I have great news for you reading this column. you are a goat!
that’s right. Of all the people who stumble upon this space, I consider you the greatest reader of all time.
Again, if you’re LeBron James, Serena Williams, or Nikola Jokic with that shiny NBA championship ring, you already know you’re the GOAT. Everyone says so.
“Bang, bang, bang” can be heard yelling goats.and Sounds made by James’ Los Angeles Lakers teammates when he entered the locker room. GOAT’s Hosanna is practically the soundtrack to his life.
Five years ago, Merriam-Webster’s coinagers entered the term GOAT as an acronym and noun into their lexicon because of its widespread use in the sports world.
Merriam-Webster’s editors define the term as “the most accomplished or successful individual in the history of a particular sport, or category of performance or activity,” according to the popular search engine Tom Brady’s I nodded that the name is widely used with GOAT. An example of why this acronym became a dictionary formula.
Yes, I understand. This GOAT thing is a little confusing. Being the greatest means singularity, right? But now there are goats everywhere.
Worse than the abuse of this acronym is its stupid simplicity. Not enough nuance. Too much emphasis on winning outright and not enough on overcoming.
What are the options here? Perhaps following the lead of Lake Superior State University, which cheekily ranked this obscure and lazy acronym at number one on its 2023 list of banned terms, in sports Maybe we should ban the use of this term altogether.
“Many nominators did not need to be physicists or grammarists to judge the literal impossibility and technical ambiguity of this superlative work,” the university said in a statement.
But a ban doesn’t seem like a possibility at all. Not when a word pierces our collective consciousness so deeply.
Definitely, being a goat isn’t what it used to be. In sports, this used to be a gross insult, a term of shame imposed on an athlete who plucked defeat from the jaws of victory. Greg Norman A.k.a. Shark, he was treated like a goat in the tournament when he lost by five strokes after trailing by six strokes in the final round of the 1996 Masters.
Before Norman, there was a goat who hit a ground ball in the worst moment of the Boston Red Sox’s World Series. Bill Buckenr.
Need I say more?
Muhammad Ali is widely credited with being the first to inject the greatest man of all time into the mix. When he called himself Cassius Clay in the early 1960s, he recorded comedy albums anchored by poems titled:i am the greatest“
After an upset win over George Foreman in 1974, he stepped up the glamor to admonish doubters and critics and remind him of his status.
But was it really Ali who came up with this particular selfish prosperity?
In fact, some say the origins of GOAT stem from George Wagner, a flamboyant blonde-haired wrestler known as Gorgeous George who earned a lavish paycheck in the 1940s and 50s by turning trash talk into art. There is also
In a harbinger of WWE-style bravado, Gorgeous George once claimed before a big fight that if she lost, she would “crawl in the ring and cut my hair!” “But it won’t happen because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world,” he added.
Ali said he learned a good deal of his bragging from Gorgeous George.
“A lot of people would pay to see someone shut you up,” Ressler allegedly told Ali after a chance meeting. “So keep bragging, keep being cocky, and always do crazy things.”
This week marks the moment when sports’ most legitimate GOAT talk will be about tennis and what its organizers humbly call a championship.
Wimbledon starts on Monday. Men’s favorite Novak Djokovic has won 23 Grand Slam tournaments, just one short of Margaret Court’s record of 24. If he wins this year, his loyal fanbase will confidently declare the Serb to be ‘GOAT’.
That would distract fans of Rafael Nadal, who is stuck at 22 major titles. They would argue that their idol would have won 25 (or more) major titles by now, had it not been for the injury.
Afterwards, followers of Roger Federer will join. Federer had records beaten by both Nadal and Djokovic. Fortunately, though, he’s Roger Federer, a quality player with a forehand boasting 20 Slam victories and a number of epic final-round fights.
Serena Williams supporters will be reminded that not so fast. Williams says not only does she have 23 Grand Slam titles, including one won during her pregnancy, but she has also valiantly played in a predominantly white sport, doing it of her own accord. bent. Additionally, she is an athlete as well as a cultural icon. Can any male player say that?
And then there are the old partisans like Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King. Stop being unfair, they will cry. No more comparing elite athletes from completely different eras.
Time has changed with better equipment, better training methods and new rules in every sport. So how can you be sure you can compare? It wasn’t until McEnroe lost to Borg in the 1980 Wimbledon final that neither benefited from sleeping in a performance-enhancing hypobaric chamber, as Djokovic did. .
The discussion goes on and on.
That’s the madness. Its stupid and funny.
who is the goat?
Well, there are four, to be honest. Willie Mays. Joe Montana. Williams. Federer.
Of course, I remember each sublime victory. But they also have their stumbling blocks. Mays, 42, lost in the outfield. Twilight bearish Montana playing in Kansas City instead of San Francisco.
I watched as Williams struggled and fell short in chasing the elusive final slam. I was sitting at Federer’s feet as he held two match points against Djokovic in the 2019 Wimbledon final. After that, Switzerland suffered a crushing defeat.
“Right now it hurts and it should – at Wimbledon any loss hurts,” Federer said at the post-match press conference. But he added that he will continue to persevere. “I don’t want to get depressed after watching a really great tennis match.”
No one can escape disappointment and weakness. But if done right, we can keep trying.
do you know what that means? It means we can all be GOATs.
Come on, my friend. Blow away!
