The other day, a group, including myself, was having a debate about which athletes we'd have have most wanted to see in their prime. Babe Ruth was one of the first names thrown out and many agreed. Then someone, whose name I won't mention, said with the utmost seriousness that no one would ever choose to see Babe Ruth over Steph Curry. I laughed, only to see my chuckles turn to bemused horror when I realized he wasn't kidding.
Nothing against Steph Curry, but I have condiments in my fridge that are older than his fame. The "Babe Ruth or Steph Curry?" question has only one answer. It's like asking, who would you rather see: The Beatles or Bruno Mars? But what about the rest? Who else would you have liked to have seen in their prime? Where would the Babe rank? We picked 13 of the most exciting, electric athletes in history and ranked them to answer this very question.
(Photo by B. Bennett/Getty Images)
This isn't a list of the greatest athletes in history, nor is it a list of the great athletes playing at a specific, signature, historic event. If those were the case, we'd have at least one football player on here (Jim Brown, probably) and we'd specify Jack Nicklaus at the '86 Masters. But watching a football player, even one as great as Brown or as electrifying as Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders, just doesn't get it done. There's too much going on in football to watch one star. And while it'd have certainly been cool to see Jack in his '70s heyday, live golf is a different animal (though, as you'll see, that doesn't necessarily preclude inclusion). So here's our list of the 13 athletes we'd have most liked to have seen in their prime. Let's start from the bottom and work our way to the top.
13. Serena Williams
Serena, one of a handful of people in the conversation for the greatest athlete of all time, is so low on this list because she tends to play one of two matches: 1) blink-and-you'll-miss-it or 2) upset victim in a match she surely should have won. Serena is better than everyone else on the WTA (a fact that may be evident in a few hours when Maria Sharapova likely retires, in part because she never could get past her main rival), so she rarely has classic matches. Her most memorable ones either contain a letdown or a blowup. But the swag and dominance alone is enough to get her one this list.
12. Usain Bolt
(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
Bolt has never been a great starter, so that moment, about 20 meters into the race, when he locks in his stride and hits the gas pedal, seeming to accelerate with every step and getting to a speed at which you don't know whether he'll be able to ever slow down, is perhaps the most exciting thing going in sports. The 100 in Rio promises to be the greatest 9.6 seconds of this sporting year.
11. Magic Johnson
You could put Larry Bird on here, no sweat, but there'd have been something, uh, magical about sitting in The Forum watching Showtime and the Lakers.
10. Jesse Owens
The 1936 Olympics get all the publicity and for good reason, but that was only the second greatest performance by the great track star of the 1930s. As a star athlete at Ohio State in 1935, Owens broke five world records in 45 minutes.
9. Chris Evert
(AP Photo/File)
The tennis star has the longevity, talent, ruthlessness and fame that made her one of the most captivating athletes of her time. She was in the top four for almost two decades, once had a 125-match winning streak on clay (take that, Rafa) and ended up winning 51 percent of the tournaments she entered and making the semifinals in more than 90 percent. That's dominance. (And, with seeing so much Evert, you'd also see a ton of Martina Navratilova, as the two played 80 times and in 61 finals.)
8. Carl Lewis
Three track athletes? Three track athletes. The greatest anticipation in sports isn't before a Super Bowl or a Game 7 or Tonya Harding skating at the '94 Olympics. It's those moments before the 100-meter dash at the Olympics, just prior to 10 seconds that will go down in history and define the entire career of an athlete. Years and years of training coming down to something shorter than a pre-roll ad on YouTube.
7. Lew Alcindor
(Photo by: Tony Tomsic/Getty Images)
This is cheating a bit because it limits the window in which you could have seen the future Kareem play, but given how dominant the then-Alcindor was at UCLA, he'd have to be the college player you'd want to see most, with Wilt at Kansas or, knowing his future, MJ at Carolina, being distant runners-up.
5. Roger Federer and Michael Phelps (tie)
Nine of the 13 athletes on our list play individual sports, which makes perfect sense, as when you watch Federer (or Djokovic, Nadal or Serena) they command your complete attention. I've seen both of these athletes, though it'd have been nice to see Federer and Phelps in a competitive event — when I saw each, they were about 99.9 percent to win (I saw Phelps before his first Olympics when he was still a star, just only in the swimming community), so there wasn't much to watch. But even with no competition, the greatness was plainly evident. Phelps' underwater is the most breathtaking explosion in sports and Federer's one-handed backhand may be the most beautiful sports sight these eyes have ever seen.
4. Babe Ruth
No one has ever been as dominant in any sport as Babe Ruth was in 1920, when he hit more individual home runs (54) than any other American League team did in total. In the National League, only one team hit more than Ruth's 54, and it finished last in the league. No one has ever dominated a sport more than Babe Ruth dominated baseball, and, I hate speaking in sports definite but this one is true, no one ever will.
3. Michael Jordan
(Photo by Barry Gossage/NBAE via Getty Images)
Unless you lived in Chicago, you had to catch MJ on one of his one, two or three visits to town, and when he arrived, you never took your eyes off him. The game was hardly important. It wasn't even secondary. It was tertiary. First, you watched every MJ move, from how he played defense to how he jogged down the court to how he ran without the ball and, most excitingly, when he had the rock and was trying to make magic every time. Second, you watched his teammates and how he interacted with them. Jordan was almost as entertaining on the bench — you couldn't take your eyes off him. And then the game — who cared? You were in the presence of the greatest who ever lived.
2. Muhammad Ali
The Greatest. It's as simple as that. Though Ali may not have been the best athlete of last century, he was its most charming, charismatic, controversial and clever. The anticipation and electricity for the three Frazier fights or the Rumble in the Jungle with Foreman were likely unmatched, sights sports has ever or will ever see again. Those fights made Pacquiao-Mayweather look, and feel, like a third-grade brawl at recess.
1. Tiger Woods
(Photo by Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)
(Jeff Haynes/AFP)
They say that attending a golf tournament is one of the best and worst viewing experiences in sports. What's great is how close you can get to the players — close enough to touch and close enough to hear their conversations with caddies. The worst is that you can't follow what's going on throughout the rest of the tournament, relying only on leaderboards delayed by a minute or two.
Not with Tiger. Everybody has heard of the "Tiger Roar," the loud cheers you'd hear throughout the golf course even if you were five holes away from the world's greatest. And every bit of it was true. No matter where Tiger was that day, you knew what had just happened: A good tee shot had extended cheers. A bad tee shot brought immediate cheers that turned to groans. A good approach brought a roar. A bad approach was accompanied by the anticipatory roar that turned into an abrupt hush. And on the green, there were different levels — the howls when the eagle putt was hit and the anguished cries when it burned the edge; the same anticipation-turned-disappointment for a lagged putt; the loud cheers for a bunker shot that rolled to within four feet and the enthusiastic applause that accompanied the par. And then there were the roars, the unmistakable birdie roars. I'm convinced the reason Tiger was so good with a lead was due, in part, to those sounds, which had to be intimidating while standing over a putt. Surely they roared with Jack, but Tiger brought in a new crowd.
Because Tiger was such a front-runner, perhaps the best example of this was at the 2005 U.S. Open, when Tiger made a back-nine comeback that eventually fell just short of the eventual winner, a trivia answer you'll never get in Michael Campbell.
At the '05 Open, I saw a lot of Tiger, but my favorite memory had nothing to do with an actual shot. My cousin and I walked around all morning watching our favorites, then darted to No. 3 — a drivable par-4 — when Tiger teed off on No. 1. (I'm always amazed at how few fans planned ahead to watch Tiger. It was far easier to go a few holes in front of him to wait for the best view rather than staying in the mass of humanity that surrounded him in those days and offered a compromised view, at best. With a little patience, you could do what he and I did that afternoon and were able to stand as far from Tiger as you are from your computer.
That Sunday, he walked to the tee box, dressed in Sunday red and trailed by thousands. All week he'd hit 3-wood (or iron, perhaps) on the hole and all week commentators had wondered whether he'd ever go for the green off the tee. I was there, waiting. While his group waited for the green to clear, Tiger stood by his bag, hand on his head cover. Thousands of eyes were trained on one man and which club he'd pull from his bag and it was as electric as anything I've ever seen. The green cleared. And when it did, Tiger pulled out the driver with the tiger head cover and the roar was deafening. I have no idea what he did with the shot (I'm pretty sure he didn't hit the green). But it didn't matter. The anticipation was greater than any result.
