No ducking it any longer. The millenium bug is everywhere and duty demands it be noticed, as if it could be avoided.
Lists of the 100 greatest this and the 100 greatest that require not agreement, but simply attention, assuming always that 100 is not stretching the definition of greatness beyond the facts.
For example, I defy anyone to find 100 great swimmers or 100 great ski jumpers, or one great fencer, including Zorro.
Even hockey strains to fill the count, beginning confidently with Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe at 1 and 2 but finishing with Craig Ramsey at 100. No way to start an argument there. And a top 100 list without disagreement is like a bowling ball without holes, nothing to get a grip on.
Tell me this, how many garages do you have to visit to find anyone who will agree that Ayrton Senna was the greatest auto racer who ever lived? I think this about that. Only those who walked away from their final race should be considered.
Still, in my own scattered research of the topic, I found a general consensus not all that startling. Best baseball player? Babe Ruth. Best football player? Jim Brown. Best basketball player? Michael Jordan. Boxer, Muhammad Ali. Golfer, Jack Nicklaus and so on.
Best baseball team? The 1927 Yankees. Basketball, the 1997 Bulls. Football, the ’78 Steelers. Hockey? Pick a year with Montreal in it.
Best sports TV moment of the century? The gold medal celebration at Lake Placid by the U.S. Olympic hockey team.
(This is where I discovered that the biggest non-sports TV moment was the first JFK funeral. This narrowly beat out Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat in the air, while man landing on the moon was way down at No. 8. I point this out just to show that sports people aren’t quite the idiots at this as real world folks are.
(And while I’m on the topic, how can any list of the 100 greatest composers not include Fats Domino? Or the 100 greatest books omit “The World According to Garp?” Ah, that’s somebody else’s column. I’ll get on with mine.)
I am here to take issue with the list I saw ranking the greatest years of sport. This has to be the ultimate sorting out of the century, pitting one year against the other. To my surprise I discovered that the greatest year in the 20th century in which to be a sports fan was 1998.
Just last year. If only someone had told me at the time, I would have paid closer attention.
We had Mark McGwire’s 70 home runs and the race with Sammy Sosa. Jordan’s last game and his last shot. The Yankees winning125 games and sweeping the World Series. John Elway finally getting his Super Bowl and France upsetting Brazil for the World Cup.
Impressive. But blurry, especially that Yankee business. And Jordan had done as much five times before.
How do you rate a year of sports being better than another? If your team has done well, it has been a great year, which makes the 90s in Chicago a golden age, because of the Bulls alone.
Here 1985 would very likely be at the top of any list because the Bears were more than just an exceptional football team, they were a team that reflected the image of Chicago, or how Chicago likes to think of itself, tough, defiant, winners. No other Chicago sports team has ever caught that the way those Bears did.
But I must be objective about this, and the greatest single year in a century of sports has to be 1973.
How about Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs and changing an entire gender’s opinion of itself? Secretariat winning the Triple Crown while threatening to lap the field in the Belmont? George Foreman winning his first heavyweight title by knocking out Joe Frazier, giving Muhammad Ali a whole new reason to reprove himself.
The only undefeated team in NFL history, the Miami Dolphins, finished 17-0, despite the single greatest blooper in Super Bowl history, Garo Yepremian’s nearly forward pass. UCLA won a seventh consecutive NCAA title behind the single greatest individual game ever played in college basketball, Bill Walton missing only one shot out of 22.
O.J. Simpson became the first running back to gain 2,000 yards. Notre Dame went undefeated to win the national football championship, beating Bear Bryant’s Alabama team by a single point in the Sugar Bowl. the Mets rallied from last place at the end of August to win the National League pennant and Henry Aaron finished the season one home run short of Babe Ruth.
A close call, but 1973 beats out the second best sports year of the century, 1963, the year Michael Jordan was born.