Don't Trust Snakes: Naming a "greatest all-around athlete" -- a pointless exercise

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Naming a "greatest all-around athlete" -- a pointless exercise

My friend, a serious practitioner and follower of cycling--and yet, somehow, not a big Lance Armstong or Sheryl Crow fan--wrote a nice critique of this ESPN.com column in her blog. I thought I'd repost my comment to that blog entry here, since it stands alone as another critique of the linked ESPN.com column. I'm all about not reinventing the wheel. So here you go:

What a silly article from ESPN.com. I particularly liked the idea that Armstrong should be penalized in the final analysis for "riding a perfect piece of equipment" (um, in competition with others riding the same) and having a good team behind him (unlike DiMaggio, Montana et al., right?). The whole article attacks a straw man, a claim--which I've not seen anywhere else--that Armstrong is being anointed "the greatest all-around athlete and greatest athletic performer ever."

Articles like this are why we have metaphors involving "apples and oranges" and "horses for courses." Who's to say what Armstrong would have accomplished in another sport, or what kind of cyclist Bjorn Borg or John Stockton or some Kenyan runner would have made? It's absurd to speculate.

Certainly Armstrong's dominance supports the saying that hard work beats talent if talent doesn't work hard. All sports do have two things in common, preparation and execution, and these are inseparable. In a sport like cycling the link is obvious, but it's also present just as much in sports where legends are born from easily-identified clutch moments. Larry Bird would surely be the first to trace his many clutch performances back to the thousands of shots he took in empty gyms when the competition was off doing something else. It would be interesting to create a sport you couldn't prepare for (maybe a decathlon of randomly-selected events) and see who came out on top , but we don't do that.

Bayless's candidates for all-around greatness are idiosyncratic at best. For him it seems that nothing tops the ability to compete at the highest levels of both football and baseball (in the relatively unskilled outfield, of course) without collecting many (any?) rings in either sport or, especially in Bo Jackson's case, having any lasting impact at all. Lance will be remembered a lot longer than Bo or Deion, that's for sure.

Bayless's choices and omissions are curious. He seems to love what might be called "athleticism," but picks John Elway and not Michael Vick. Women get no mention: no Babe Didrikson Zacharias or Martina Navratilova on the list. Mickey Mantle makes the list but not DiMaggio, whose streak has been identified as the single most improbable performance in the history of sports (by a wide margin). No Carl Lewis. No Herschel Walker, whose mix of football and other prowess might exceed that of Jackson or Sanders. No Pelé, Maradona, Ronaldo, Michael Owen, Zidane, etc. I could go on.

Now that Armstrong is retired, I think there are only three active athletes in major sports with a fair chance to be remembered as the best ever in their sport. These are the people it makes sense to compare Armstrong with. Tellingly, Bayless mentions none of them.

They are Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Martina Navratilova. Maybe Barry Bonds sneaks in there, I'm not sure. He has an invisible asterisk in any case.