Federer: The Greatest Champion In Sports History

[Busted]

Maybe it's time to stop lumping athletes who compete(d) in individual sports with athletes who play(ed) team sports? Federer walks on the court alone. Ali stepped into the boxing ring alone. Nicklaus walked on the golf course alone. Jordan, Gretzky, Pele - frickling Tom Brady - all had\have teammates to rely one. Even Jordan couldn't pass himself the ball. Schumacher drove a fricking CAR...so I'm taking him off the list completely unless you're willing to add Valentino Rossi and his motorcycle...

 

[Busted]

^ Ali is an icon that transcends his sport, much like Arnold Palmer transcended golf to become an icon of America during his heyday. Neither one of them was statistically the dominant of all times, but they stand over their sports as kings. Federer is like this and tennis, with Borg being the only one in the same vein.

True...and if Federer was an American instead of Swiss, or tennis more popular in American, I think the same would be true of him as well. Whether people disagree or not - it tends to be success and popularity in America that pushes an athlete's reputation to new heights. Given the lack of popularity of tennis in the US these days - most people didn't even care when Serena won #23. Although, if she was a man it probably would have gotten more coverage from the general media.

 

[shawnbm]

^ saddens me, but largely accurate. Because the USA markets and television and radio influence is so pervasive, American athletes get built up tremendously compared to other parts of the world. Ali and Palmer became international figures and the latter was and still is enormously popular in Japan and the Far East. Ali was a symbol of the brahness of the sixties in light of the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement. He was enormously popular in Africa because of his political stances. As for Serena and Venus, they are quite famous and followed in the States and elsewhere.

 

[Obsi]

Even if Federer were an American, he wouldn't have impact on the world like Ali.

 

[shawnbm]

^ agreed--Ali was a unique figure in history, in some ways more impactful than Palmer, in other ways not. Certainly he was a symbol of a generation, for better or worse. He was a political punch as well as a boxer's punch.

 

[shawnbm]

Sorry--mentioned Federer and I thought you meant Arnold Palmer. Federer is not enough of a political lightning rod that Ali was. He is more like Palmer in that sense, but like Nicklaus in having the greatest record. He's an amalgamation of the two, but in tennis terms.

 

[Busted]

Even if Federer were an American, he wouldn't have impact on the world like Ali.

True...but it's a different era and a different time in history. Would Ali have the same impact today that he had in the '60s and '70s? Nope. Culturally it's a completely different time. That's not to say that racism and prejudice doesn't still exist. It's just that in the days before social media and the internet athletes built a mystique because they were seen and heard from so infrequently. Now days they all tweet and endorse products out the ying yang and can be seen all over doing so.

 

[mrzz]

True...but it's a different era and a different time in history. Would Ali have the same impact today that he had in the '60s and '70s? Nope. Culturally it's a completely different time. That's not to say that racism and prejudice doesn't still exist. It's just that in the days before social media and the internet athletes built a mystique because they were seen and heard from so infrequently. Now days they all tweet and endorse products out the ying yang and can be seen all over doing so.

It is true that we live on different times. But the cold truth is that Ali faced the great questions of his time in a way that it is impossible to forget. What he would do now is anyone´s guess, as what would do today´s sportsmen in Ali´s era. We assume that today is impossible for an athlete to become as great as Ali, which is reasonable, but it could well may be so simply because we actually do not have someone as Ali around...

 

[shawnbm]

That time in the Sixties with the Civil Rights movement AND the war in Vietnam is a very unique sociological event, and Ali was a centerpiece of it. he was loud, brash and defiant, in addition to being self-aggrandizing. He was the antithesis, for example, of Arnold Palmer. Those two are like bookends of that decade--Palmer is 1960 and Ali is 1970. I loved both and followed (and read widely about) both, even though I actually saw more of Ali in the early Seventies (Palmer had been supplanted by Nicklaus by that time). Ali was thrust into a limelight no other had been thrust into precisely because HE changed the way the professional athlete interacted with the press. He was the first of his kind, and had the boxing skills to match. He clearly was a bright and intuitive man, who happened to be the best boxer of his time--a time when The Sporting News and boxing as a whole was much firmly in the center of the sports world in USA along with baseball (both have fallen off in the last fifty plus years, sadly). As a result, his impact is unequaled in terms of sociological impact across races, socioeconomic strata and even nations. We shan't see another Ali or someone approaching him until there comes another confluence of sociological turmoil on core beliefs in our world.

 

[scoop]

Scoop Malinowski writes:

Shawnbm; Thanks for sharing those wonderful comments about Muhammad Ali. I only experienced the later 70s part of Ali. I also wrote a book about Muhammad Ali: Portrait of a Champion, and in all my years of covering boxing since '92 I've heard hundreds of Ali stories and not one, NOT ONE was even remotely negative. He always had time for everybody and he uplifted and inspired everybody and also made them laugh and smile. I'm looking forward to the new Ali museum site at his old training camp in Deer Lake PA which will open soon.

 

[shawnbm]

^ how fortunate you have been Scoop. Outstanding!

 

[Busted]

Even if Federer were an American, he wouldn't have impact on the world like Ali.

I didn't say he would have - just that he would big an even bigger star if he were. Even Michael Jordan and LeBron James haven't impacted the world the way Ali did. Ali was from a singular moment in history when sports, religion, politics, human rights and an unpopular war collided. The late '60s was literally a perfect storm for Ali to re-invent himself. I doubt we'll ever see anything like that again - not in this age of the internet where hackers are hacking celebs' phones and posting their nude selfies just because they can. Up-and-coming athletes are almost over-exposed, and in some cases have their failings exposed, before they can achieve anything. It's just a whole other word these days and you can't go back to the vacuum of the '60s when everything happened offline without an instant selfie to document history.