My Top 5 Athletes

I was a little critical of others choices for top athletes of all-time. Others can be critical of mine now if they want. Here they are.

1. Be critical of others on my list, but Babe Ruth has to be in the top five and in fact, he has to be number one. What household name athlete came before Babe Ruth? Ty Cobb maybe, but ask people today who Ty Cobb was and most won't know. He popularized sports. He was the start of the big salaries in sports. He was a great ambassador for sports. He was the idol of all the kids. He wasn't perfect, but as far as the public knew, he was. They played fewer games each season and he still had more home runs than almost anyone. Only Hank Aaron, another hero and great guy, and Barry Bonds, a scum sucking cheater, had more. Everyone by his era was trying for home runs. They just couldn't do it. The year he hit 60, third in the league had something like 20. If he played in the live ball era of today and had as many at-bats, and used steroids, how many home runs would he have? Way over a thousand, I bet.
2. Michael Jordan. LeBron isn't retired yet, so we don't have to get into all that. Michael was great. It's to bad he broke up his career with wasted time with baseball, or his stats would have been even more impressive.
3. Wayne Gretzky. OK, I don't know much about hockey, but I know Gretsky was great and owns all the records and no one else is even close. You have to judge these guys by the era they played in because things keep changing. In his era, no one was close to Gretsky.
4. Jerry Rice. All the wide receivers still get ranked by how close they come to matching what Rice did. There is a debate about best quarterback of all time or about who was the best running back. There never seems to be a debate about receivers, though.
5. Pele. I know less about soccer than hockey, but he has to be on the list, right?

Honorable mention - Edwin Moses. He only did one thing - run the intermediate hurdles, but he won something like 120 races in a row and gold medals in the Olympics. He just dominated his event. A nice thing about my list is it covers all the main sports - baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer. So we've got to put track in there, too.