Half a century ago, it wasn’t just common for young males to idolize athletes; it was encouraged. But then as now, famous human beings weren’t necessarily always the best role models.

It’s generally acknowledged that talented, coddled individuals sometimes believe rules don’t apply to them, and all too often their actions reflect that sense of entitlement. The sheer number of egomaniacs in professional sports may well be greater now than it was 50 years ago; after all, there are significantly more teams today in Major League Baseball (30), the National Football League (32), the National Basketball Association (30) and the National Hockey League (30) than there were in the four “major” professional sports five decades ago, when there were 20, 14, nine and six, respectively. In addition, the athletes in today’s “big leagues” earn exponentially higher salaries than their counterparts in 1962 did.

Professional sports has always had its share of wife beaters, dope fiends, skirt chasers, alcoholics and others who could not or would not conform to society’s norms. But when John Kennedy was president, what is now called “the media” was quaintly referred to as “the press,” and often as not those individuals fortunate enough to make a living reporting on the sports scene would compliantly sanitize whatever flaws America’s athletic icons may have possessed. Mickey Mantle, Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain, Bobby Hull and their imperfect contemporaries could count on worshipful “reporters” to airbrush out any and all blemishes, frailties or peccadilloes some might have found unattractive.

Today’s relationship between journalists and high-profile athletes is often adversarial, and why not? Those making a handsome living playing children’s games are cursed with an omnipresent media horde competing 24 hours a day, seven days a week to unearth the lurid and the sensational. Who won last night’s Red Sox game too often takes a back seat to which athletic misogynist has roughed up his mistress, fathered yet another child out of wedlock, or done himself in as a result of having sustained too many concussions.

Inappropriate and anti-social behavior on the part of elite athletes is so common these days that it begs the question: Was there ever an athlete worthy of serving as an appropriate role model for children?

For those wishing to answer an unqualified “yes,” Jack Twyman is Exhibit A.

In 1960, two National Basketball Association players averaged more than 30 points per game, a mark that had never been approached before. One was the aforementioned Chamberlain, an NBA great best remembered today not for his numerous scoring, rebounding and assist records, but for his unfortunate and preposterous claim in one of his autobiographies of having bedded 20,000 different women during a remarkable life that lasted only about 23,000 days.

The other 30 points-per-game player in 1960 was Jack Twyman.

The NBA of the ’50s and ’60s was a far cry from the corporate colossus it is today; Twyman sold insurance during his off-seasons while he was an active player. He continued to excel in business during his post-basketball career, spending nearly a quarter-century as chairman and chief executive of a food wholesaling company in Dayton, Ohio, which, according to the New York Times, quintupled its earnings under his leadership during the 1980s.

But Twyman’s greatest contributions didn’t take place on a basketball court or in a boardroom. In March of 1958, Maurice Stokes, his multi-talented Cincinnati Royals teammate, tumbled over an opponent and struck his head on the floor. Given the medical knowledge of the day, he did what any other player would have done: Took a whiff of some smelling salts and kept on playing. But he had suffered what turned out to be irreversible brain damage; three days later the 24-year-old fell into a coma, and when he finally came out of it weeks later he was permanently paralyzed, unable to speak and financially destitute.

That’s when Twyman, who was 11 months younger than Stokes, stepped in. He had himself appointed Stokes’ legal guardian, and for the remaining 12 years of his ill-starred teammate’s life attended to everything that Stokes himself was incapable of doing. Twyman and his wife, Carole, later became co-trustees of the Maurice Stokes Foundation, which was set up to defray the hospital costs of needy NBA veterans unable to fend for themselves. Twyman shunned publicity for his actions as strenuously as many of today’s “superstars” court it, maintaining any friend would have done the same things he did. Similarly, the fact that he was white and the fallen Stokes was African-American was of no significance whatsoever to him.

Although he himself would likely have denied it, Jack Twyman was a true American hero. His death last week at age 78 is a reminder that quality people once existed in professional sports, and in all likelihood still do today.

— Andy Young has been trying to battle the melancholia brought on by the dreary weather of the past few days by reading all he can about Jack Twyman and Maurice Stokes, and it’s been working.