celebrated assist men in sports, who aren't even thought of as assist men. Quarterbacks spend 98 percent of their time handing off or throwing the ball to someone. If you've seen the Wizards play this season, you might have enjoyed a moment when Juan Dixon and Steve Blake got out on a break together, passing the ball back and forth like they used to at Maryland, with Blake giving up the ball at the last moment so Dixon can make a layup. The shot was easy; the pass made the play. When James played his first NBA game, a preseason contest at Detroit, everyone awaited his first basket but ended up marveling at his second assist. It was something to behold. He cut across the lane, attracting a second defender, and with that, threw a no-look, behind-the-back bounce pass to a teammate for a dunk. 

Cavaliers Coach Paul Silas told reporters after the game, "Where he gets that vision from, I don't know, because he can come up with some passes like nobody can." James is averaging an eye-opening 6.7 assists a game, including two games with nine. As for Blake, he probably wouldn't be in the NBA if he hadn't repeatedly proven his ability to pass the ball during four college seasons; with 972 assists, he ranks fifth all-time in the NCAA, fourth all-time in the ACC, a passer's league. Pele, Wayne Gretzky, Bob Cousy -- they could score, but they were artists in setting up teammates.

One time long ago, the basketball coach Press Maravich waited out the start of a game in his motel room. Suddenly, he said, "Wait'll you see my kid." The
kid,  from the father's description, could shoot, but more than that, he could
play every part of the game -- first of all, "Pistol Pete" could pass. There's
something other than selflessness involved in passing. The best passers have always been highly competitive. They want to win as much as anyone else.  But it's their way of thinking, and the way they go about the game, that separates them.

To them, the assist is a means to an end, not the end, and that's just as good. They work to make it easier to score, no matter that the scorer is someone else. The assist man likes to attract attention, but only opponents'
attention, not the crowd's; having done that, he'll drop off the pass as easy as putting a letter in a mailbox. There's no hiding the beauty of it. 

I have to wonder what it would have been like had Tom Sheckells and Jimmy Lewis attended the same school and been teammates. The diminutive Lewis played for Navy. He was a flamboyant scorer, while the taller Sheckells was as prescient a passer as there was among attackmen. A high school teammate, Homer Schwartz, called him "a dream, because you always knew you would get to score." Sheckells came out of Baltimore Poly to set up 80 goals in his Army career. I saw him get four assists one day against Maryland, and two goals and two assists at Navy --  more than half of Army's production against the national champion Midshipmen. He was Army's captain and one of the captains in the 1965 North-South game, in which he
assisted six times for the victorious North. I used to see him around quite a
bit, walking in our Bethesda neighborhood or shopping at the Giant.

Day-to-day, Sheckells was the personification of the assist man, never mentioning all he was doing to help his sport and its players. He founded the Potomac chapter of US Lacrosse, the national governing body. He founded the Capital Area Lacrosse Officials Association. Sometimes he refereed three youth games in a row.

It's why his death a year ago, at 59 of a heart attack, came as a shock.  He
had seemed in perfect health. He always knew he had a chance for the Hall of
Fame, but that's hardly what he lived for. Instead, his passion was to help lacrosse thrive in the Washington area, where 14,000 now play the game.  His wife, Anne, and their children, Kate and Riley, accepted the award on his behalf Saturday night at the induction ceremonies.