This concerns me as well. I don’t want to believe he was juiced, because I am a huge fan. But it is reasonable to suspect that because so many people were caught using steroids, and he beat most of them, that he also used them.
But, again, I wear fan goggles on this one. We share the same alma mater and I have met him a few times. Contrary to the bad press he has received, he is a VERY good guy.
At the Liberty Bowl in 1996, I was in a big crowd waiting to get into the stadium. I look to my right and there stands Carl Lewis. Right next to me. He passes the VIP entrance and just keeps walking with the crowd. As the crowd begins a UH cheer, Lewis joins right in with it.
I checked, and here’s what I found for career scoring records:
Goals per game: Gretzky: 0.601 Lemieux 0.776
Assists per game: Gretzky: 1.32 Lemieux 1.14
Points per game: Gretzky 1.921 Lemieux 1.925
Gretzky was obviously a great athlete. But the idea that he exceeded his fellow competitiors by a greater margin than did Don Bradman is not supported by the facts.
Gretzky played every sport well; by all accounts he could have been a major league baseball player or a pro golder if he’d tried. The fact that he chose to have a complete hockey career, as opposed to reducing his hockey career to have a mediocre baseball career like Bo Jackson or Deoin Sanders (doesn’t anyone REMEMBER those guys playing baseball? They weren’t all that good) seems a strange reason to dismiss his claim.
What’s more impressive to you; someone who is the greatest EVER in his sport, like Gretzky, or someone who was not one of the thousand best in either sport he played, like Bo Jackson?
You know, it’s understandable on a message board based in America, and dominated by Americans, that any list of the greatest sports stars will have a strong American tilt. It’s happened before on these boards, and will happen again. But this is the first time i’ve ever actually seen anyone argue that a player from a particular sport doesn’t evenqualify, based purely on the fact that it’s not a sport that most Americans care about. It’s a bit depressing, really.
Also, if you’re arguing based on the popularity of the sport itself, then you’d have to disqualify Lance Armstrong. Sure, everyone’s heard of him, but how many Americans really give a shit about cycling as a professional sport? Hell, how many Americans paid any attention to the Tour de France before Armstrong started winning?
Same with people like Carl Lewis and Jesse Owens. Very few people pay attention to track and field until the Olympics come around every four years. I’ll bet more Americans watch pro hockey on a weekly basis than watch track and field or cycling (well, maybe not this year with the NHL strike).
As for my own contribution, i’m going for another non-American:
1980s Jahangir Khan (squash): Unbeaten for five straight years and over 500 matches. Winner of 6 World Opens and 10 successive British Opens.
I’m going to chime in with those questioning the Joe Montana pick. Montana was probably only the 3rd best quarterback of the 80’s (behind Elway and Marino), let alone football player or athlete. You gotta go with Gretsky, Bird or Magic.
Bo Jackson never attended a football training camp, took one week off after a 162-game baseball season and then led the league in average yards per carry his final two full seasons before his hip injury. He was the best running back in the league – with zero preparation and no off-season.
And he also was a starter in Major League Baseball’s All-Star game, 1989. (And won the MVP.) Obviously, injury derailed his chance for long-term success in either sport, but his pure athletic prowess is unmatched in the last three decades. The only guy I gather that touches him in the last 50 years is Jim Brown. And for all the talk about Brown’s all-around ability, he played one pro sport.
Umm, while it seems easy to hand Michael Jordan the 90’s title, consider for a second: Barry Sanders.
Played for a lousy team in the pros, an average team in college (in a conference filled with powers) and became the All-time rusher in each. Well, he would have become the all-time pro rusher if it weren’t for a contract dispute. And this on a crap team with mediocre lineman “blocking” for him and no passing game. And playing the most violent sport in the world, he was durable at 5’7" and missed 7 games in a 10-year career. Oh, made the Pro Bowl each year, a perfect 10 for 10.
Football players are the best athletes (by far), and Barry was the best of all of them in the 90’s.
Jordan had Pippen, Grant, Rodman, Phil Jackson. Barry had… Rodney Peete???
I guess this same argument could be made for Walter Payton in the 70’s.
If we’re going to talk about squash (and why shouldn’t we, even though it’s very much a minor sport in the US), I’ll see your Jahangir and raise you a compatriot of yours, Heather McKay, who won sixteen consecutive British Opens (at the time, the equivalent of Wimbledon for tennis) from 1962-1977. She only dropped two games in total during this British Open run. Over a period of nearly twenty years (1962-1981), she only lost twice in tournament play.
She took up racquetball at age 34, and not long thereafter was world #1 at that sport (and earned more money than she ever had at squash).
[It is probably very much to the benefit of the game of squash that no current players dominate the sport to anywhere near the extent that Jahangir or Heather McKay did, and the world #1 spot is nowadays a much less secure position.]
If people are throwing in Joe Montana and, even worse, golf players as the greatest athletes of the decades, then how about these two titans:
Phil “the power” Taylor, twelve time world darts champion. The greatest thrower of tungsten ever to stand on the ochy. Dominates his sport like no other currently active athlete. Except perhaps, for:
Dougie Lampkin! Twelve world titles in motorcycle trials riding, arguably the greatest trials rider ever.
Also, ice-hockey is not really my game, but I am reliably informed by the hockey-fight community that Bob Probert is the greatest player ever to lace em up. Put old Bob down for the 80s.
I understand this is a US centric board, but the concentration upon athletes whom most of the world has heard little of, to the exclusion, nay, even the tacit dismissal, of true world champions is amusing if only for confirming the stereotype, you sound like a bunch of petty, parochail, provincials
True, it didn’t state ‘worlds greatest athletes by decade’ but it might have added the words ‘North American’, if that’s what we really want to talk about.
That’s fine and fair enough, now, how about reality,
lets look at what would be recognised as the Worlds greatest athletes, around the world and by the rest of the world and not just in the good ol’ US of
Actually, the reason I named US athletes, is that those so named would definately be recognised as the worlds greatest around the world in their sport, in that, at least I show a certain amount of balance.
The big differance between the names I posted, and some of the US posters, is that I am prepared to consider athletes from around the world including America, which to me shows a more balanced view.
I also note there is something of a paucity of female athletes mentioned here too, I also mention athletes that relatively few outside their own country will have heard about, maybe some folk will have the initiative to do a search on them and discover something they didn’t know.
US media and sports business pushes and promotes US sport because that’s where the money is, so in the US baseball stars, football stars are well known, but renown is not the only criteria by which to judge the ability of athletes, all thats happening here is that the best known to American athletes are being named by American posters, with only small regard to others who are giants in their own sports.
My take on it is simply this, don’t be so blinkered, things like this thread will always be a matter of opinion, but look wider and you’ll maybe see other points of view.
It is, after all, the mission statement of this board.
While we’re adding fringe candidates, I offer Takeru Kobayashi, Hotdog Eating Contest World Champion. HEY! It’s on ESPN, so it must be a sport! And he’s not even an American!
[sub] I kid. I kid. My list is hopeless North American. I don’t follow sports outside the US much and that is naturally going to effect my list.[/sub]
Well, if you want to call people such as Daly Thompson, and Juan Fangio as fringe candidates, and performers in little sports that are hardly know or competed seriously, fair enough
All I maybe ask, is that perhaps you google a few of those named, and see whats out there, no need to be some kind of expert, but perhaps you’ll see how great the scale and competitiveness of other sports are, and that they have immense followings around the globe.
Yeah, i should have mentioned McKay. She truly was incredible. I guess i was just following the trend and focusing on men. She would be a good contender for the 1960s and the 1970s.
And i agree with you that it’s probably better for the sport that such domination seems to be a thing of the past.
Actually, i think he was more concerned about a couple of people who, in this thread, have dismissed people that they actually knew about simply because the sport they played isn’t “big” in America. WordMan actually dismissed Wayne Gretsky as a possibility because hockey isn’t as popular in America as football.
No-one should be faulted for their ignorance of things that they’ve never even heard of, but being unwilling to incorporate them once you know about them, just because they’re not big in America, strikes me as a little counterproductive.
