The Brazen Idiocy of GOAT Debates
What are we gaining from debates over who is the greatest?
I grew up with sports talk and debate. ESPN launched in 1979, when I was one year old. While sports talk radio dates to the mid-sixties, the golden era debatably starts in the eighties. By the time I was a teenager I was a rabid listener to 820AM, WSCR (the Score) in Chicago.
Point being, I became accustomed to the good natured, high octane, ultimately meaningless banter that could be confused for genuinely important discourse, if one were to judge by the tone of the predominantly male hosts and callers.
But there is a variant of this discourse that has become more and more prevalent, and which I find increasingly exhausting — and this is the GOAT debate.
For the unfamiliar (and please know that I envy you with my whole heart) — these are arguments about who is the Greatest Of All Time — the acronymous GOAT. This usually has some specificity to it — boxer, pitcher, quarterback. But the GOAT movement really kicked into high gear with a generic comparison, circa 1999 — ESPN’s Greatest Athletes of the Century. This was an exercise in which I, as a Chicago kid growing up in the eighties/nineties, had rooting interest in my childhood icon, Ryne Sandberg.
Of course I’m joking — it’s Michael Jordan.
In retrospect, it was only natural that the swell in media attention and athlete salaries, not to mention the increase in knowledge about sports nutrition and training, would spur an era of ceaseless record-breaking. And yes, I’m very aware of the role Muhammad Ali’s braggadocios played in the popularizing of the phrase. But for me, it felt like the arrival of Jordan specifically, an unprecedented advertising phenom and world renown figure, really drove the exponential increase of this kind of debate.
More recently, we can add to that the arrival of Lebron James, the unparalleled championships won by Tom Brady, the sensation of Caitlyn Clark, and we now have epidemic level occurrence of men in suits spewing spittle across soundstages as they furiously try to “prove” who is the GOAT.
These are subjective arguments naturally and the first one or two you hear are fun. Especially set against the difficulty and stress of dealing with things that actually matter, this is a nice reprieve — if infrequent. But much like everything in American life, the volume of these debates seems to have been ratcheted up to a level that makes it intolerable.
NOTE: I was going to call out some very specific loudmouths of the sports media world but decided that this would be unhelpful — but if you’ve seen ESPN, the flagship or any of its sequels, you know exactly who I’m talking about.
Fundamentally, these arguments can be reduced to a few elements, each of which is confounding.
A proxy argument for “The Great Man” Theory of History
If you’ve seen a GOAT debate, you know that at some point one of the men will bang his fist on the surface in front of him and announce a “ring count” that he believes ends the discussion — that INSERT NAME HERE athlete won X number of championships and the other(s) won Y. This usually spurs a lengthy dialogue about the quality of the respective teams and coaches. This is the biggest part of the fun for these debaters when for me this is the dumbest element, particularly in American football where breathless debates comparing Quarterbacks seems to occupy fifty percent of the dialogue about the sport.
If an alien listened to coverage of American football with no visuals, they’d have no choice but to imagine that two men called quarterbacks climb into a cage and battle each other for supremacy and that was the whole of what Americans call football. They would certainly never imagine that two quarterbacks are never on the field at the same time. The ease with which broadcasters and fans hand over supremacy over the sport to this single position emphasizes man’s seeming inability to look at the human experience as anything other than a series of prominent apes who beat their chests for a time before yielding to another. This is the Great Man theory and men who have flirted with greatness (like former athletes and broadcasters) are especially drawn to it and the entire GOAT Industrial Complex is built around affirming this way of thinking.
A Generational Death Match:
In the reasonable GOAT argument, the participants will attempt to establish some ground rules about how to deal with the fact that there is an undeniable increase over time in RAP (Raw Athletic Performance). Athletes are just getting bigger, faster, and stronger. To account for this when considering players from decades past would need exact ground rules for how to adjust for these factors. Unfortunately, very few of these debates are reasonable. Instead, we get nonsensical value assessments about the eras in which athletes performed. This ends in younger gen Z/millennial types disparaging the defensive play of the past and older folks decrying the lack of fundamentals of the present.
A Fundamental Misunderstanding of the Nature of Time
What exactly do the words “all time” mean? Is it one directional — backward looking only? This may seem like my pettiest gripe with GOAT debates, but it’s the most important. These conversations start off with a deception — that any individual can consider something as vast as “all time.” We can’t know the future, which is an undeniable part of all time.
Old Athletes Grappling (or failing to) with their Mortality
I think the real reason for the ubiquity of GOAT debates is the number of former athletes engaged in the sports media. What we see in these arguments is their futile attempt to make their moment of glory extend into something eternal — which is a violation of the tacit agreement that exists between athletes and the rest of us. As told by AE Houseman’s To the Athlete Dying Young, the Athlete gets temporal glory and acclaim for something ultimately petty, but then have to go away as their prowess and relevance quickly fades:
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
But no one wants to go away and these men now retire to desk jobs where they lose themselves in the notion that the athlete is capable of being remembered forever. He or she is not.
Ironically, the older I get, and the more I see in the world of sports, the less interested I am in these debates. I’ve come to understand that no set of statistics, no collection of championships or accolades can overshadow the thrill of viewing a great performance.
That’s what sport is — performance. In judging greatness, I yield all consideration to a simple question — how much was I entertained? When I use this metric, even something as impressive as Tom Brady’s quantity of Super Bowl wins mean nothing to me. For I saw Vince Young perform in the 2006 Rose Bowl. That one game is not much less (as a percentage of “all time”) than a twenty-year career and it was a hell of a lot more entertaining.
