ESPN
has declared Vincent “Bo” Jackson as the greatest athlete of all time.
In a related development, ESPN has
decided that no athlete active before 1980 was any good at all.
Jackson was a tremendous athlete, a
football and baseball all-star. One of the great sporting stories of all time.
From everything I’ve ever heard, he’s a nice guy.
I covered the Raiders during the time
he played in the NFL and I was in the press box in the Los Angeles Memorial
Coliseum the day he suffered his severe hip injury. It was an ugly thing to
see. I bring this up to illustrate that I understand what a tremendous athlete
Jackson was in his best days.
But the greatest of all time?
According to the piece I read about
the announcement, someone created a matrix (wow!) to determine the list of
greats. The determining factors included things very difficult to quantify.
You would think that multiple sport
athletes would have a big edge on single-sport guys (more on the term ‘guys’ in
a moment) and they did.
NFL all-timer Jim Brown was matched up
in the final round of eliminations against Jackson. Brown was a great lacrosse
player as well as the best running back of all time and deserved to be on the list.
Somehow, Michael Jordan is in final
16. Some call Jordan the best basketball player of all-time (I do not) but one
thing nobody has ever called Jordan is a great baseball player. When he played
minor league ball, I think he was placed on a double-A team but the only reason
he made it that far was the fact that he purchased the team’s bus. I’m not sure
what other sport in which Jordan was a superstar.
Kirk Gibson was a college football
star and had a Hall of Fame Major League Baseball career. He was a truly great
clutch player in the brightest of spotlights, yet his matrix wasn’t good enough
to make the top 16.
Dale Earnhardt is on the list but A.J.
Foyt is not. Yikes!
You know who else made this list? Tony
Hawk, the skateboarder. Jackie Robinson is on the list of 16 finalists and I
understand that because he was a college football star when he wasn’t playing
baseball at UCLA. But why is Tiger Woods on the list?
And darnitall, where is Babe Didrikson
Zaharias? She won two gold medals and one silver medal in the 1932 Olympics in
Los Angeles. She led a team to the AAU national amateur basketball championship
in 1931. She set five world records on
the same day during an AAU meet in ’31. Then she moved on to golf, winning
the US Amateur and British Ladies Open before turning professional. The only
opponent that ever beat the Babe was cancer.
I have a question for the fine
individuals at ESPN, the ones who created the matrix to rate all the athletes
of all time (this vast matrix must
include some kind of algorithm, right?): Have they ever heard of a guy named
Thorpe? Jim Thorpe?
He won both the decathlon and
pentathlon in the 1912 Olympic Games. When the king of Sweden said to Thorpe,
“You sir are the greatest athlete in the world,” the King was working without a
matrix. Thorpe, who did not have his algorithm with him that day, still managed
to reply, “Thanks, King.”
Thorpe was a great football player,
though his best days were behind him by the time the forerunner to the National
Football League was founded. By today’s standard, he’d still be a great punter
or drop-kicking field goal specialist.
Thorpe played major league baseball
too. In six seasons, he had a career average of .252, playing mostly outfield.
That’s better than Jordan did in double A ball. In his final year in the
majors, Thorpe hit .327 for Boston’s National League team, hitting seven
doubles, three triples and a home run, driving in 16 runs in 159 at bats.
There is very little film of Thorpe
and even less video, so the folks at ESPN might not have heard of him. They
stuck to what their matrix told them (and to guys they had film of), which is a
shame.
Bo Jackson was a phenomenal athlete,
perhaps the most remarkable of his era.
But the greatest of all time? I think Bo
knows better.
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