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THE IDEA
I owe the notion of THE SPORTS 100, a ranking
of the one hundred most important people in American sports
history, to a book called simply The 100. It is a remarkable
ranking, by an academic named Michael H. Hart, of the most influential
people in human history. Muhammad is #1, for instance, followed
by Isaac Newton, Jesus Christ, Buddha and Confucius. Einstein
is #10. Aristotle is #14. Freud, Alexander the Great, Napoleon,
Hitler and Shakespeare are numbers 32 through 36. Thomas Jefferson
is #70. Homer is #94. Fascinating stuff. I thoroughly recommend
it.
There have since been several derivative
rankings – The Black 100, for instance, and The Latino
100 and The Jewish 100 and The Gay 100 and
The Film 100. There was also a book, by boxing guru Burt
Randolph Sugar, called The 100 Greatest Athletes of All-Time,
a straightforward ranking of athletic ability. His book came
out a few months before mine. About a year later, it was re-printed
as a paperback and renamed The Sports 100. That’s bad
karma. Boycott that book.
My book judges influence, not athletic prowess.
If all you can say about someone was that he was the best quarterback
or hit this many home runs or won that many games, that isn’t
enough. There are too many stars in the world of sports to have
included people for star power alone. You won’t find Hank Aaron
or Walter Payton or Charles Barkley. But you will find jump
shot pioneer Hank Luisetti and vilified baseball owner Walter
O’Malley and influential bookmaker Charles McNeil. It is an
attempt to show that there are relative unknowns who left more
of an imprint than a great many legends.
Another aim of The Sports 100 is to
put the games into historical perspective, to show how its cultural
influence often manifests itself in a handful of significant
individuals. The book also highlights the many cases in which
one person was largely responsible for introducing an eventually
monumental element of sports – be it free agency, the point
spread, artificial turf, the minor league farm system or the
forward pass. In fact, it is not only a study of 100 remarkable
people, but also of 100 components of sport’s evolution. It
is as much a history of the games as a profile of the participants.
My hope also is to provide new information
to even the already knowledgeable sports fan. So the reader
learns, for instance, that George Halas was supposed to be on
a ship that capsized in 1915, but he missed the boat… that the
Nike “swoosh” was designed by art student Carolyn Davidson for
$35… that Vince Lombardi didn’t coin the phrase “Winning isn’t
everything, it’s the only thing”… and that Abner Doubleday likely
never even witnessed a baseball game, let alone invented one.
In the end, The Sports 100 is as diverse
as sport itself. There are athletes and innovators, activists
and academics, executives and inventors, journalists and judges,
agents and outcasts, pioneers, producers, promoters and presidents
– all of whom made a lasting impact, in one way or another,
on American athletics. Of course, you are bound to disagree
with many of the selections and omissions. But like the old
argument about New York’s greatest centerfielder, it’s all a
matter of perspective.
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“Brad Herzog may not be
one of the 100 most important people in sports, but with this book
he’s off to a great start.”
– Dick Schaap
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