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ESPN just released an article on the top athletes of the 21st century. The list is…interesting.
Shocking Phelps is ranked No 1. This is contra evidence against culture war fodder. He is white, male, and I assume straight. But then, their No 2 is Serena. The list is allegedly about how great they were at their sport. There is no good argument where Serena had a better career than Novak Djokovic. Novak has more slams, masters, career grand slams, only golden master, calendar slam, weeks at No 1. And Novak did it against the two other greatest tennis players of all time. Serena’s field was weaker. And of course, Serena wouldn’t last on the ATP whereas Novak wouldn’t lose a set on the WTA.
But Serena became famous for being good at a white sport while being black. And Novak (who shocking is ranked lower than Roger Fed despite clearly being better) is famous for refusing to take the covid vaxx.
So culture war? But then how do I explain Phelps at No 1? Maybe ESPN is just bad at its job? After all Brady is at five. On the other hand, ESPN has a ton of WNBA players on the list. Which is funny. The WNBA is not a good league and doesn’t generate (at least historically) a lot of money. There is no way the three of the top 34 athletes of the 21st century are WNBA players. Yet shockingly no female soccer players that high. What am I missing?
ETA: 8 of the top 100 athletes of the 21st century happen to be WNBA players per ESPN. And that is out of all Olympic sports, soccer, cricket, football, hockey, MMA, etc. Why so many WNBA players — a minor league that wouldn’t generate sufficient revenue to attract this alleged level of talent.
https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/40446224/top-100-athletes-21st-century
Why are we all doing Top 100s of the 21st century this week? Seems like weird timing. Not a slow news week, in sports or in general. Not the end of the year, when it would hit the 1/4 mark. No one died who makes us assess legacies. So...what gives?
Anyway, the answer is either Steph Curry or GSP at #1. Until those guys nobody played like those guys.
Steph revolutionized the game of basketball in a way comparable only to Babe Ruth in baseball. The 3 point game has never been the same since Steph burst onto the scene. Lebron might be great but he is great in the same way that MJ was great, Steph is great in a whole new way. From the year he first got MVP votes (2012-2013) the number of Three Point Attempts per game in the NBA has increased 75%, from what was previously more or less flat for years.
GSP did something similar in MMA. Before GSP it was mostly still in a style v style mode, a wrestler against a boxer or a BJJ guy against a brawler. GSP came in and did everything, and he did it better than anyone else. Jon Jones is probably better P4P, and Anderson Silva at his peak was a legend, but GSP did it first, and the attitude problems that Silva and Jones have had mar their legacies in my mind.
Brady in my mind comes next, then Woods, then Federer, then Bolt, then Djoker and Nadal and Lebron and Jon Jones and Mike Trout and Messi. Then all the minor sports gods: Phelps and White and the other Olympic guys, the auto racers, the cyclists.
Steph Curry's playstyle reinvented the game because others could copy it; he demonstrated that shooting the 3 could be viable. Messi couldn't reinvent the game because nobody could replicate what he could do. Its a bit unfair to rank Steph Curry higher than Messi, just because his style could be replicated and Messi's couldn't.
Also what raises the question of what is greatness?
Steph Curry optimized the hell out of middling (by NBA standards) physical gifts and redefined the game. A Lebron has way better hardware but arguably achieved more as an individual. Also how do you calibrate a Shaquille O'Neal (absolutely absurd frame, middling work ethic, great career) or a Wilt Chamberlain (S+++++++ athleticism relative to peers but noted asshole and not particularly winning)?
Well he won the “sleeping with a lot of women” trophy.
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I wouldn't put any basketball players on any list extolling greatest athletes. Basketball has a huge height filter. Be seven feet tall and have any athletic inclination and you have a shot of being in the NBA. MJ could maybe make the lists just for being in two different professional sports. But his mediocre baseball career shows how much the NBA is a joke in terms of athletic prowess.
Being smart and strategizing is cool, but I don't see why that matters for athleticism.
Phelps deserves greatest athlete. His superpower was basically ADHD and a willingness to monotonously spend five hours a day swimming.
Usain Bolt should probably be second on a list of greatest athletes.
In terms of sheer physical ability they crushed their competition in sports with almost zero barriers to entry.
Steph is 6'3". Which is still really tall, but is another reason I put him above Lebron and Duncan and Jokic. He's an incredible physical specimen, but he's not just coasting on raw physicality.
No he's playing against lazy tall players. I just don't know how good he is as an athlete. Kinda the same problem as babe Ruth vs modern day hitters. Babe Ruth was hitting against shittier pitchers than there are today. I bet there is a player or two on every professional baseball team that might have beaten babe Ruth's record had they the opportunity to hit against the same caliber of pitchers.
For what it's worth this is a discussion that even professional athletes have and argue over. The New Heights podcast (Jason and Travis Kelce) had a number of bits discussing athleticism of basketball players and NFL players and how they'd do in each others sports. IIRC it ended up most leaning towards "the basketball players are total athletic freaks but it's easy to miss that because of the way the sport is."
Some things to keep in mind: LOTS of games. Moving around that much body is fucking hard. Handfighting, pushing each other, etc doesn't always come across on broadcasts, but if you've ever had court side seats you can see how much extracurricular athletic activity is going on.
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Modern NBA's actually cut down quite a bit on the slow moving, lazy tall players, largely as a result of the 3 point revolution that Steph Curry was a large part of.
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I find it bizarre that you consider basketball players to be unimpressive athletes because their sport requires a specific set of physical attributes (height, long limbs) while celebrating Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, whose extreme and atypical genetically-determined physical attributes (both men look as though they were designed in a lab to excel at their respective sports) were absolutely vital to their success.
Why is LeBron James’ incredible success at basketball invalid because he couldn’t have achieved the same feat if his height had maxed out at 5’7”, but Usain Bolt is an incredible athlete even though he couldn’t have achieved what he did if his leg length had maxed out two inches shorter? At the top level of most sports, no amount of obsessive work ethic is enough to put one over the top without prodigious God-given physical traits. Sprinting is one of the most genetically-based sports - far more than basketball, where a great many of the all-time greats are on the lower end of the league’s height distribution. There is no sprinting equivalent of a Steve Nash, a player with limited physical tools who excelled due to hard work, intelligence, and savvy.
They won the lottery on athletic related traits. Basketball players won the genetic lottery on height. I don't consider height to be a key component of athleticism.
I also don't consider hard work, intelligence, or savvy to be part of athleticism. Apes are better athletes than humans in most respects.
To me the only IQ related aspect of athleticism is hand eye coordination / reaction times.
So wait I guess the better question is, what do you consider to be "part of athleticism"? Sounds like your getting on the hard determinist train. Welcome.
Athleticism: strength, agility, and speed at physical tasks (those words come up in lots of definitions, I'm not sure if power or toughness should also be included). I thought basketball allowed height as a partial substitute for these characteristics. You didn't have to be speedy and agile to get a rebound, you just need to be taller. You don't have to fight over the ball if you can literally just hold it over your opponents head. I say thought past tense, because after thinking about it, @Mottizen seems right that my opinions about basketball are outdated. A shift to shooting three pointers has apparently heavily evened the playing field in terms of height advantage.
There are some sports where injuries tend to take out promising athletes, fighting and gymnastics are two good examples. The people that do end up dominating these sports are still very athletic, but I just wouldn't be certain they are the most athletic. I just tend to feel that swimming and running have some of the least amount of blockers or gates on the sport. You can certainly still get injured doing both, but humans are designed for running, and swimming is low impact. Height gives a bit of an advantage, but it can still be overcome, the shortest gold medalist swimmer was 5ft 3in. Su Bingtian is a runner in the 2020 olympics, he is 5ft 7in. Su apparently holds the fastest 60m split time in the 100m dash (faster than Usain bolt). Those are below average heights for men in their country.
I'm not sure I'm not a determinist, so much as I think the determinism question is useless. Whether the universe is determinist or not does not change how I interact with it or how I think other people should interact with it.
But all those traits are basically genetically determined, especially when you get to the top end of any sport, the silver medalist isn't silver instead of gold because they didn't try hard enough or something. They studied top swimmers and found long arms compared to torso length is very important.
I don't think I ever expressed any problem with genetics, or the winners of sports being determined by genes. Perhaps you have me confused with some other commentor.
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NBA players are still massive by ordinary person standards but there's less rewards for assembling stationary 7-footers.
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A huge part of Phelps was his frame, though. Guy is 193CM tall, 200CM wingspan and would not have been anywhere near as dominant without those two things. Usain Bolt 195CM and had probably the highest topspeed ever as a result of it.
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But somehow:
Usain Bolt is 6'5", Michael Jordan 6'6". Bolt could presumably have made much more money in the NBA than the olympics if he were the athletic equivalent of Jordan. Basketball filters on height but also many other athletic traits, much less unidimensionally than sprinting.
Phelps used his superpower of hard work to turn himself into the ultimate athletic specimen. If Phelps has worked hard at learning spreadsheets I wouldn't call him a good athlete. He worked hard at being an athlete. Possibly harder than anyone has ever worked.
Usain was born with muscle traits that made him an amazing athletic specimen.
Jordan played in a sports league with a bunch of lazy tall players that he could look impressive against. Steph Curry is doing the same thing.
Imagine a different world where basketball has a maximum height restriction, and that height restriction just happens to be the height of whatever basketball player you think is really good. I'd wager that we would fine better athletes who are a few inches shorter than the star players of today. But those few inches of height against Jordan would make them useless against the 7 foot centers of the sport. So they get weeded out early. I think there are 6'0" guys that could be to Curry and Jordan what they were to the rest of the league. Watch a bit of that weird trampoline basketball sport and you'll see how much talent is being left fallow in that sport cuz of height.
What you're describing is essentially the modern NBA, though. Curry brought an era that made spacing and mobility more important than pure height for various reasons. NBA height & weight peaked in 2013, just before the Warriors and Rockets made the 3 pointer so much of a pivotal part of the game. We're now starting to see true ridiculous freak 7-footers like Wembanyama who have the ability to shoot 3's/move dynamically whilst still being gigantic, but you're essentially criticizing a NBA product that hasn't existed since Jordan's era.
https://www.thehoopsgeek.com/average-nba-height/
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"I don't consider height to be a key component of athleticism"....why?
Would you consider plunging for distance to be a great test of athleticism? Thats a "sport" that rewards being extremely fat (plus i guess some amount of training and discipline).
Alternatively, what if they raised the basketball hoop so that you really have to be super tall to compete? That would be ridiculous.
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Because my learned friend in argument rejects obvious genetic gifts in favor of celebrating less obvious ones.
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Just use a measuring tape if you want a height competition.
This is all very confusing for me. So you think height is different from every other genetic advantage?
Yes and no. There are theoretically other genetics that might heavily gate a sport behind a non-athletic characteristic. I just don't know if any actual examples.
Gymnastics is sort of gated behind being short, so I'd sort of discount the abilities of those athletes as well. But that's just the other side of the coin with height.
I don't consider IQ to be athleticism related so if there were any sports that were heavily gated by it I'd apply the same discount to the athletes within that sport. But I don't know of any sports that are like that. Maybe chess boxing? Or maybe Esports which no one really looks to for examples of supreme athleticism. Even though most Esports players are in relatively good shape.
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That’s one way of defining greatness. I like the guys who have to reinvent their games. So take a guy like Novak. He came onto the tour bring an incredible defensive baseline player. Overtime, he changed into a guy who was more mixed from the baseline. Late in his career he reinvted himself as someone who plays a lot more serve and volley.
Crosby is another guy who fits this category. When he came on the scene, he was a fast high flying guy who could see the entire ice. After an ankle sprain, he wasn’t the same speed. So he worked on his slap shot and worked on his grinding game and was going streaking until Steckel gave him a concussion he almost had to retire from the sport. He came back and while still great wasn’t quite the offensive force he was. So he became more of a two way player.
Interesting way of looking at it. Both those guys definitely deserve spots on the list.
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