Roger Federer wins his 14th grand slam title, and is all but crowned the greatest tennis player in history. Stephen Strasburg is drafted by the Washington Nationals as the greatest pitching prospect baseball scouts have ever seen. Another title for Phil Jackson of the Los Angeles Lakers could make him greatest basketball coach of all time, and Tiger Woods prepares for this week’s United States Open hoping to reassert his status as the greatest golfer ever.
Along with Michael Phelps’ eight gold medals and another Super Bowl ring for the Pittsburgh Steelers, this has been one of sports’ greatest stretches for “greatest” buffs, whose greatest obsession is to argue about who is, you know, really good. All this “best” business is enough to make one forget how futile the arguing truly is.
One of the allures of competitive sport is its conclusiveness: the scoreboard says who won, who lost, go home. It’s when each of these daily pixels is considered part of a larger picture that things get far more fuzzy. And loud.
In a sports world teeming with numbers, no statistic is sufficient. No argument is irrefutable. Debates over the “greatest” athletes become Escher staircases of rhetoric.
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