My Sport is Better Than Your Sport: the GOAT thread

[DMC]

1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

To add more on the athleticism-in-team-vs-individual-sports argument- I'd say in some respects many team sports require more all-round athletic ability than most actual out-and-out athletic competitions, because those are very strictly measuring one thing whereas many team sports (and things like tennis) require more of a spread.

So you want to join The Idiots?

[Maithanet]

People seem to be arguing that being specialized towards one particular aspect of athleticism (say running in a straight line very fast) is "more athletic" than being in the top 99% in most/all aspects of athleticism, even if you aren't quite in the top 99.9999999% in any single one of them.  That argument makes no sense to me. 

Plenty of NFL guys were track stars in college.  Like, could quite possibly make the US Olympic team fast.  But they instead focused on football and become receivers or cornerbacks because they also had the other skills (upper body strength, lateral quickness, hand/eye coordination) that are needed as well.  And they did that because virtually nobody becomes a millionaire running track, whereas the hundreds of guys get that playing football. 

 

[DMC]

The Idiots are becoming as fearsome as the 2004 Red Sox.

[Ramsay B.]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

The Idiots are becoming as fearsome as the 2004 Red Sox.

You’re ok with being the Kevin Millar of this argument?

(Also, Judge #55)

[3CityApache]

The thread was started today and you guys already produced four pages of it? Then I can safely go back to tennis thread I guess. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

14 hours ago, DMC said:

If jacking off counts as a sport there's heavy competition among fellow posters but I'm happy to take on all comers.

all the corners and the cookie. Do not forget the cookie. 

[DMC]

59 minutes ago, Ramsay B. said:

You’re ok with being the Kevin Millar of this argument?

 

Well, Johnny Damon would be the easy way to make fun of me, so sure?

[dbunting]

Interesting topic that seemed to get derailed by semantics. I'd think that someone like Daley Thompson who was a decathlete and won back to back Olympic gold medals would be in consideration. Jim Thorpe would be another. Won gold medals as pentathlon and decathlon. played professional baseball and football and is in the pro football hall of fame.

Bo Jackson was a modern athlete who was fast enough to be a NCAA track runner, competed in decathlon and qualified for NCAA nationals. Oh, and he played pro football and pro baseball at all star levels.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

6 hours ago, baxus said:

Are we talking about greatest sportsmen/women or best athletes? Because those are very different things.

Phrasing always can make this tricky. Greatest and best can mean different things and being the most accomplished may just mean you had great longevity and/or in team sports you likely had a lot of great teammates. Bo Jackson was just mentioned and there are a lot of NFL fans who think he may have been the greatest athlete to ever play in the league, but his career was really short. One can joke he was literally too strong for his own good.

Or to use another example, MVP can mean different things to different people. Shohei Ohtani could realistically win the MVP in MLB every year so long as he continues to be elite at batting and pitching, but he probably won't win it this year because Judge is also doing something special on the greatest team in North American sports which also happens to be in the biggest media market. And unlike Ohtani, his team doesn't suck.

Quote

GOATs are people who have taken their respective sports to a whole other level, whether when it's the quality of the sport itself or it's popularity or whatever. Those are people after who their sports have never been the same.

So are we allowing for multiple GOATs in a given sport? And if so, how many? Take basketball for example. Russell could be the GOAT because he's won the most and had the most dominate run. Kareem could be the GOAT because he's a top three all-time player and they had to change the game and court because of him. And he had the most unstoppable shot the sport has ever seen. Jordan could be the GOAT because he's the best player ever in a majority of fan's eyes and he is more responsible than anyone else for growing the game internationally. LeBron could be the GOAT because he's the most gifted player ever (at least in my eyes) and his Heat teams fully cemented positionless basketball. And yet Curry, who I don't think most people would rank ahead of the aforementioned greats, will probably have a greater impact on the actual game than any of them.

Quote

Best athletes is a bit trickier. There's a lot of talk about athleticism in this thread, but how do we define athleticism in the first place? World class marathon runners are clearly athletic, but their athleticism is rather narrowly focused, as is world class weightlifters', for example. How do we rank those? Is strength aspect of athleticism more important than endurance? Or agility? Or whatever else?

Or are we talking about some imaginary competition where all this is tested and evaluated and the score is tallied in the end? Funny thing is that I'd say team sports athletes would have much better shot at scoring well in this imaginary athleticism competition.

I lean towards the imaginary with a bit of a twist. For me, and this can be a fluid opinion, but right now the greatest of the greats should be able to do great things at multiple sports and that's why I lean towards LeBron. LeBron is either number one or two at his sport and I believe if he was groomed from birth to play other sports he could have gone professional in multiple leagues. LeBron could possibly be the greatest TE ever in the NFL and maybe he could have been an elite edge rusher as well. @DMC touched on it, hitting a baseball consistently at a high level might be the hardest thing to do in sports and I think LeBron could have a real chance to be great at that too, and he would be a crazy defender regardless of what position you wanted him to play (other than catcher) and who knows, maybe he could have pitched too. I also think LeBron could have been a great goalie at top level international football. Shit LeBron might also be awesome at tennis if that's what he had dedicated his life to. The combination of size, speed, strength, durability and commitment is pretty fucking impressive, and the cherry on top is he's got a photographic memory which is an incredibly valuable.

[Jaxom 1974]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

Well, Johnny Damon would be the easy way to make fun of me, so sure?

Johnny Damon almost cock blocked Barney Stinson once. That guy isn't to be trifled with...you k own, in an imaginary made up bar in New York...

[Raja]

11 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Normally yes, I mentioned in the other thread re Sugar Ray Robinson. But his stats are so otherworldly I can't not have him as the greatest. 

Everyone's going to have different answers when it comes to this, which is why I tend to go with 'greatest I've seen play', but 'stats' to me mean not as much as other things. Though I totally get that stats is a reasonable way to conclude who is a GOAT.

[dbunting]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

LeBron is either number one or two at his sport and I believe if he was groomed from birth to play other sports he could have gone professional in multiple leagues. LeBron could possibly be the greatest TE ever in the NFL and maybe he could have been an elite edge rusher as well. @DMC touched on it, hitting a baseball consistently at a high level might be the hardest thing to do in sports and I think LeBron could have a real chance to be great at that too, and he would be a crazy defender regardless of what position you wanted him to play (other than catcher) and who knows, maybe he could have pitched too. I also think LeBron could have been a great goalie at top level international football. Shit LeBron might also be awesome at tennis if that's what he had dedicated his life to. The combination of size, speed, strength, durability and commitment is pretty fucking impressive, and the cherry on top is he's got a photographic memory which is an incredibly valuable.

So the guy who never played even high school level baseball would have been great? Could have pitched???... I know you are kind of just tossing out hypotheticals but damn at least ground them in reality! 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

8 minutes ago, dbunting said:

So the guy who never played even high school level baseball would have been great? Could have pitched???... I know you are kind of just tossing out hypotheticals but damn at least ground them in reality! 

LeBron has elite hand-eye coordination and is the same size as Judge, if not bigger at times. It's not crazy to think that if baseball was the sport he focused on from an early age that he could have made it to the big leagues. And the argument isn't that he'd be as good as he is at basketball, just that he could play professionally. 

[Jaxom 1974]

15 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

LeBron has elite hand-eye coordination and is the same size as Judge, if not bigger at times. It's not crazy to think that if baseball was the sport he focused on from an early age that he could have made it to the big leagues. And the argument isn't that he'd be as good as he is at basketball, just that he could play professionally. 

Touching on this...I'd still put Jordan ahead of Lebron...and to your point, Jordan did go play baseball without years of training and was able to do well, if not major league level, and who knows what he'd have done if he'd stayed with it for two or three more years...

(Also though, another reason I put Jordan ahead of LeBron is because he wasn't playing basketball from a young age. He basically walked onto the HS team...)

[Raja]

Would pay so much money to see LeBron play test cricket

[DMC]

54 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

(Also though, another reason I put Jordan ahead of LeBron is because he wasn't playing basketball from a young age. He basically walked onto the HS team...)

I don't think this matters much.  I started playing organized basketball at the age of 6 and other than being a better shooter than most NBA players (as many are) it didn't get me anywhere because I was always going to be athletically limited.  A lot of baseball players, namely international/Latin American players, don't have much experience before even being signed for oftentimes six figures at the age of 16.  There's definitely a certain threshold that 99.9% of the population is just never gonna touch, and it's very apparent even at an early age.

[Arakasi]

Jordan was a physical freak but not compared to LeBron who is stronger, faster and could probably jump higher too. Now there are likely some sports that I want the leaner guy. But probably not as many as I just want the one with the more physical gifts. But it’s nice to think of those people like James, Bo, Hershel Walker, Jim Brown, etc and wonder what they could have been in other sports.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Touching on this...I'd still put Jordan ahead of Lebron...and to your point, Jordan did go play baseball without years of training and was able to do well, if not major league level, and who knows what he'd have done if he'd stayed with it for two or three more years...

(Also though, another reason I put Jordan ahead of LeBron is because he wasn't playing basketball from a young age. He basically walked onto the HS team...)

What made Jordan great at basketball doesn't exactly translate to baseball. LeBron is one of the greatest passers of all time and I think that probably translates better to hitting and pitching than Jordan just being able to out athlete everyone and wanting it more. Jordan would also probably be less impactful in the NFL than LeBron.

But otoh,

57 minutes ago, Raja said:

Would pay so much money to see LeBron play test cricket

I feel the same about Jordan and tennis. If he could learn how to serve at an elite level, that would be wild to witness. 

Edited September 8, 2022 by Tywin et al.

[polishgenius]

While it's certainly both possible and fun to speculate on which pro athletes would have been good at other sports, I do think it's a bit... jumping the gun to declare that a LeBron or whoever would have gone pro in multiple sports (or at least, been a notable pro). For sure, speed, strength and co-ordination will get you a certain amount right off the bat, but past that there's always sport-specific details both in the nature of the physicality required and in the sub-second understanding of space and decision-making that may have translated between sports, but may not have. As an example it's tempting to look at a LeBron and a Jonah Lomu and guess that they'd have been great in each other's sports, and they may have- but part of being a great winger like Lomu was is being able to swerve-step while running at a full sprint really really well, a tiny detail but one that's insanely difficult and relies on a hyper-specific sort of movement (admittedly, would probably translate quite well to American Football, but not basketball) that it's entirely possible LeBron would be perfectly capable of but he also just might not have been that good at it. That's a very specific example of course but there are others, the nature of passing in rugby making a whole thing of the understanding of the space behind you in a massive area, etc. The same goes the other way, I'm just using the rugby examples coz I understand that sport, but Lomu would face similar challenges in being elite elite going the other way. They'd certainly have a better chance than most non-GOAT players of their own sport, but I wouldn't wanna make bets on it. 

 

 

That calculation does also make me wonder sometimes which people decent at one sport might have been great at another, though. I always think of Adam Gemili- as a footballer, in his late teens, he was shaping up to be okay, probably would make it as a pro, but probably not in the Premier League or anything (possibly playing at a level that wouldn't be pro in other sports). At one point he moved teams and schools and while settling in tried out for his school's sprint team basically to keep busy- and turned out to be so good at it he'd qualified for the Olympics within nine months. He didn't quite end up fulfilling that potential either, because of repeated injury, but it is an interesting thought to me.

The way Adama Traore runs makes me think he might have been a very good rugby player, although he'd have gone from being an insanely powerful footballer to a decently powerful rugby player, which of course affects things too.
 

 

To lean into the original thought though: I always feel there's a decent crossover between the skills required to play tennis and fight in boxing. Their talent pools are drawn from such vastly different areas of society there's not likely to ever be someone who was torn between both, the way quite a few high-level footballers were promising boxers too, but... Nadal vs Floyd Mayweather hell yeah.

Also Cristiano Ronaldo could have made a good boxer if his handspeed matches his footspeed, which I see no reason to doubt. 

[ljkeane]

6 hours ago, polishgenius said:

While it's certainly both possible and fun to speculate on which pro athletes would have been good at other sports, I do think it's a bit... jumping the gun to declare that a LeBron or whoever would have gone pro in multiple sports (or at least, been a notable pro). For sure, speed, strength and co-ordination will get you a certain amount right off the bat, but past that there's always sport-specific details both in the nature of the physicality required and in the sub-second understanding of space and decision-making that may have translated between sports, but may not have.

If you take rugby league and rugby union, two sports which are about as close as it's possible to be while still being different sports, there are a lot of players who were excellent at one and failed to successfully transition to the other. It's not as easy as it might seem just looking at someone's basic attributes in one sport and assuming it translates to another.

Taking the example of LeBron I'd say it's likely he could have been at least a professional level rugby player in one of the lower skilled positions (second row, blindside flanker, wing or crashball centre depending on how fast he is) if he really wanted to. Full contact sports at the higher level does require a certain level of disregard for your own physical wellbeing which not everybody has and we really don't know that about him unless he actually tried it.  I doubt Lomu could have played basketball at a particularly high level. His hands weren't anything special.