(08-13-2017, 06:36 AM)JPRI link Wrote:[quote author=ATLcard link=topic=17155.msg197061#msg197061 date=1502629358]
Tiger vs OJ? Tiger made a lot of terrible mistakes and is paying the price, but he didn't kill anybody. Maybe Tiger vs Barry Bonds is a better analogy. I see some people on the list with similar personal issues to Tiger, and think his absence from the list is striking.
https://theundefeated.com/features/50-gr...injustice/
OK, fine. What's your theory as to why he didn't make it, then?
(Actually, the poll is a composite of the opinions of thousands of people, some of which were no doubt pretty informed on the subject and some of which probably weren't. To try to figure out a rhyme or reason for the rankings is IMO a fruitless task.)
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I'll make two points that touch on why Tiger didn't make the list of the Top 50 greatest black athletes.
First, golf is remote for most people. It's the oldest sport (outside of archery), but it touches far fewer people than the other sports. And it is declining in popularity. I saw in the WSJ the other day that the number of golfers, as defined by playing at least one round over the course of a year, has gone down from 30 million to 24 million.Â
Second, as the non-lamented Glenn Dickey used to say, "Golf isn't a sport, it's a game."Â To a fair number of people, golfers aren't athletes.Â
There were a few others excluded. For my money, Josh Gibson should have been included. As Buck Weaver used to say, there were only two hitters that you could tell by the sound of the ball leaving the bat, and that was Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson. The Big O, Oscar Robertson.Â
As for breaking color barriers in snooty sports, I would have taken Althea Gibson, who predated Arthur Ashe by a decade and a half. Gibson won the French Open in 1956, the U. S. Open in 1957 and 1958 and Wimbledon in 1957 and 1958. As an aside, she probably wouldn't have made it, had it not been for a lot of public support by San Francisco-based Alice Marble, a star tennis player who wrote a scathing public letter decrying the entry qualifying methods (accumulating points at tournaments at whites-only clubs). Gibson also won three straight Wimbledon ladies doubles (with three different partners), 56 titles overall. She retired at 29 because she needed to make money, and tennis was amateurs only then.
And finally, they used to call the decathlon champion the World's Greatest Athlete. Ashton Eaton is the world record holder with seven international gold medals, including London and Brazil. He reached 8,000 points in just his sixth decathlon. He was the first male athlete to win three consecutive international decathlon competitions. He owns the world record in the heptathlon and is the only decathlete to have scored over 9,000 points in the decathlon (100m in 10.23, LJ in 25.85 ft, SP in 47.6 ft, HJ in 6'7", 400m in 45.0, 110HH in 13.69, discus in 142.2 ft, jav in 208.9 ft, 1500m in 4.17 min). He's the World's Greatest Athlete, just not one of the 50 best black athletes. I'm guessing that three-quarters of the people who took the SurveyMonkey survey don't even know Eaton's name.
