Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The GOATs

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

In any sport, there is always one debate that comes up. It comes up year after year, and it has been around for as long as sport has existed.  The debate is about who is the greatest of all time, or in common parlance, who is the GOAT? Every sport has its own contenders for the GOAT. In some sports, the GOAT is pretty easy to identify. In others, it isn’t quite so clear.  Learn more about who the GOATS are in many major sports on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to Butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily at checkout to get $30 off your first box! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In any sport, there is always one debate that comes up. It comes up year after year, and it's been around for as long as sport has existed. The debate is about who is the greatest of all time. Or in modern common parlance, who is the goat. Every sport has its own contenders for the goat. In some sports, the goat is pretty easy to identify, and in others, it's not quite so clear. Learn more about who the goats are in many major sports on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is going to be a bit different in that any discussion of the greatest athletes is going to be entirely subjective. There are no definitive answers to the question of who is the greatest of all time. That is what makes it subject to such intense debate.

What I'm going to provide here is ultimately my subjective opinion, and I know for a fact that some of my opinions will spark disagreement with many of you. If you disagree, and again, I know many of you will, feel free to leave your opinion on the Facebook group of the Discord server, the links to which are in the show notes. That being said, I am going to be providing my, reasons for each selection. I'm not picking them arbitrarily. Before I get into my picks, I should provide a brief background on where the term goat came from. It actually began with the boxer Muhammad Ali.

Ali called himself the greatest. In the 1990s, after his boxing career was over, his wife began to use the term goat as an acronym for Greatest of All Time. The term became popularized in the year 2000 by the rapper LL Cool J who titled one of his albums, Goat, The Greatest of All Time. The phrase became popularized, and today it is commonly used to reference, the greatest of all time. So with that, let's get started with the first goat, and I'll start with a relatively easy one, ice hockey. I don't think there is any question that the greatest hockey goat has to be Wayne Gretzky.

Gretzky holds the NHL career record for goals, assists, and points. Resky holds 11 of the top 12 seasons for assists and the top two seasons for goals. He won the Heart Trophy, the NHL MVP Award, a record nine times. He was so good his number 99 was retired throughout the entire league. He is very clearly the greatest hockey player of all time, and I don't think anybody else is even close. Another easy goat selection is in golf, because Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer of all. all time. There's really only one other contender for the title of Gulf's goat, and that would be

Jack Nicholas. The debate between Jack and Tiger has always been over one metric, the number of wins at major tournaments. Jack Nicholas has 18 wins and Tiger Woods has 15, and the debate usually ends there. However, if you look at any other metric, Tiger is clearly ahead. Tiger has 82 PGA Tour wins and Jack only has 73. The Varden Trophy is given each year to the PGA Tour player who has the best scoring average. Tiger has won it nine times. No one else has won it more than five. And Jack has never won it.

If you include the U.S. amateur, which used to be considered a major, Jack won it twice, and Tiger won it three times. At the U.S. junior amateur, Jack made it to the semifinals once and Tiger won it three times. Tiger was the tour's top money winner 10 times and Jack was the top money winner eight times. Moreover, Tiger did all of this playing in far fewer tournaments than Jack did. Jack played in 586 PGA tournaments for a winning percentage of 12.5% while Tiger only played in 358 tournaments for a winning percentage of 23%. So despite three fewer major wins, I still have to give the nod to Tiger for pretty much

much everything else. The next sports goat that I'll name is in tennis. In men's tennis, I think the answer, as of the time of this recording, is obvious. It's Novak Djokovic of Serbia. Djokovic has won more majors than any other player with 24. He's won a record 40 ATP master's events. Has been the number one player at the end of the year a record seven times, and he won an Olympic gold medal.

The only competitors for the title of goat would be Roger Federer, and Raphael Nadal, whose careers overlapped Djokovic's. In head-to-head competition, Djokovic has winning records against both men. In women's tennis, I don't think the goat is quite so clear, but I would have to give the nod to Serena Williams. Many people think that this is a slam dunk, but I think that both Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova can make a good case. Unlike the men, the careers of these three women did not significantly overlap. In terms of major championships, Serena has 23, Steffi has 22, and Martina has 18. However, none of them hold the record, which is held by Margaret Cordesmith at 24. If you look at the total number of

tournament wins, Martina has 167, Steffi has 107, and Serena only has 73, and that's a very large spread between the three of them. Steffi finished the year at number one eight times, Martina seven times, and Serena just five times. There's one other metric that really sets them apart, doubles competition. Steffi only had one double majors victory and never won one in mixed doubles. Serena was one of the best double players in history, having won 14 doubles majors and two mixed doubles majors. Martina de Verratolova, however, was arguably the greatest doubles player in history,

having won 31 major doubles championships and 10 mixed doubles championships. My point to all this is to show that it really isn't a cut and dry case for either of the three women. But I would go with Serena due to her performance and singles competition while still showing herself to be one of the greatest doubles players. In boxing, many people think that the goat is Muhammad Ali. Ali was certainly great. And around the year 2000, many lists came out listing the greatest athletes of the 20th century. ESPN put Ali at number one. My problem with that list is that for Ali to be the greatest athlete, he had to be the greatest

boxer. And to be the greatest boxer, he had to be the greatest heavyweight. And I don't think he was the greatest heavyweight. That claim would have to go to Joe Lewis, who held the championship for 12 years and won 25 consecutive title defenses. While Joe Lewis may have been the greatest heavyweight, does that make him the greatest boxer pound for pound? And there I would have to go with Sugar Ray Robinson,

the consensus pound for pound best boxer of all time. Almost every boxing magazine and expert ranks Robinson as the greatest boxer. He had a career total of 201 professional wins, only 19 losses, and six draws. From 1943 to 1951, he had a 91 fight win. winning streak. He held the Walter weight title for five years from 1946 to 1951, then won the middleweight title, then retired, and then won the middleweight title back. And the entire phrase pound for pound was invented to describe Sugar Ray Robinson.

The goat in gymnastics is another really easy one. It's Simone Biles. She has won 11 Olympic medals so far, including seven golds, making her the second most decorated Olympic gymnast. She also, also won the all-around gold medal twice. However, where she really separates herself from everyone else is her performance at the World Championships. She has won 30 medals at the World Championships, including 23 gold medals, far more than anyone else. She was also a trailblazer who had no fewer than five different vaults, jumps, and moves that were named after her. In swimming, the goat is one of the most obvious. It's Michael Phelps. Phelps has won 28 Olympic

medals, 23 of which were gold. And this is more than double the number of the next closest male swimmer. He set world records in seven of the eight events that he participated in. The greatest female swimmer would have to be Katie Ledecki, who has won 14 Olympic medals, nine of which are gold. Ledecki swims longer distances, which have fewer events than shorter distances, so she has fewer opportunities to win medals compared to, say, Michael Phelps. She has recently announced that she will be competing at the 2028 Olympics, which means that the odds are good that you will be increasing her medal tally. In the game of cricket, the goat is also a relatively easy choice. It's the great Australian batsman, Don Bradman. Bradman had a batting average of 99.94, which is the number

of run score divided by the number of outs made. No one is even close to Bradman in terms of batting. The next closest batting average is over 30 points lower, and to be above 50 is considered to be great. His dominance over everyone else is so great that it's hard to find another sport with such a wide gap between the first and second person. Now let's move on to a sport that will generate a lot more passion and more controversy, association football or soccer. With apologies to many great players, I think that the three candidates for Goat are Ronaldo, Pele, and Lionel Messi. Pele has 762 career goals, Messi has 838, and Ronaldo at the time of this recording has 895. It would seem that Ronaldo has an edge, but he has also played significantly more games.

On a per-game basis, Messi has scored more goals and had more assists among almost every other metric. Messi has been awarded the Golden Ball eight times, a record six European Golden Shoes, and was named the world's best player for a record eight times by FIFA. Pele won three World Cups, and Messi won one, and Ronaldo has not won any. However, Messi and Ronaldo have had much more successful club careers than Pele, with Messi having the slight edge in terms of team trophies won. So I'd have to give the edge to Messi as the goat of football. although the gap between him and Ronaldo is not as great as most people think.

What about baseball? Baseball has an abundance of statistics and almost all of the top-level advanced statistics, which try to evaluate career performance and contribution, all point to one person. Babe Ruth. Despite having played over 100 years ago, he is one of a very small number of players in history to have excelled at both pitching and hitting. He won seven championships, and he won seven championships, and he won. and led the league in some statistical category a record 157 times. At his retirement, he was the career leader in home runs, RBIs, and walks.

And to this day, he still has the highest slugging percentage and the second highest on-base percentage in history. In American football, it is difficult to select a single person because each position is completely different. For my greatest defensive player, I'm going with the Minister of Defense, Reggie White. He was selected to 13-pro Bowls, was a 13-time all-pro, and was a two-time defensive player of the year. He is second in career sacks behind Bruce Smith by only two sacks.

However, Reggie spent two years playing in the USFL, and in those two years, he registered 23 and a half sacks. The greatest running back in history, I think, has to be Jim Brown. He retired early, but he was the greatest running back in an era of great running backs. He was a three-time MVP and led the league in rushing a record eight times. Even the father of Barry Sanders, the next greatest running back, thought that his son wasn't as good as Jim Brown. The greatest receiver would have to be Jerry Rice, which is the easiest selection as he holds pretty much every single receiving record.

And as for quarterback, as much as it pains me to say it, I have to go with the seven-time Super Bowl champ Tom Brady, who also happens to be the career leader in Touchdown Passes, attempts, and completions. Now I'll get to what I think will be my most controversial selection, but it is a belief that I've held for a long time and I think the evidence supports it, the goat in basketball.

I do not think that it is Michael Jordan. He was great to be sure, but I have to go with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. People often point to Jordan's six titles, but Kareem also won six titles. Jordan won five MVP's and Karim won six. Jordan won an NCAA championship and Karim won three. Jordan was named NCAA Player of the Year.

Karim won at a record three times and was also named Outstanding Player of the NCAA Tournament three times. And the only reason Karim didn't win four of each of those awards in college instead of three was because at the time freshmen weren't allowed to play. And on top of that, he was also named the high school player of the year. twice. Jordan didn't win a playoff series in his first two seasons. Karim carried an expansion franchise, the Milwaukee Bucks, to an NBA championship in just its second season of existence. Karim retired as the all-time NBA scoring leader, third in rebounds, and first in block shots. One of the big strikes against Jordan was that he voluntarily quit the game for almost two

years in his prime to play minor league baseball. This wasn't like being injured or being drafted. It was something that he had full control over and had to be considered in his overall evaluation. I'll end this episode by bringing up the goat of goats, the greatest of the greats in all of sports, and someone familiar to every member of the completionist club, the great Alan Francis, the world's greatest horseshoe pitcher. Just days before I recorded this episode, Alan Francis, on whom I've done a complete episode before, won his 28th Horseshoe Pitching World Championship.

He won it in a totally dominating fashion, just like he has won the vast majority of his world championships. He's 54 years old and is still the greatest at his sport by a wide margin, which means that he could still be winning world championships when he is in his 60s against competitors a third his age. I'm sure almost no one disagrees with all of the world championships. of my goat picks, but I'm also pretty sure that almost everyone disagreed with at least one of my goat picks. And that is just the nature of the goat debate. If you want to share your

picks for the goat in any of the sports I've mentioned or some that I didn't, feel free to head over to the Facebook group or the Discord server to share your goats. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise

is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.