The Greatest Eclipses in Sports History
15 Suns and Moons that have eclipsed anything you’ve ever accomplished athletically
Happy Eclipse Day, everyone!
The eclipse is finally here apparently, because everyone is talking about it on social media and buying those super fashionable cardboard glasses that are sure to protect your eyes from staring directly into the sun.
Many sports balls are round like the sun, but experts do not recommend you trying to create your own eclipse by holding a basketball or volleyball in front of the sun or moon. Instead, how about a quick ranking of the 15 greatest Suns and Moons and athletic history?
Let’s start with the worst…
15. Byung-Woo Moon, soccer
Byung-Woo Moon was the worst player on FIFA 2014 with a putrid overall rating of 42 for South Korea’s Gangwon FC. He ranked 34 as an attacker, 46 as a defender, and 93 at picking his nose ball-watching while horrendously out of position. He’s no Ethan Albright, though.
14. Arkansas Tech women’s athletes
Technically, they’re the Golden Suns. It’s not great, but it beats the heck out of what they used to be until a name-choosing contest in 1975: the Wonder Girls or Wonderettes.
13. Sun Mingming, basketball
Mingming holds the Guinness World Record as the world’s tallest basketball player at an insane 7'9", or approximately 3.7 Muggsy Bogueses. He’s apparently also a pretty good mini golfer, according to The Rock:
12. Daphne Moon, Frasier
Long before marrying Frasier’s brother Niles, Daphne Moon was a talented darts and billiards player and won many youth championships. Of course, she also raised show rats, so… call it even?
11. Sailor Moon, various sports
Seiya is good at basketball and most other sports, Usagi is good at throwing Frisbees and ice skating, and you can check the forums for a full rundown of everyone else if you’d like an alternate way to scald your eyes today.
10. Jamario Moon and Sun Yue, NBA
Sun Yue scored just six career points but won a championship with the Los Angeles Lakers. Jamario Moon played on five teams in five years, including that one LeBron team that choked in the playoffs. Yue’s two-month career began a week after Jamario’s first game against the Lakers that season and ended two days before the second matchup… so Moon sadly never had a chance to block Sun.
9. Shams Charania, expert Wojbomber
“Shams” is Arabic for “sun” and NBA for “turn your Twitter notifications on, Shams is about to nuke you with NBA news.” He took NBA Twitter by storm this summer when he eclipsed former colleague Adrian Wojnarowski (Polish for ESPN sellout) among NBA newsbreakers.
8. Sun Tzu, Chinese general
Sun Tzu was the brilliant military strategist who wrote The Art of War, a sentence that will never be written about the man who wrote The Art of the Deal. I’m sure Sun Tzu never really played any sports, but do you want to be the one to tell him he didn’t make the list?
7. Wally Moon, baseball
Wally Moon was the 1954 Rookie of the Year for the St. Louis Cardinals and a three-time World Series champion with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He scored the last ever run at the Coliseum and batted .289 lifetime, but his career was eclipsed by the insane unibrow he sported.
6. Sun Yang, swimming
Sun Yang won nine World Championship gold medals in the pool and became the first Chinese man to win an Olympic gold in swimming. But he’s still better known as that Chinese dude who got banned for doping that you remember cheering wildly against at the Olympics last summer.
5. Randy Moss moon
Minnesota Vikings fans traditionally haven’t had much to cheer about, but one of the greatest moments in franchise history came in their first ever playoff meeting against the hated rival Green Bay Packers. Star receiver Randy Moss caught a 34-yard touchdown in the 4th quarter to put the game away and gave Lambeau fans a little eclipse of their own in celebration.
4. Warren Moon, football
Warren Moon is one of the best quarterbacks in football history. He was a nine-time Pro Bowler and became the first African-American quarterback to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He never won a Super Bowl but did win five consecutive Canadian championships, which I think converts to 0.3 Lombardi trophies.
3. Steve Nash, Phoenix Sun
Is this cheating? Yes, definitely, which is why there’s only one Phoenix Sun on the list. Nash was a pretty easy choice as one of only 11 humans in history to win back-to-back NBA MVP awards, and the only one to do it despite being Canadian.
2. Sun Wen, soccer
Sun Wen is one of the all-time greats in women’s soccer, which is the sort of thing you can claim when you are named as the FIFA Female Player of the Century. You might recognize her as “that sad woman on the other team they kept showing after the USWNT beat her in the finals for the 1996 gold medal and 1999 World Cup.”
1. Archie Manning’s sons
Archie was a former #2 NFL draft pick that sported a career record of 35–101–3 with the New Orleans Saints. His sons Peyton and Eli each went #1 in the draft and subsequently won two Super Bowls. It was the greatest example of sons eclipsing something in modern sports history. Archie’s other son Cooper once watched Olympic badminton on television.
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