kenobi_65:
I’m still at a loss to figure out how I won it in 2006.
There’s no way the 2016 Cubs don’t get the Sportsman award. The 2004 Red Sox won the award as a team also, plus if (a certainty) newsstand sales effect the award the Cubs are easily the best selling cover they could find.
Theo Epstein may not a bad choice… Theo Epstein and the 2016 Cubs (with the Cubs in the background)?
Nancy Pelosi (who became Speaker of the House in 2006) is probably at a loss to figure out how she ended up sharing it with everybody else.
Phelps already has one (2008); he didn’t really do anything in 2016 to deserve it again, and besides, if they do want to give it to an Olympian, it will almost certainly be one or more women (who, as I said earlier, probably would have won in 1996 had it not been for Tiger Woods).
Of all the Olympians, I think Bolt deserves it, but he won’t get it for no other reason other than the colors of the flag he entered behind at the Olympics.
I have a feeling next week’s cover is just going to be while with a blue “W,” possibly made up of smaller photos of the Cubs.
I said from the beginning it’d be Theo if the Cubs won.
I stand by that.
I also think he should just go into the Hall of Fame right now too.
Connor McGregor - hands down. Four fights this year, two of them at a weight class 25lbs above where he normally fights, ridiculous number of records in the UFC, first to hold to titles simultaneously, has raised the bar for fighters’ pay simply by virtue of being him and has gone toe-to-toe with the UFC and won every time.
I’d almost be willing to throw Holy Holmes a bone for finally destroying the Rhonda Roussey myth but she was just a one-and-done champ.
Holmes beat Rousey in November of 2015 (one year ago today, in fact), so if she was to have been recognized for that feat at all, it would have been last year.
It’s such a fond memory that it seems more recent 
All the boxing and UFC fans I know are some of the most knowledgeable sports fans in my circle of friends. Fans of the sport(s) know their shit, and they know when amazing feats and milestones have happened.
But no one else is even remotely aware. McGregor may have done the seemingly impossible, most amazing thing ever seen by an athlete - but he’s not going to win Sportsman of the Year. It’s just not going to sell magazines.
I can accept that - but MMA is about the fastest growing sport in the world. There have been breakthrough athletes who are known by even non-fans (Ronda Rousey, Georges St. Pierre, Gina Carano, Connor McGregor.)
I think you are right that it will be a long time before a (MMA)fighter gets sportsman of the year but I was going by deserving rather than who will actually win.
Has MMA ever even been on the cover of SI? Even professional wrestling has made at least one cover.
Yup here ya go. I didn’t even really try to find them - just “MMA Sports Illustrated.” There could easily be more but the dismissive tone of your question seemed to warrant a desultory response.
I didn’t include Rousey’s swimsuit issue cover because… it ought to be obvious.
And McGreggor’s accomplishments this year certainly thump the Cubs.
“Fastest-growing” is a tricky designation, as it applies pretty much only to sports that don’t have strong popularity to begin with. In the US, it’s very difficult for a truly popular sport like baseball or basketball to be “fastest-growing”–it starts from too high a baseline. It could be that MMA’s popularity is indeed growing rapidly, but it clearly still has a long way to go to catch up to some of the older and more established sports, at least in the USA.
I’ve said this before on these boards, but it’s interesting to me how much boxing has dropped off the mainstream sports radar in my lifetime. I was never a fan, but when I was a kid (born early sixties) boxing was a topic of conversation, a central part of sport talk, and sometimes even broader than just sports. The Ali-Frazier matches were part of “current events” at school, our PE teacher taught us in broad outline about the strategies the fighters used, there were boxing headlines in the newspaper and not always just in the sports section, Olympic boxing made up a big part of the televised Games, I had friends who went to see the closed-circuit broadcasts of some of the big matches.
I move in similar sorts of socioeconomic circles today, and boxing is just…gone. The last time I think I can recall it registering in any way with me and the people I know was when Tyson bit off Holyfield’s ear.
I don’t think I’ve seen a real boxing headline in the newspaper for years, I don’t think I’ve heard it discussed on sports talk radio, the Olympics hardly ever shows it these days, none of the kids I teach seems to have the slightest interest in boxers or boxing (or the slightest awareness of them).
I’m sure there are many Americans who continue to love boxing (and MMA) but it seems to have completely disappeared from my own personal landscape and the landscapes of the people I know best.
Just as an example, I’ve heard of Rousey, but not the other three you mention. I don’t follow football, but I could certainly name a dozen current players and would probably recognize the names of at least a dozen more. Football is in the air. So, for that matter, is professional golf, another sport I don’t care about one way or the other. Boxing and MMA, not so much…
You’re mostly right, but you lost it there at the end. McGregor is the best at a relatively young sport who hasn’t really exploded until the recent past.
The Cubs did something that hasn’t been done in, literally, over a century.
[hijack] I think the decline in popularity can largely be attributed to the rank corruption of the sport through the 80’s and 90’s. People just got sick of all of the extraneous BS that went along with the sport itself.
While Don King did not originate corruption in boxing he certainly exemplified and wallowed in it.
Then the Mike Tyson fiasco put the final nail in the coffin. [/hijack]
All they did was snap a century old dry spell. That is only historic in the sense that the team finally won.
But I say that as someone who cares nothing at all about baseball.
The UFC over the weekend set the attendance record at Madison Square Gardens owing largely (though not entirely) to McGreggor’s presence on the card.
I’m not saying that Connor McGreggor is going to win Sportsman of the Year (in fact I doubt he will even be considered) but in terms of individual accomplishment in a sport - both on and off “field” - in one year it would be hard to find a better candidate.
I’ll see your “generic” cover and raise you one with McGregor on it.
However, SI likes to play to its established fan bases when choosing a SOTY (which IMO is why Tiger Woods got it over any of the Atlanta Olympians in 1996), and baseball is more popular with the readers than MMA.
Besides, if it was based solely on accomplishment and dominance of a sport, I’d give it to Usain Bolt. I’d consider Tatyana McFadden, who has won (at least) 17 straight “major” wheelchair women’s marathons (London, Boston, Chicago, New York), as well, but she didn’t win the Paralympic marathon - then again, she did win the 400, 800, 1500, and 5000, along with silver in the 100 and the marathon.
A team wins the World Series every year. In the last century someone’s done it every year except 1994.
It’s neat the Cubs won it, but there’s nothing historically noteworthy about them aside from the fact the franchise had not won in awhile, a fact not really connected to anyone currently playing for the team.
Yes I know that there is a World Series champ every year. But the notworthiness of the act comes from the fact that this particular team hasn’t won it in a 100 years.
Not to mention the person that I want to/think should win it is the person who did something that no one has been able to do in 100 years…bring a championship to that team.
<– emphasis mine
So would that be the coach, manager, owner or a particular investor?
It would be whatever title Theo Epstein has. President of Baseball Operations? I think? Or something like that at least.
He was the one who came in when the Cubs were toiling in obscurity, drafted their young core, traded for their stars and is the architect for this victory.
He is also the same person who managed the other “unbreakable curse” in baseball by giving the Red Sox their world series.