Sumo : Chiyonofuji, “The Wolf”
Judo : Jigaro Kano (not really in disagreement with Shodan)
Cheers, Bippy
My vote would go to Ruth: He not only revolutionized baseball,
He saved Baseball. Remember the 1919 World Series?
Cricket (bowling) : Shane Warne
Cricket (batting) : Brian Lara.
Or am I out of date?
Only insofar as he’s dead 
Seriously: check out his records. They make Elway and Montana look like hacks, and Johnny U played in an era that didn’t favor the passing game so much.
Though he can’t be the best football player because Jim Brown was effing Superman.
Wow, a lot of replies in 24 hours.
As the OP, I wanted to clarify what I was after:
Not who you thought was the best in a sport up to this point in time, but so much the best that their efforts will probably never be equalled, much less surpassed.
Hence Babe Ruth may have been good in his time, but if his records have been surpassed since, he remains in his time, not THE sportsman for all time. Tiger hasn’t even equalled Nicklaus for majors, or Nelson for a grand slam, so he can’t qualify (yet).
So I accept Gretzky, Navratilova for number of Grand Slam titles, Nadi for fencing, Mackay for squash.
Any others? And details, please. (eg Kurt Browning)
Re: Kurt Browning: First man to land a quad in competition, though they’re becoming common. Phenomenal footwork, phenomenal artistry, phenomenal showmanship. (The last three are all obviously a trifle subjective.)
Honestly, as far as records go, they almost all get broken, with a few exceptions… it’s the nature of sports. The few records that can be legitimately deemed safe are mostly longevity records, e.g. Cal Ripken. However, based on the updated requirements I’d like to amend my plea- nobody’s going to score 100 points in an NBA game, not with the way they play defense nowadays… there’s only two teams out there who you can count on to put up 100 points a game.
I have to say, though, that the specific numbers as far as the records can be pretty meaningless… I mean, to have the same impact as Ruth did statistically, the next home run king would need to crack about 170 in a year and a couple thousand career HR. Also, expanded leagues and schedules are really screwing up the scope of alot of record books- I think David Justice is the all time home run and RBI record holder for postseason games, and if you look at, say, Todd Helton or Alfonso Soriano’s stats thus far and extrapolate, they’re all going to break some kind of records.
Actually, spin was the mainstay of many bowling attacks of Bradman’s era. Two of Bradman’s Aussie contemporaries, Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly and Clarie Grimmett, both spinners, led the Aussie attack, for example. Hedley Verity, another spinner, was considered perhaps England’s finest bowler of the 1930’s. (BTW, Verity died in WWII, when he would have been at the peak of his career but for the war.) In a later era, Jim Laker and Tony Lock, Surrey’s “spin twins,” dominated English bowling in the 50’s, a decade overloaded with spinners on the British Isles (how times have changed).
Bradman, in fact, was considered a remarkably good player of spin. A great article by Gideon Haigh, which appeared in Wisden after Bradman’s death, noted how quick Bradman was to move to the flight of the ball, something many modern cricketers (save Tendulkar! noted Haigh) failed to do. Bradman’s main weakness was not against spin but short-pitched fast bowling, hence England’s attempt at “leg-theory,” better known as Bodyline, to thwart him. I think Bradman’s nemeses if he’d played during the 70’s would have been Wes Hall and Joel Garner rather than Bishan Bedi and Bhagwat Chandrasekar.
But I’m willing to concede that Sachin Tendulkar is the closest thing we’ll have to Bradman for a long time. Bradman himself noted the similarities. Tendulkar for the 90’s tops the same list I produced for Bradman in the 30’s (though by a much smaller margin). And it’s true that fielding standards have improved greatly since the 30’s, though one could also say that pitches have as well. Still, I’m more than willing to give Bradman the benefit of the doubt as the best batsman of all time.
duke: thanks for pointing out the abundance of spin, i was about to speak up.
As for Johny Unitus, theres a man with sideburns you can set your watch too.
no seriously, I didnt know he really existed outside of the simpsons.
My vote definately goes to Bradman.
Allow me to second Duke. I was just working out how to cross this thread over with the “just spit liquid out my nose” thread.
Bradman also had to deal with uncovered pitches, which would let spinners have their way with any batsman unfortunate enough to have to bat on a sticky wicket.
Bradman’s one weakness was against sustained, quality pace bowling which there wasn’t a lot of in his day. Nevertheless, on all pitches, against all attacks, he was so stupidly far beyond the curve it’s ludicrous.
Tendulkar, OTHO, tends to be a flat-track bully who (with notable exceptions) is only an average batsman away from home. I wouldn’t class him as the best batsman running around today.
Can’t agree with you here; have to side with duke, jono, BigNik, etc.
And, even if we ignore their points altogether, i think that, for purely pragmatic reasons, we have to pretend, in a comparison like this, that a “good” player in 1930 is the equivalent of a “good” player in 2000. Sure, those guys back then weren’t the professional athletes that modern cricketers, football players., etc. are. And sure, they had different conditions to deal with. But, in the absence of any reasonably objective way of comparing different time periods and assigning values to them, we have to adopt a system of temporal equivalence.
You could even argue, as some people do, that players from the 1930s were actually better natural athletes, because they didn’t have the early, elite levels of training that many modern sportsmen and women have.
It’s certainly possible to argue that Tendulkar is the games best current batsman. It’s also pretty certain that he’s one of the best ever. But he’s nowhere near as far ahead of his contemporaries as Bradman was. I did a Wisden search of current and recent players, and limited it to those who have batted more than 50 innings (to weed out the occasional 2-test wonder who retires with an average of 87 or something).
The only peson with a higher average than Tendulkar is Adam Gilchrist, with a batting average of 58.11. Now, even though i’m an Australian, there’s no way i’d argue that Gilchrist is a better batsman; he’s had the advantage of a few high scores, abetted by the fact that he finishes “not out” about once in every five innings (11 out of 56).
Tendulkar averages 57.58 for his career. And, while i wouldn’t quite agree with BigNik that Tendulkar is only “average” away from home, he has certainly been much better in India than he has outside it.
His averages are:
home: 64.52
away: 52.46
and, for playing in each country:
Australia: 46.14
Bangladesh: 18.00
England: 71.59
India: 64.52
New Zealand: 41.50
Pakistan: 35.83
South Africa: 42.40
Sri Lanka: 111.66
West Indies: 47.69
Zimbabwe: 40.00
There are four other current players averaging in the fifties (Dravid; Hayden; Flower; Kallis), as well as a few above 48 (Lara, S. Waugh, Inzamam-ul-Haq). This list also discounts other recent players with averages in this range (Border; Crowe; Miandad; Vengsarkar). So, Tendulkar’s average is only about 15% higher (at most) than about ten or twelve current and recent players. And, as duke pointed out, Bradman’s average was about 50% higher than any of his contemporaries, or anyone since, for that matter.
You stated earlier:
But this overlooks the fact that the batting average is of key importance, because it is a figure that remains largely independent of the number of matches played. Playing many more games allows players to rack up a large number of total runs or a large number of centuries.
And even then, Tendulkar isn’t as impressive as Bradman, IMO. Tendulkar has 31 centuries and 35 half-centuries in 105 matches (169 innings). Bradman had 29 centuries and 13 half-centuries in 52 matches (80 innings).
I would have to disagree here. With regards to your first para above, I would say we are comparing apples and oranges. If we assume temporal equivalence, then there’s probably a dozen unrecorded players who played cricket in the 1800s who were as dominant in their times as Bradman/Tendy were in theirs. The correct thing would be to assume that we are comparing apples and oranges here, or at the very least, cricket has gotten harder and more competitive with time.
A broader question here, is what is meant by “best batsmen” ? Sure, we can talk about numbers and Tendulkar/Bradman have those by their side, but are we talking about consistent performance over time or are we talking about those who had sheer batting “genius” ? If the latter’s the case, then Vivian Richards comes into the picture as well and I don’t think the picture is as clear-cut.
As for American Football, there’s only one answer, and that’s Jerry Rice. There is no argument to the contrary.
He is number one in 33 different statistical categories, including:
Career TD’s
Career receptions
Receiving yards for a season
Consecutice 1000+ receiving yard per season
Consecutive Pro-Bowl appearances (10)
The list goes on and on. Despite his being 40 years old, he still is a force to be reconed with whenever he lines up. The man is amazing.
If you look at his full body of work, throughout his career, there’s NOBODY that comes close to what he’s done on the field.
With respect to the first paragraph, i still contend that, in the absence of anything to go on other than eyewitness accounts and statistics, we have to do the best we can with what we have. Sure, cricket has gotten harder with time, but it hasn’t just gotten harder for Tendulkar. All those other cricketers only a few runs behind him in average have also had to deal with modern bowlers and modern wickets and modern schedules. What i meant when i said that we have to assume temporal equivalence was that i think it is fair to assume that, in general, an average test cricketer in the 1930s and an average test cricketer in the 1990s probably had about the same amount of natural talent; it’s just that the latter receives more training from an earlier age, and is coached much more rigorously once he gets to the elite level.
If Bradman had been born 60 years later, would he have averaged 99.94 against the teams of the 1990s? I really don’t know. And if Tendulkar had been born 60 years before, would he have averaged almost 100? I don’t know that either. I think we can only assess their performance in relation to their contemporaries, and overall in the history of cricket that we have available to us. And we can also assess their perceived dominance of the game, and it seems to me that Bradman was more feared by opposition teams than Tendulkar is today.
With regard to your second paragraph, i absolutely agree. In fact, when i was looking at the Wisden statistics last night i was rather surprised to see Viv Richards averaged “only” about 45 in test cricket. As someone who spent his teenage years watching Richards smash Australian bowlers all over the park, i can honestly say that he was one of the greatest batsmen i’ve ever seen. On his day, he was unstoppable, and his bat seemed like it was three feet wide. Martin Crowe of New Zealand was similarly spectacular on a good day, and i also loved to watch Gordon Greenwich and Desmond Haynes take apart an opening attack (even while i wished for them to be dismissed).
I certainly agree that there is plenty of room for subjective judgment here. Although i never thought of him as particularly flashy, it was always a pleasure to watch Sunil Gavaskar craft a long innings. Javed Miandad could also be amazing on the right day. And what about South Africa’s Graeme Pollock, who some thought was the best batsman in the world at the time, but whose test career was cut short by sporting boycotts of South Africa over apartheid (boycotts i agreed with, BTW). Pollock averaged 60.97 in 23 tests (41 innings), including 7 hundreds and 11 fifties.
As an Australian teenager in the early and mid 1980s, i got quite depressed watching my team beaten time and again, especially by England and the West Indies. Yet, time after time, when Australia looked like they were going to be bundled out for a meagre score, Allan Border would dig them out of the hole with a magnificent innings. Border ended up averaging 50.56, and the fact that so many of his great performances came as captain of a struggling team makes him an even greater batsman than his figures indicate, in my opinion.
Things have turned around now, and Australia is at the top of the world cricketing totem pole. I know this might smack of heresy to many Aussies, but i won’t be too depressed when England finally wins the ashes back; beating them so convincingly over such a long period has been a little boring. In general, no matter who is playing, i like to see a good contest.
With the one difference being, given their respective sheer talents, The Don was probably able to utilise it further against the bowlers then than Tendy is able to be use his against today’s bowling & fielding.
If the swap scenario you mentioned cannot be reasonably contemplated, then saying either of Bradman or Tendulkar is better is pointless
I’ve seen Lance Armstrong and Miquel Indurain nominated for cycling, but neither one is even close to Eddie Merckx.
Merckx’s wins:
5 Tours of France
5 Tours of Italy
4 World Championships
7 Milan-San Remo
5 Liege-Bastogne-Liege
3 Paris-Roubaix
3 Ghent Wevelgem
3 Fleche Wallone
3 Paris-Nice
2 Tour of Flanders
2 Amstel Gold Race
2 Tours of Belgium
2 Tours of Lombardy
1 Tour of Spain
1 Tour of Switzerland
17 6-Day Races
World Hour Record, Mexico 1972 49.431km
Super Prestige Trophy 7 times
Well I am going against the grain on Baseball and saying Willie Mays. I am not looking at the stats between the different eras. I think of whom (did I use that correctly) I would pick first overall on my team if I was to draft an imaginary baseball team of all the players in history. Mays had it all and did it all.
Gretzky no question about it. Case closed. Next!