I’d guess cricket comes second, assuming it’s popular in India.
But I’m not convinced popularity matters. Soccer is so popular because it’s cheap. Even in the poorest countries kids can play a pickup game with nothing but a ball, and you don’t even necessarily need a ball. Any cloth that can be rolled up will do.
I wouldn’t limit discussions of the greatest restaurant meals to the McDonald’s menu, or the greatest beer to the Budweiser variations, and in the same way I wouldn’t limit “greatest athlete” to the sports of the masses.
It takes quite a bit of infrastructure to play football and hockey, and so their popularity is limited from the outset. One football player made a comment that he felt playing in the NFL is a privilege, because normal people simply can’t play it like you can go out and join your company’s softball league. You have to be very talented to even be able to put on pads.
Since you mentioned it, the break every 30 seconds isn’t for beer commercials. Football is a turn based strategy game, like chess. There is little more strategy in soccer than there is in foosball. Football, on the other hand, has a myriad possible strategic matchups to ponder every 30 seconds. The other purpose is the same purpose rounds in boxing serve. Given the chance to rest up for a bit, boxers are able to come out swinging more aggressively than if there were no rounds. Any fan of the UFC knows that a 20 minute fight with no breaks has nowhere near the activity of 7 3-minute rounds with a minute rest in between each. This has the effect of increasing the overall level of intensity of the live action in the game.
So there you go. More strategic depth, plus more intense action. The fact that you can put in the occasional beer commercial is simply an added bonus. (And penis pill commercials. Don’t forget the penis pills!)
On another note, the knock against race car drivers (and jockeys) is not that they aren’t athletes. The knock is that it isn’t a human doing most of the work. It’s the car or the horse that are the true “athletes”. The driver may be calling the plays, but the car’s engine is doing the bulk of the work. (This argument may or may not break down when scrutinized against gravity sports, like skiing. It’s not originally my argument, though I tend to agree with it.)
The strategy in (non-US) football is deep Ellis, deep. Its v hard to pick up on because the game is so fluid, but seeing one team slowly outplay another over ninety minutes can be a lesson in sports strategy. I would say hockey is sort of similar, minus the fluidity, I would watch it in the US as a casual observer and not really understand why one team was getting the upper hand, because I didn’t know the game.
I like the hyper-analysis of sports strategy in the US, particularly with respect to match-ups. I lived in the US for a bit and people would talk about John Cheney’s match-up defence at Temple U in the same sort of reverential tones that a mathmatician would use when discussing a particularly powerful theorem.
One thing I always found funny was the way some NBA players are described as being “unstoppable”, eg "Allen Iverson cannot be stopped, no one can guard this man! You just have to let him have his forty points and leave it at that. " It sounds so defeatist. I don’t know any other sports were this attitude prevails (do people really think like this in basketball?)
Interesting discussion…and one that I don’t see being resolved any time soon!
I do have a pick for the '80s and '90s that I think that many people may agree on as this athlete (and his sport) possesses many of the qualities argued for in the previous posts.
Tony Hawk (skating). He revolutionized and dominated the sport for 20 years, was a constant innovator, and I don’t think that anyone can (seriously) doubt his athleticism.
I’d like to nominate Billie Jean King for an Honorable Mention in either the '60s or the '70s (I think she’d qualify in both). The woman was not only an extraordinary athlete ("…by the time she quit playing competitively in '84, she’d won 71 singles championships and had been ranked in the world’s top ten seventeen times, #1 in the world five times, and #1 in the U.S. seven times."), she was a pioneer in women’s sports. I think women’s tennis would be about as entertaining today as women’s golf, if it hadn’t been for Billie Jean.
He is an athlete, but it’s tough to have a strong opinion of people who compete in sports where victories are assigned by judges. He was revolutionary and had a pretty large media impact, but a solo, gravity-based sport decided by judges will be a pretty tough sell. I like the guy, but you’ll never convince me he’s in the same discussion with Jordan, Gretzky and Bo.
One question to pose:
How heavily should mental aptitude weigh in this discussion? Team sports generally speaking will dominate this factor, though using the “British” definition of athlete referenced above mental/analyitical capacity would be outside the definition. I personally prefer the “American” defintion which is more inclusive, but it’s a factor I haven’t seen much reference to here.
If hand-eye coordination is a important factor in a the measure of an athlete, why isn’t ability to remember plays and/or read opponents?
Due to this measure I almost always degrade the value of a baseball player versus a football player.
A second question to consider:
How much does simple abnormal size factor in? I tend to discount guys like Jim Brown and Wilt Chamberlain because they simple were so abnormally large in comparison to their contemporaries. As a result the feats of a typically sized guy like Jordan and Payton seems to be a much greater athletic achievement in my view.
Lastly, Barry Sanders? WTF!?! You must be high. Lets elect the guy who never won anything, is responsible for the greatest number of negative yardage plays in the history of the NFL, and single-handedly killed countless drives by getting stuffed on 3rd and 2. Yeah, he’s a highlight reel and a terrifically agile and fast guy, but in the grand scheme of things I can name probably 25 RBs in the 80s and 90s I’d take over him. The reason he put up those stats was two-fold. First he was the only option on offense for most of his career, a fact I do not hold against him, secondly because he always tried to hit the home-run. He was ineffective as a short yardage runner and his resistance to accepting a no-gain play created a staggering number of 4 and 5 yard losses on critical downs. If he wasn’t such a good natured guy people would have crushed him for being a selfish stats hungry guy. Granted his teams sucked and perhaps he was coached to play this way, or perhaps you could argue that the Lions best hope for winning was him trying to make every run into a 60 yarder, but the fact remains that he was never consistently effective against anything resmbling an effective D and was consistently brought down behind the line. Most smart football coaches would not trade a guy who ran for 1 60 yard run and 5 -2 yard runs for a guy who ran 10 5 yard runs, which is the difference between Sanders and Payton/Brown/Dickerson.
I would suggest that it is tough to have a strong opinion on an athlete who competes in a sport with which you are not familiar (and this is not directed at you specifically, but rather in general). It is the reason why most of us (as North Americans who have played football, baseball, and basketball) would consider Jordan, Gretzky, and Bo as the premier athletes of their generations. I can appreciate the accomplishments of tennis players, rowers, cricket dudes (what the hell do you call them?!?!), cyclists, and wrestlers but I don’t have any point of reference to “calibrate” my appreciation. However, I can unequivocally say that Bo Jackson is amazing not only because of what he accomplished on the field/diamond but also because I played football and baseball. By the same token I can say that Tony Hawk is beyond amazing because I skate.
BTW, skating is unique in that kids don’t grow up dreaming of winning “the big skateboard championship.” Contest wins are a necessary evil and are by no means the arbiter of who the best skaters are.
I started a debate about which sport had more depth, and what little participation it got was a unanimous “yes, football has more strategic depth, but that doesn’t mean there is none in soccer.”
I can’t imagine 30 different soccer teams having 200 different plays that they constantly update each game. I can’t imagine having to watch game film of every performance your opponent has ever played (like chess) just to get an idea of what to expect, and then not see any of it on game day, as they’ve completely retooled to surprise you.
Not getting into the fractal-like unending depth of strategy, but just the top level overarching schemes. I can name around a dozen unique approaches to the game of football. (West Coast, Smash Mouth, Run & Shoot, Vertical Passing, etc…) This isn’t even mentioning the vast assortment of personnel matchups you can tinker with via formations. How many different top level strategies are there in soccer?
How much game film do I really need to watch on a soccer team before I have a firm understanding of what they’re going to do against me in the upcoming game?
This is a particularly relevant point when I compare football to chess. Kasparov complained that Deep Blue had an unfair advantage because it had generated no game film for him to watch.
I maintain that the post-snap aspect of football (with its hot reads, option routes, coverage jumping, etc…) alone is on par with the strategic depth of soccer, and that the pre-snap reads, audibles, formations, playcalling, and the entire playbook itself is an element of depth simply not paralleled in soccer.
The point of the post you were quoting wasn’t that Lemieux was better than Gretsky, it was that Gretsky was not as far ahead of the pack as Australian cricketer Don Bradman.
No denying the enormous amount of strategic thinking that has grown up around American football, its practically a cottage industry. The game is bewilderingly complex on the face of things, but very amenable to analysis due to the static resting state before each play. Football, by contrast, is far, far more difficult to analyse in any strategic fashion. Ninety minutes of constant movement, with one break, is obviously going to be resistant to attempts at interpreting patterns of play. As a result, football analysis is in its infancy, relative to the far more mature thinking that goes on in American football.
Your doing a great job emphasising the cerebral aspects of American football, but I have to say that I am not entirely convinced. Fundamentally, chess is played by geniuses and professional US football is played by dumbasses, by and large. There is a gap of some sorts between the mountains of analysis going on and its implementation on the football field. How many of the great plays made in a game are down to the bespectacled analyst sitting in the stands, and how many down to the superb athleticism of the players getting results? eg, fuck the playbook, lets just hoist one up to Randy.
Or to put it another way, who wins out of great players/dumb coaching staff versus mediocre players/brilliant coaching staff?
Regarding the line calling football players dumbasses, some are, but taken in comparison to every other sport its no contest. Football players are brighter, this fact is almost assured by the common practice of teams testing prospective draftees before choosing them using a virual battery of tests. Certain positions allow for less knoledge than QB, but the only ones I can think ofwhich allow a player to be a total dumbass is the kicking game, and in some cases the D-Line. To assert otherwise implicates your lack of understanding of anything beyond Lifetime channel specials and bad sit-com plots.
This question is so easy to answer its comical…New England Patriots
Great list ISiddiqui, they’re all legends bar Keegan, as huk24 points out. He was a little before my time, but I don’t think he had much talent as a player. His reputation lies in his phenomenal work rate and application, he was twenty years ahead of his time in terms of physical conditioning. Can’t really think of a replacement right now who could go on the list.
Omniscient, Beckham is a little below this level in terms of quality, although he will no doubt go down in the history books as the first truly global football media icon. He’s a great player though, IMO. If you picked a world team right now he’d be in the squad, but maybe not as a starter.
I am a bit surprised by the rejection of Joe Montana as one of the greats (at least as far as American sports). Is that because the OP asks for greatest athletes?
There is no question that Montana was the greatest QB of his time. He may not have had the running ability of Elway of the stats that Marino put up, but come on. Elway didn’t win the big one until the mid/late 90s and Marino didn’t win anything. All Montana did was win and win and win. Does he not count as an athlete in your opinion?
I would also like to add Jim Thorpe as one of the most versitile athletes of which I am aware. His ability to dominate at many sports puts Jim Brown and Bo to shame:
Won decathlon and penthatlon events at 1912 Olympics
He played major-league baseball from 1913 to 1919
Outstanding halfback in Football
I am pretty sure he could have won at almost any sport during his prime outside of boxing.
I would also like to hear more about non-American greats. Please enlighten us here across the pond! We simply don’t get much exposure to sports other than NFL, MLB, NFL, and the NBA.
However, I am a big fan of mixed martial arts and grappling. Rickson Gracie could be added to this discussion if he was more well known. He has a record of winning approximately 400 fights without a single defeat in mixed martial arts, vale tudo, and brazillian jiu-jitsu competitions (all pro level competition). Some say he fought watered-down competition to preserve his record as he got older, but that is still an outstanding accomplishment. Marciano is the only boxer I know have that went undefeated.
As far as the hockey sub-argument, it really is clear that the Great One is the greatest to play hockey: http://www.canoe.ca/Gretzky/records.html
I had a quick count of 44 records, 9 MVPs, and 2 playoff MVPs. That is really un-fucking-believable.
(No comment on whether the cricket player is better since i don’t even know what a googley is!)
Gene Tunney retired undefeated, although he dropped a decision to Harry Greb earlier in his career.
But you can’t mention grappling without talking about Yasuhiro Yamashita, the greatest judoka of all time. 202 consecutive wins (196 by ippon), seven All Japan championships, four World championships, and an Olympic gold medal. It would have been two Olympic golds if Japan hadn’t boycotted the 1980 Olympics.
That is truly incredible. Another amazing guy is Yoon Dong Sik–I can’t find his stats right now, but he may be the best judoka outside of Japan. I believe he also competed in Japan and only lost once or twice.
I have an interesting article (I guess it’s really more of a chart ) for people to read regarding what the toughest sport is…here you go
This isn’t necessarily the be all, end all but it is pretty interesting. The top 10 are:
Boxing
Ice Hockey
Football
Basketball
Wrestling
Martial Arts
Tennis
Gymnastics
Baseball/Softball
Soccer
It’s important to note that Cricket isn’t on the list (it’s espn). I had a very hard time making up my own list of best athletes per decade. I ended up with about 10 each after 1940 (don’t know much before then). They are generally made up of people who play in those particular sports (with the exception of Lance Armstrong, Paula Newby Fraser, Karolina Kluft, Joyner-Kersee, and a few others)