I’m old enough to remember when calling a sports figure a goat wasn’t a good thing.
Putting it in capital letters apparently changes everything.
Once was the time when a goat was someone whose mistake at a key moment or simply overall poor performance caused his team to lose an important game.
Nobody wanted to be a goat.
The capital letters changed that, making GOAT an acronym meaning Greatest Of All Time.
When LeBron James broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s NBA career scoring record the other night, it was taken as gospel that James was the greatest basketball player ever. And when Tampa Bay quarterback Tom Brady announced his retirement from the NFL recently, fans pointed to his seven Super Bowl victories as evidence he was the GOAT when it came to football.
Some baseball fans are insisting that pitcher/designated hitter Shohei Ohtani must be the best ever because no one since the great Babe Ruth has been as successful as both pitcher and hitter.
In fact, the only major sport that doesn’t seem to claim a current player is the best ever is hockey, Even though Alex Ovechkin is chasing the NHL’s all-time scoring record, few people are saying he is as good or better than the Great One, Wayne Gretzky.
Of course it’s all at least 50 percent foolishness. Basing greatness on numbers is extremely misleading, especially in team sports. Brady probably has the most legitimate claim with his seven championships and his ability to perform at a high level long past ordinary retirement age.
Certainly James has to be in any conversation about the greatest ever, but simply scoring the most points doesn’t make him the best. First of all, he didn’t go to college at all. That gave him four additional seasons when he was young to amass points. Second, if it’s all about winning championships, he doesn’t even make the finals.
Michael Jordan won six in an eight-year period and was either retired or partly retired in the other two seasons.
Boston’s Bill Russell, who played in the 1950s and ’60s, led the Celtic to 11 championships in 13 years, although stat-obsessed fans might say Wilt Chamberlain was better because he scored more points. Of course if that’s your prime criterion, you have to say LSU’s Pistol Pete Maravich is the greatest college player ever because he averaged more than 40 points a game in three different seasons.
I’m not denying James’ greatness, just saying that he’s probably less of a lock as GOAT than Brady.
It’s actually quite natural for fans to overrate the players they enjoy watching the most. Who wants to think the best players in history are ones so far back your grandfather didn’t see them play? Actually, my grandfather did see the Ty Cobbs and Babe Ruths play, but he was born in 1895.
The reason Ruth really is incomparable when it comes to Ohtani and others in the modern era is that when he was leading the league in home runs in his younger years, he was hitting more home runs than most entire teams in the league.
Yes, Ohtani is a wonderful player. Yes, he is doing things that haven’t been done for decades. But that’s not because no one else could have done it. It’s at least partly because players in this country are told early that they have to decide either to pursue hitting or pitching, not both.
In my long life as a sports fan, I have seen a lot of wonderful athletes in all four of the sports mentioned. In 16 years as a sportswriter from 1979-95, I covered some of the athletes in the running as GOATs, including Jordan and Gretzky.
But it doesn’t make my memories any better if someone says they were the greatest ever. My favorite player ever was a pitcher who lost more games than he won and never got one vote for the Hall of Fame. Walt Masterson pitched in the American League from 1939-57. I met him in 1980, when he was 60 and I was 30, and he was a dear friend till he died in 2008.
GOATs?
You can have them.
It’s all a matter of opinion anyway.