One last list to incite debate

All in all, I'd have to call the one about to expire the best century I've lived in so far; but the most pleasing thing of all about the passing of the Millennium is that nobody will ask me to vote for the Top 100 anything for at least another 100 years.

As Y2K has crept up upon us, we have been - literally - inundated with lists of the greatest this and the best that of the 20th Century, and in this part of the world nobody has managed to milk the process better than ESPN, the American all-sports network, which managed to get an entire year's worth of attention out of its SportsCentury series, purportedly naming the "100 Greatest Athletes of the 20th Century".

By revealing its selections in piecemeal fashion from 100 on up, ESPN managed to produce debate, even among its selectors, which consumed all of 1999. It was widely surmised that the fix was in and that Muhammad Ali would top the list when the winner was named last week, but with a few days to go the network crossed up everyone when Ali was announced as Number Three, leading to an anticlimactic final weekend in which Michael Jordan edged out Babe Ruth for the top spot.

The electors, it should be noted, were limited in scope to voting for the top "North American Athletes", which ensured that no Peles or Bannisters would clutter up anybody's list. In fact, just a handful of Canadians (and no Mexicans) made it at all, omissions which left our neighbours to the north and south sorely distressed. But no one who has watched the way US television covers, say, the Olympic Games (if an American wasn't involved, it didn't happen) should have been remotely surprised by the way the list played out.

Ali, named the world's top athlete (though the second-best boxer, behind Sugar Ray Robinson) of the century in most other polls, had been favoured to top this one, and most people figured that if, for some reason, he didn't get it, then Ruth would. We have no particularly quarrel with the top selection, but we would point out that anyone calling Michael Jordan the "greatest athlete" of any era obviously never saw him play baseball.

ESPN's "Greatest" roster will, however, prove instructive to future generations in understanding how 20th Century Americans viewed the world of sport. The top 100 list, for instance, included no soccer players and (Greg LeMond's three Tour de France titles notwithstanding) no cyclists. It did, however, include the names of three equine "athletes": Secretariat (35), Citation (97), and Man O'War (84). (Curiously, although the list had three drivers but no cars, it did name two jockeys and three horses.)

Tony Kornheiser, the gifted Washington Post scribe, has already pleaded guilty to influencing the list by putting Secretariat first on his list. "If you're asking me," Kornheiser defended himself to fellow panellist Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe last week, "on a serious note, if there is one spot left in the Top 50 for either Bonnie Blair or the horse, I'm still taking the horse."

Broken down by sport, the ESPN list comprised 23 baseball players, 20 football players, a dozen track and field athletes, 11 basketball players, eight tennis players, seven boxers, six ice hockey players, six golfers, the aforementioned five representatives of the broader world of horse racing, three race-car drivers, two speed skaters, a swimmer, and a diver.

The astute and mathematically gifted observer may have noted that the above figures add up to a number greater than 100. The explanation is that some multi-sport athletes were tabulated in more than one category. Bo Jackson (72) and Deion Sanders (74), for instance, counted for both football and baseball; Babe Didrikson Zaharias (10) for track and field and golf; and 1912 Olympic decathlon champion Jim Thorpe (7) for track and field, football and baseball.

Curiously, major league baseball's first black player, Jackie Robinson (15), is listed only for that game, although, as at least one panellist pointed out, baseball was actually Robinson's fourth-best sport, behind football, track and basketball. Similarly, the late Wilt Chamberlain (13) was a far better track and field athlete than was, say, Neon Deion a baseballer, but he is listed only for basketball.

One can not resist the temptation to point out that OJ Simpson (49) might also have been counted for both football and fencing.

Even those who were on the voting panel have quarrelled with its conclusions. It has been pointed out that Chamberlain, for instance, was ranked ahead of Bill Russell (18), who dominated him at every turn in head-to-head competition, and that Joe Louis (11) was ranked far ahead of Rocky Marciano (51), who knocked him out. Al Oerter, who won the discus and set personal bests in four consecutive Olympics, is ranked behind 66 other athletes and one horse. More glaring still are the wholesale omissions of (to name just two) John Elway and Tiger Woods.

ESPN points out in its defence that the voting was tabulated in the autumn of 1997, allowing it time to prepare 48 half-hour specials and two one-hour programs for the top 50 athletes. Elway had at that point never won a Super Bowl, and Woods had yet to win $7.6 million and 10 worldwide tournaments in a single year.

And in truth, excluding the last two years of the century may have been a blessing in disguise. Given the mindset at work here, the electors would probably have voted in enough members of the 1999 US women's soccer team (collectively named as "Sportsman of the Year" by Sports Illustrated just last week) to displace the likes of Jack Johnson (100), Sam Snead (99), and Michael Johnson (96).

What cannot be argued is that ESPN got just what it wanted out of this exercise. People speculated about this list all year long, and now that it is over, they are talking about it still.