Noah Godwin
Assistant Sports Editor
Sports fans are doing it more and more. Fans force themselves and others to believe that the players they’re watching right now are the greatest players of all time.
These false beliefs come through the most in football. Name the best football player before the 1970s. You’re not alone if you have a difficult time even thinking of a player from that long ago.
Now rank the top football coaches of all time. Vince Lombardi, Bear Bryant, Knute Rockne … Pete Carroll?
Maybe the only reason the coaches of the past are revered so much more than contemporary coaches is that we really can’t imagine how those coaches managed to win games with those players.
Most fans now think that they’ve had the pleasure of watching in just the past 15 years the best athletes ever. Most likely they’re wrong.
But there are a few athletes who have received their all-time greatest status fairly. It’s hard to argue about Michael Jordan, so I won’t.
Lance Armstrong has been branded the greatest cyclist of all time, but maybe it has more to do with him receiving more funding and using better equipment than his skills alone. I wonder what would happen if Jan Ullrich received the same funding as Armstrong?
We all saw what happened in “Cool Runnings” when the playing field was more level. OK, maybe Armstrong is the greatest. I just compared a German cyclist to a Jamaican bobsled team coached by John Candy.
Beyond Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong, I really don’t know if we’ve seen the greatest athletes of all-time in the last 15 years.
Soccer and boxing are easy sports because nobody has really challenged Pele or Ali as the greatest in their respective sports, but give Freddy Adu and American sports fans some time.
We’ve probably had an all-time high in pulled hamstrings recently after everybody tried to jump off the Tiger Woods bandwagon. Undoubtedly he was the greatest young player of all time, but maybe we should have waited just a little before we hoisted him above Palmer and Nicklaus.
Tennis doesn’t have the problem of the older great players being forgotten because those older great players are announcers and therefore able to defend themselves from being seen as inferior to the younger players.
And that brings me to baseball, the sport in which all-time greats seem to be debated the most.
Fans have assured themselves that they’re seeing the greatest power hitter and perhaps player in the history of the game in Barry Bonds. He is clearly the most feared hitter of all time by opposing pitchers and managers, but he’s never hit more home runs in a season than entire teams like Babe Ruth did.
Willie Mays has long been assumed to be the best defensive center fielder in the history of baseball, but now Andruw Jones is challenging that assumption. Jones fans, including me, really got excited when Atlanta Braves Manager Bobby Cox called Jones the best center fielder he’s seen, including Mays.
But then I realized that no manager likes to cheer his players more than Cox. He has always said he believed if you make players think they’re better than they are, they will be.
Fans say Roger Clemens is the best power pitcher in history. I thought it would take a little longer for fans to completely forget about Nolan Ryan. Ryan only struck out about 1,500 more batters than our new proclaimed greatest power pitcher Roger Clemens.
Greg Maddux is the great artist on the mound, always figuring out a way to win. I can’t believe fans forgot that Cy Young had almost 200 more wins than Maddux, especially since the award for best pitcher in each league bears Young’s name.
Fans even try to celebrate the athletes who have the worst reputations of all time. But remember: Pete Rose bet only on meaningless regular season Reds’ games. Shoeless Joe Jackson helped throw a World Series.
Fans proclaimed Dennis Rodman the ultimate bad boy. There was a time when it took more than dyed hair to earn that reputation. Ty Cobb would sharpen his cleats so they would tear the most flesh when he slid, cleats high, into second base.
Randy Johnson’s perfect game was billed by many as the exclamation point near the end of the career of the greatest lefty in history. I never saw him pitch, but I flinch even when I read about Sandy Koufax’s curveball.
I find it hard to believe that there was a time when the combination of the words “humble” and “athlete” didn’t constitute an oxymoron, but Koufax was embarrassed when he was named the greatest lefty of all-time in 1999 because he thought it was ridiculous that Warren Spahn was not celebrated as the greatest.
And Spahn himself always thought that turn-of-the-century flamethrower Walter Johnson was the greatest lefty. Maybe that’s what they all mean when they talk about the good ol’ days. And maybe fans’ short memories of those days are as much to blame as anything.
09-30-2004