GARY SOBERS
In any sport, it is fascinating, but futile, to wonder who was the all-time greatest competitor. People who engage in such discussions often make overriding claims for their own favoured choice, without taking into account the different conditions of one period compared with another. For example, those who make a case for Rocky Marciano as the greatest heavyweight champion ever, simply because he beat everyone he fought and retired undefeated, should ask themselves three questions. Were his technical skills really that good? How good was the crop of challengers then? Could he have beaten the Joe Louis of 1937? No one can answer such questions definitively. But they do demonstrate how tentative any claims must be.
In some sports, however, such speculations are not quite so insecure; in the sports, that is, which involve a variety of skills, like gymnastics. In the gym, there are several disciplines: the parallel bars, the rings, the tumbling, the vaulting, the balance beam, the pommel horse, the uneven bars, the horizontal bar; men and women competitors face different combinations of these disciplines; but it is a rare gymnast, of either sex, who so masters all of the compulsory disciplines as to defeat all comers in each of them. Only from the ranks of that rare few could a candidate be put forward as a probable favourite. Yet even at that, the recorded results are open to question: the marks are awarded by judges; and notoriously judges have been pressured politically to upgrade or downgrade competitors according to patriotic or other considerations. So here again there are no reliable answers.
There is, in fact, only one individual, multi-disciplinary sport in which a plausible candidate comes to mind: swimming. Mark Spitz, in the 1972 Olympics, won seven gold medals in four individual races and three relays, setting Olympic records in all four of his individual races. His records, in each of them, have subsequently been broken, and that has a certain significance: Olympic records in running, by contrast, cannot be validly compared from one era to another, because of different weather conditions and track surfaces and footwear; but Olympic records in swimming are set in indoor pools, unaffected by weather, and water is just water in any year, so that when Ian Thorpe set a new Olympic record for the 100 metre freestyle, he has to be counted a faster freestyle swimmer than Spitz at 100 metres. Nevertheless no swimmer has ever matched Spitz’s record of seven gold medals in one Olympics. In that regard, therefore, but only in that regard, Spitz can be considered the greatest male swimmer of all time.
In team sports, the picture is different. Teams employ players specializing in particular skills, who jointly make up an effective ensemble. Baseball is an obvious example, with its specialized pitchers, catchers, fielders, and batters. No baseball player in history has ever excelled at all the required skills. So any discussion of who was the greatest has to be narrowed down to comparison of possible candidate within a given skill. Maybe Babe Ruth was the greatest batter, but if Yogi Berra was the greatest catcher, how do you compare the two? Clearly there is no such animal as the greatest baseball player in history.
In another team sport, cricket, the same is almost true. History records supreme batsmen like Donald Bradman (inarguably the greatest), supreme spin bowlers like Hedley Verity, supreme fast bowlers like Harold Larwood, and supreme fielders like Neil Harvey. But as with baseball, how do you compare Bradman with Larwood, to say that one or the other was the greatest cricketer in history? The whole idea is nonsensical. That is, it’s nonsensical until you remember Gary Sobers. Where other cricketers have been specialists in one skill only, or at best in two, he was a consummate master in four of the special skills. To describe him merely as an excellent all-rounder is grossly inadequate. Consider his credentials: as a batsman, he scored freely off the best bowling anywhere, with a world record of 365 not out, and until recently he was the only batsman ever to have hit a six on all six balls of a single over; as a fielder, he was peerless, with safe hands and lightning reflexes; and no other recorded bowler had his unprecedented ability to serve, at need, as either a superb spin-merchant or a superb exponent of the fast ball. Moreover, as if that were not enough, as Captain of the invincible West Indies eleven, he not only inspired his players to do great things, but on the attack he marshalled his field with great savvy and rotated his bowlers with masterful address.
On the evidence, it seems that Sir Garfield Sobers, as he became, has to be reckoned the one cricketer, above all others, who truly was the greatest. And it is hard to think of another team sport that can boast one individual of equal stature. Moreover, outside of sport, only one other human being of equally diverse mastery comes to mind: Leonardo da Vinci. The comparison is not far-fetched. For Sobers, in his way, was a true artist. And both of them, in a purely incidental respect, had another thing in common: as freelancers, they had to peddle their talents wherever work could be found.
