Without Royce Gracie, MMA in America would have died before it was born.
He competed in the first five UFCs. Go ahead and look at some of the complete meatheads that were in them. Art Jimmerson. Scott Morris. Sean Daugherty. Robert Lucarelli. Emmanuel Yarborough. Marcus Bossett. Joe Son. Andy Anderson. Jon Hess. Don’t even get me started on Harold Howard.
When they entered the ring, you could expect ridiculous flailing, stumbling, flopping, and wasted opportunities. When Royce entered the ring, you got to see a lean, mean, powerful, ferocious, merciless grappler who took advantage of the slightest opening and was unstoppable on the ground. Without Royce, a pretty-good fighter like Gerard Gordeau or Patrick Smith would’ve taken home a title, and Dan Severn would’ve completed the most boring UFC tournament whitewash ever (that “honor” belongs to Mark Coleman for UFC 11). With Royce, pretty good wasn’t anywhere near good enough.
It’s impossible to overstate just how critical he was in creating this whole new league from the ground up. In a sense, his one-sided loss in UFC 60 was a fitting bookend…the league had finally risen past his level.
I don’t know if Magic Johnson exactly fits the OP’s request, but as a floor leader/passer, I thought he transcended the game. I was such a diehard Laker fan by 1982, I don’t think I missed more than two or three televised games per year for the rest of his career, and I never saw him fail on a fast break. He just had an amazing court vision like no point guard before or since. (If you could take away Steve Nash’s turnovers, he might be in the conversation.) I was watching some old highlight footage of Magic on YouTube today but came away thinking that almost any Laker game during the Showtime Era could have made for a highlight reel – his highlights were that plentiful (it helped to have guys like James Worthy and Jamaal Wilkes on the wings and Kareem to keep the opponent’s defense honest).
Overall, he was not Michael Jordan’s equal IMHO (really not even close, but a little like comparing apples to oranges). The Lakers had to hide Magic on defense – just about every time he got stuck on an island his defender either blew past him or shot over him – and his outside shot was merely above average. But when it came to passing, transcendent.
Barry Sanders for football was transcendent but couldn’t change the way the game was played because his skill set was so unique. As a running back, some of his skills were average at best (blocking, receiving, pushing a pile), but his acceleration, balance, and vision were without peer. Jim Brown mentioned upthread was a better overall running back, but Barry Sanders transcended the position in a way I’ve never seen anyone else approach.
The way you describe it, though, it’s hard to argue MMA was much of a sport to transcend.
In the case of Wayne Gretzky you’re talking about a guy transcending the manner of play of a sport that had existed, and had been an established professional sport, long before he was born.
I think there are 3 different kinds of transcendent players.
Just Better - guys who are simply better at playing the game than 99% of the other top players. I think Jordan fits into this category.
Game Changers - guys who come into a sport and change the way the game is ultimately played. Others may catch or surpass their achievements, but they left their mark
Freaks of Nature - guys who do things that nobody before or since will be able to do.
The guy that embodies these, to me, is Babe Ruth.
Just better, he hit tons of home runs, high average, high walks, career leader in slugging and OPS. The amount of black ink on his Baseball-Reference page is sick.
Game Changer, he created the Long Ball game we see today. When he it 54 home runs in 1920 no team in the AL hit 54 home runs except his own. The next year HRs were up 30%.
Freak of Nature, not only was he an absolute top shelf hitter, arguably the best hitter of the modern era, he was a good pitcher too. His last two years of full time pitching, when he was 21 and 22 he put up Walter Johnson type numbers. One year led the league in ERA and Shutouts, another year leads in complete games with a 2 ERA. Obviously we don’t know how that career path would have played out, but he was a highly effective pitcher when that was his only role.
I see where you’re going with your points but for one tiny little detail: for all his reputation and foibles, the guy did what every great athlete is out there to do – he won. Only once in his entire career did he ever play on a team with a losing record. He picked up two championship rings along the way. Regardless of his motivations, he got results. And the fact remains that the NBA key is four feet wider now because the league wanted to find a way to keep him further from the basket that his opponents simply couldn’t solve on their own. If he had been the best guy on a series of bad teams that only managed to have one good season, I’d concede your point about the stars aligning just right, but since teams he played for were consistently in the hunt for the title, I’d have to say the evidence is not in your favor.
I agree that context is worth taking into consideration, but even if we ignore the raw numbers and look at the sheer magnitude of his accomplishments, the results are staggering. Nine times he led the NBA in FG Pct, eight times led the league in minutes played, 12 times led the league in rebounding, once led the league in assists, seven times led the league in PPG, second all-time in career offensive win shares and fourth all-time in defensive win shares. Oh, and he did manage to win four MVPs and a Finals MVP along the way, so he did earn some recognition in his time in spite of everything else. Drop a player of that calibre into any era, including the current one, and he’s going to be a singular force. Does he score 50 a game nowadays? Perhaps not, but he’d certainly be in the hunt for the scoring title year in, year out, and he’d be in the hunt for the rebounding title as well.
The answer to 'The Wayne Gretzky" question is, and always will be, hidden in Bernie Nichols career stats.
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By the power vested in me by The Hockey Gods:** No discussion about Wayne Gretzky is hereby permitted to proceed in any way about Wayne Gretzky’s Greatness without a glance at Bernie Nichols career stats.
Looking at the season and a half Niccols had with Gretzky in LA, it seems rather obvious. Are there any other players that had such a dramatic results due to the Gretzky Effect?
Yes, but at nowhere near the consistency or level his reputation and stats would suggest. Russell was a winner- 11 championships. Hell, Russell even won a championship as a coach/player. Wilt almost never got the best of him or the Celtics. Wilt finished with 2 championships, and only one before Russell retired. That’s not bad, but if you assume Wilt was head and shoulders above everyone else, as his stats might imply, 2 chips is pretty unremarkable. If Lebron ends his career with 2 rings, people will think he was a failure.
Wilt was often a cancer to his team who prevented them from living up to their potential. When I read things like Wilt being benched for the closing minutes of a close game 7 in the NBA finals, you kinda have to wonder whether his contemporaries really thought he was such a great asset. Can you imagine Jordan being benched during a close playoff game?
Don’t get me wrong. He is still clearly one of the best to ever play. What I object to is this notion that he is some other-worldly figure that is far better than anyone.
Highly unlikely. And that is not a knock on him, it’s just that the game is so much better and faster, he would have no chance. The same would apply to almost any athlete from that era. For example, a legend like Carl Lewis set the 100m record in 1988 at 9.93 seconds. Four people beat or tied that time in the last Olympic final. People are just that much better these days.
One of my favourite sports trivia questions is “Name all the NHL players who’ve had 150 points in a season.” Almost everyone gets Gretzky and Lemieux, and hockey fans will sometimes get Yzerman and Esposito. Wrong guesses often include Lafleur, Savard, Bossy and others.
This post is way too long to really get into the Wilt issue, but his statistical accomplishments should be seen in context. He was playing against a bunch of six-nine guys, and this was an era when Elgin Baylor could get 38 and 19 per night while shooting about 12 for 30 from the field, and his team would get to the Finals basically every year on the strength of those numbers. What Wilt did was what he did, but the idea that he would dominate today because he won once back when the league had ten teams in it, and once as a glorified garbage man on a team with Baylor, Jerry West and Gail Goodrich, is… well, come on.
The way too long, am not going to read version: my position on Wilt and on Jordan is wrapped up pretty nicely in this clip. Look at Wilt’s effort on defense, and look at the shot Oscar Robertson (Oscar fucking Robertson) is allowed to take on a basic pick and roll.
The trouble is that at some point my argument depends on what you see when (or if) you watch NBA games. What you’re saying is that if there was never a Jordan, the game today would look the same. On a very basic aesthetic level, that’s just not true, but I don’t know that describing what it looks like is going to change your mind. I’ll try anyway.
Career FG% and those numbers you listed obviously don’t determine who changed the game; it’s hard for me to believe you think they do. I admit that I’ve grown really quick to assume bad faith when it comes to arguing about “greatness,” but it seems strange to me that you’d lead with numbers like that unless this was all just an argument about how great Wilt Chamberlain is, not about Jordan himself (and even then, but a little bit less).
The league today, from year to year, is dominated by teams that play exceptional team defense and have great perimeter scoring. The best player is a 6-8 forward/guard who plays on the wing but basically initiates the offense, gets his own shots off the dribble by attacking the basket and forces double and triple teams, punishes you at the rim, plays in the post in a slowed down game, and who uses his freakish athleticism on defense to shut down the other teams’ best offensive weapons rather than guarding his position and resting up, and averages more than a steal and almost a block per game for his career. His teams have always been unstoppable in transition because of him. There’s another guy like that on the same team. Before Lebron was the best player in the league, the best player in the league was a 6-6 two guard who did all the things I listed above, and who as he got older started relying more and more on killing people from midrange with pullups and fallaways and post moves, so his efficiency went up as his athleticism dwindled, and he stayed about as deadly a scorer.
All of that above is a description of how Michael Jordan played basketball, and it’s not a description of anyone before Jordan. You say “he was good at everything” like it’s incidental to the discussion, but besides the fact that his “good” was actually the best at most things, there’s also the fact that some of what you’re including in “everything” is stuff nobody had ever done before. There had never been a guy who could catch the ball 50 feet from the basket and get to the rim over and over again if you played him straight, and score over whoever was waiting. The fact that the previous sentence seems like just a description of a good player is how Jordan changed the game. The Jordan Rules wasn’t just some cute marketing scheme; the Pistons decided that they couldn’t allow Jordan to actually play basketball. Team defense on the level that it exists now – with the premium teams put on help-side defending, hedging screens, protecting the rim and keeping the ball out of the lane – was invented to stop Jordan. Defense used to mean everybody stands between their man and the basket, and you put a hand up if they’re shooting from inside 18 feet, and occasionally you commit some kind of egregious flagrant foul on a guy with an uncontested layup.
Roughly speaking, the league went from dumping the ball in the post and passing around the perimeter with more or less zero resistance (watch an old playoff game and the announcer gets audibly excited if somebody takes an open 20 footer) to, after Jordan, placing an incredible emphasis on creating shots individually. That happened because teams started seeing the value in pressuring and scheming (and drafting, conditioning, etc.) to get the ball out of the hands of scorers as much as possible. That happened because it was the only conceivable way anyone could imagine beating Jordan’s teams. Even great players like Nowitzki or Durant, who don’t share much of Jordan’s skill set, are playing a game that’s on a different level from what was played before Jordan, because they have to play against post-Jordan defenses (albeit with the rules changed in their favor, which is a different conversation). Watch Nowitzk do his little rocker-steps and fades in the high post, and then watch late 90s Jordan in the post. Or watch Durant take that big lateral hop to create space on a game-winner. Older players didn’t have anything like that in their arsenals, because they didn’t have to.
Bill Elliott on big tracks in the mid-80’s. I’ve seen some of those races. This guy was unstoppable. A typical superspeedway race for Awesome Bill went like this: 1. Go for the lead 2. Take the lead 3. Casually pull further and further and further ahead while expending roughly as much effort as a stoned fisherman. He was Secretariat for 500 miles, the Roadrunner to #2’s Wile E. Coyote, lightning in a bottle strapped to nuclear missile. I’m convinced that the main motivation for instituting restrictor plates was that it was the only way to rein him in.
Konishiki. Now and forever. Both for being a devastating, crushing, obliterating force and for when he stopped being a devastating, crushing, obliterating force. Larger than life in every sense of the term, yet, in the waning moments of his career, all too human. He was on Wide World of Sports, posters, promotional materials. When he was denied promotion to yokozuna, it made national headlines. Now, even now, almost fifteen years after his retirement, go do a search and see how often he comes up. Heck, he’s not even entitled to that name anymore (it belongs to the sumobeya), and he still goes by it. Anyone even call him Salevaa Atisanoe, or, affectionately, “Sally”, anymore?
It’s the final of the world snooker championship today, O’Sullivan v Carter. Most people would agree that O’Sullivan is the most talented player to ever grace the green baize. In terms of dramatically changing the way the game was played, though, it’s another player who co-incidentally just retired after being knocked out of the tournament - Stephen Hendry.
He was responsible for the massive ratcheting up of quality from the late 80s - 90s - where he’d get in early on and have total commitment to clearing up the frame. Fearless long potting and breaking the reds at the earliest opportunity. Older players would tip toe around the reds, picking them off and only spreading them when they absolutely had to. Hendry and the players who came after him were so much better that they were looking to break-build from the very first shot.
The other alehouse sport, darts, is worth a mention with Phil Taylor being the supreme transcendent being. He didn’t really do anything different though, let’s face it what can you do different at darts? It’s a v simple game. He was just that much better and had more bottle than anyone else.
I just clicked to see if Tinsley were mentioned, and am pleased to see he has another fan.
Wrong. He lost seven games which is hardly the same as matches. For example 2 of his games lost were to Chinook in a match Tinsley won:
On another matter, I have a question about Tiger Woods. I’m guessing, but don’t most sports depend on brawn and innate reflexes? While golf deoends hugely on psychology and attitude? If this is true, I might be surprised Tiger is doing as well as he is, given his big life upset.
