IN MY PRIME by Chris Heller
We ask it all the time. We debate it all the time.
Who’s the best (fill in the blank) ever?
I think I’m in my prime as a sports fan. Have been for about 7 or 8 years now. I was a project with potential before the age of 10; a raw talent. My teenage years I began really perfecting the craft, and developed a monstrous type of upside (think LeBron James circa ’03). During college, I officially arrived on the scene. The ceiling was removed. Anything was possible. My prime began sometime in the few post-college years. Maybe it was the ‘real world’ responsibility that did it, forcing me to see things in a different way. Who really knows when/why/how people enter their primes? It just sort of happens.
To be clear, let me define what I mean by ‘prime’. As a fan of a sport, I mean a REAL fan, we get to a point where we pretty much know everything we’re going to know about said sport. We’ve watched and studied. We’ve seen all types of situations. Aside from potentially taking up coaching, and learning the language of X’s and O’s, we get to the point where we KNOW the game. The only real difference between an athlete’s prime and a fan’s prime is that a fan’s prime doesn’t end (maybe we lose a little in the last few years of our lives, around the time we start wearing diapers to bed and talking to the kitchen sink thinking its our old cousin joey, but everyone’s different-I don’t even have a cousin joey).
I’m not arguing that I won’t ever see a new degree of talent enter the picture in any sport. There very well may be the next evolution of Iverson or Peterson or Pujols from an athletic standpoint. I will be just as amazed as every other fan. But, I will be able to accurately assess their unique talents in comparison to other players I’ve seen during my prime.
Getting back to the original ‘who’s the best ever’ question. Unless you’ve seen Babe Ruth and Bill Russell and Sammy Baugh, and everyone who’s played since, the correct answer is ‘I don’t know’, but what fun is that. However, for me to really respect someone’s answer, the fan must have seen the athlete play while they were in their prime as a sports fan.
Let me explain.
Obviously, the common answer to the greatest baller of all-time is MJ. I grew up watching Jordan, and I knew I was watching greatness, but I hadn’t yet reached my prime as a sports fan. Since then, my definition of greatness has evolved. I didn’t ‘know’ the game then the way I ‘know’ the game now. So how do people my age and younger know for sure that MJ was the greatest? How can they know he was better than Wilt or Oscar?
To listen to someone “tell’ me Unitas was better than Brady, and for me to believe it, would be undermining my own intelligence as a true fan. How can I possibly say Johnny Unitas is better than Tom Brady if I’ve never seen Unitas play and I watch Brady every week?
So, when faced with this question, I always have to go with ‘my guys’. ‘My guys’ are simply those who I’ve seen play during my prime as a sports fan. Moving forward, since my prime will continue for (hopefully) the rest of my life, the group of ‘my guys’ will grow, and with that I will become more ‘qualified’ to speak intelligently on the ‘who’s the greatest’ debate.
Who’s the best basketball player of all-time? Kobe.
Who’s the best QB of all-time? Brady.
Who’s the best baseball player of all-time? Bonds.
And no one can tell me any different.
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TIGER STYLE by Luke Heller
The whole G.O.A.T. (a.k.a. greatest of all time) discussion in sports is oddly subjective. You expect that subjectivity when you’re talking about the greatest book (Catch-22), the greatest president (FDR), or the greatest rapper (me), but shouldn’t sports, with all of its clear-cut measurements of success and achievement, be a little more straightforward? Isn’t sports predicated on the idea of competition? That at the end of the day, there’s a winner and a loser (or a bunch of losers)? Maybe there’s a definitive way to measure the greatest of all time in each sport. If there is, I don’t think we’re close, and maybe that’s what keeps it interesting (or what keeps nerds like us interested).
It’s really tough with team sports because the resumes of the greatest players are littered with achievements that could not be done without teammates. In 2007, Tom Brady threw 50 touchdowns in a single season to break Peyton Manning’s record of 49. 23 of Brady’s touchdown passes were caught by Randy Moss. John Stockton is the all-time assist leader for the NBA with 15,806 career assists, but he certainly got some help from Karl Malone, who is second only to Kareem in career points scored. Michael Jordan never won a championship without Phil Jackson (quite possibly the greatest NBA coach of all time) and Scottie Pippen (a consensus top-50 player all time). That’s a lot of help. And in a team sport, even the greatest players are inevitably going to get help.
What’s weird is that it’s not much easier in individual sports. You’d think the numbers would be a pretty solid guide because they are the product of an individual’s performance and can’t be partially attributed to teammate assistance like Brady’s touchdowns or Stockton’s assists. But how much of this do we want to be about the numbers? Right now I’m thinking about Tiger Woods. In my opinion, Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer of all time. I’m not sure how much my opinion on this matters though, considering I wasn’t alive to see Jack Nicklaus (the other G.O.A.T. candidate) play. There are a lot of people who agree with me and there are just as many who say Tiger would need to beat Nicklaus’ record of 18 major titles to be considered the greatest golfer. Tiger currently has 14 major titles and is ahead of Nicklaus’ pace. In fact, most people who say that Tiger needs to break Nicklaus’ major title record are sure that he will eventually do so. And that’s what’s so messed up about this whole thing. The general consensus is that Tiger Woods does not need to get any better at golf to become the greatest golfer of all time. He can elevate his status as a golfer without elevating his game.
The thing about winning golf majors is that it’s somewhat circumstantial. It’s about being in the zone for the right 4-day period. Every golfer has some rounds he’s proud of and some rounds that make him want to quit, but the idea is that he keeps practicing to increase his chances of having 4 great consecutive rounds when he tees off for a tournament. Every now and then someone is just going to be in the zone at the right time and snag a major title. That’s why Tiger leads all active players with 14 major titles and no other active player has more than 3. Almost every golfer other than Tiger is overachieving when he wins a major. In Tiger’s case, it’s basically a coin flip: Tiger vs. the field. Now, unlike every other player, Tiger doesn’t need to be in the zone to win a major. If Tiger plays 4 rounds that are “solid” by his standards, he will win the tournament. That’s not to say Tiger doesn’t try to go out and play the best round of his life every time he tees off, because he does. When Tiger Woods is in the zone, he hits shots that can only be described as “Tiger shots,” because no one else on earth can hit them. But he doesn’t HAVE to do that to win. Not only does Tiger not need to improve his game to break Nicklaus’ record and become the greatest golfer of all time, he can probably play below his ceiling and still get the job done. I’m not saying it’s going to happen like that (as a fan of golf and Tiger Woods, I certainly hope it doesn’t), but it could. The numbers matter, but in cases like these, they can sometimes start to look like a formality.
Does the greatest of all time refer to whoever had the greatest career? Or should it be more along the lines of “if you had to bet your life on either Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods playing against each other while in their respective primes, who would you pick?” Is being the greatest of all time about sustained quality or playing the game better than anyone has ever played it? I guess it’s a combination. If it’s the former, I’d say Kareem and his 20 seasons of consistent performance needs consideration for best baller of all time. If it’s the latter, I think Magic deserves a little more attention. The point is we don’t really know, and that’s what keeps us so invested. The fact that we probably won’t find a definitive answer is why we are so adamant about voicing our opinions. Being a sports fan has a lot to do with loyalty, be it to a player, a team, or the sport itself. After the Lakers lost to the Celtics in the 2008 finals I continued to believe that the Lakers were the better of the two teams and that the Celtics championship had been a fluke. I didn’t care what the results said. And I don’t really care that Tiger hasn’t broken Nicklaus’ record (yet). I know he’s the G.O.A.T., because I fucking said so.